Location, Location, Location

Something that I have thought about more than once, and often seems superfluous, is the idea of location or space/place. Is an empty patch of ground that gets overgrown the same place? Is a prairie that is covered in suburbia the same location? What happens to the space that is full of memories that is a car or a building that is destroyed. Is the compacted piece of metal or the empty space in the sky the same place? Can location really be charted by GPS? 
I just returned from Cambodia two days ago. It was a hell of a trip. I just watch "Frost Nixon", it was a hell of a movie. Something was brought together by watching the movie.
There is intellectual knowledge that is factoidial and almost dead. There is emotional knowledge that invigorates the intellectual. In the movie images of the invasion of Cambodia were shown. I was there just 72 hours ago. The images were of naped villages and people. Crying children, killing soldiers, and dead animals. That was a location in time shown of a geographic location. Driving through now, it is simply a shithole. A place where pride (perhaps only as I see it) is a luxury, where people surround buses and sing-song their goods and wait for your guilty eyes to meet theirs through the window so they can smile and raise whatever crap they want to sell up and motion with their heads. Routine desperation perhaps. 
Anyway, the location that I saw, the place, is as distant as DC from San Francisco when compared to the images from the movie I watched. And it is from Butte to Missoula in relation to what I saw 3 1/2 years ago. Especially in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.
I read a book a while back where a man was raised on Mars by Martians. These aliens had a different relationship to time where they could feel, view, and even be overcome by all the memories of a place. Of course that isn't true for humans. We visit Civil War battles sites and Holocaust Death Camps, but these aren't the same places. There may still be petrified blood on the ceiling of S-21 (a Khmer Rouge killing prison in Phnom Penh) and ghostly, sunk-in blood stains in an Antebellum mansion in Tennessee (I visited a few years ago) from Forest's hospital of butchery, but the places die with the passed moments of saw meating bone and bullet passing through brain. With hobbled adult imaginations the places get withered. Thank ingenuity for video I suppose. For what would those locations in time be without memory, especially the kind that pulls emotions into full action?
Those places along the road in what was, for the 1970’s, the Heart of Darkness, and the videos depicting in full reality Nixon’s deeds, for a moment made real how America formed it’s experiment into a lie for a time. Or formed itself into a mirror of those chaotic and savage locations (Thames reflecting Congo). There is a man in Phnom Penh who has full body burns and is the most freaky and abrasive beggar I’ve had the sad opportunity to be confronted with. Very likely he is a napalm victim. Unless he is a Khmer Rouge soldier, then is his horror of life a sort of just reality and not victimhood? What is certain is that the city and the countryside is filled with the human detritus of land mines (USSR and US) and bombies (US). You can see these people. I gave several money (nothing that hurt the wallet.) Tonight I saw a man using wooden blocks on his hands to walk across Cat Linh street in Hanoi. No legs. NVA soldier? Is the location where he lost his legs, be it a factory, road, or crater, have more credentials as a location than others because it is the spot where he lost normalcy and pride? Even though it is undoubtedly completely changed in the 30+ years since? (Although, you can still see bomb craters from the air when flying out of Saigon.)
Well...I guess location is a very subjective thing despite Google Earth. Despite on-location museums. Location is where important events demonstrate the fragility of the realities we want. And it is where the unnoticed and forgotten happen, and where good things make their space in time too. Of course.