ROGER SIZEMORE'S MIDNIGHT RADIO

Back in the swim

2011-12-01T07:18:00.000-05:00

For several months after my return to Chiang Mai, I swam daily at one of the local hotels which offers monthly membership in its pool and fitness center. Signing up was easy: just go to the cashier's desk, give her your name and address along with $35, and she hands you a receipt with an official-looking red ink hand stamp. Then she says, "we will give you a permanent membership card within ten days."

I know exactly what she says because I've heard it twice.

That's because I've joined twice.

It's a sordid story, but it's high time I confessed and moved along.

Here's how it went...

In March, I signed up for the first time, and happily swam every morning before lunch. Each day, I'd go in, say hi to the guys pretending to work while they lay around on sofas watching television, and self-serve a fresh towel. I'd change into my swim trunks, and tuck my belongings into one of the many beat-to-hell metal lockers lining the back wall. Then I'd climb the double stairs up into the brilliantly sunlit pool level, and swim for an hour. I'd go back down, change into my street clothes, say goodbye to the unmoving young men, and self-serve my wet towel into the bin behind the desk. Each day, I signed in and out. I became a fixture. Occasionally, one of the young men would be distracted from the television long enough to recognize me, and he'd make a charming display of concern about fetching me a fresh towel and writing down the towel's unique identifying number.

One day, I went really late and actually met the manager, who was trying to teach his decidedly un-athletic son how to swim a basic dog paddle. Another time, I sat after sunset and watched the same hapless boy crouch in imaginary blocks and sprint ten yards to the spot where his father stood with a stop watch. You didn't need to speak the language to understand dad wasn't too happy with junior. Like a lot of Thai kids in this generation, the boy had obviously pumped a lot of fast food and sodas through his system. He was, as they used to say when I was a kid, "husky," and he was also chronically out of breath. His father, on the other hand, looked like a former muay thai boxing champion with lots of friends among the police.

If you know what I mean.

We nodded at each other like manly men who lamented the decay of the species, but never introduced ourselves by name. It's not necessary here to know many names: people either know you, or they don't, and if you have a name like mine, nobody can pronounce it anyhow.

The days flashed by, and I noticed no one ever stepped up with an ID card. At the end of the month, no one stopped me and asked for my dues. No card, no dues: it seemed fair enough to me and I let it slide. At the end of the second month, same things failed to happen. My conscience tweaked me a little bit, but not too hard. "What the hell," I told it, "we're in Thailand. Relax."

Three months went by, then four and five. I could no longer ignore the clamoring of my Puritan upbringing, and my excuses didn't sound good even to me. However, I'd worked myself into something of a social cul de sac. If I went back to the cashier and told her the truth, Mr. Muay Thai would lose face, and I'd never be able to show mine again. I took the coward's way out, and drifted away.

Yesterday, while I was having lunch at the Cat House with Joby, a fellow white geezer strolled in and took the two-top next to ours. He didn't say anything, which I've learned is a good sign among retired expats. It demonstrates some degree of reticence and respect, which is a gift far better than gold in a foreign land. Eventually, when Joby's girl friend called to interrupt his soliloquy on the science of human resources management (he's in the business grad school at Rajabhat University), the guy looked up from his paper and asked me if I knew Brett. I said I did, and he mentioned that his connection to Brett came through their mutual membership in the club where I used to swim. It seemed a good time to ask for advice, so I laid out my predicament.

The man looked me in the eye, and told me to just go back.

He's lived here eight years now, and he's been a member since he first came.

He actually knows the only person who ever got into trouble over back dues.

It was a Dutch man who didn't pay for four years.

They asked him to pay three months back dues, and he left.

He was really pissed off that they'd asked.

I swam 45 minutes this morning. It was paradise.

I look forward to the mornings again.

I swear I'll pay my dues. Some of the time.

The Bicycle

2011-11-14T09:50:00.000-05:00

After returning to Chiang Mai from Bangkok, I began scanning the want ads for a used bicycle. The Big Mango never inspired me to roll up my pants and go for a spin, but there's something about Chiang Mai that makes the concept really inviting. I watched Citylife Chiang Mai classifieds, as well as the much more exciting Craigslist Thailand offerings, but pickings were very slim. I saw a lot of bikes for rent around town, and many tourists wobbled along against the local traffic flow whenever I took a walk, but nothing showed up in the listings for almost two months.

When I finally spotted my future steed, it was on Craigslist, and even though the photo was murky, I could tell this bicycle and I could get along. First of all, it looked an awful lot like my last one - a Schwinn road/mountain hybrid from that period during the '90s when the company was going bankrupt, and all my hip friends warned me it would be nothing but trouble. That turned out to be an unfounded opinion, as it performed like a trouper for years, only finally succumbing to neglect as I successfully replaced all physical activity with a high-speed internet connection. The last time I rode it, I was so stiff and rusty that I fell over in front of the Decatur Dairy Queen and sustained a hip injury that still hurts me with every step. I parked the bike, and when I walked away from my home for the last time, it was still leaning against the wall near the back door with two flat tires and a rusted chain.

The resemblance was even more remarkable when I managed to match schedules with the owner and take her out for a test drive. Loosey-goosey, knobby tires, mysterious death rattles from unlubricated moving parts, sucky brakes, etc. However, this one had a basket, which for some reason struck me as a VERY IMPORTANT ACCESORY, and one of those little passenger carriers in back. The owner was a young medical type doing an internship at Maharaj Hospital, and, like me, he had a freakishly large head on a short body. That meant the existing helmet fit me, and would be thrown in at no extra charge. He also had one of those combination cable locks that neither he nor I could open. He assured me it worked, and I assured him it would. Later, I dropped it in the trash. Nobody with the proper Chiang Mai attitude ever uses a lock anyhow. So it was an irresistible, complete package. It even had fenders, which my last one didn't, so rainy season wouldn't mean a constant rooster tail of water going up my back.

As always, we had to dicker for a bit. He wanted an insane amount of money for it, about 65% of the replacement price, and I firmly declined to pay him that much. I pointed out all the obvious flaws, and the fact the drive shaft needed replacement, which would set me back $30 American. He wheedled for a few minutes, pointing out the pristine condition of the helmet, and how it alone had cost him $25. He mentioned the free lock. He talked about how much fun it was to ride up Mount Doi Suthep. We settled on two thirds of the asking price, and I sensed we both felt we'd gotten away with a felony. As I rode away from him, I glanced back over my shoulder. Until the bike veered sharply left and threatened to give me a Dairy Queen replay, I could see him waving. I pulled myself back into line, and vowed to never look back again unless I was parked. That was the last time I ever saw Eric.

My first trek was all the way across the city to the serviced apartment I was keeping off Loi Kroh Road. Eric lived, as fate would have it, about three blocks from where I now live - two apartments and several months later. It's still pretty exciting getting from here to there, but I'm getting better all the time. That first day, I made the trip in an unrelieved state of blind terror. Not pissing myself was something of which I could be proud, and as much as I might have wanted to, I did not scream once, nor did I burst into tears of rage and frustration. All of those options were on the table for the interminable twenty minutes that it took me to come from Nimmanhaemin to Loi Kroh. Test riding in front of Eric's side street condo had in no way prepared me for the obstacle course that is Chiang Mai by bicycle.

To be perfectly honest, I pretty much repeated my Decatur performance for the first three months of being an Asia-based bicyclist. As long as I stayed at Lanna Lodge, I found a quiet spot where I wouldn't be likely to see the bicycle very often, and proceeded to walk and take taxis as I'd done before. When I moved across town to my second place, Chiang Mai Lodge, I threw it in the back of a pick-up truck along with my other possessions, and quickly parked it behind the building so I wouldn't have any crazy notions about actually riding it. It was a very nice parking space, protected from the rain. I was sure she'd be happy there.

I can't tell you exactly why, but one Sunday morning I awoke with a yen for bicycling through quiet morning streets, and went downstairs to the parking area. Of course, the tires were completely flat, and at 7AM on Sunday, there really isn't much available in the bicycle service line. I waited until 10AM, when The Magic Store opened its doors (which in their case is the same as removing the entire front wall of the building), and ran inside to see if they might have a pump and pressure gauge. As usual, they were more than prepared for me: they had three pumps in different sizes, each made in a different country. The tiny Japanese one looked cute, but cost twice as much; the one from India was really cheap and had a pressure gauge inline, but was incomprehensible as a tool; and, finally, the Chinese one was built to military spec, and even cheaper. Not only that, any idiot could quickly master the working concept, which meant I was the man for the job. I paid my six bucks and went home. I pumped the tires until I couldn't pinch them more than a little bit, and figured that was a good test for pressure. It worked. I was on my way.

If you were to ask me what is most important to know about riding a bike in Chiang Mai, I'd boil it down to this:

1. They aren't driving on the wrong side of the street. You are.

2. Relax. Asians do everything really close to other people.

2b. Try not to clench your bicycle seat too hard. They can see you.

3. No matter how much you believe in 2 and 2b, never go out after dark.

4. Stay off the super highway.

5. Never insist you have right of way if the other vehicle is larger than a bicycle.

6. Take your time, and come to a complete stop if you're not sure.

7. Always look to your right before turning left. If it is at all possible, never turn right. There's a reason they call it the Buddha right.

8. Faded yellow strips across both streets at an intersection means it's a four-way stop. You should stop. No one else will.

9. Never assume you can follow a Thai who is also riding a bicycle. If you go that slow, you'll just fall over. Pass them.

10. If anything goes wrong, never forget it's always your fault.

11. Wear your helmet, and buy a bunch of those little blinking light thingies. Stick them on yourself, the bike, your helmet. They're cheap, and once you've felt that soft night wind in your face one time, you'll never be able to obey rule 3.

2011-10-26T01:21:00.001-04:00

I'm reading two books right now, one about the mapping of Siam (Thailand), and the other about the rewiring of our brains by the internet.

Since writing that first sentence, I've checked my Facebook twice and opened four links to Thailand flood information. It's entirely possible Nicholas Carr draws the right assumptions about the dangers of hyper-linking information in his book, The Shallows, but I'm too distracted to be sure. Also, there's a guy with a tile saw in the hallway, and no matter how much I try, his particular brand of noise can not be ignored. The only thing missing from the dentist's office ambiance is the vibration in my jawbone: the sounds are identical to those we all remember inside our heads as the root canal drug on and on.

Someone warned me that, no matter where one moves in Thailand, the sounds of remodeling and renovation are never far away, and he was dead on. So far, it's been a constant part of my environment for nearly two years.

The casual observer might be deceived into thinking such an ancient culture would be slow to change, but that's not at all true. Sometimes, I think Thais build things just so they can tear them down and build new things. A twenty-year-old house is considered a relic only worthy of demolition, and even the temples, which are about the only structures with any longevity, are in a constant state of flux. New wings are built to obscure old ones and pavestone parking lots are laid in to replace unproductive gardens. Sometimes, the illusion is good enough to preserve continuity with the past, but most of the time it is not. There's something transparently false about a designer home with double carport and swimming pool built in the style of a 400-year-old Lanna farmhouse.

That Thais are open to new concepts is a part of Thongchai Winichakul's premise in his scholarly book, Siam Mapped. The kingdom was quick to grasp and incorporate Western ideas about boundaries and physical geography, and moved from the religious abstractions of the ancient Buddhist "maps" to modern cartography in a relatively short time. As a result of their adaptability, the Thais managed to become intellectual peers of the European imperial powers who colonized every other country in SE Asia. This in no small part explains Thailand's uncanny ability to remain independent in spite of its relatively small size. They learned to speak the diplomatic language of the invaders, and quickly adjusted their statecraft. Centuries spent learning how to balance and share power has taught them how to bend and not break.

I think it's possibly illuminating in regards to the current struggle over Preah Vihear at the Cambodian border that for a very long time, there was an understanding between Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam that Cambodia was an independent state subject to the rule of the two stronger countries. There was no such thing as a firm boundary separating these entities. Instead, there was a dynamic, diffused accommodation of interests and allegiances along the frontiers. This "pre-modern" way of coping more resembles the reality I've observed in my travels along other frontiers, and is more efficient. It's less likely to cause military confrontation than the "modern," British-inspired insistence on forcing lines drawn on paper out of the realm of the conceptual and into the arena of social geography.

New attitude

2011-10-11T03:33:00.001-04:00

After playing the expat white guy cards for a year and a half, I recently decided to see what life was like on the other side. For the first time since I arrived in January 2010, I determined I should find a place where people were living as actual Thai people live their quotidian existences. I followed no old hand recommendations, did not Google map anything, and promised myself I wouldn't be scared off by building managers who didn't speak English, nor by entrances that didn't have air-conditioned foyers accessible only by waving an electronic key over a lighted pad. I gave up the prerequisite in-house restaurant, laundry, hair salon, coffee shop, bar, swimming pool and fitness center, because I've had all those things and found them only briefly engaging or altogether useless. Even in the most expensive, highly westernized condo developments, I have come to understand these amenities are often closed because no one can make a living selling commonly available goods and services at highly inflated prices, or because no one is interested in performing the necessary maintenance. Why pay a dollar a pound for laundry when you can walk next door and give the lady with the washing machine thirty cents to do the same chore? Why pay fifty dollars a month for a dubious swimming pool and a fitness room full of broken equipment when you can buy one fifty dollar second hand bicycle that will take you to the twelve dollar a month swimming pool? If you want to lift weights, you can always go down to the girly bars and lift size one Thai women over your head. Most of them love that, and the tourists find it hugely amusing.

After strolling the neighborhood for a few days, I happened upon a really shabby-looking condo building near Kad Suan Kaew shopping mall. It carried no English signage, but I discovered it went by an unlikely name: Impress Town Condo. It may have been impressive when it was built, but I can't say there's anything left of that: it has aged in much the same way as Brazzaville or Brasilia, or any other Social Realist concrete city in a hot place. When I first looked, I assumed Impress was a late '70s production, but one of my neighbors, a retired building contractor from the US, assures me the infrastructure components date it to the early 1990s. I'll take his word for the reason it aged so rapidly: like most such projects, Impress was pre-sold with the understanding that buyers would clear their investment and realize a certain annual profit within the first ten years. After that covenant was fulfilled, the building's managers settled in for a long war of attrition. They would do zero maintenance until the original owners chose to sell the units back at a substantial discount and move along. After enough did this, the building would be renovated and units would be resold at much higher prices. To give you some idea how total the neglect is, not a drop of fresh paint has ever been applied to either the interior or exterior in twenty years.

In spite of all this, I am delighted with my room. Once inside the door, I'm in a cozy, fairly well-kept Thai woman's idea of a single person's home in the city. There are more built-in wooden cabinets than I will ever be able to use, and a rich-looking wooden parquet floor. I have a decent little kitchen with refrigerator, rice cooker and microwave. My dinette seats four and looks like dark stained maple. There are many direct daylight balanced ceiling fixtures, and tungsten balanced indirect accent lights on three walls. The bathroom is strictly business: the sink is tiny, and the toilet and shower are almost in the same spot. The tile is intact however, and there is not a hint of mold. Hot water is quickly available in fair measure. The very fast, always available, included internet is via building wifi, and utility prices are fixed at government levels. For this, I pay a base rate of $125 per month (rent+internet). Yesterday, I settled my utilities for the first month. Water cost me seventy-five cents, and the electricity came in at a whopping eight bucks.

My last digs, which were a big step down from my condo in Bangkok and had no kitchen, cost me $175 base rate, and the monthly utilities averaged six dollars for water and $75-$85 for electricity. I did have an infrequently-open coffee shop, expensive Taiwanese restaurant, beauty salon, key card door, and fat loss spa. Every day, the place was cleaned with toothbrushes, and paint touch-ups were a constant source of industrial aroma. However, after they spent two months knocking down concrete walls and sawing tile from morning to night in the units above me, I was more than ready to give up a few familiar-looking amenities. Before I left, I spoke to the building owner, a Thai Chinese man from Bangkok. He told me he was remodeling the top floor with an eye to attracting more upscale foreigner retirees. When I asked how much he planned to get for the combination of two $175 a month rooms, he told me he thought $600 was about right. Who knows? Maybe he's right, but I won't be in his target market. I'm Impressed now.

VIEW TO THE EAST FROM IMPRESS TOWN

Groundhog Day

2011-10-03T11:55:00.000-04:00

Lately, much of my time seems to be spent going back to the last familiar spot and starting over. Something like the movie "Groundhog Day," but with fewer icy puddles in the streets. I can almost predict my next few moves as if I were a detached observer, and not the central player. The fellow who came to Thailand intent on reinventing himself continues his busy ways, but another part of me is already settling back to watch the show.

This much is clear: all my assumptions were incorrect.

In many cases, comically incorrect.

I've been lucky to avoid tragedy, but so far, in spite of crashing a motorcycle and a pickup truck, I'm in one piece. Although it's pretty much an inflexible and xenophobic culture, Thailand is very forgiving of personal foibles. If you want to come here and pretend you are Don Quixote, that's fine. As long as you can pay your tab and not hurt anyone, pretty much anything goes. You can decide a ladyboy from upcountry is the reincarnation of fair Dulcinea, and demand that everyone in the village show proper respect when her majesty passes by on her motosai: chances are excellent everyone will play along. When you're out of sight and/or earshot, they'll make merciless fun of you, but as long as you're watching, they'll always be kind and polite. They know you're crazy, but they also know it's not that important whether one is or isn't technically sane.

Everybody is a little bit of everything, and that's okay.

I've received a lot of good advice from Thai people, but it's so subtle I'm just getting around to understanding stuff I was told a year ago. As a result, I've followed almost none of it, and come out the worse for wear in spite of many efforts to keep me on the rails. Still, everybody I've known is quite happy to talk to me when they see me: even if I broke off relations in a fit of anger and spent months sulking about how they failed to understand me. It's the damnedest thing I've ever experienced. They never seem to forget anything, but the things they remember always come with a powerful positive spin, and whatever it was that was bothering me hasn't the slightest importance to them. This lends a phantasmagoric quality to my self-assessments, because I'm pretty much wedded to the idea that whatever I'm pissed off about must be significant. I've discovered I am the only one who thinks so, and that's not an easy thing for an overcompensated American male to digest.

Later in the week, I'll go back to Bangkok to participate in a festival for the Goddess of Mercy. My friend Apple took videos last year, and posted them to YouTube. I was blown away by the emotional sincerity and ecstatic abandon of the celebrants, and was amazed to discover this high tech corporate manager and her family go back generations with the observation at the ancient Indian temple in Silom. Since then, we formed a relationship and I moved there. Nothing was working for me, so I bailed out after six months, and came back to Chiang Mai, where familiarity blunted my profound culture shock. Now, we only see each other every few months, but she's just as considerate of me as she ever was. She's happy to have me come, and I'll be happy to see her again. Whatever we're doing now couldn't be defined inside my limited concept of what a relationship is, but she seems to have a grip on it. I have my white shirt and pants ready. This time, I'll try to listen a little better.

Hot water

2011-09-18T00:32:00.000-04:00

A friend posted an interesting New York Times link on his Facebook recently. It appears the most significant negative environmental impact of the average home can be found in the laundry room. The piece discusses at length how almost any piece of clothing can be washed in cold water, but Americans don't like the idea, and won't buy any of the cold water detergents on the market. The amounts of greenhouse gases produced by heating water for the wash are staggeringly large when accumulated on a national scale, and could easily be avoided. However, once people have been sold on a technology and all the trappings that grow up around it, it's very difficult to walk them back.

This set me to thinking about the lifestyle I now have, as opposed to the one I had two years ago. Since arriving in SE Asia, I haven't seen a hot water enabled washing machine, and I haven't been in one kitchen that featured hot water on demand at the sink. Many homes and lower end hotels don't even feature hot water showers, and the places I've been where I could run a tub of hot water and soak cost me a lot of money - as much money for a couple of nights as I'd normally spend in a month for an apartment. Where there is hot water for the shower, it's universally provided by small heaters located on the wall. You switch on the power, wait thirty seconds, and then turn on the water. A few seconds later, you have a warm stream that you can hop into and enjoy for a few minutes. I haven't run into one that will heat the bathroom and make steam for a half hour of luxurious bathing, but in this climate, that sort of thing isn't so appealing.

After throwing money at the laundry ladies for many months, I decided to take over that chore, and was surprised to discover that none of the places I went had hot water washing machines. Only a very few offered dryers, and I never found one which would actually dry things. The clothes went in the washers cold and dry, and came out cold and wet. The dryers didn't significantly alter things, although the clothes usually came out a little bit warmer. Thus, I learned I had to bring everything to my room to dry. I invested a few bucks in racks and clips. If there was rain, I put the racks underneath the ceiling fan, and when the sun shone, I used the balcony. Later, I pretty much abandoned the commercial washers except for doing large items like bedding and jeans. I found the best smelling wash came from standing at the kitchen sink and hand washing my shirts, tea towels and skivvies in liquid dish detergent. I tried using the powdered stuff for a while, but it takes a whole lot more water to rinse out. The net result is a huge saving of money, water, and electricity. It really doesn't take any more time than it did to pack things up and walk to the laundry place, and my clothes are in much better shape.

In the US, I would go once a week to the laundromat. This required that I get in my vehicle and drive for ten to fifteen minutes before even beginning to do any washing. At the Laundry Lodge behind Ansley Mall, I could select from cold, warm or hot water settings on my washing machine, and I always picked hot. Hot equaled sterilization, which equaled clean was my thinking. After feeding a lot of money into the little quarter-sized slots, I would go sit in the lounge area which was equipped with a constant supply of hot water for tea and coffee. If I went to the toilet, I washed my hands with hot water. I sat by the door, because the walls running down both sides of the 75 foot space were lined with dryers, almost all of which were used at the highest possible temperature. Hot equals dry, and the faster one achieved dryness, the fewer quarters one had to spend. As a result, the air conditioning system was always taxed, and ran continuously, even in the winter.

Because I'm willing to pay extra for the luxury, my Thailand apartment has an air conditioner. It even has a remote control, so I don't have to get out of bed to chill out. So far I've not turned it on. High ceilings are a matter of course in most buildings, and all the older structures are made with an eye to using natural air currents created by cross ventilation. My ceiling fan is always on, but it nibbles energy in comparison to the gluttonous air con, and the breezes it creates aren't harsh and dry. If I perspire, I take off my shirt. Evaporation always suffices to bring me back to a comfortable temperature. Back home, I could almost touch the ceiling in my last apartment, and the space was constructed to be closed and air conditioned at all times. I had a very large, intricately mullioned window that looked onto the garden, but it didn't have a single pane that opened.

Monday morning

2011-09-13T07:58:00.000-04:00

The dissonance level in my daily information diet drastically increased over the last week.

People who live in the US may have an inkling of how differently the rest of the world sees things like our national obsession with the 9/11 events, but, unless they're prepared to dig, even the most diligent dissenters will continue to end up looking at each other through different ends of the same microscope.

Those who are comfortable with official story lines remain focused on the narratives in the media, and those who reflexively question authority continue to sift through the evidence for proof that someone somehow managed to orchestrate an event too vast to describe.

I think I can see some convergence of opinion as the years pass by, with more and more of those formerly inclined to dismiss alternative stories showing some signs of curiosity, while their skeptical siblings turn down the volume and lay the groundwork for historical resignation.

Maybe it didn't happen the way we were told.

I think even the most diehard Fox News partisans can understand that now.

Maybe secret weapons from outer space weren't the real reason buildings fell in Manhattan.

Not many serious people will step that far into the conjectural for answers.

If Occam's Razor is a valid tool, then its corollary would be that the more complicated an answer becomes, the less likely it is to be true, and I think that's something even untrained thinkers intuitively understand. When I spent hundreds of hours researching what is often called the "9/11 Conspiracy," it was clear that intelligent people of good faith had real questions, but it was also obvious that finding actual answers wasn't likely, and that any hope of replacing the existing narrative was vanishingly small. Sometimes we see what we want to see, and other times we see what we are told to see. The more we know about perception and justice, the more obvious it becomes that we have no reason even to believe our eyes and ears during moments of great stress. We all think we see what we see, but scientific support for that proposition is hard to find.

I looked at it for as long as I could, and I finally had to make up my mind: I believe we don't really know what happened on that day in 2001, and I further accept that I have no answer. I also don't think it's especially important to continue nattering away about how the horse got out of the barn after he's already escaped and jumped off a cliff into the sea.

I have lived in Asia for almost two years now, but I still get a daily feed of information from the US: I have the internet, newspapers, and satellite television. Since Rupert Murdoch ran a power play on the area satellite feeds, I'm stuck with Fox News for actual television, but the feeds from CNN, MSNBC, et al, are always available online. I can drop by the news stand in the mall and get a locally printed edition of the day's papers from any city in the world, and the latest magazines are also usually available in something like real time.

What has changed is the variety of sources that make up the daily overdose of details: now, instead of tuning through a half dozen US news feeds on the teevee, I get to browse Thai, Singaporean, German, French, Arab and Japanese channels. Some of these don't constantly offer English language coverage, but all do on a daily basis provide services that are easy for me to understand.

For a week now, the Arab channel, Al Jazeera, has been giving me a comprehensive look at the 9/11 story from a totally different point of view. This came as something of a surprise, because in spite of its fire-breathing reputation as a fiercely partisan Muslim news outlet, Al Jazeera's daily approach is very even-handed and non-partisan. Comparing them to Fox is common among those who wish to affect an air of sophisticated distance, but it's like comparing a high school football team with the debate team. There may be smart people on both teams, but you don't hear much intelligent discussion in the Fox locker room.

Unlike every other source of news at my disposal, Al Jazeera spent a week looking without sentimentality or cliche at the very ugly destructive forces unleashed after 9/11. They weren't insensitive to the losses in the US, but they relentlessly pursued the bigger story that led to our current reality: a handful of highly-placed US government officials used the attacks to promote a culture of never-ending war on democratic principles in the US, and on actual people in other countries. We went on an epic binge of violence and oppression, and we're slowly waking up broke to a terrible hangover.

After watching what AJ had to say for a few hours, I have to admit that while it all should have been obvious to everybody, only those outside our culture had a clear view of what we were doing to ourselves and others. While the rest of the world had a vigorous discussion of the moral intricacies involved in our actions over the last ten years, we were being told to sit down and shut up. The most pointed example would be the Iran-Contra weasel Ari Fleisher's remark that "Americans should watch what they say." While everybody else was trying to figure out how to be as free as we in the US were, our political establishment was busy abolishing the free society we'd all come to think was our birthright. In a twinkling of Dick Cheney's eye, due process and immunity from military intervention in domestic affairs were replaced by the Patriot Act, and W The President actually went to England and met with the Prime Minister in an on-the-record discussion of bombing a news network's headquarters because he didn't like what they were reporting about our invasion of Iraq.

That network was Al Jazeera. They haven't forgotten, and neither have a few billion other people.

Thai Muslim ladies prepare a wedding feast

9/11/2011

2011-09-10T21:40:00.001-04:00

We may not be compelled to regularly move away from our messes any longer, thanks to pesticides, sewer systems, and garbage pickup service, but other less tangible stimuli than fleas and solid waste accumulate around the lives of God's immobile freeholders. The rituals of spring cleaning may soothe the maternal desire for a fresh nest, but even that tradition has fallen behind us in our rush to normalize and level the experience of life. We move through the seasons with no regard for the rhythms of life on the land, because our daily needs are no longer connected to the ground beneath our feet. Indeed, it is now the common experience to live life without ever actually setting foot on the Earth, with the possible exception of those few moments when we seek out a patch of dirt and grass so the family dog can relieve himself in comfort.

When he reached his sixties, my grandfather appalled the family by deserting my grandmother's hearth and home to live alone in a tiny cabin on the south side of the Tennessee River. No one could imagine why a man with a good wood-burning stove and a smokehouse might do such a thing, but he was adamant, and did not come home for months. He built a flat-bottomed boat, ran trot lines across the river, and brought in a harvest of fish twice each day. These he would take to the local fish camp, and sell to the restaurant where Governor Folsom liked to dine when he brought his mistress out of Montgomery for a little R&R. Sometimes, if he really needed cash, he'd act as a guide for some rich man who wanted to enjoy a fishing trip without the annoyance of baiting a hook, but he didn't like doing it, and finally stopped altogether.

There were times when even the rudimentary shelter of his cabin proved too much, and he would ditch his routine, set off through the forests with a pocket full of crackers and sardines, and be gone for days at a time. He was delighted by the invention of plastic laundry bags, as he no longer had to stop at night and sleep on the damp ground. He simply wrapped his compact body in plastic and found a flat spot to lie down. Even if it rained, the inconvenience was minor, and he seldom had to worry about getting cold. Trapped inside the bag, his body heat was more than enough.

Now, I am sixty-something, and half a world away. Yesterday, I moved for the third time in nine months, and I can't tell you how pleasing it is to be sitting at a different desk, listening to different birds, and tapping out a message on the same old keyboard. I understand my grandfather better now than ever before, because I clearly see that although it may be a temporary release to simply move, we are, first and last, temporary beings. We are all overwhelmed by the pettiness and failure which accumulate around us, whether we stand and fight, or take a walk.

At least for today, I'm okay with taking a walk.

There are no heroes, and no one escapes forever.

I recommend you bury your dead and move on.

Going home

2011-08-29T23:07:00.002-04:00

Nine o'clock in the morning, and it's already 90 degrees outside, with a relative humidity above 80%. It goes against everything I believe to use air conditioning early in the day, but we do what we must. If I didn't turn on the coolness, I'd never make it through my second cup of coffee. The first already bathed me in sweat, and made me admit my immediate environment wasn't exactly comfy. Even the raucous mynah birds haven't stirred much since dawn, when papa hit the balcony rail for his daily sunrise serenade. The air is heavy and sticky, and I imagine flying, which he usually does all day, isn't such a lark now that we no longer have crisp, clear mornings with cool breezes. He and I don't get along very well, so it pleases me to think he's just as uncomfortable as all those riding motorcycles with burning skin and watering eyes. When it gets really hot in the afternoon, many Thais don full coats with parkas to protect themselves from the wind. At 100 degrees, it's very common to see a procession of them cruising down the street, looking for all the world like they're on their way to start the Iditarod.

Yesterday, I got a call from one of the first expats I met here, and he had surprising news: a mutual friend and the one man we'd all come to think of as an indestructible fixture in Asia had suddenly decided to pack it in and go back to America. After Katrina destroyed his home in Biloxi, , he came to Thailand for the first time since the Vietnam War, and, in spite of knowing very little Thai, plunged into the countryside in search of the perfect woman. Unlike most of us, he had never divorced, and was an earnestly grieving Catholic widower who'd been married to the same woman for nearly forty years before she came down with cancer. He was looking to replace her with someone of equal goodness, and his search led him all over rural Thailand and into the Philippines. He had no patience with city women, and wasted almost no time on the legion of Bangkok women who dominate the online dating services. He liked country girls and country people. He was at his happiest describing visits to remote village schools with boxes full of games and toys for the children, or talking about the way he'd come to truly see and appreciate the richness of daily life in a culture that had no televisions or internet, let alone movie theaters and fast food.

Still, after a year of watching him and listening to his stories, I knew he didn't really want another relationship: it was enough to take the trips, meet new people, and help in small ways to make life better for others. At his core, he knew he'd never replace the woman he'd lost, and he also knew that at 68, he was really too old to begin again. Lately, he'd taken to making dark allusions to our limited time here on Earth, and, in spite of his good health and vigor, he was obviously worried about the prospect of dying alone in an alien culture. He didn't want to become the focus of a "Buddhist barbeque," which is how he described the cremation ceremony one of his girl friends promised to afford him when he died. He didn't want to become a box of bones in some up-country cemetery because, in the end, he was very much a man of his own culture. He's going home. He has adult children and a large extended family to receive him, and I wish him peace and completion in his remaining time. His decision is a shadow over all our assorted expat dreams and plans.

Selah.

Little things

2011-08-16T02:16:00.000-04:00

Watching the news on Al Jazeera yesterday, I was struck by something on the crawler at the bottom of the screen:

PRESIDENT OBAMA APPROVAL RATING AT AN ALL-TIME LOW

That's what it said, and that's all it said. Something seemed odd about that.

Al Jazeera isn't Fox News, but they looked a lot like that sad joke about news networks with the statement they continued to run all day.

This sort of thing has a cumulative effect: most people having the usual passive experience of the news would certainly come away with the impression Obama had somehow become the most unpopular president ever.

That's not even close to being true. The guy who was appointed to be president just before this one sank into the twenties before taking his sorry ass back to Texas, and Obama is still perking along around forty. This in spite of the worst financial news since the Great Depression, and the best efforts of a multi-billion dollar conspiracy to block his every move, and to discredit whatever it can't obstruct.

After two years, Obama has dropped to the sort of polling rank Bush had after eight months with a solvent government and little bad news.

So it is that we continue to die the death of a million paper cuts and facts sink beneath the waves.

Excellent wines in Tuscany

2011-08-12T08:32:00.001-04:00

I watched a few minutes of David Cameron's long-winded performance before Parliament yesterday, and stopped when I noticed my jaw had dropped to my chest and showed no inclination to correct itself. I haven't seen anything like it since a drunken friend decided to show a fascinated crowd of New Orleans barflies that it was, indeed, quite possible for a man to piss up a rope.

He got his shoes wet, lost a few bets and had to go downtown on an indecent exposure charge, but he at least had the satisfaction of emptying his bladder. Mr. Cameron may be feeling a similar sense of short term relief, but in the long run, it's likely he'll have to put up with more collateral damage than did my drinking buddy.

While the riots were in full swing and Mr. Cameron was making his way back from a "holiday" in Tuscany, some London activists were already saying the worst case scenario would be for the government to respond to the crisis by adopting the prison camp mentality that prevails in the US. If you don't think we're a frightening example to others, take a look at the first few hits that come up when you Google US prison population. We have 5% of the world's population, and 25% of its prisoners. As many as 50% of those imprisoned in the US are in "pretrial detention." Simply put, we have 12.5% of the entire planet's prison population incarcerated without ever having had a trial. That sort of thing worries people who live in other countries, and Europeans in particular live in fear that our example may be globalized.

Cameron has nothing fresh, and appears ready to play along with the idea that those in power can simply hunt down all offenders and throw the book at them until the societal "sickness" goes away. Thus, the ever fearful citizenry can once again return to the regularly scheduled programs that put them to sleep each night, and the conservative government can resume picking their pockets. I know it sounds oversimplified, but what have we Americans done since 1980? So far, it's working well for those who prosper, and the prison biz is pure gold for those with the necessary connections. Who could have predicted 30 years ago that private prisons would one day stand a chance of replacing all that cheap offshore labor with US convicts working at a fraction of minimum wage? Talk about a win-win situation.

Of course, England was very well-prepared to take this step, as it has more video surveillance than any place outside China; and I'm sure every rioting adolescent left his or her ghostly image lingering on hard drives all over the country. Many will be arrested. Some may be convicted. All will be incarcerated in a system so over-crowded that it will take a very long time behind bars, guilty or not. That's the nature of "pre-trail detention." I think the man is probably a bit disingenuous, but Syria's UN rep made some sense when he asked why Cameron can get away with doing the very same things the Assad regime thinks it's trying to accomplish in Syria. As I suggested before, the difference between a riot and a revolution may be entirely semantic, and watching the British Prime Minister suggest he'll begin shutting down online social media because it works to the advantage of his adversaries is no different to me than watching President Mubarak shut down the internet in Egypt.

Sleepy London Town

2011-08-10T06:49:00.002-04:00

No matter how far away I get from the world of classes and jobs, it still feels like hooky when I take off a day to turn on the air-conditioning, take lots of Tylenol and watch the news from the comfort of my bed. There's a tiny voice nagging away as long as I remain awake, so I sleep. It's always been my way of dealing with sickness, and I'm happy to report I can nap all day at 64 just as well as I did at 24. Occasionally, I wake up, eat a banana and resume my news watch, but it never lasts very long: within the hour, I'm usually asleep again. Thus I have wasted Wednesday, August 10, in the Year of Our Buddha, 2554.

Today, there's a lot of chatter about events in England. Talking heads discuss Twitter, BB chat and Facebook as shops burn in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham (home to the wicked Sheriff who gave Robin Hood such a hard time), while hooded children dash around stealing everything they can carry. As one, Serious Men declare the original cause of the rioting was a legitimate grievance, but, really, this sort of behavior is just insupportable. Leftists want an orderly revolution, not a riot, and everybody else just wants to return to the regularly scheduled programs.

Fetching as the "Arab Spring" model of social revolution in Egypt may be for western intellectuals and progressive political junkies, it's not likely to become a commonplace occurrence. When people get pissed off and decide they've had enough, it's usually been the case that they turn to violence against property, police and other easily spotted symbols of power. The Tea Party in Boston Harbor wasn't a poetry slam; it was a calculated act of vandalism. Revolutions may have narrative coherence, but only after the fact, and if there's any fine talk, it usually makes an appearance early on and beats a retreat for the nearest exits when the brawl starts.

All over the globe, we're seeing people in the streets these days, and it's pretty obvious we're approaching a point where the existing power structure has to negotiate and co-opt, or face the abyss. There's a very fine line between civilization as we now know it and blind anarchy.

When the people in charge make their way to the top through looting, intimidation, and murder, how can we expect those on the bottom to do things differently?

Grumpy old expats

2011-08-08T08:31:00.000-04:00

Solitude has a self-reinforcing consequence: the longer one remains alone and silent, the more difficult it becomes to speak to others.

People who run into a man who has spent a lot of time communing with himself often assume he is stand-offish and difficult, but that may not be true at all. The aloof expat who casts his eyes down and to the right when passed on the street may not be avoiding others as a matter of taste, but because of a loss for words, and a failing memory of just what constitutes a proper social encounter. All the little non-verbal signals and signs that normally form the bulk of our communication with others aren't easily faked, and so it is that the lonely man eventually becomes silenced.

I think this is especially true for those who end up living in a place where everybody is speaking an unknown language, and it's compounded when the culture is so alien that even body language is unreadable. Spend a few weeks or months under those conditions, and it's likely you won't even be able to have a decent conversation with former friends and family, let alone perfect strangers who pop up and disappear at random. In a way, it's even worse if the natives can speak at least some of your mother tongue, because with that in the bank, many decide learning a new language is not only daunting, but unnecessary. That's a trap, because the truth is your hosts know enough to find out what you want, but not enough to talk to you. You have no idea what they're saying to each other, and they have no way to tell you. The result is more isolation, and an attendant decline in communications skills in the language one once used all the time.

All the money's gone

2011-08-06T00:26:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I watched my little hedge against disaster shrink by thousands of dollars in just a few hours. It wasn't a pretty sight, and left me rattled. I'm too old to go make a bunch of money to replace what I lost, and have to depend on the actions and beliefs of strangers to get back to where I was only a week ago. That's an odd feeling for me. I never really noticed market swings in the old days, when there was always an option, but I'm paying attention now. If our psychotic government manages to shut off a very slender monthly lifeline, or even reduce my purchasing power through bad management of the currency, there's trouble ahead.

So far, I've left my bets in place, confident that no matter how self-destructive temporal behavior in the US might become, the long term prognosis was still good. I'm re-thinking that. In 18 months, I've watched things steadily deteriorate, and it appears quite possible the whole thing jumped the shark long ago, and won't be back. As a young Brit seat mate said to me during a bus trip last week, "for a year, I thought things couldn't get any worse. For a year, I've been wrong. Every time I turn around, things have gotten worse." Like me, he didn't off-shore his money when he came to Asia, and, also like me, he's seen his currency dwindle in value by 10% as a result. We came to a "third world" country that looked pretty unstable, and bet on the folks back home to keep things running properly. Now, that "third world" country has a fast-growing economy with a very strong currency, we'd be much better off if we'd let our money come with our hearts, .

A few days ago I made what now looks like a bad decision: I let my 401K sit at Fidelity because I thought paying the 20% tax on withdrawal would outweigh any advantage I might gain by bringing the money to a Thai savings account. In one day, I lost 10%. In one year, I already lost 10% in the currency exchange, and, as the man said, "it could get worse." I'm going to give it some time, because it's bad policy to make big decisions under duress, and because the US economy tends to pick up before a presidential election. Assuming the latter happens on schedule, I should be cashing out about a years from now, and putting my money in Asia. Back home, schools and other societal functions are closing or taking big cuts and managing to survive as crippled institutions. Here, the new government is promising every student a new Ipad, and a substantial raise for every working person in the country. Banks here actually pay interest on savings accounts too. I haven't seen that in 20 years.

I was born in a country that had just finished fighting World War II. The national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product had never been higher, and hasn't been since. Instead of whining about the money we owed and making vicious cuts in what we spent on ourselves, we got busy and built the world's largest national economy, while preserving and improving the living standards of our people. It wasn't an either/or kind of thinking which accomplished our transformation: it was a do this/then have that ethos. Some got a little, some got a lot, but there was nothing like the kind of economic perversity we now see. I don't think we had many people drinking one bottle of wine with dinner that cost as much as many people make in a month. It was very rare to see a man driving a car that cost more than one's house. The man who managed the factory where my father worked made three times as much money as my dad, and was more than happy to have it. My mom stayed at home with the kids, and nobody ever thought it would be a good idea for her to go to work and bring in extra money.

Now, every news cycle brings us stunning examples of disparity, and where the money went isn't exactly a big mystery. There seems to be no embarrassment in running a story about one US city or another falling into bankruptcy because they invested in novel financial instruments with a fawning feature story about some hedge fund wizard's Zeppelin-sized yacht, and how it's always stocked with champagne and ready to depart on the slightest whim. Every little city and town began giving up its factories and farms to corporations thirty years ago, and the last time I drove across a substantial part of America, it looked like a ghost town with fancy little gift shops in the "restored" areas, and some post-apocalyptic nightmare of careless commercial development in the rest. The factories are in ruin, the jobs went to distant countries and the farms are run by a handful of workers smuggled across the Mexican border. Giant robotic devices following GPS mapping plow the fields and bring water to mile after mile of monocrops, while the locals have to find a WalMart Super Center to buy a tomato grown in a foreign country.

The country I knew was gutted like a tuna and thrown on the pile of other national carcasses accumulated by multinational corporations pursuing the Neo-Liberal plan to industrialize and interrelate the entire planet as a way to save us from ourselves. The intentions were good of course, but they didn't last very long. Having everybody trading with everybody else in a free and open market sounds good on paper, but the wars grind on, consuming more and more of the resources we now understand aren't infinite. Free trade or not, some people are more powerful than others, so if North America wants to buy corn from Central America to make alcohol for internal combustion engines, then Pepe the ranchero in every remote village south of the border sees his tortilla prices triple overnight. That it makes no sense to burn food in pursuit of a process we now know is unsustainable and utterly stupid isn't a concern for the capitalist lords of the universe who run the modern world. "It will all come out in the wash," they tell us, and proudly point to the huge number of dollar a day jobs they created in India as a result of closing every shoe factory in New England.

But, I go on. If I can manage to bring most of my fish into port before the sharks eat it all, I'll be content. There aren't any sure things, of course, but I'm getting a little too old to find a collapsing culture amusing.

Bringing the War Back Home

2011-08-04T00:05:00.001-04:00

Throughout the '70s and '80s, I consciously avoided movies and books about the Vietnam War. I may be the only person I know who read Lord Jim, but refused to see Apocalypse Now. It was a time of bitterness, loss and frustration for me, and for many others on both sides of that monumental SE Asian cock-up. In the end, there just wasn't much to talk about. If you were opposed to the war, the takeaway was that your own government wouldn't hesitate to shoot you down in the streets for making too much noise. If you had been a supporter, you had to face the fact that the men who kept us there were criminals. The airlift off the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon and Nixon's departure from the White House lawn were eerily similar events, and even if you could manage to excuse the men responsible, the fact remained we had lost the war, and had nothing to show for it except a smattering of Vietnamese restaurants and a bunch of displaced Hmong in North Georgia.

Last week, a friend handed me a copy of Caputo's A Rumor of War and recommended I read it. As I did for Apocalypse a few years back, I granted this book an exception from the moratorium. So far, there's nothing new, but I do like the way the man writes, and I respect how hard it is to back away from the kind of commitment he made to a bunch of very bad ideas. Very few men have the courage to totally reassess their beliefs in a public forum, but Caputo has that, and he's blessed to have the intellectual depth required to confront and then reject some very compelling common delusions. I saw many men fall into the vortex before and during the war, and almost none re-emerged intact. Some died, some drank, all were wounded at the core of their being. They left us after high school if enlisted men, and after college if they were to become officers. They returned years later as almost unrecognizable versions of themselves, darkly brooding, prone to abrupt violence and isolated from others. Often, marriages that had survived years of war didn't survive months of peace.

We're now in a state of perpetual warfare, and the veterans never stop pouring back into the country. The effect this has on a society is incalculable, but I think it's safe to say we're now much more brutal, and far more cynical. Our pockets are as empty as our souls, and those of us born into the generation that came to be overrun by the military machine face difficult times as we grow older. Not only is there no money left for us, there's no patience with elders, and little respect for experience. To a degree, that's always the case, but it makes me uneasy to see that the passionate dissent now dominating our national conversation has moved so far away from human/humane concerns. The cult that has seized the megaphone isn't concerned with the values that made us a great country. They despise tolerance, relativism, multi-culturalism and any value system not based on accumulating money and individual advantage over others. It's the value system of the jungle, or the battlefield, and we're facing the consequences of bringing our many wars back home.

Looking for love

2011-08-02T10:07:00.003-04:00

As a matter of habit, I check the personal ads on Craigslist Bangkok most days, and often find entertaining nuggets among the dross of hooker listings and scams.
Today's little gem came in two parts.
The first was this terse dismissal in the "women for men" section.

"...your 70 and you look for young long term you will live to 100
you have no money dont come here hahaha..."

This wasn't something that had a context, and, deciding it must be a Thai woman speaking, I searched the recent "men for women" listings. Sure enough, the first one appeared to be the provocation.

"...hi my name is N--- i"m looking for compaion to live with.prefer under age 50 I'm going to be relocating to thailand the first of next year and want to have someone waiting for me when i arrive I'm living on small pension so if your looking for a rich man look else where. I'm easy going and very romantic if you want to know more please get back to me with a picture hope to hear from you soon. ..."

Unfortunately for N---, what followed were several candid photos of a white-bearded guy with the fashion sense of Elmer Fudd and the body of Santa Claus. He actually looked older than 70, and even the casual observer could see he wasn't exactly a high roller. It appeared Norm did have a good attitude, but I doubt it will survive much more undiluted truth.

How Thailand became a beacon of hope for aging men with little social ability and no hope of maintaining a relationship is something I don't know. There are a lot of possibilities, starting with the culture's historically lenient attitude toward sex, but I can't tell you why this little country ended up hosting so many western men in search of women. Yes, it was the major R&R destination for Vietnam's young warriors, and gained a reputation during that time. I suppose it could be said that many return here out of nostalgia and because it was the last place they ran into women happy to give them whatever they wanted as long as the money was good. However, that doesn't say a thing about the fact that Brits flock here as well, and, if anything, they're even more besotted with the alleged charms of Thai women than the Yanks.

If there is a more inaccurate stereotype than the obedient, ever affectionate Thai woman, I'm not sure what it is. Thai women aren't a different species, and, like their sisters around the world, they're not exactly waiting around for an old man with little or no money to sweep them off their feet. Maybe things have changed here since people started making more money and watching soap operas about the lives of the rich and famous every night, but I haven't yet run into an example of the woman most expats seem to be seeking. If that creature did exist, I think it was in a slower, poorer, and less connected society. The people I see around me aren't waiting for us to come and save them from unhappy lives of drudgery and boredom. They're pretty sharp operators in a culture very few westerners can even understand, and they work hard every day to get what they want.

When I first looked at Chiang Mai as a place to retire, most of my interest came from the fact that I could afford to live here in some comfort. I spent a lot of time looking at a very complex website which offered everything from meeting me at the airport to getting me settled in with my own condo and Thai wife. After I got here, I discovered 99% of it was hot air, and the only marriages they actually said they could arrange were with poor hill-tribe girls from the mountains. There simply weren't any Chiang Mai women interested in hooking up with an old foreigner. The country girls could speak not a word of English, often not much more Thai, and sometimes arrived not knowing how a flush toilet functioned. I've heard tales about these young girls refusing to sleep in the bed with their new husbands, because they feared being disrespectful toward a powerful elder. After sex, they would crawl off onto the floor at the foot of the bed and sleep until morning. After a few days, weeks or months, they all disappeared back into the mountains, taking whatever they could carry on a motorbike with them.

A few observations about play for pay

2011-07-15T07:32:00.000-04:00

Ashton and Demi's crusade against child prostitution has stirred things up among those expats in Thailand who spend most of their waking lives posting on internet forums. The consensus seems to be that if there is a lot of that going on, it should stop, and that if there isn't, the do-gooder NGO types should just sit down and shut up. Many of these people didn't leave their homelands because of an excessive sense of civic zeal, and they don't take kindly to liberal meddlers of any stripe. As they're quick to point out, people pretty much do what pleases them, and most efforts to change that are often led by people with an unhealthy interest in the behavior they say they're trying to contol. All of which is basically true, but I can't help wondering how many of these crusty old farts has a child bride tucked away in the bedroom. When a sixty-something guy gets sensitive about such things, I always assume a vested interest.

Although I have mostly observed the Thailand scene with the detachment of a man who has the luxury of sufficient "unpaid" female companionship, I have had contact with people in the sex trade, in Pattaya, Bangkok and Chiang Mai. If that weren't enough information, it's easy to observe the biz at nearly every public venue, and I've had ample opportunity to listen to comments made by Thais from different levels of society. After a year and a half, I haven't seen any children in the mix, but some Thai guys who run a large Chang Phuack karaoke bar were busted a few months back for offering the company of teenaged girls out of Burma. The service wasn't intended for foreigners, but relied instead on the sizable number of Thai men who're happy to indulge. Even so, I must admit I've seen a lot of Asian women who appeared quite young at first glance, but who proved to be adults on closer inspection. Thai women have no trouble fooling Westerners and Asians alike, and marketing considerations dictate that they all would have you believe they're a lot younger than they are. Youth sells in the sex trade, and don't let anybody tell you that's weird or exceptional: it's always been the way things work.

So far, the youngest sex worker I've had the opportunity to talk to is 21 years old. That means she's 20 in our years, as the Thais calcuate their age at one year on the day they are born. She has a younger sister whom she helps support, and she bristles at the suggestion a 15-year-old might bring a better price than she does. It's not a moral objection, however. She has no problem with her sister working as a prostitute, but is adamant about a minimum start-up age of 18. Why? I have no idea. I see this sort of thing pretty often: there are iron-clad rules about what is and is not accepted behavior, but moral attitudes about sex seem curiously free of any absolute moral constraints. Almost every woman I've met is quick to admit that selling sex is a reliable way to bring in money, and, although wealthy Thais will often lament that poverty forces women to sleep with rich foreigners, I have yet to meet anyone who thinks it would be a better idea to get a job at 7/11 if the woman in question is pretty enough to earn a good living in bed.

Just how good that living can be varies with the woman and her location, but even a street-level hooker with no special skills can earn several times the daily wage with just one customer. These "short-time" girls have no pimps or madams, and don't need to pay a house percentage. They seldom if ever spend more than one hour with a customer, and I have seen them decline business if they're not personally interested, or sense something weird about the john . That's another thing about all this that the casual observer will never get: the girls are in control every step of the way, and if you do something inappropriate, every woman in town will know all about you before you finish your morning shave. They look out for themselves, and for each other, and they generally enjoy long working lives so long as they don't get into the drugs and alcohol trap. One woman I know in Chiang Mai has been hanging out on Loi Kroh Road for more than twenty years without any major difficulties. She has to take care of the occasional club owner or policeman, but it's just the price of doing business. She has a nice professional wardrobe, a large, late model Toyota pickup truck, and a three bedroom home in the suburbs. That's where she keeps her mom and two kids. Nobody gets to go there.

Often, a sex worker will have several sisters, cousins and/or aunts plying the trade, and they all tend to concentrate the family enterprise in a market one of them has scouted and found reliable. The cliche about prostitutes coming from the hinterlands and being corrupted in the cities may be true sometimes, but I doubt it happens very often. Most of the girls will automatically tell anyone who asks that they are from Isaan, or the hill country north of Chiang Mai, areas known for their poverty and lack of opportunity, and that they've come to town in a last-ditch effort to raise money for the mother who needs an operation or for the maintenance of children abandoned by a no-good Thai father/husband. I'm far from convinced most of these stories can be taken at face value: bar girls' hearts are full of secrets, and many men carry on long relationships with them without ever knowing anything important about who they are.

The role of the pimp is much reduced here, and breaking girls into the trade is generally left up to older women. There is always muscle present wherever money changes hands, of course, but outside really big club venues, one is unlikely to run into a man controlling the activities of the women. If there is a most common story about the unseen man behind the door, it's the one where an unwary repeat visitor finally discovers the woman he's been sending money for years is married and has been since long before he ever came on the scene. Thai boyfriends will take money from the old lady for as long as she's willing to give it up. As one woman told me, "Thai man take care of woman one year. After one year, Thai woman take care of man." When I asked why, I was told the men often get bored after a year or so, and wander off in search of someone younger and prettier. As a result, many Thai prostitutes are literally working to save not only the extended family, but their own marriages.

Old is new again

2011-07-08T23:50:00.002-04:00

There's a vertiginous quality to my thoughts of late. My sense of disconnection from any familiar landmarks grows as I muddle into my second year of living in Thailand. With the exception of one month in the spring of 2010, I've not been in the US for nineteen months, and I'm finding it more and more difficult to engage the second hand experience of my homeland that comes through the news. The stories are too sad, too bloody, too trivial. Each passing day seems to bring with it another heavily vignetted image of a people too preoccupied with fantasies to concern themselves with the real problems and blessings that surround them. Every day I grow less interested in rejoining that dance, but it's also true that I'm not really satisfied with the place I am.

I find myself browsing internet forums about expat life in other countries, but still making tentative plans for a sabbatical in hill tribe country if my visa is approved for another year in Thailand. Penang, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Pnomh Penh, Jakarta, Mexico City, and Quito all beckon from the glowing screen, promising new experiences and a better life, but I know deep in my soul that there is no better place than the place I am, and that the struggle of travel is less attractive than it used to be. This discontent is the same one that has propelled me and my forbears across one continent after another for several millenia, however, and cannot be lightly dismissed. It would be nice to have a Thai's unquestioning loyalty to his familiar place, but that's not in the cards for blue-eyed devils like me.

Since childhood, my most frequently reoccurring dream is one in which I have climbed into a cul-de-sac, natural or manmade, and there is no possible escape without awakening. It's terrifying, but also familiar to me now, so I'd not call it a nightmare any longer: it's more intractable dilemma than night terror. My subconscious has been working with the set of symbols involved for a very long time, with no progress. Each time the dream begins, it's without warning: I may be strolling along a country road and suddenly find myself on a narrowing path across a cliff face high above a rocky surf. There is no way to turn back, and, indeed, the transition is so abrupt that I can't see where I went astray when I look back. One moment I'm strolling carelessly, and the next I'm in deadly peril with no escape possible.

If I try to push on, things just get worse, and my sleeping mind has learned to simply awaken the dreamer and not waste time looking for solutions. When I was a child, I couldn't let go, and would scramble into the Escheresque traps of my dreamscape with a mounting sense of desperation. I even remember falling to my death on one occasion. That one wasn't as bad as I expected it to be: the Earth simply opened softly beneath my falling body and swallowed me up without pain or sound. Still, waking up screaming and thrashing around in a pool of sweat was a common part of the bedtime experience almost all my life. Only in the last few years have I gained enough control over my dream life to exit at will.

These days, my personal metaphors don't hold as much mystery as they did when I was younger, and I think I understand this one to be about the unpredictable inevitability of mortality. We may struggle against it, but death comes to us all, and there is little we can do about that. All the relentless cheerfulness of our dearly bought isolation from the ground rules of life is finally undone by the fact that there is a last day, and a last hour. If we don't allow ourselves to think about that, we are prone to misbehave, and nothing else really makes sense, but we struggle to avoid the unpleasant fact of our impending demise. All of us are out on a limb, and fatally subject to gravity.

My flight from the life I knew is, at worst, all about trying to evade this fact, or, at best, one last Promethean attempt to negotiate a better deal. All around me I see others making the same play, and, when I'm feeling empathetic, there's a common poignancy to be seen in the lifestyles of all expatriates. From the Rotarian vigor of the morning coffee club at Tops cafeteria to the lone curmudgeon sitting on the curb drinking a Chang beer for breakfast, we establish our familiar routines in a strange land, and reach out for to others for a little company in a shared language. It's not a comfortable thing for a lot of old, eccentric men to do, but almost everyone makes some effort. We hardly know each other, but we nod and speak on the street, and when someone dies, there's a sense of loss, even if we never actually learned the guy's name.

Lately, I seem to run into a lot of men who think they'll move to the Philippines, because the women there speak English, and are more faithful than Thai girls. It's a delusion I don't share, but can certainly understand. There's no getting around the fact that much of the aging male's fantasy life centers around women, and the younger and more compliant ones that live just beyond reach are always the best. At the beginning of this pilgrimage, I made my own mistakes in that area, and will probably make more before it's over. The fact that one's erotic potential doesn't go away simply because one has had X number of birthdays is at first a delightful surprise, but usually ends up being something of an albatross as the complexities of reality take their toll on the fantasy of eternal youth through association with younger women. I do believe Asian women are more tolerant of older men, but I don't think they actually prefer them, which is something you'll hear often if you arrive with any money at all. Many accept that odd proposition as gospel, and most end up discovering there's a younger Thai male in the mix, and he's often the one who ends up with the woman and the money.

Maybe I'll take that month among the Akha who live outside Chiang Rai, and see if Mr. Kurtz had it right all along.
Somehow, I'm finding it hard to expect much "horror," unless I bring it with me.

2011-07-06T01:33:00.000-04:00

My friend Vivien flew up from Bangkok for a three-day marathon shoot in Northern Thailand.

We took on too much, but came away with some good images.

She's especially good with elephants, I think.

Next up, lingerie in the waterfalls.

I'm sure that will bring up the hit count.

New digs

2011-05-31T05:34:00.000-04:00

It hasn't been the best month ever.

There are a couple of worse ones I can recall, but May of 2011 stands with the best for pure misery and general provocation.

First, there was the matter of my visa status.

True as it may be that spending a long day in the back seat of a small Toyota and dumping a large sum of money into the pocket of a royal policeman temporarily solved that problem, it is also the case that my unhappy day of coming and going precipitated a really nasty viral infection.

It was a thorough bug, beginning its mission in my bronchial acreage, sailing past all my digestive tract, including the scenic Isles of Langerhans, and ultimately making a dramatic and unsavory exit through my Windward Passage.

All that merriment took up the two weeks I had set aside to make ready for Apple's return visit by leasing and outfitting sparkling new digs in a "better" part of town. The upshot was that I, weak as a kitten and querulous as an octogenarian, had just two days to move my meager effects from the cozy confines of Lanna Lodge to the austere Chinese modernity of Chiang Mai Lodge.

The space is a huge improvement. I wouldn't argue that.

But it is a space. Period.
No lamps, no clothes hangers, no soap, no shampoo, no maid service, no daily magical appearances of fresh water bottles on the bedside table, no bedside table, no dining table, no bookcase, no shoe rack, no drinking glasses, no coffee cups, no cutlery, no flatware, no plates, no bowls, no towels, no sheets, no blankets, no pillows, no pillow cases, no bolster, no trash baskets, no cleaning supplies and no daily laundry service.

There is a bed, a tv set, a refrigerator and a vanity/ desk with a tiny, backless stool and a large mirror. The wardrobe has three locking drawers, but the keys don't work. The shower is enormous, but it's right next to the toilet, and there's no shower curtain. I hate sitting on a wet toilet seat.

Apple arrived the day I moved.

She pitched in and led me around Tops Market, choosing the correct laundry detergent and showing me how to read a "Downy" label in Thai script. She chose red hangers and some oversized clothes pins that would fit over the stainless pipes circling my balcony. I bought a substantial quantity of active culture yogurt in a nod to my still-sensitive GI tract, and she counter-intuitively added high-fiber Squeeze orange juice and a fried whole Nile perch. We came back fifty dollars lighter, and still didn't have enough to make a dent in even one corner of The Space. It's amazing how much territory is involved in 450 square feet when you have no sofa paintings or sideboards.

Fortunately, my friend Reed knows every nook and cranny of Chang Phueak neighborhood, and had kindly shown me the Magic Store after one of our lunch strolls. The Magic Store isn't something most westerners would even see, but Reed does all his research on foot, and has ample time to stop and smell the roses. Not that anyone is likely to think of roses and this particular little shop in any given lifetime: to say it is ugly and malodorous is closer to praise than truth. There's no air conditioning, nor any windows, and it's a metal roofed structure filled with Chinese plastics that happens to be located in a tropical city where daytime temperatures usually exceed 90 degrees. When it's closed, there are no openings at all. When it's open, the owner removes the front. It's never open before midday, and closes some time later at night than I'm out. My usual arrival is in the sweet spot between two and six, when I can shop and enjoy a free dry sauna all at the same time.

I went there with Reed a few hours before Apple arrived, so some of the basics had been taken care of already, but once she heard about it, there was no stopping her. There's nothing more satisfying than a cheap place filled with tremendous variety.
"I can't believe I spent a dollar for these at Tops yesterday," she grumbled, fingering a package of oversized plastic clothes pins with a price tag of thirty-five cents. We bought as much as we both could carry and spent twenty-five dollars.
As Reed remarked, "when I came to Thailand I was told it was possible to furnish an apartment for less than a thousand dollars. If you buy everything here, you can probably get by on less than a hundred."

After three weeks, I have to agree.
My shower curtains cost sixty-five cents. My large drinking glasses cost forty-five cents each and the highballers set me back thirty. I have two red plastic chairs that cost three bucks apiece, and the most expensive wooden shelf unit was less than ten bucks. I have a large wash pan for dishes that cost a dollar, and a really nifty little wooden stool that I can sit on while using the pan cost a buck and a half. After using the same pan for washing dishes and rinsing out my tee shirts for a few days, I decided to go ahead and spend another dollar and a quarter to have a really large pan for clothing.

It's like living next door to a WalMart, but much cheaper. I find myself wandering down to browse when I'm bored with my room. It's shopping as entertainment, I know, and contrary to everything I believe in, but I tell myself I'm only buying stuff I actually need, and that usually works.

Lest we forget

2011-05-08T04:10:00.000-04:00

There was no legitimate reason for George W. Bush to launch an invasion of Iraq.

After 9/11, he and his leadership group worked night and day to associate the 9/11 attacks with Saddam Hussein, but, as everyone concerned is now happy to admit, everything we heard from them was simply untrue.

They were lying.

We believed them, and allowed our military to be used to further the interests of global corporations..

Some 3,000 innocent people died on 9/11.

Since then, more than 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein was given a political trial in Baghdad and publicly hanged.

Osama bin Laden was located in Pakistan and executed by an extra-legal military kill team.

He was never charged for anything in connection with 9/11, although he was on the FBI's most wanted list in connection with crimes committed in the 1990s.

Now that the blood lust has been satisfied, isn't it a good time to stop and think about where we are and how we got here?

Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein may have been great villains, but they weren't the only bad guys in the tragedy that cost us trillions of dollars and our tradition as a free people.

It may be too late to change anything, but it's worth a discussion.

Ting Tong

2011-04-26T09:42:00.001-04:00

Thais make a sharp distinction between someone who is harmlessly loopy and someone who is mad. The first is referred to as "ting-tong," and the other is "ba."

Today, I'd be happy to settle for a diagnosis of ting-tong.

There's mounting evidence I may have crossed the bar and reached ba-hood. If I end up all the way in the loony bin, I will, of course, demand a recount and appeal the rules, but partisan as I may be, I have to admit things don't look all that good for my team.

This morning I was up with my nemesis, The Rooster, cheerily showering, shaving and donning my best shirt for what I assumed would be a pro forma meeting at Thai immigration. I had my paperwork from the US side all in order, my copies had been made and placed in an attractive but official-looking blue binder, and all my teeny portraits were trimmed and in a plastic baggie. I was sitting on go at 6:30, and the driver wasn't even due for an hour. Content that I had done all a man could do to prepare himself, I strolled up the lane in search of breakfast. That proved fruitless, as Thais who live in my neighborhood simply don't arise at such an ungodly hour, so I trekked up to the McThai at Thapae Gate. Sausage McMuffin, hash browns and coffee filled me up, and I walked back home feeling the strength that only comes through the miracle of American fast food. As I scraped the front gate open, I awoke the night clerk and chuckled to myself when he threw off his blanket and ran for the bathroom. I'm not exactly an early riser, and it felt good to get the drop on a man who had supposedly been up all night working.

The driver was ten minutes late when I called him. That's the kind of mood I was enjoying. I was locked, loaded and ready to roll. In Thailand, ten minutes is an imperceptible amount of time, and certainly not something to get urgent about. By the time we arrived, the office was packed with supplicants, and I had to sign in at number thirty-six. Still, I figured I had a good chance of making my way through the process in time for lunch. I sat down under the air-conditioner and waited. The office officially opened at 8:00AM, and an official shouted over the hub-bub to say he'd be doing a quick analysis of our cases and assigning us to the appropriate desks for processing. Within fifteen minutes, I was at the head of the line, handing off my passport and a quick summary of what I wanted to accomplish. The man nodded, and looked over my papers.

What I wanted to do was quite direct and usually very simple. I wanted to convert my one-year student visa to a retirement extension visa of the same duration. Others I know have undergone this transformation with no difficulty, so I had no doubt it would be a slam dunk. Basically, all the Thais want to know is whether or not you can support yourself, and are you over the age of 50. I can support myself, and had the notarized statement of income from the US Department of State that's required to prove it. That I'm over 50 pretty much goes without saying, I think, but my passport and announcement of birth pretty much set it in stone. What could go wrong? I'd already been in Thailand more than a year, and had a feel for the way things work, so I had no apprehension as I watched the man thumb through my passport. He paused, then started back at the beginning. Stopped. Started again. Stopped. He looked up at me quickly and said something that took my breath away:

"Are you aware that you've overstayed your visa by ninety days?"

No. No, I wasn't aware of any such thing, but when I looked at the note on my passport that he was helpfully underlining with his thumb, I could see that the last time I came through Suvarnnabhumi Airport in October, the agent had stamped me good until January 27, 2011. On the next page, the official ED Visa stamp showed me good until April 29, 2011, a date I'd seized upon as my last possible moment for converting things over. Unfortunately, The Kingdom has a rule that requires long-stay visa holders to either exit and re-enter the country every 90 days, or show up at an immigration office for a personal interview. How I managed to confuse this matter to such an extent as to cause me to be summarily ejected from grace is something I'm working on reconstructing, but I have no ready explanation. None. I apparently decided at some point in December or January that I no longer needed to follow the 90-day rule, and so I didn't. Why I made that call isn't clear.

Meanwhile, back at Immigration, the official listened to me gabble for a few seconds, then punched a button on the automated queuing machine, and pulled out a paper chit. "You are number 223. Please come back after 1:00 PM."

"What does this mean?," I asked him.

"It means you will owe a substantial fine. It is up to the case officer to determine what effect this will have on your application."

I went out to the car and climbed in the back.

"Already finish boss?"

"We come back at one o'clock, John. Today is not my lucky day."

John is very sensitive to the moods of others, so he became my very somber, silent mini-me as we made our way back across town. He dropped me at the hotel before nine. I had a few hours left to come up with some plausible excuse, I thought, and settled down with a cup of black tea to think things over.

At 11:30, I had a bowl of soup and some rice. At 12:30, John came back.

Nothing.

I may be ting-tong, or I may be crazy, but whatever the case, I headed back to the office to take my medicine. I had decided the only thing I could do was to humble myself and apologize loud and long.

As it turned out, the Thais weren't interested in that: they wanted a large sum of money and a substantial delay in my plans.

After handing over the cash, I have 105 days to wait.

After that time, I may resume the process I had assumed I'd finish today.

They were very courteous, very professional and quite firm.

And I am no doubt ting-tong.

At the very least.

Easter in Asia

2011-04-24T03:26:00.000-04:00

My thoughts turn to this fine poem by Robinson Jeffers as I sit half a world away from home and consider Easter.

Sorry if it's not very cheerful, but Jeffers never was much of an entertainer.

His was a beautifully gloomy spirit, haunted by the world's beauty, and by the failures of humankind.

I think we keep going back to the same well for our inspirations, and seem unable to grasp that its water was poisoned from the start. There are some universal themes that run through Christianity, making it look congruent with the world's other great religions, but the fact remains it is rooted in blood sacrifice and the desert dweller's obsession with controlling the oasis.

After a lifetime of study and reflection, I am convinced the New Covenant that Christ brought to the Middle East owed a great deal to schools far to the east of his homeland, and his mission was to convert the iron of the Israelite myths into the gold of humanistic philosophy.

To an extent, that mission was accomplished, but it was and is a very uneven work in progress. Radical departures don't gain much favor among the powerful, and co-opted objectives have a way of being turned to the service of those who have the most to lose if there is any fundamental change in the order of things. From the self-serving councils at Nicea to the present-day efforts to re-merge church and state in the US, men with decidedly worldly motives have determined almost all of the shape and most of the content of Christianity. As a result, much of the original intention has been lost, and Old Testament values enjoy greater dominion now than they did before Christianity came along. The original teachings didn't hold up well, just as humility, pacifism and tolerance get short shrift in the secular world.

My advice to any future race of men would be to avoid the customs of desert people and concentrate instead on the accumulated wisdom of those who live by the sea. Better yet, abandon all previous negative cultural memories and seek to live a life based on cultivation of the conscience. Just as I am now sure all our religions and political philosophies have failed us, I am also sure the small voice at the center of my being has never failed to give me good directions when I stop to listen. We know what is right and wrong, or at least enough of us do to keep things moving along. I don't know why this is true, and I don't think it matters so long as I remember that there is no reason sufficient to cause the murder of another person, and no personal need so unbearable that I cannot share what I have.

The saddest men I have met all have one thing in common: at some point in their lives, they relinquished control over themselves and handed off responsibility to some "higher power." They will kick and scream if you point out to them that everything is a matter of individual choice, but I've yet to hear a coherent argument in defense of giving over control of one's actions to an outside agent. If you choose to walk down the path of death and destruction for any reason, you have lost your soul. It may cost you your life to disobey, but that can be a blessing in disguise. Living a long life filled with misery and regret is the only hell we can be sure exists, and I've met far too many who condemned themselves to that fate in the name of God and country.

The sun is shining brightly on my balcony, and birds are singing in the trees along my little back street. Across the way, monks are chanting, and I can occasionally hear softly ringing bells. It's a Buddhist Easter Sunday in Chiang Mai. The monks I've talked to are well aware of what we're doing, but they don't choose to join us. They have their laughing god with the fat belly, and that's good enough for them.

I'm a big phony

2011-04-23T09:12:00.000-04:00

Although there's a considerable real-world experience behind the title of this blog, it's been a long time since I was actually on the air. To put it mildly, it came as something of a surprise when I heard my recorded voice once again.

This all started when I gave myself a small waterproof Kodak Playsport for Christmas, and began shooting short videos around Bangkok. Video files have a way of piling up pretty quickly, and it wasn't until after the Chiang Mai Songkran festival in April that I finally got serious about trying to edit and publish on YouTube. Editing video falls somewhere between listening to grass grow and watching paint dry on my list of favored activities, so I had no illusions about how much fun I'd have. What I didn't anticipate was how distasteful it would be to have to listen to myself chuckling and chatting in the background.

Since coming to Thailand, I've had to endure a number of identity crises, beginning with my discovery that most Thais shared the opinion that I looked just like Colonel Sanders. That one quickly forced me to start losing weight and shaving my full beard, because if there's a bigger turn off than having young women call out the name of an ersatz Kentucky colonel when I walk down the street, I don't know what it might be. With their smiling faces etched in my memory, it became almost physically painful to look in the mirror and know they were right on target.

After three or four months of eating Thai food, taking long walks and a daily hour of exercise in the pool, Colonel Sanders faded away, but then I moved to Bangkok. There are many fine things one can say about the Big Mango, but to say it's an inspiration to healthy living and an outdoor lifestyle wouldn't be high on the list. I arrived late in October, and by the height of Christmas season, I'd earned another identity among Thais: when I showed up, they were dead certain I had to be Santa Claus. My ruddy, plump face might be beardless, but they saw right through my hasty disguise. In a fit of self-deprecation, I bought one of those red Santa caps and wore it around town. There are few things a Thai finds more amusing than a westerner who's willing to make light of himself. At least I was getting laughs while my Christmas spirit drained away.

I knew I'd put on some weight and cultivated my paunch, but what I didn't know about myself until months later was that the Thais weren't just looking at me, they were listening too. The big white guy with the white hair may not have looked exactly like Santa, but when he laughed and spoke in his relentlessly cheerful elementary Thai English, he sounded just like a department store Santa who's worked his way through half a pint of bourbon before lunch. I didn't know because I hadn't listened to myself in decades, but the videos were inarguable: I have never lost my radio voice. John Hartford once made a mournful self-assessment that I now realize can be generalized. Once you've been trained in the artifice of radio rhetoric, there's no turning back. Try as you may, you'll always sound like a radio announcer. Even if you're trying to sing.

At first, my impulse was to hit the delete button on every video in which I played a supporting role, but I thought better of that. Nobody is more critical of the things I do than me, but I'm realizing time has a way of smoothing the edges of all my prejudices. Who knows? The day may come when I can allow myself to laugh like Santa while having cold water poured down my back, and when that days arrives, I'll have the videos to prove what I'm saying now. In the meantime, I have all those videos stored in a safe place.

Girl in the barrel. A Songkran scene

2011-04-12T00:51:00.001-04:00

Friday night at My Place

2011-04-08T11:14:00.000-04:00

I can't say for sure, but I think you may already know these people from an earlier post...

The question of the moment is "can I write a blog entry sitting in a bar," and the answer is "yes, probably." Right now, there's a beautiful woman standing just off my right shoulder shooting pool, and Mick Jagger is singing "God Gave Me Everything" at a comfortable volume. I've had a really cold beer and snacks in front of me since I sat down two hours ago, and I think my tab is standing comfortably short of five bucks. I edited some photos and "played Facebook" as the Thais say, but I'm not ready to shut down just yet.

If you're in Chiang Mai, there are two things you should do: first, you should get in touch with me so we can talk; and, second, you really need to stop by My Place and have a beer or two.

Russ Markowitz has created a really nice place on a street where phrases like "really nice" don't normally come tripping off the tongue. Loi Kroh road is many things to many people, but the bottom line is that it's a toned-down Northern Thai attempt at Pattaya and Bangkok decadence. There are many bars and bar girls, the prices are inflated, and the massage parlors are too often staffed with girls who know a lot more about forced ejaculation than they do massage. It's sleazy in a small town way, and I love it, but every once in a while it's nice to take a break from all that.

Russ came into this scene many years ago while working as a line producer on Rambo IV, and like many expats I meet in Chiang Mai, he fell in love with the city and never really managed to get away. I can relate to that. The exact same thing happened to me. He's been here for the better part of eight years now, but the bar is only a few months old. The prices aren't inflated, and there are no girls working you all night for faux cocktails. It's next door to the venerable Chiang Mai Saloon (the place with the wooden cowboy out front), and across the street from The Garden guest house and restaurant.

If you're hungry, The Garden will shuttle food right to the bar, and you can pay without walking across the street.

There are nights when that could be important.

Sexpat blues

2011-04-03T22:18:00.001-04:00

Last Friday night I spent out on the town, something I hadn't done since coming back to Chiang Mai. After four months in Bangkok, I wanted a long rest, and after Friday night, I'm ready to restore that policy.

Whatever they put in the Jello shots at My Place is lethal.

Just one in the midst of my four beers was enough to obliterate my good intentions and my discretion. Once again, I fell into the Loi Kroh Road way to knowledge, and awoke somewhat the worse for wear.

The experiment wasn't without its benefits, however. I did manage to have a long, drunken conversation with an interesting 49-year-old sexpat from Bournemouth, England.

I'd run into him before, and was surprised to see him again.

During my last visit, he was sporting a very attractive bar girl on his arm, and had told me he was in Chiang Mai for only two more weeks.

That was almost a month ago. When he showed up Friday night, he had no woman in tow, and his mood might have been described as morose. I asked the obvious question, and got what I now know will be the obvious answer.

The girl drifted away as soon as a compliant man with more money showed up and paid her to go with him to the beach.

That left Terry without his steady date, and a week to burn before his visa expired. He cruised the bars for a few days, and decided to double down.

He went on a run to the border and got an extension for another two weeks.

Every night he went out, but couldn't find another girl he liked as much. When he sat down with me at the bar, he had only a four days left on the visa, and was thinking it might be a good idea to get another extension. He said it was past time to get back to work, as he'd already been in Thailand for nearly two months, but I could see the lost girl friend problem hadn't resolved itself.

"How many girls have you seen since she left?," I asked.

His answer startled me.

"I'm not sure, but about twenty. Not one a day, but close to that."

"You've had twenty women since I was here before?"

"About that. I lose count." He ordered a beer, and asked if I needed another. The shot was still buzzing in my head, but I accepted.

In the economy of Loi Kroh, twenty women represents between one and two thousand US dollars. Each bar girl requires thirty to fifty dollars for herself, and the bar where she works gets an additional fifteen to twenty dollars when you take her off premises. This is known as a bar fine. The bar requires compensation for the drinks she might have helped sell if she stays, and it's a daily thing. If you take the girl away and decide to keep her for longer than one night, you must go back the next day and pay again. Add to this the drinks you have to buy in order to become acquainted with the girl and, often enough, her boss, the mamasan, and the investment can easily run into the high end of my estimate. While this isn't much money for professional company, it's a lot for the average guy to spend on anything in less than a month. When I asked him about his lodging, he told me the studio he'd rented cost him about $250 per month with utilities, for example. One can spend a lot more, but his place is about average.

I sipped my beer and reflected on all this.

Twenty women in less than a month is a lot of work at any time of life. I tried to imagine what it must entail at the age of fifty, but stopped short of mental exhaustion.

Terry stared off into space, and then shook himself back into attention.

He drained his beer and stood.

"Well," he said, "I think I'll go over to Spicy for a look around. It's early, but you never know until you ask, right?"

He winked.

"I'll come back by in a couple of hours."

We both knew he wouldn't. He was right on course to spend this Friday night with number 21.

Sexpat blues

2011-04-03T21:40:00.002-04:00

Please see above.
For reasons I don't understand, I'm unable to delete this entry.

Rough beast

2011-03-16T05:00:00.000-04:00

I have fled Bangkok for the quieter, slower life in Chiang Mai, because I'm feeling the stress. My attention span has dropped to milliseconds, and my ability to recall even very important things is shaky. For example, when I showed up at the airport Monday night for my escape via Air Asia, the nice young lady at the check-in had to muster all her Asian courtesy to assure I wouldn't lose too much face when she broke the news that I was 24 hours early.
It didn't help that I'd just spent a few minutes upbraiding a young employee manning the self-check kiosk about how the thing never seemed to work for me.
I felt pretty low about my failure as a human being, but managed to laugh at myself.
"Is it funny?," the young lady asked.
"Not that funny," I replied.
I shouldered my bags and trudged back to the taxi stand to go home.

I sense a burnout in the making, so here I am back where I started. An unknown sage (he may be well-known, but I can't remember who he is) once remarked that when things go wrong, the best action is to go back to the beginning and try to spot where you jumped the rails. Already, I know it's going to be hard to choose among the available options. When I came to Chiang Mai a year ago, a local business owner told me everything would run smoothly once I'd learned the rules in Thailand. I took that on faith, but his credibility has been compromised. Last night I dropped by his bar and the girlfriend told me he'd gone back to England for good. She'd taken him to court for failing to deliver on certain promises he'd made, and the court obliged her by taking away all his business assets and giving them to her. Home stadium advantage, I suppose.

If he had a handle on the rules and still obtained this result, imagine how much trouble I may be in. Not only do I not know the rules, I've never in my life acknowledged there was any need for them. While inhaling the aromas climbing from my bowl of tofu soup with cilantro and chicken this morning, it dawned on me for the very first time what an outlaw really is. I'd always assumed outlaws were deliberately bad people who broke the law to gain an unfair advantage. Today, it occurs to me I'm an outlaw without intentions, and I'm sure there must be many others like me. If you don't start out with the assumption that there are limitations and "known knowns," then you are, like me, an outlaw. It's possible to do evil when in this condition, but it's not necessarily a given.

Men who think they know the rules worry me far more. In my experience, the two classifications of mankind most often possessed by this delusion are engineers and managers. As I sit in my little room and try to see through the clouded window that is my 80-channel international satellite television feed, I'm looking into the same abyss that now preoccupies the entire planet. Northern Honshu appears to be on the brink of nuclear apocalypse, and they have a lot of smart guys to thank for it. I'm scanning the usual internet opinion feeds, paying special attention to the comments from readers, and it's stunning to see how many people are still willing to go to bat for the nuclear power industry.

Let's face it. There is no logical explanation for what General Electric, in all its wisdom, did to the Japanese people. They thought they were being rational, of course, and hundreds of engineers with thousands of years of experience worked hard to design a nuclear power plant that would be profitable and safe. Nevertheless, they built the reactor complex within spitting distance of the sea, and the sea is notorious for producing tsunamis when major earthquakes hit. All these engineers and managers also knew Japan floats at the junction of the most active earthquake zone in the world. I find no reason to believe anyone didn't understand these fundamental concepts when the designs were made and the plants were built
Over the usual objections of local citizens, they built the plants and insisted all the objections were stuff and nonsense. "Perfectly safe. Latest generation. All precautions taken." Ad nauseum. The people knew better, but they were just in the way. The leviathan of global business needed a lot of electricity near Tokyo, and it got what it wanted.

Now, we get to the best part of this black joke: in order to shut down a reactor that's under stress, one has to be able to access the control room (that's where Homer Simpson works) and the manual overrides that allow pulling the fuel rods. I remember watching the propaganda films in school when I was a boy, and it all seemed quite simple when I looked at the colorful flow charts and clever animations. Unfortunately, at Fukushima, all the controls necessary were placed in the basement, and, as every young scientist must know, water seeks the lowest level. Earthquake to tsunami to flooded basement. Piece of cake. Nature dusts its hands and sits back for a well-deserved round of applause while "experts" flock to the studios of every news network in the world to start laying the groundwork for tomorrow's arguments in favor of nuclear power.

I may not know when my plane leaves, but I can tell you this much: nothing is a given in this world, and nature has no regard for human rules.
If we're going to play with fire, the least we can do is not choose such long-lived toxins as radioactive isotopes. I see people seriously arguing that solar panels when disposed pose an equal hazard because they contain heavy metals. Yes, they do, but heavy metals are relatively easy to contain, and have an awfully hard time becoming airborne.
Same as me.

Idiots may howl, but the truth will out

2011-03-13T07:23:00.003-04:00

You know there's room for discussion about the Bradley Manning affair when a State Department spokesman calls out the Defense Department for being "idiots" in the way they've treated him.

I suspect the spokesman has a point.

Just as the witch hunt into alleged radicalization of Islam within US borders is giving us a black eye among the faithful and not so faithful members of that religion, the military's over the top detention of Manning speaks to free speech reformers everywhere.

So far as I can tell, you're either all-in on the principles enunciated at the creation of our nation, or you're not. Some things don't lend themselves to compromise: that's why the Nuremberg defense went down in flames when people got a clear view of what those good soldiers had been supporting with their unquestioning obedience to orders. That's why we have to put up with a religious zealot who likes to send demonstrators to our dead soldiers' funerals so he can call them faggots. Not tasty, but necessary.

I don't care for Islam in the least, and certainly hold it in no higher regard than I do the Southern Baptist Convention, but I have no reservations about extending them every courtesy regarding their right to freedom of religion. The freedom to make choices among theological illusions is something of a precursor to secular freedom of expression, and must not be compromised.

Maybe the DOJ/ Homeland Security can produce the occasional half-witted Muslim conspiracy to help justify our trillion dollar a year obsession with people who hate us. We might more usefully employ all those resources in an effort to make people like us instead, but that's another hill of beans. Still, having very little on the prosecutorial plate shouldn't be seen as a call for legislative investigators to dash into the fray and discover what the juggernaut of American law enforcement has failed to notice.

Similarly, the fact that Manning may have broken some laws when he turned the DOD's dirty laundry in re Afghanistan and Iraq over to Wikileaks shouldn't be given disproportionate importance. No reliable source has come forward to prove the man's actions have resulted in anything more taxing than the utter humiliation of a military establishment so corrupt that it's allowing itself to be used as a pipeline for taxpayer dollars to mercenaries and drug lords all over the globe. Manning hasn't killed anyone, so far as I know, and isn't being charged for that, but the people who crawled out from under the stone he turned over have killed thousands.

There's just no way the truth can be a bad thing in the long run. It's a fundamental determinant for the way things will work out, and no amount of obfuscation will serve to stop that. You can slow it down, but it just keeps coming.

Stepping back

2011-03-09T21:42:00.002-05:00

I admit to being a lapsed hipster and attempted intellectual, so I know first-hand the loathing that precedes many modern assumptions about the nature of humankind. For as long as I can remember, skepticism about the intelligence, motives and capabilities of others has informed the world-view of those who presume to know what's going on. I got caught up in these articles of bad faith when I was in high school, that hotbed of sophomoric cynicism, and I honed my disdain for my fellows through many years of "advanced" education and management training. I became a member of the elaborate intellectual hierarchy that had evolved to defend the ramparts against the unannointed, and rationalizing that defense occupied most of my thoughts for decades.

Looking back, I'm amazed I could have spent so much time on so little. I have no defense handy, and I'm not interested in any extended mea culpa. I don't think I'll be turning to religion or drinking more as a result of this epiphany. I'm long past the age of reason, and my liver is already working hard enough. Sometimes, the first best step is to forgive oneself and move on.

Lately, it appears some people have been giving the lie to my toxic assumptions in an active way.

More power to them.

They are making the necessary adaptations, and I hope they will prevail.
It seems likely. The species has survived its leadership throughout history by simply deserting the sentry boxes and temples.
I still think about the day I understood this first. I was standing beside a flooded Toyota on a dirt road in Chiapas, listening to the gabble of my gringo companions as they waited for the guide to resuscitate our ride. We were in search of the ancient Maya, it was 1978, and the mystery of the day was "where did they go?" Everybody who came into the scene had a theory about the "true" nature of these Meso-American natives who had built such amazing structures in the jungle and then disappeared from history.
As my acquaintances discussed this puzzler, I realized we were being watched.
Not a hundred feet away from us, a Lacondon Maya stood in his white robe.
I wasn't sure, but it seemed he might be a little amused.
Then, five Mayans on horseback swept by on their way to some place we'd never know about. I walked down the little river that had done in the Corolla a hundred yards and came upon a group of women and children washing clothes and swimming. It dawned on me the people who built the pyramids were all around me in the jungle. They hadn't gone anywhere: they'd simply walked away from the cities and taken their gods with them.
We've wandered away into the deserts, mountains and forests many times before, and we will do it again. It's the ultimate radical act of restoration, one foreshadowed by Ken Kesey as he abandoned the culture wars at Berkeley in favor of a dairy farm in Eugene.

If there is to be a future, it will belong to ordinary people working hard, and making do. The current models for organization are all unsustainable.
That's not welcome news to a culture that confuses "Black Swan" with high art, can't have an orgasm without expensively threatening set dressing, and chuckles at the antics of reanimated corpses. Intellectual high priests have little patience with people, and, in the end, I fear not much interest in life itself. It's messy, and lacking in aesthetic structure. It also requires a long attention span, and a high tolerance for boredom.

Let's face it. There's not a big market for those qualities, but they may be our last hope.

* Please file with other documents in the category "brief asides." *

Another brief aside

2011-03-05T06:31:00.002-05:00

People who never think about the way they think are prone to swallowing a load of crap and then presenting it to the world as if it were carefully considered opinion.

I see people do it every day.

Sometimes I'm the person doing it.

We all have our filters, prejudices and sources of information.

For every acquaintance who subscribes to howling newsletters from the "Right," there are several who daily consume equally unconsidered boilerplate from the "Left." As we become more and more specialized consumers of online interest group output, we increase the number of nodes from which we may gather and then redisseminate dubious information.

Post-Gutenberg, we are all publishers, or, more usually, republishers.

The new way of doing things probably differs very little from what we've done since we developed language, but it looks different. We aren't sitting together around the fire pit as we exchange stories these days, and most of those whom we address aren't people we know, or who know us. Still, the quality of information depends upon the reliability of the sources, and the ultimate disposition of the data within the group consciousness still depends on testing over time and under changing circumstances. The hot topic of today is likely to be a dead letter next year, not so much because we lose interest in the story but that we come to a group consensus about just how useful a particular bit of data is to our collective self.

In the end, I believe this winnowing process can continue to work for us if we refuse to relinquish control over the time dimension of our lives. Individuals are easily driven into panic mode by spurious information, but it takes more time to bring large groups up to speed. There is some evidence that incremental improvements in human understanding do occur, so it's not as likely that a highly interconnected information environment can be exploited through the use of rhetorical constructs already stored in the collective consciousness. In full awareness of the potential for irony, I would suggest that Hitler and Goebbels wouldn't get very far in today's world, simply because their methods and goals are all too well known for successful retailing to any but the most uninformed cultures. This is likely to remain true ad infinitum, but unfortunately does not preclude the introduction of some new form for the information. I can see how it remains possible under certain sets of circumstances for people to be persuaded they must act quickly and without mercy to preserve themselves, but I also think the likelihood of that happening diminishes over time.

We are now self-conscious to a remarkable extent, and even the heartiest abusers of the neural network are more likely to be effective nihilists than villains with a master plan to take over the world. I watch the strutting pomposities whose job it is to entertain and enrage the masses, and I no longer see much hope for their long-term survival. They and their followers are fighting a contrarian battle with reality, and most of them are already aware on some level that the fight is hopeless. It doesn't matter to them that their causes and fixed ideas make no sense, because they've already surrendered themselves to the sensual satisfaction that comes from cynical abandon. Today's Tea Party more closely resembles the '70s left than it does the oft-invoked Founding Fathers: the absence of any rational argument in favor of one's actions serves to reinforce one's determination to say fuck-all and take another toke.

Add: I merely use the baggers as an easy reference. Apocalyptic fundamentalism exists on many levels, and is equally self-indulgent, no matter what its announced flavor may be.

Vivien Nuengruetai

2011-03-02T21:20:00.002-05:00

Vivien is a student at Bangkok's Ramkamhaeng University, studying Political Science. After working several years at Toys-R-Us, she hit the road and visited all of SE Asia with just the pack on her back.
When she finished, she decided to go to college.
She doesn't want to be famous, and she doesn't care about being rich. What she wants is good memories of a life enjoyed.

Her mom is Thai, and her father Malaysian.

She's 172CM in height and weighs 108 pounds.

Her dress size is 0.

She was delightful to work with, and she paid for her own taxi.

Why I'm thinking about forgiving Obama

2011-03-02T12:32:00.000-05:00

I read an essay at The Beast today that started me thinking about my distaste for the President. It was a useful exercise.

We just spent eight years under the rule of reactionary ideologues who left the country in a total shambles. The morning after Obama won the election, The Onion led with a headline that said "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job."

Like many, I thought that was pretty funny.

After a year and some weeks, I'm prepared to say it wasn't all that funny, but it certainly was true.

It's not for me to judge how well Mr. Obama has acquitted himself in the Augean stables he inherited from the neocon cabal, but I'm prepared to go out on a limb and say he's doing a hell of lot better than anyone the other side of the argument can produce, and he's showing some class while he's doing it.

Leave it to Donald Rumsfeld's head speech writer to trash Obama for not being the sort of swaggering blowhard so beloved of the utterly discredited Republican Party. In his Beast piece, Matt Latimer even suggests the introduction of a virtual Reagan to lead the country because Obama so resolutely refuses to be stampeded into rash decisions and inflammatory language.

I understand what he means: a nation that cut its teeth on the simplicity of Hollywood horse opera ethics really does yearn for forceful language and moral superiority. However, that's not at all the way things work in the larger reality of the world we inhabit, and it's a callous man who would ignore the potentially murderous consequences of unconsidered speech.

I don't like that he's so careful with people I consider criminals for robbing an entire generation of its birthright, but I don't know what he has to live with every day, and I'm humble enough to admit my ideas about proper revenge might have disastrous consequences for the country.

So for now I'll quit slagging the man and wait.

I might have given up on him entirely had I not seen just how much the wrong people hate him.

In my world, that's a really good reason to give him some room.

Amazing Thailand, with something for everyone

2011-03-02T06:13:00.001-05:00

To the dismay of some readers, I passed on an opportunity to spend a weekend of bliss in Fang Valley outside Chiang Mai. You may remember Sweet Home for Men, but, if not, here's a link to the original post.

Today, I have another proposition from entrepreneurs of a very different sort working in the same general area. If you aren't into spending a couple of days with two babes in a natural hot spring tub, maybe you'd be interested in going to a monastery and hanging out with the monks for a week?

I'm thinking a package tour might be just the thing.
Question is, which comes first?

Where did I leave Plan B?

2011-02-22T02:33:00.001-05:00

I'm sitting alone in a ninety-degree room, listening to the sounds of people busy constructing yet another condo development at On Nut, and wondering what comes next. I think the Bangkok card has been played for all it's worth, and it's time to move along.

I've learned a lot since I came here, mostly about Thai family life and the harsh realities that separate the very few rich from the very many poor. Inequality is now a global problem, but there's something particularly jarring about the scenes I see here every day.

On the street level, I have to run a gauntlet of beggars without arms, legs, eyes, ears, faces. They come every day to the same spots in hopes of collecting enough change to eat that night and pay for a room. I suspect most of them live with little or no medical care, because Thailand's health care bureaucracy has become almost as byzantine as what we find in the US, and the safety nets are little better. If you have no education and no advocate, Thailand is a tough place to have a health problem.

All over the country, hospitals are going out of business as doctors refuse to work without their full pay, and administrators pad their pockets with kickbacks from equipment and building contractors who never deliver.

The people I see on the street are all poor, of course, and many are also homeless. In their home towns, there's even less hope for medical attention than there is here, and fewer deep-pocketed benefactors able to drop half a dollar into the cup.

Once I get inside a Ratchprasong District store, however, it's another country. Idle teenagers sipping three-dollar Starbucks coffees lounge on leather sofas waiting for IMAX 3D movies while their moms shop for thousand dollar handbags in the boutiques below. If dad's in tow, he can browse the collection of Maseratis, Ferraris, Aston Martins, Lamborghinis and Porsches while waiting for the rest of the family. I've watched the Lamborghini showroom for several months now, and not one vehicle has lasted more than a week on the floor without having a SOLD sticker slapped in the window. Moving up the street, I arrive at Central World, a retail temple so luxurious the Red Shirts burned it to the ground less than a year ago in a fit of rage. It's not hard to understand why they keep coming back to the same place for their rallies. They managed to burn down some buildings, but it appears they'll have no permanent satisfaction. The old building has been replaced with a new one that is even more in-your-face opulent than the one they destroyed, and security is 24/7.

I haven't been "up-country" as the Thais say, but I have been to Suphan Buri and Ayutthaya. I've ridden trains and buses through the Lampang-Pithsanulok heartland, and if the squalor I've witnessed there is as superior to the poverty of Isaan as I've been told, I'm not sure I want to go "up-country." When I ask Apple about it, she just shudders and says she'd never be able to live there like some of her friends do. They scored well-to-do expat husbands with healthy incomes, and spent the equivalent of 100,000 euros building palatial estates for their extended families to live in while hubby mostly busies himself elsewhere. In Isaan, that kind of money represents unimaginable wealth, and those who live inside the mansions popping up all over the place must remember to pay off all the proper people, or they won't survive long. This part of Thailand isn't safe for anyone with money, and is doubly dangerous for a foreigner.

As the weather heats up and the rains come, I imagine we'll be seeing more and more political activity in Bangkok, as the forever-promised new elections draw closer and factions jockey for power. Already, real policemen who aren't spending their time drinking in the back streets and shaking down tourists are worried about what's coming to town as we approach the one-year anniversary of last year's throw-down.

I'm thinking it may be time to roll out plan B, and I will, just as soon as I think of it.

Pattaya Beach, Thailand

2011-02-20T09:46:00.001-05:00

Friday morning, February 18, 2011

Facebook set of all the photos is here.

Murder most foul

2011-02-15T22:59:00.001-05:00

For the last few days I've been thinking about the never-ending problem of excess biomass.

The history of our last century could be summed up by counting the number of human beings eliminated in the pursuit of greater social efficiencies. Every major political and/or philosophical shift triggered waves of mass murder around the globe, and I fear we've reached a point in our development where such activities are likely to become even more commonplace.

Not only do we have better means, we also have stronger motivations emerging as the Malthusian equation heads toward its long-anticipated resolution.

With the successes of the Green Revolution fading from memory and billions of new mouths to feed, national and global management operations are caught in a terrible bind. Soon, there won't be enough food for those already here, and it appears there's no quick way to stop people from reproducing themselves into even shorter rations.

A lack of affordable food has been the unspoken provocation for many who recently took to the streets in Egypt and Tunisia. It's not all about "democracy," although that's a convenient way for western news outlets to explain things to their audiences. All over the world, hoarding of basic food supplies has begun, and unexpected demand has led to some surprising shortages in my own existence. It's been three weeks since I could find any cooking oil at the local Tesco Lotus store, and acquaintances all over Thailand confirm to me that it's a common problem everywhere. If I'm willing to pay twice the price and settle for a product I think is unhealthy, I can still find and buy very limited quantities of canola oil, but there's not a drop of palm oil to be had.

Meanwhile, Thailand, the world's top rice producer, has been scrambling to fill all its backorders as governments in North Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia stockpile the stuff in spite of predictions this year's harvest will set records and force prices down. As we all know, panic has no rationale, but the underlying anxiety about maintaining stability through consistent food supply does make sense. Failure to provide accustomed levels of cheap calories is dangerous for governments everywhere. The will to survive is nature's most powerful force, and people very quickly sense threats at the fundamental level of food supply. They may not give a hang about monetary policy or international affairs, but take away the feedbag and they immediately come to attention.

With climate-induced famine stalking both China and Russia, things could get seriously fubared in short order, but we've lucked out before, and the double-digit inflation of food prices in China may have more to do with internal economic pressures than with any actual shortages. Having said that, I must admit to an uneasy feeling about all the official statements coming from major food producers around the world. In spite of drought and rising temperatures, the party line from Beijing to Buenos Aires is that supplies will be at record levels later this year, and that prices will drop. The mechanics of that elude me, but I'm no expert on anything except human nature, and it's only human to lie through your teeth when you're in a tight spot.

Maybe we can work our way out of the cul-de-sac without resorting to mass murder, but it seems unlikely in light of our history. The most effective way to unite people in hard times is by convincing them things will get better if only they'll agree to a bit of human sacrifice. In many ways, we're no different than those forebears who tossed swains and maidens into the local volcano in an effort to appease the forever-angry gods. Now that we've taken up residence in the virtual information space, that atavism may well end up being exaggerated as negative impressions flicker around the globe like heat lightning.

In the end, it's not about any particular brand of politics, or any philosophical persuasion. The 20th Century was the most murderous time in human history, and bodies lie stacked up before the altars of every contending group. From the Nazis in Germany to the Communists in Russia to the Maoist reformers in Cambodia, socialism in every form took millions of lives in the name of advancing civilization and providing for the common welfare. As for capitalism, you may take your pick from the American Civil War to Iraq and Afghanistan. All the differences fade away when you look at the process without ideology, and realize that all the prevailing concepts are smokescreens for a much less idealized reality. We have a murder problem, and I hope it's not too late to talk about it.

Meet the new boss

2011-02-06T09:19:00.001-05:00

I see important people like Frank Rich are pulling away from the Facebook/Twitter revolution meme this weekend. That's a bit reactionary, in my opinion, and a whole lot premature.

Whatever some Belarussian intellectual has to say about the paucity of Twitter accounts in Tehran, the fact remains that several thousand people who organize themselves around anything have power that the sleeping millions will never know. Sure, the Egyptian government shut off the internet and telephone service. Of course bad people can seize control of the communications systems and spew misinformation, disinformation and wreak havoc on the public mind.

That's sort of the point.

However, it serves no good purpose to strangle the baby and pretend no one heard it crying. Significant interruptions in the status quo have occurred in the past few days, and the fact that those were not the rule, but exceptions, will color all establishment definitions of what went on in Egypt, Tunis, Yemen, and Jordan.

Look at what's already emerging from the smoke in Cairo: a US-backed military intelligence honcho as despised as Mubarak has trotted onto the field to be the New Boss. He will, of course, champion Democracy and independence for the Egyptian people. I believe that because every mainstream media outlet in the western world is telling me this is a great leap forward, and a triumph for men of good will everywhere.

Nonsense.

He's a man up to his chin in the sewers of our post-911 international renditions gulag, and no more a champion of freedom than Stalin was.

While this part of the scam is aborning, it's time for all sensitive intellectuals to begin gazing at their navels and wondering how they could have been so wrong. Get over it, Mr. Rich.

It's only natural that a highly nationalist counter-meme such as "this is not a Facebook revolution, and the term is an insult to the people of this great country" should come into play now.

This counter meme is irrelevant to the future of freedom, but it may be just the ticket for those who want to reclaim control of the microphone.

Keep your eye on the pea.

I love my country ...

2011-02-02T01:46:00.001-05:00

Back in the Censorious '90s, when Bill Clinton was the anti-Christ and armed private militias began roaming the American landscape in hopes of catching members of the New World Order's invading armies red-handed, I remember hearing a phrase whose innate lack of logic didn't occur to me until this morning. I'm not always the first one out of bed, so it's really not that unusual to see me turkey-slapped by reality long after the moment has passed for more alert members of the community. Still, I'm not sure I ever heard anyone address this particular meme, so maybe my case isn't that exceptional.

I saw it everywhere: "I love my country, but I fear my government."

At the time, I thought nothing of it. It appeared to make some kind of sense, and was less provocative than much of the overheated rhetoric that inundated the republic in those days. I gave it a semi-conscious pass and moved along. This morning, for reasons I cannot explain, the phrase came back to me while I was cooking breakfast. As a token of my late-riser bona fides, I'll mention it was 10:00AM. Maybe it had something to do with recalling the high school anthology short story "The Man Without a Country" that got me started. I'd been thinking about whether or not I'd go back to the US when my current visa expires, which led me to wonder if I'd ever go back at all, and Edward Everett Hale's tale percolated up from the depths for a fleeting review. I know it was after I'd finished my brief rumination of that minor literary gem that I wandered back into the '90s and a vivid recollection of the slogan about loving one's country.

A quick look at Google (which I'm committed to using more often after yesterday's cock-up over the burning of Alexandria's library) revealed that the slogan is very much alive and well among the Tea Party's Smart Ass White Boys (more on that another time). Cafe Press and Amazon can ship a wide range of merchandise bearing the motto at the drop of a credit card, and there are bloggers working on the subject day and night. I'm not recommending you read everything at the link, mind you, and it was chosen because it was the first piece that showed in my Google search which had no incorrectly spelled words. The guy does write pretty well, but he doesn't directly address my main question about the matter at hand. Eschewing further suspense, I'll just ask it now: how is one to understand the concept of "country" as divorced from the concept of "government"?

Countries, if I remember correctly, were the geographic references used to demarcate spheres of political and cultural influence before we moved on to our current habit of describing these same spheres of influence in terms of "nations." However, the rules tightened up as we moved toward defining politics as activities of nation states, and many cultural articulations were lost along the way. At one time, we had highly individualized countries named England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland which represented the cultural identities of even larger numbers of local communities. Now, we have the UK. God only knows how many countries had to disappear over the centuries and millenia that preceded the emergence of what we call the UK, but it's certain there were a lot more than four of them.

The modern nation, or nation-state, is itself imperiled by historical forces that now push us toward global definitions of human interests, but, for the moment, it's the paradigm of politics. So what is a nation, we may ask ourselves. For my purposes, the word "nation-state" may better apply, as there are many who identify themselves as a "nation" in spite of powerful evidence to the contrary. A nation-state organizes itself around a shared body of human interests within a geographically demarcated territory and uses the rule of law and military force to perpetuate its existence. Woodstock Nation doesn't fill the bill. Neither does Cherokee Nation, or, for that matter, Palestinian Nation. Nations may declare their existence, but survival depends upon following certain rules for engaging the larger world. The US has evolved from its early status as a loose confederacy of regional business interests into the super power of today by organization and the use of force, not by declaring its allegiance to abstract ideals.

When people say they love their country, but fear their government, I think it may be a way of saying they feel great affection for their property, and for their familiar landscapes, but loathe the complexities of civilization. The preservation of personal property and of the more fundamental right to remain in a homeland are tasks that individuals cannot manage to secure on their own. That's a large part of the motivation behind forming states, establishing boundaries, codifying laws and setting up a military. One may have an emotional attachment to the concept of a state of nature in which humanity was somehow happier and more at liberty than is currently the case, but there is no factual evidence to support that belief. On the contrary, there is much demonstrable evidence to support the proposition that the practices of successful nation states have generally resulted in greater prosperity, longer life and greater freedom for their inhabitants.

Those who say they love their country and fear their governments have poetry on their side, and that is a considerable ally. The "State of Nature" dilemma native to revolutionary thought is manifest in the slogan, and predates the revolutions that swept away British colonial rule in the US, and royalist dominance in France. It played a powerful role in the secession of southern states in the US less than a century later, and then, another hundred years down the road, it forever altered the popular cultures of both the US and China. It's a very powerful tool for change, and deserves the respect of all who would presume to sit on their political laurels too long.

Still, for those who luxuriate in the bosom of the richest, most powerful state on Earth to bray that they fear their government seems disingenuous, and intellectually lazy. It's not as if they're embracing the spirit of instability and anarchy inherent in Rousseau's philosophy, after all. Most of the people who say this stuff are comfortable, middle-class, white, and at least modestly educated. They don't really want to change anything: they just want to turn back the clock to a time when noble men in tricorn hats beat the Empire with their Jeffersonian ideals. Additionally, they'd like to take the Wayback Machine to a time when pesky women and brown people didn't challenge their authority every step of the way, and they could keep all the money they managed to extract from their brothers and sisters without having to pay taxes.

Now, we are the Empire, and it's vanity writ large to pretend otherwise. Affluent white guys aren't the people who should fear the government: they ARE the government. They might more realistically fear what will happen when the government runs out of money and can't defend them any longer.

Jail break

2011-01-31T20:34:00.004-05:00

Several billion essentially anarchic humans are on the brink of staging a global jailbreak, and you know that won't go unchallenged.

Those who presume to manage our affairs have their own resources, and I'm sure a lot of all-nighters are going down planet-wide as smart guys with spreadsheets try to figure out how to shut off the faucet. Previous experience suggests they'll come up with something, but it will be a very interesting test some basic assumptions about human nature if they don't.

Are people capable of running their own affairs with minimal top-down instructions? I happen to think they are, which means I'm an advocate for free information flow and an end to the reign of terror perpetrated on us by our "leaders." As a result, I can't claim any sort of objectivity in the debate, but I think I also have the occasional ability to think on both sides of any question, and to empathize with my adversaries. I know there's an outside chance our species can't handle the truth, and must be shepherded about to prevent it from doing itself even greater harm than they already do.

I like to think that's not the case, but I don't have any proof.

We're in one of those rare historic moments when the monkeys are coming out of the cages and threatening to take over the laboratory. If they succeed, we'll have the first globally observed experiment in how naked apes organize themselves when information is shared with little, if any, regard for hierarchy.

If the Egyptians manage to bring down their established order and don't immediately replace it with another, I'll consider it a victory, but I won't consider it an occasion for euphoria. It will simply be a first step in the long journey away from our accustomed forms, and the beginning of our real work.

That so much of our attention is now focused on Alexandria is poignant.
It is the city where Alexander burned down a library and effectively rebooted civilization on the new Roman model.

Correction: It was Julius Caesar, the Roman conqueror who may have burned the library, not Alexander, the Greek. I blame early rising for this sort of thing.

The revolution is on the internet

2011-01-31T07:59:00.001-05:00

It is with a sense of wonder that I observe the events unfolding in Egypt.

Inside of a month, the internet served to advertise and organize a revolution that promises to overthrow a thirty-year-old regime within days.

The most delicately balanced, heavily funded detente in the history of mankind is a heartbeat away from dissolving, and all the wise men are at a loss to tell us what is to become of our plans for the Middle East.

The revolution that blew through Tunis so fast I didn't really notice has gained steam in Egypt, and I would imagine we'll be looking at new wonders arising by the week as the stultified dictatorships of the Arab world begin to topple before these soldiers of the new age. When everyone can talk to everyone else, and we're all looking at the same pictures, how long can the twisted human parodies that rule Libya and Saudi Arabia hope to remain in power?

Educated Arabs have known this time was coming, but I doubt they had any idea how quickly things could unwind when a generation of formerly silent young people sat down at their laptops and picked up their cell phones to call bullshit on the prevailing paradigm. People like bin Laden and Zawahiri look like pterodactyls now. It's not bombs and assassinations and endless paranoiac nattering over plans to bring down the Great Satan that will change the Arab world. The revolution came from the bottom up, and is on every television with a cable connection from Paris to Hat Yai. Even China is feeling the heat, as they make another clownish attempt to control information by blocking the word "Egypt" from being searched on microblogger sites there.

Gutenberg, roll over.

We're officially not in Kansas any more.

Madness ongoing

2011-01-26T03:31:00.001-05:00

The thoughts and dreams of madmen are no more independent of cultural influence than those of others. A schizophrenic may differ from "normal" people only inasmuch as he or she is unable to control the priority given mental processes we all use every day. A lot of the anguish felt by mentally ill people may be generated by their inability to either actualize or shut off internally generated images and patterns that are common to many, but which remain safely partitioned off from day to day functions as long as the brain is functioning in the usual manner. Most of us can fluently and quickly move from dreaming to waking states, but schizophrenics can't. That's very unpleasant for someone having a bad dream.

When I look at the now-ubiquitous mug shot of Jared Loughner, I see a man filled with fierce joy. He did something most of us never do: he moved his dream state into the public reality, and managed to complete it to his satisfaction. He did it without suffering and dying, and there is no prison that can hold him. He escaped his bonds when he waded into the crowd and started shooting people.

Why he had that particular dream is the issue that continues to occupy my thoughts. It seems pretty clear to me that he acted out a prevalent fantasy among politically disaffected Americans, but many professional wise men seem content to agree that Loughner can be dismissed as insignificant because he's crazy. To an extent, I'm sure that's true. My mother sat on her sofa and heard voices telling her America and its tradition of personal freedom was in great danger because of shadowy forces being massed against us. She wasn't significant in the public debate because she was just a housewife in a small Alabama town, she didn't kill anyone and was demonstrably mad. However, this happened at the height of the Cold War in a community obsessed with Communists and race-mixers, so it's hardly fair to say she was thinking anything unusual for her time and place. She first heard everything the "voices" told her in an ordinary setting, and was then unable to stop repeating the concepts when they took over her dreams.

I suspect the same is true of Loughner.

It's not important now to try and address any "political" motives he may have had, because he was no more capable of linear, ideological thought than any other dreaming man. He did what he thought was necessary to finish the violent dream American culture now embodies. We see the Other, and want to destroy it by any means available. We've waded through amoral slaughters around the globe for fifty-odd years, and come away with the idea that everybody is a threat that can be eliminated with a bullet. Sarah Palin is just a sock puppet for those who run the death star, and probably isn't subtle enough to worry about the content or effects of her language. I don't blame her. She shows no signs of consciousness. There are others in the same orbit who more deserve our contempt and outrage, and, I think not coincidentally, most of them are men.

I watch a lot of old movies these days, and one of the genres that catches my attention is the zombie flick. More recent cinematic zombie fantasies focus on the corpse-like appearance and curious diet of the undead, but there was a totally different idea about them in the 1930s. As our world teetered on the brink of war, a curious new phenomenon had arisen in Germany: a charismatic man using recently-developed and little-understood communications technologies was succeeding in taking over an entire culture through thought control. The prevailing cinematic concept of zombies at the time was that they were human automata controlled by a sinister man intent on world domination.

I think that's a more intellectually engaged take on the concept, and not at all dated.

Madness, Part 2

2011-01-18T02:01:00.005-05:00

I first encountered the concept of zeitgeist while reading Goethe in my high school years. It translates as "spirit of the times," and Goethe thought of it as a way to describe the connectedness of the European intellectual community.

It's one of the rare nineteenth century concepts which has gained in relevance over time, as we are now literally connected to a collective global mind which instantaneously communicates the same information to everyone on a continuing basis. Our consensual reality is formed and reinforced at the speed of light every second of every day. Whether we want to admit it or not, everything we think is now programmed and re-programmed in a constant dialog between anonymous forces.

*******

Ask any "expert," and you'll soon discover there's a pervasive loathing of pattern recognition among those who police our thinking. From historians to physicists, trained minds are very sensitive on the topic.

That's understandable when you consider how much is invested in the idea of free will, individualism and independence. These illusions inform the fabric of the world we live in, and every effort is made to preserve them from sinking back into the undifferentiated mud from which we arose. Pattern recognition is the province of the soothsayer, the madman and the conspiracy buff. Those who suffer from paranoid schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder are so consumed with the patterns they see that they've become parodies of themselves. When any person discovers an informational pattern that's inconsistent with the prevailing world view, he or she runs a great risk of being consigned to the same "loony bin" where we store inconvenient people like these.

At this late stage of the game, nobody in the western world wants to admit he's the product of a terrible mistake, although evidence in support of that premise piles up by the day. Nobody is eager to take Occam's Razor to the cultural knot we first created out of an arrogant disregard for the ancient wisdom that everything is connected, and then perpetuated by the ruthless enforcement of ensuing religious, philosophical and economic concepts. As a result, we find ourselves peering into an abyss filled with dire consequences for the entire species. What we do is unsustainable, and there's an invariable consequence for living outside the law.

Not that I have any quick answers for you. Also, I can't recommend anyone who does. Over the past two days I watched the last director's cut of "Zeitgeist," and another related work, "Zeitgeist Addendum." If you don't know what these are, it's quite likely your kids do. Many people make the mistake of thinking there's a single face on the many different anti-establishment movements emerging into mainstream prominence, but there's no such thing. People of every political stripe are now grasping for a way out of our seeming impasse, and these films have a lot to do with the way both Utopian anarchists and Tea Party conservatives view the world. Honestly, I was quite taken with the original when it hit the internet a few years back, but I came away from this week's review with much different feelings.

There's an unmistakable link between active intelligence (as manifested by imagination and ideation) and paranoia, inasmuch as the end result is a set of conclusions based on the mind's attempts to provide an organizing principle for confusing stimuli. That's what our pattern recognition function was designed to do, and it will work even when there's no empirical reason for us to believe the universe is anything other than chaotic. I suspect too many thinkers are willing to toss the baby with the bath water, and my own experiences as a child of madness lead me to conclude that attempts to analyze our condition in this dimension will always hit the wall of dichotomy when chaos and order collide. There is order in everything, but it may be impossible to see through the fog.

The Zeitgeist oeuvre calls to mind the image of a dissatisfied adolescent boy riding on a bullet train in France. He realizes he doesn't want to be in Europe any longer, and decides he'd rather be riding a bullet train in Japan. As there is no handy way to stop the train he's on and make an orderly transition to the train he'd prefer to ride, he reaches for the emergency stop and leaps through an open door to his inevitable demise. I feel the same way about most theories relating to our present state of affairs. The perception that something is seriously wrong with the world causes me no problems. That we may isolate certain patterns through careful observation of events is inarguable. No problems there. That we'll never survive unless we change ourselves is a reasonable conclusion. I can accept these premises, and do so without the slightest reservation about the sanity of the speaker.

The patterns are threatening, and it's only human to want to do something to assure our continued survival.

According to popular myth, Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. It's a myth, of course, because Einstein never said anything even remotely resembling that. Many think it was Rita Mae Brown who first wrote it, and she may have been copying a line from her Narcotics Anonymous Handbook, so we have no idea where the concept first surfaced.

In spite of its dubious provenance, however, the definition has some utility, and is at least amusing.

People on the right-hand side of the political spectrum endlessly call for sacrifice, order and obedience as nostrums for societal ills. On the left-hand side (which is closest to the heart, by the way), progressives implore us to embrace humane technical solutions, and liberals ask us to empathize and enable. Because these solutions never work, sane people would have abandoned them long ago, but our entire political discourse is built around these formulas, and there's little else available. So are we led by the insane? Maybe. I'd go as far as to guess it's likely.

The fact is, we're stuck in a world where our descriptors and concepts no longer keep pace with reality, and, as a result, no one is entirely "sane." We keep doing the same things over and over again because, although we're uncomfortably aware there's big trouble on the horizon, we're at a loss for fresh material to carry us past the dilemma. Worse, the mechanism by which our thoughts are controlled is very new, and only a handful understand how it works. To complicate matters, those who do have a rudimentary grasp on the new reality aren't the nicest kids on the playground, and they have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. Which dumps us all right back into the soup. At a time when world-wide cooperation in the application of technology to our problems is most important, the loudest voices are of those dedicated to egging on the fights that consume our attention and resources.

Back in the halcyon days of W The President, we were introduced to the right's contempt for the "reality-based community" in Ron Suskind's NYT Magazine article. The people who overthrew the established order following the election of 2000 knew enough about the information machinery to take possession of the world's most powerful country and relaunch it as history's largest and most profitable war machine. No wonder they were so breezy about reality. They didn't respond to it: they made it. It was the ultimate punchline to the tough boss stereotype, where the world is divided into people who have heart attacks, and those who cause them. Their legacy has resulted in the most anomalous Democratic president in my lifetime: Barack Obama is a black progressive who inherited a Republican reality so powerful that he's had to run his show as if he were an extension of George W. Bush. If anything, he's worse, because the machine created during Bush's first term has grown exponentially ever since. The military/security/anti-terrorism/corporate protection industry now consumes twice as much of our treasure as it did in 2000. It's the gorilla in the corner of the room.

Mess with it too much, and it will crush you.

Once reality becomes a commodity, control over its content obviously devolves to those with the most money. If those who purchase that control want to convince people it's in their best interest to give up their money, their homes, their jobs, their identities, their dignity, the quality of their lives and their common humanity, it only requires time and patience to accomplish these goals.

Back to the pattern recognition.

After Jared Loughner did his small part in the continuing assault on public figures identified with "the left," a lot of ink was spilled over the question of whether he's a political hit man, or insane. To me, this is a pointless question. His actions simply made manifest the fantasies of professional scenarists who work for corporations struggling to maintain control over the economic life of the US. I've watched Zeitgeist several times, and I can guarantee you that's not where he got the idea to commit violence as a way of changing the system. Whether he's mentally ill or not, and I think he is, the mission he carried out is not one he created by himself. He's just the Renfield who does Dracula's dirty work for him while the sun shines and the master is indisposed. The list of such operatives is growing all the time, and will continue to do so for as long as our reality is held in thrall. Loughner is part of a tradition: what is commonly called "the right" sets a tone and agenda which results in the murder of those who disagree with them. The person who carries out the attack is often incoherent, and sometimes apparently apolitical, but the political agenda that gets served is the same on each occasion. At no time in our country's history can I find a political assassination initiated by "the left." As I said, some people have heart attacks, while others cause them.

As we remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy, we would be well-served to recall it was quite likely a high-level government and business conspiracy which led to his murder, and that conspiracy wasn't hatched by people upset about the decline of labor unions, low minimum wages, substandard diet, no health insurance, or any of the many causes embraced by King.

As for the sanity test on King's assassin, let me just say I lived in a Birmingham, Alabama boarding house with James Earl Ray, and, although I didn't know him, I knew his drinking buddies. Two nights before the assassination in Memphis, two of them dropped by my room to ask if I'd seen Ray, and they stayed for a chat.
We were talking about Robert Kennedy's run for the presidency.
When one asked me if I was "for" Kennedy or not, I replied that I was.
"Oh," he said, "so you're a Capitalist," and laughed.
Five days later, the FBI showed up.
I never saw any of those guys again.