Without Protest

By David Simmons

Normally around this time I write a year-end letter and e-mail it to everyone I can think of who might take some interest. This year, however, I simply have nothing to report. Nothing happened in 2011.

That might sound like a dismal admission, but anyone who actually read my 2010 letter will know that it is a big improvement. And any improvement is quite an accomplishment considering that Time magazine has named The Protester its Person of the Year.

History has proved that the only revolutions that have made any meaningful, positive difference to the human project have taken a lot longer than a few months. But it does seem pretty clear that some of the remarkable events we have witnessed in 2011, from the “Arab Spring” to the Occupy movement, will have lasting effects; it’s just too early to know what those effects will be. Already the hope we had for Egypt seems headed for the trash bin.

Meanwhile, though Occupy likes to portray itself as a “global” movement, it has not taken root in Asia, other than a quiet spurt in Hong Kong. But even in Thailand, where I have made my home for most of the past decade, a revolution of sorts is taking place; ordinary people are waking up, and no longer see any reason for the few to be privileged while the many are not. Unlike last year, when the “red shirt” movement descended into chaos and bloodshed, the revolution this year took place at the ballot box. Not for the first time, of course; that was a decade ago, when the elitist Bangkok-based Democrat Party was trounced by Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai (“Thais Love Thais”) party. He gave the majority a share in the country’s wealth for the first time and introduced modern social-welfare programs such as universal health care. The monarchists and the military put up with this until 2006, when a more normal manifestation of Thai politics occurred: a coup d’état. Convicted of corruption and sentenced to prison, Thaksin fled to foreign countries that were happy to host him and his billions.

But the genie was out of the bottle. Populist movements, both legitimate and illicit, took hold of the political agenda, and a succession of pro-Thaksin parties were elected, only to be ousted by the corrupt judiciary. The Democrats were reinstalled, this time with a charismatic, handsome and articulate leader, Abhisit Vejjajiva, at the helm. But he was surrounded by the usual gang of corrupt and incompetent politicians in his cabinet, and despite a “wag the dog” border conflict with Cambodia to shore up their popularity in Thaksin’s support base, the populous rural areas, the Democrats were trounced again this July in one of the fairest and best-run elections Thailand has ever seen. Promising a series of programs to deal with the country’s huge wealth gap, Thaksin’s beautiful younger sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, became the nation’s first female prime minister.

So far, the latest Shinawatra regime is still in place; even the military, which holds the real power, seems reluctant to instigate yet another coup given the overwhelming support Yingluck still enjoys in the heartland despite her alleged mishandling of the flood disaster this autumn. Legal attempts to discredit the government through impeachments have also failed, though the business class is going all out to sabotage such measures as raising the minimum wage to C$10 a day. While these efforts are predictably supported enthusiastically by US-based multinationals and to a slightly lesser extent by the Europeans, many of the Japanese and Korean firms have said they support improving the standard of living of the working (and consuming) class, and are well able to absorb the cost. The Chinese too, who are quietly taking over the entire Southeast Asian economy, have refused to be distracted by Western-based neoliberal race-to-the-bottom propaganda.

As a journalist, I am often amazed at the failure of the Western media to see what is happening in the world. Massive greed has all but destroyed Europe; by at least one analysis, nearly half the population of the formerly great United States of America is living in some form of poverty. Western democracy appears to be finished; the balance of power is shifting to the BRIC countries, only one of which – Brazil – is a reasonably well-functioning democracy, and the most powerful of the four – China – does not even pretend to be democratic, as do India and Russia. The media largely ignore this huge economic and geopolitical shift, even misunderstanding – or deliberately misinterpreting – the popular anger in their own neighbourhoods, shrugging off the corporate-backed coups in Greece and Italy, and failing yet again to take an active stance against military aggression.

Even the Occupy movement is a side-effect of the Western decline. What exactly does the “99 per cent” want? It wants what it briefly had in the past, a good standard of living, hope for a decent pension in old age, affordable education and rewarding careers for their offspring. But those benefits were only enjoyed in Europe, North America and Oceania, then latterly in a few Asian enclaves such as Japan and South Korea. Elsewhere, every year millions starved or perished from preventable diseases. The West never used its power, when it still had it, to repair global inequities; on the contrary, the US and the main European governments fuelled them, even resorting to terrorism, sabotage and war when the imbalance came under threat.

The Occupiers blame corporations, and the media and politicians they have bought, for the decline in the Western standard of living. But who gave the villains their power? In a democracy, the buck stops not with the king or the dictator, but with the demos, the people themselves, who can and usually do choose to squander their democratic rights and, ultimately, their personal well-being and their children’s futures, through blindness, laziness or greed.

But I digress. For the Simmons family, 2011 was a good year, at least compared with 2010. Nearly half of that unloved year was spent in a foreign country, away from my wife, kid and cat, in the first journalism job I have actually despised. Those frustrations were aggravated, and caused to some extent, by a latent blood ailment that was sapping my energy and finally landed me in hospital for a transfusion of O-negative.

By the end of 2010, my health had returned, I was back with my family, and things were looking up again.

That trend has continued in 2011. My health is still good; we live in comfort, with various sources of income to support a lifestyle we enjoy. I don’t travel much any more; my sense of adventure is passing with the years, and when I have managed to get some time off work over the past year, I have been content to enjoy the tropical and affordable charms right here in Thailand, easily and conveniently accessible without the hassle of airports, visas or foreign-exchange ripoffs.

And what of 2012? Will the frauds and felons who run the world succeed in destroying it, as the Maya predicted? There are ominous signs; the financial system in the West is being exposed as a gigantic Ponzi scheme, as the Chinese and their Asian allies wait patiently to lap up the dregs of a half-century booze-up in Europe and North America. And for the first time since World War II (and no, I haven’t forgotten the Cold War, which was nothing more than a game by boys with toys, albeit one that kept hundreds of millions of people in misery for decades), the possibility of a global conflagration brought about by sheer stupidity – military aggression against Iran – looms.

Difficult to see, the future; always in motion it is. I’m a survivor, of this year’s Southeast Asian flood disaster, earthquakes, tsunamis, desert sandstorms, a 30-year journalism career, my wife’s driving lessons, and myriad mistakes for which I alone was to blame.

So there is no reason yet to suspect that I won’t survive 2012. And as always at this time of year, my lovely and patient wife Pong (นวัลนอย), my spoiled but still delightful daughter LukYi (นัทนิชา), my often annoying but generally amusing cat Onet (โอเนส) and I wish all of our friends and family a happy and prosperous twelvemonth.

My, Aren't We Beastly

By David Simmons

The family wanted to go to Sri Racha Tiger Zoo just southeast of Bangkok, and I'd heard it had kind of a bad reputation, so I had a quick look around the Internet before we piled into our niece's pickup for the journey.

The first thing I came across was a long, humourless sermon by someone claiming to have spent 30 years in the zoo industry (and therefore, we presume, an expert) but had a traumatic divorce and is now a "traveller" (therefore, we presume, a cool expert).

The gist of the piece is that people who still like zoos are unsophisticated, and that the Tiger Zoo "is one of the worst I have ever visited. Sadly just because it is a bad zoo does not make it unpopular."

Well, we all know, of course, that zoos aren't politically correct in the West, but this is Asia, which, as we also all know, is still far behind when it comes to acquiring Western values, other than consumerism and unsustainable growth, where many countries including Thailand have caught on pretty well. The Sermonizer goes on to note sternly: "The opportunity is there to have your photograph taken with a Tiger Cub. People do, too. Just about everyone in my party forked out the two hundred or so Thai Baht to feed a cub."

My eight-year-old daughter joined this unsophisticated throng, sitting on a bench hugging a tiger cub as her picture was taken. Years later, we are led to presume, she will look at those photos and shake her head in wonder that she could have ever been so uncool as to be thrilled at the privilege of playing with a baby tiger.

But The Sermonizer really starts foaming at the mouth when it comes to the crocodile and tiger shows.

"The Crocodile Show was as I would expect it to be. A couple of people poking and prodding and standing on poor crocodiles. An absolute waste of time. There was the inevitable put your head in a Crocs mouth. I don't doubt that I was not the only person in the audience that wished the Croc would wreak its revenge."

Revenge? For what? Basking in the sun all day being fed fish lacking the nutrients to be found in Southeast Asia's polluted rivers? But there's more: "No education here, it was not even clever. I actually thought it lacked professionalism too even for the crappy persecution it presented. I could have quadrupled their 'tips' with a couple of simple manouveres [sic]."

The Sermonizer didn't elaborate on what his "manoeuvres" might be, but given the tone of his tome, we can presume it would be "educational". Possibly he would stand on the stage with a blackboard and pointer lecturing on the life cycle of the Siamese crocodile, while the crocs themselves (and the audience) drifted off into slumber.

The tiger show is his next target: "The Tiger Show was just a circus with all those stupid ancient circussy  [sic] tricks. Nothing clever, no imagination and certainly no education." It's true; there was no sign in the auditorium of a lecturer's blackboard, and the audience was wide awake, laughing and applauding as the great beasts did their "stupid ancient circusy tricks", including standing on their hind legs and wai-ing to the unsophisticated, largely non-Western and therefore so politically incorrect crowd.

Coming from one of the most sophisticated countries on the planet, Canada, I have always aspired to be as politically correct as The Sermonizer. Not much progress so far, I'm sorry to report. I still don't have any problem with zoos. (Actually the best one I've ever been to was in ultra-politically correct southern California, the San Diego Zoo.) Whining that it's cruel to hold wild animals in captivity doesn't really wash with me. In all the zoos I've been to, the animals look well fed and reasonably content. I'm not convinced they'd prefer to be fending for themselves in a jungle.

As for training them to do circus acts, again I don't see why this is so horrible, and here's why.

In the animal kingdom, there are three kinds of inter-species relationships: predator, prey and symbiont. Like many mammals, humans fit into all three categories: Most of us prey on other animals, and are also preyed upon by insects, parasitic micro-organisms and, occasionally, other carnivores such as sharks, crocodiles and tigers.

As for symbiosis, the most important example is our digestive system, which relies on bacteria living inside our bodies. If these bacteria suddenly all decided to stop "exploiting" us, or simply decided there was more to life than wallowing in a stinking soup of stomach acid and Quarter Pounders, and took a hike we'd be in serious trouble.

But to an extent seen in no other species, we have established a variety of other symbiotic relationships with higher animals. We have domesticated them to assist us in transportation or agriculture. We have made pets out of them to provide us companionship. And we have used them for entertainment. While it is true that there are too many cases of humans abusing animals, by and large the most successful of these relationships have been give and take: The animals do what we want, and in return are provided food, shelter and health care. An increasing number of humans wish they could get a similar deal.

I don't know anything about how tigers are trained to wai and jump through hoops; maybe some abuse is involved, but The Sermonizer provides no evidence that this is so (in fact, he doesn't even suggest it). Certainly there has been evidence in the past of cruelty to animals for entertainment, the most famous being the Roman spectacles in the Colosseum. But even in that extreme case there were payoffs for the animals such as a reliable supply of Christians to eat. Even today some suggest reviving this idea might not be such a bad thing, to help cull the world of televangelists, for example. I am opposed to this view, more or less.

But to return to the main point, if the Sri Racha tigers are properly compensated for their work, there is no more reason that it should be condemned than "non-educational" human-based entertainment such as acting, professional sports or ballet.

To argue that it is "against nature" is nonsense. Humans are a natural species, one of the most successful, and our ability to exploit other species is a natural part of that success. At the same time, our brains have evolved pleasure centres to an extent that is probably unique in the animal kingdom, and our development of vast varieties of entertainment is therefore also perfectly natural.

These developments, especially the ability to alter our own environment (deliberately or inadvertently), could of course also lead to our extinction. Our failure to control our own procreation along with our almost universal adoption of a self-destructive economic system are putting unsustainable stresses on our planet, and on the other species with which we share it. But before we destroy the world, I for one am pleased that my daughter and I occasionally have the opportunity to encounter some of the most remarkable of those other species, such as tigers, up close.

As for the Sri Racha Tiger Zoo itself, in my opinion, in Thailand, the Dusit Zoo in Bangkok is a better value and much easier for most foreign tourists to get to. Admission to the Tiger Zoo is an eye-watering 450 baht (about C$15) for foreigners, and even the Thai rate of 150 baht is pretty steep. I could think of several ways to have a lot of fun in Thailand for 450 baht – not all of which my wife would approve of, however.

Still, this is her country, not mine, so the final verdict on the Tiger Zoo should go to her: "I very like tiger, mawden cockodie. Cockodie make me very afraid!"

The More Things Change

By David Simmons

In the autumn of 1980, I spent several happy weeks in Greece. It was a very different country than it is today; indeed, it was a different era.

Often called the "cradle of democracy", Greece had up to that point actually enjoyed modern democracy for only about five years. It had just rejoined NATO, and there were protests in the streets of Athens – for or against the alliance I didn't know. It could have been either; one of the poorest countries in Europe, Greece had been spending huge amounts of money on its military machine, apparently in fear of nearby Turkey, which was also a NATO member. So maybe the idea was that after rejoining the alliance, Greece could spend badly needed funds bringing its social services up to European standards.

On the other hand, NATO did not have a good reputation in those days. It was the middle of the Cold War, and the United States, having largely screwed up the struggle against communism in Asia, was supporting brutal dictatorships and death squads all over Latin America in the name of crushing the Red Menace. And in the eyes of many, NATO and the US military-industrial complex were one and the same. It was, as noted above, a different era.

So I wasn't sure what the protesters wanted. I wasn't very politically aware back then, just emerging from the intellectual wasteland of Protestant fundamentalism. Still, specific grievances aside, there was a broad sense that having finally rid themselves of their monarchy and military dictators and embraced the form of government whose name they had coined millennia before, democracy was here to stay. It was a time of hope, especially for the young.

I settled into a flophouse on the south coast of Crete populated largely by young Brits. Maggie Thatcher had been in power for about a year, and the miracles of monetarism were already having their effect. British youth were flocking to the Mediterranean for working holidays – mostly picking olives by day and enjoying cheap moussaka and ouzo by night. Still, everyone knew the UK's economic woes would soon be over. After the pain of Thatcherism would come the gain of European-style stability. It was a time of hope, and a good time to be young.

That November, another disciple of Milton Friedman came to power, the B-movie actor Ronald Reagan. One wag in the flophouse quipped, "I see a fiery glow over Tehran." The weak, incompetent president Jimmy Carter had crashed and burned, just like the helicopters he had sent into the Iranian desert. Soon, it was thought, the Khomeini theocracy would do the same, renewing hope for modernization of the Middle East.

Eventually, as autumn began transiting into winter and the Mediterranean surf became less inviting, I abandoned Crete and moved on to a kibbutz in the northern Negev, just east of the Gaza Strip. Founded in 1949, it was a large primarily agricultural kibbutz with a secular socialist philosophy. Kibbutzim of that persuasion had not been having an easy ride since the election of the right-wing former Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin, but the hopes of young Israelis, for the full embracement of human rights and for peace with the Palestinians, remained strong.

The literal voice of that hope was anchored not far offshore on a former Dutch cargo ship renamed MV Peace, the home of a radio station partly funded by John Lennon and called Kol HaShalom, the Voice of Peace. Days after my arrival at the kibbutz, Lennon was shot and killed in New York City. Like much of the world, everyone on the kibbutz – Zionists, socialists, industrialists, Bedouin orchard workers, foreign volunteers – mourned this loss, as Kol HaShalom and the Armed Forces Radio played Lennon's songs for 24 hours.

But mere bullets can't destroy hope. Soon it was Christmas, and our Jewish hosts turned over the kitchen facilities to the foreign volunteers and brought in special supplies so we could feast together. On New Year's Eve, we tried to stay awake as everyone's home time zone ushered in 1981. Because of the 10-hour time difference, we didn't make it to mine.

But it's the thought that counts, and good thoughts – for prosperity and democracy in Greece, for peace in the Middle East, for the success of the European experiment of human rights and economic equality, for a global end to poverty, war, racism and injustice – prevailed.

It was an era that belonged not to Thatcher, Reagan, Begin or Khomeini, and certainly not to Mark David Chapman. It belonged to youth, and the power of hope.

The Grumbling Down Below

By David Simmons

"More and more I see people losing faith in once untouchable and untarnished institutions," the editor of a Vancouver-based news website said on Facebook recently. He was commenting about the "double standards" on how police deal with criminal activities by one of their own, adding: "This force is not the same one I knew years ago and standards have declined – both in terms of investigational skills and in terms of ethics."

Vancouver is not alone in this loss of faith, of course – far from it. And disrespect for the police is only a symptom of a malaise that runs very deep, to the very core of Western society. In Europe, decades of profligacy, waste and incompetent government abetted by bankers so blinded by their own greed they could not see – or, more likely, didn't care about – the coming collapse of the euro zone have led to a breakdown of order in Greece, with rumblings of anger and dissent ready to burst forth in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, France and even Germany. Meanwhile in the US, what began as a quiet protest in New York City against the collusion of finance and government shovelling the nation's wealth away from the masses and into the pockets of a tiny few has swelled to such a level, thanks largely to police incompetence and ham-fistedness, that even CNN can no longer ignore it.

As is typical of CNN, though, it has completely missed the point of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. It sent a young reporter down to Zuccotti Park where, as veteran anchor Jim Clancy stroked his chin and nodded wisely, she found a lack of any "coherent" message from the protesters (who she claimed, amazingly, appeared to be outnumbered by media folk, even though the protest had been barely covered until the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge).

This lack of "coherence" of Occupy Wall Street has emerged as something of a theme, now that the movement, in the words of The Independent, has become "too big to ignore". Self-described British "leftie" Brendan O'Neill, in one of the most mean-spirited and scathing attacks on the protest to date, wrote in his Telegraph blog that the occupiers "spend their time spreading all sorts of demented conspiracy theories about modern political life. 'Corporations … run our governments', they claim, indulging in a David Icke–like fantasy that faceless men-in-suits puppeteer the political sphere. Apparently these evil men, not content with making squillions of dollars and starting billions of wars, have also 'poisoned the food supply through negligence', inflicted 'cruel treatment on countless non-human animals', and 'purposefully covered up oil spills'."

But it is the very incoherence sneered at by these reports that speaks most loudly of the unrest rumbling, like a dormant volcano, too far below the surface for behind-the-curve analysts to hear. They are like someone who criticizes an AIDS sufferer dying of pneumonia: "He is just lashing out, complaining about his lesions at one point, then about his inability to breathe, then about HIV, then about the fact that he can't afford antiretroviral drugs. And when pressed, he can't offer any cure for AIDS."

It is the disease itself that is incoherent: an economic system built first on paper, then on bubbles, and now on unsustainable debt repackaged and resold as "derivatives", while the basic necessities of life – food, shelter and health – are so downgraded in importance that vast numbers of people in what used to be called the Third World (now the "developing" world, though what it is "developing" into is never explained) don't have these things at all, while more and more people in the once-prosperous West are losing them.

The police in New York, or Vancouver or Toronto or Athens or Chelsea, are not the problem. They are only the armed force of a system that is not simply broken, it is shattered. Their pepper-spray canisters, their truncheons, Tasers and guns are powerless against the volcano, which must eventually erupt. Will it be a Pinatubo, a Mount St Helens, or merely a plume of noxious gas that quickly peters out? Only time will tell, but it's down there, it's down there somewhere. CNN and Brendan O'Neill just can't hear it yet.

On Onet

By David Simmons

One of the good things about living in Thailand is that I've never run up against that bane of the renter in Canada, the "no pets" policy. But it's not only Canada that permits this violation of the basic human right to animal companions; the Vatican Apartments also ban them, to the chagrin of their best-known tenant, Pope Benedict. His black-and-white shorthair Chico has to stay at his home back in Bavaria.

Our cat Onet takes full advantage of Thailand's tolerance of tabbies. In fact, she wanders off for days on ends sometimes, apparently taking up temporary residence in other townhouses in our neighbourhood that, we suspect, bribe her with squid, her favourite snack. At our place, if she wants squid and we're not paying due attention to her needs, she'll steal a package from the shop my wife runs in our carport, subsequently enduring the wrath of said shop's proprietress.

My wife isn't keen on cats. When she was a child, one bit her in the head while she was sleeping, and she still has the scar. But she puts up with Onet for my sake.

Onet's latest neighbourhood walkabout started last month, when we were all out of town for a short time. When we returned, the cat was nowhere to be seen for several days. Our eight-year-old daughter decided that when Onet did finally return, she would be thirsty, and so she filled a tub with water and left it in the kitchen for everyone to stumble over.

I had a look around the Internet to see if anyone besides Benedict shares my fondness for cats, and some of the "famous cat-lover" entries are not too surprising: Albert Schweitzer, Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Albert Einstein. I didn't know before that the Prophet Muhammad, who thought dogs "unclean", liked cats so much that they now reportedly hang around his gravesite. Sir Winston Churchill was very fond of a cat named Jock, while Adolf Hitler, like Napoleon Bonaparte before him, despised them.

Among my fellow linguists, Noah Webster defined the cat as a "deceitful animal and when enraged, extremely spiteful", while Samuel Johnson's cat Hodge was so "indulged", according to biographer James Boswell, that a statue of Hodge (with oyster) stands outside Johnson's former home in London. But the late Barbara Holland, who wrote the book The Joy of Drinking decrying the rise of "broccoli, exercise and Starbucks", suggested that both lexicographers had missed the point: "There is no cat 'language'. Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one."

Onet isn't around as I write this – out hunting birds, maybe, or stealing squid from the neighbours. That's OK; as many have observed, you can never really "own" a cat, and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead noted, "If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer." But at least I get to indulge in the simple pleasure of a purring cat in my lap fairly often, without having to go all the way to Bavaria. Benedict, meanwhile, has to content himself by issuing edicts against condoms.

In the end, it's a mistake to get sentimental about cats – they would consider that a victory, proof of their superiority, if they even cared that much. American humourist Garrison Keillor probably got it right: "Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function."

Speak English, Will U?

By David Simmons

The greatest lesson of history is that the future is utterly unpredictable. The evolution of language itself, the essential element of history, is one example.

Who would have predicted, centuries ago when the Spanish, Portuguese, British, Russian, German, French and even Swedish empires were vying for dominance that the Latin term lingua franca, which literally means "French language", would refer to neither Latin nor French but to English? Or that the continuing dominance of English would be maintained not by England itself but by its former colonies?

The English language has some strengths that make it useful as a lingua franca, but also some great disadvantages. Its great strength is its flexibility, and its ability to absorb and adapt useful terminology from other languages. Its great disadvantages are the complexity of its grammar and its diabolically difficult spelling system – or, more accurately, systems plural, for every dialect and sub-dialect has its own spelling quirks.

The first difficulty, its grammatical complexity, can be quite easily overcome in spoken form, which perhaps helps explain how English managed to take root in places as linguistically diverse as India, Nigeria and the Philippines. To express basic ideas, English is quite easy to use: If an uneducated African or Malay says something like "Want go home", he won't make much impression on the prospective publisher of his first English-language novel, but everyone will understand what he means.

Its phonological system is also reasonably simple. Tones and stress have little or no importance; most of its consonants have equivalents in most other languages; and while it has a somewhat intimidating array of vowels and diphthongs, which again vary widely among its many dialects, most of them can be approximated to simpler forms without making the speaker too difficult to understand if he speaks slowly and puts a bit of effort into it.

It is the written form of English that creates more serious problems for anyone striving for anything close to fluency – not only for non-native speakers, but for people born in Britain, North America or Australia. Would-be reformers have struggled for centuries to simplify and regularize English spelling, but the only one who achieved even moderate success was Noah Webster – and his reforms are still only accepted widely in his own country, the United States, and disparaged elsewhere as "Americanisms".

Two concurrent, relatively recent developments are exacerbating the disaster that is English spelling. One is the Internet, which has further driven the need for English literacy. The other is the rise of Asia, whose major languages are very different from English and many of which have their own writing systems that are completely alien to the Latin alphabet used by all dialects of English. 

It is too early to judge whether these two developments will enhance or denigrate the status of English as a global lingua franca. They must result in simplification and perhaps even regularization of written English, which would make it more useful to the great majority, but could also have the effect of weakening its ability to express complex ideas. 

At the same time, there appears to be no way to control the development of Web-based English. There are already indications that a generation is emerging that sees nothing wrong with using e-mailese terms such as "u" (for "you") in, for example, job applications.

The effects of the Asian influence are also readily observable. In most East and Southeast Asian countries that publish English-language daily newspapers, there is still concern about maintaining traditional standards, and depending upon the availability of well-educated local staff, most of them employ a phalanx of native or near-native English speakers as copy editors to maintain quality. But at some papers there is dwindling interest in such maintenance, partly because of the cost of employing foreigners, and partly because of growing acceptance of English usage, again driven by social networking and other Internet phenomena, that until recently was disparaged as "substandard".

And so one of the greatest languages the world has known, the supplanter of French the supplanter of Latin, continues its journey into an unpredictable future. Whether that future is better or worse, u will just have to wait and c.

Revenge of the Gekkos

By David Simmons

The 1980s Charlie Sheen film Wall Street opens with a panorama shot of Manhattan, dominated by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, symbols of the might of the US financial industry. Fourteen years after the film's release, the towers lay in ruins, but Wall Street itself was more powerful than ever, its excesses abetted by deregulation; Charlie Sheen was establishing his reputation as a premier comedy actor on Spin City, a TV show about New York City government.

Another 10 years have passed, and Ground Zero is still basically a hole in the ground; Charlie Sheen is ... well, let's not go there. Much more interesting is what's going on in Wall Street itself: protests against a system that has systematically shifted America's wealth to the top while ordinary working people lose their jobs and homes. Interesting, that is, to everyone but the US "mainstream media".

Or so goes the story. But who exactly are the "mainstream media"? Do they even exist any more? Can such an entity exist in today's interconnected world?

The growing crowds of protesters in Wall Street see the lack of coverage as a conspiracy – after all, the major media are all owned by the same corporations whose survival depends on the same system the protesters want to bring down, nostalgic for an alternative system that, they believe, once existed in the dim past and worked for the majority, not just a tiny elite.

In fact, however, news-coverage decisions are still made in newsrooms by editors and to some extent reporters; direct interference by corporate owners is extremely rare, and is heavily resisted when it is attempted. Corporations control the news indirectly, by appointing senior editors who agree with them, and paying them lots of money not to stray too far. Even so, there remains a lot of autonomy in news organizations that are not openly partisan such as Fox News.

So why aren't CNN, The New York Times etc covering the Wall Street "occupation"? For the same reason they aren't covering the bake sale at the senior citizens' centre down the road from your place: They don't consider it news.

"News judgment" is a difficult concept to define, and even more difficult to explain. Sometimes a story gets covered simply because it affects a reporter's family or friends. Homelessness and unemployment are under-reported largely because they are uninteresting to reporters, who themselves have homes (for the time being) and jobs. After they lose their jobs (and their homes), they of course are no longer reporters, and couldn't cover the story if they wanted to – except, of course, via the Internet, which has replaced the traditional newspapers and to some extent TV news departments as the real "mainstream". But Internet coverage is scattergun, undisciplined and unreliable, and its influence minimal.

The fact is, the Wall Street "occupation" is not a big story, at least not yet. Protests happen all the time in the US, and only become "news" when there is some interesting event attached to them, such as police brutality. Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna of the New York Police Department obligingly added that element with his liberal use of pepper spray on non-violent protesters, but as usual the real story of police involvement is either not reported at all or obfuscated by spin on both sides. There have been reports that the cop rank and file quietly support the protesters, as they too have been victimized by the looting of their pension plans and the bursting of the Wall Street–fuelled housing bubble that was at the root of the US economic meltdown.

Inside the plush offices of Wall Street itself (or actually Midtown Manhattan, where I understand most of the big banks moved their headquarters to some time ago), nothing has changed. As he did in 1987, Gordon Gekko still rules with his mantra "greed is good". Americans continue to tolerate the status quo even as their pensions are ravaged, their kids can't afford higher education, and decent jobs are shipped overseas. This has been going on for decades, death by a thousand cuts. But they're not marching in the streets in droves; on the contrary, they're voting for the Tea Party.

Meanwhile on the opposite shores of the two oceans America straddles, the real news stories are unfolding. Europe is in a much faster meltdown than the US. The euro experiment has failed, with Greece in near-anarchy as its government flails around with "austerity" measures that will benefit no one but the French banks that financed the largesse that bankrupted Athens. The people won't wear it, and there is talk of revolution or, probably more likely, another military coup. However the Greek tragedy plays out, the fears of "contagion" are real, with the far larger economy of Italy next in line, and the trembling not only in the European central banks but the International Monetary Fund itself is palpable.

Meanwhile, the bemused Chinese bide their time. Sitting on vast international reserves, the Communist government stands ready to rescue the foundering capitalist system. The result will be an even more dramatic shift of power than we have already seen from West to East.

It will be the first time in history that a system that makes no pretence about the fact that it is a dictatorship takes over the global economy from a system that pretends to be democratic. Way back in 1987, Gordon Gekko saw democracy as a sham, a system of tossing out a few scraps to the great unwashed so they would keep the wealth engines churning. But like all kleptocracies, Wall Street and its European clones found greed a little too good, and began to kill the goose that laid their golden eggs.

At least one thing will be certain after China rules the world: There will be no "mainstream media" to fret about.

Dream State

By David Simmons

In parts of Latin America, the vernacular verb for "sleep" is not the standard dormir but soñar, which literally means "to dream". It's easy to read too much into casual speech and slang, but it's tempting to think that among the poor (from whom I learned this usage), the most important thing about sleep is not rest but escape to a better world, a fantasy world.

Thailand likes to call itself the Land of Smiles, but it is also a land of dreams. Thais are dreamers, and foreigners come here to make their dreams come true. Sometimes they do come true, for Thais as well, but for the most part, life here is a steamy blur of illusion and fantasy that pervades all levels, including government. The solution to any problem is not to deal with it, but hope it goes away, and if it doesn't, pretend it never existed in the first place.

Ratchadaphisek Road in Bangkok is a long street full of upscale hotels and huge, neon-clad, glittering massage parlours. These aren't the "sex tourist" haunts you mostly read about in the sensationalist Western press; they cater mostly to well-off or well-positioned Thais, and to a lesser extent long-term Thai-speaking expatriates. Inside, you can get anything you want, including Alice. A number of tycoons have made their fortune off these places, and senior police have got fat safeguarding their operations.

In the most recent general election, former massage-parlour tycoon Chuvit Kamolvisit won a seat in Parliament. He has made a name for himself by denouncing the police corruption not only in the industry that made him rich, but in another big business in the same area: illegal casinos.

Thais love to gamble. In any village on any evening, you can find a card game, a source not only of good, clean, penny-ante fun, but "tea money" for the local police. The only legal gambling in the country is the state lottery, but even this spawns illicit spin-offs. In my neighbourhood in Bangkok, a numbers game based on the lotto is popular. I don't know exactly how it works, even though I'm on intimate terms with the lady who runs it. Say no more.

Everyone knows all of the above, including the politicians (some of whom are heavily invested in the legal casinos across the border in Cambodia, and therefore have no interest in seeing gambling legalized in Thailand). So it was extremely annoying to a lot of people when Chuvit started blabbing about it in Parliament. He even showed video evidence of the existence of the biggest casino in Bangkok, which reportedly hosts 1,000 high rollers every night and makes a cool US$500,000, every night.

What happened next was a great joke. Senior police lapsed into their dream state, pretending there was no illegal gambling on Ratchadaphisek, in the back yard of their Sutthisan police station.

Since then, the casino has supposedly been shut down, and a bunch of senior cops shuffled into "inactive posts". But no one believes any real difference has been made.

My wife is a great dreamer. A simple chat about my possibly semi-retiring some day and working from home immediately goes off on a tangent about how she's going to have a special office built for me with Wi-Fi Internet and satellite TV, with a side door out into the garden where she spends her time growing jasmine, and where I can take a break from work and stroll among the palm trees, yada yada yada.

Unlike most Thais, of course, she has hard evidence that dreams come true. Her dream was that a kind foreign gentleman of means would marry her and rescue her from a life of drudgery in the rural Northeast, and buy her a Honda CR-V and maybe a house. The house is now built and occupied by a couple of college girls who don't pay enough rent to make a dent in my mortgage payments; the CR-V is parked outside our rented townhouse in Bangkok. Now nine years old, it's in excellent shape, but she is eager to see the new 2012 model. "We don't need a new one," I say. "I can dream!" she replies.

I don't begrudge her that. But I grew up in a culture where practicality, not wishful thinking, was the key to progress. I believe Thailand is held back by its people's – and its leaders' – self-delusion and denial of reality.

But on the other hand, maybe existing in a dream state is what makes this a Land of Smiles.

Don't Mention the War

By David Simmons

The longest war of the world's greatest warmonger, the United States, is lost. The Taliban, whom the Afghan war was meant to destroy, are gaining strength by the day, now ravaging Kabul itself.

Most people in the West originally thought the US invasion of Afghanistan was justified, as it was allegedly harbouring al-Qaeda, blamed for the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and the Pentagon. That justification was shored up by the fact that the Taliban regime was extremely nasty, even though (or because) it had in effect been installed by the US Central Intelligence Agency in its campaign against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan and the leftist regime Moscow supported.

Now, of course, hardly anyone thinks the war is justified, not even the Americans themselves. About the only supporters left are the private contractors that have got fat off of bogus "reconstruction" projects, the arms industry, and the heroin traders. But all this was completely predictable, and not just because this war, and its twin in Iraq, was hatched by the neo-conservative puppetmasters of the George W Bush administration.

The fact is every war is a blood-soaked amalgam of lies and fraud. War is the ultimate evil, full of sound and fury and accomplishing nothing but even more evil. Apart from the death, pain and destruction it directly causes, its effects on surviving societies far outlive "victory", with wrecked economies, ruined families, and usually the installation of a dictatorship, puppet regime or outright kleptocracy that inflicts even more havoc, while the "victor" itself suffers from a reinvigorated culture of violence.

My father fought briefly in World War II, in the Royal Navy, until he was stricken by tuberculosis. My mother, meanwhile, served in the Women's Land Army, and survived the London Blitz. Neither spoke much about their experiences, and I never pressed them, or learned much about how they were shaped by that period. Both were very gentle people, and it's only in retrospect that I can imagine how surreal the horror of war must have been to them.

That war, my generation was brought up to believe, was far better than the alternative. But it, like all wars, was shrouded in secrecy and outright lies. Could it have been avoided? Many tried, most famously Neville Chamberlain, responsible for the redefinition of the word "appeasement" into something bad (much like "protectionism" today, or "socialist" in the US). Adolf Hitler was a tough nut to be sure, and the sell-out of Czechoslovakia by the British and French difficult to defend, now. But Hitler made it clear from the outset that he never wanted war with Britain, and in the end was defeated not so much by the deaths of millions of soldiers but by his own megalomania.

On the other side of the planet, the war with Japan seemed even more avoidable; it was after all not a noble battle to save Asia (about which no one in the West cared a hoot) but a clash of two Western empires against an Oriental one. It was the US attempt to cut off Japan's oil supply that triggered the attack on Pearl Harbor, not (as it would probably be spun today) Japan's "hatred of American freedoms".

We'll never know the whole truth of what happened in Europe and the Pacific in the 1940s. Maybe the Western version of history is right, and those conflicts really were justified, and accomplished lasting benefits not otherwise seen.

But the preponderance of evidence is that total, not conditional, pacifism is the only philosophy not imperilled by dishonesty, hypocrisy, or recycled violence and misery.

Eleven

By David Simmons

We all make history in our own way, but it is mostly irrelevant to all but a negligible few. Most often, we at best live on its periphery, or observe it from afar.

This is just as well, for historic events are almost by definition hugely dangerous, sometimes fatal. The closer we get to them, the more we are reminded of life's fleeting nature, and hence its preciousness.

This weekend, of course, we are all thinking about where we were when the Towers came down. Like the Kennedy assassination, it is one of the few historic events that etch themselves on our personal – rather than our much vaguer, general – memories. The sight of the second plane banking gracefully through the jewel-like blue sky into the South Tower and erupting into a grotesque fireball was a horror rarely matched in intensity, and we hated ourselves for our inability to tear our eyes away from the reruns obligingly rerun on television over and over again.

But it is the peripheral nature of our observation of history that is perhaps more interesting than the events themselves, for our brushes with cataclysmic events are what illustrate the tenuousness of our existence, if for no other reason than that they are so much more survivable.

Over the decades, I've had many such brushes, including with the World Trade Center itself, which I once stood on top of (an obligatory part of any visit to the Big Apple back then), as well as brushing the ash of Mount St Helens off my motorbike, landing in Athens just after an earthquake, riding in the back of a Sandinista army truck through mountains infested with Contra terrorists, getting swept off my feet by the great Indian Ocean tsunami, and now, riding in Bangkok taxis nearly every day. Such a dangerous world: how is it that we survive it for more than a few minutes, let alone our "allotted" three score and ten?

It's a mystery, a miracle perhaps. Yet that's the definition of life itself.

Ten

By David Simmons

There has been little on television over the past week but features related to the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And of course the question on top of everyone's mind is: What is the significance of 10 years?

The answer, of course, is "absolutely nothing". We mark things by tens because we have 10 fingers, a fact that has nothing at all to do with a gang of wackos flying airliners into buildings.

The September 2001 attacks are often described as "world-changing", but in fact that description is far more apt to an unrecorded event: the day humankind learned to count past the number 10 (or 20, assuming this happened before the invention of the full-coverage shoe). However, even with that giant achievement, humans were unable to leave behind their 10-digit-based mathematical origins. Despite built-in flaws and even clashes with the cosmos itself, we cling to our base-10 numbering system.

Our own planetary system tells us that 12 would be a better base, as there are 12, not 10 lunar phases. The decimal-fraction system shows how this is so. One of the most useful fractions we have, one-third, cannot be conveniently expressed decimally: it becomes 0.333... with infinite repetition. One-fourth is not much better; it requires two numerals to designate as a decimal. But with a base-12 system, one-half would be 0.6, one-third would be 0.4 and one-fourth would be 0.3, vastly simplifying calculations at all levels. We actually do use base-12 for time, as you can see by looking at a (non-digital) clock: 12 hours, each divided into 60 minutes, for a total of 3,600 seconds – all numbers easily divisible by the prime numbers 2, 3 and 5.

This timing anomaly may derive from that most basic of clocks, the lunar cycle. Yet even here we see reflections of our obsession with the number of fingers we possess, for the 12th month is called "December", which means "10th month". This actually happened not because there were once 10 months in the year but because the pre-Julian calendar started in March, not January. Still, one would have thought that the various renamings of the months that took place over the centuries would have dealt with this oddity had we not been so decimally biased.