There is a kind
of synergy between my physiology and my faithful old Honda CR-V. It
and my body function OK most of the time, and get where they need to
go. But the CR-V makes some nasty noises most mornings when it’s
started up for the first time, as if in protest; it had most of its
engine hoses replaced last year; some of the interior lights have
gone out, apparently permanently; the clock tells the right time only
occasionally.
As for my bod,
it developed an ailment eventually diagnosed as achalasia, a failure
of the esophagus to function properly. This resulted in increasingly
painful upper-chest pains, inability to swallow food or even liquids
easily, and a general downgrade in my lifestyle as I gave up coffee,
tea, beer, eggs, anything oily or spicy, and on and on.
For most of my
life I’ve enjoyed good health, perhaps undeservedly given a lack
of exercise and studied ignorance of dietary advice. The downside of
this is that when I do get ill, I become very impatient, irritable
and, in extreme cases, depressed.
The same happened after the achalasia developed.
Despite an
irritating lack of co-operation from the hospital in Bangkok I
approached for treatment, the condition has largely improved on its
own, thanks to careful food intake, better exercise, and nitrate
medication. This has put me in a better mood to write a
year-in-review piece, about a month late much to the disappointment
(I’m sure) of my many fans.
Another flaw I
like to blame on advancing age, although to be honest it has never
been a strong point, is a weak memory. Facebook came to the rescue,
as I scrolled through the timeline to remind myself of the great
events of 2015 before writing this piece.
The major
development has been a burgeoning pet population. Khao Pan the
Pomeranian joined the family in 2014, just before my cat Onet was run
over and killed. Then in March 2015, Khao Pan got all excited when a
tiny kitten somehow fell into our yard, and he fussed until we
followed him outside to investigate. Named Tan Yong, the cat quickly
became fast friends with his canine saviour.
Around the same
time, a third member of the not-officially-human part of the family
arrived, a Pomeranian-Chihuahua cross named Tam Lai. She had
originally been brought to our place temporarily to mate with Khao
Pan, and eventually moved in permanently. In April, she gave birth to
a pup, but it died after only two days.
Toward the end
of the year, Tam Lai got pregnant again, and this month she gave
birth to an amazing (for a Pom) litter of six. One was stillborn and
another died shortly after its birth, but at this writing the four
survivors are doing well.
As always,
another major aspect of my life last year was work. My main employer
continues to be The Nation in Bangkok, for which I work by
remote from home. At the end of 2014, my secondary employer, the
South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, announced it would
begin phasing out offshore editors, foreshadowing a pretty big blow
to my income, as the Post pays a lot better than The
Nation. As in the past, however, the SCMP’s
“reorganization” didn’t go smoothly. On March 22, I posted on
Facebook:
The horror! The horror! Just as I was getting used to having two-day weekends again, the very same venerable Hong Kong broadsheet that sent us offshore editors packing with a cheery “good luck with your new endeavours” a mere three weeks ago dropped a frantic e-mail in my inbox this afternoon calling me in to work this evening. Ah well, the unexpected HK$1,800 will come in handy during my next trip to Bangkok on the Easter Weekend, where lo, I shall rejoice and fellowship with visitors from Hong Kong and Victoria, BC.
And on May 17:
Six months ago, I was warned that because of a “reorganization”, my weekend moonlighting gigs at a certain venerable Hong Kong newspaper would end, as it embraced more enthusiastically the Online Information Age. Three months later, I was advised that the “reorganization” was so successful that my lay-off would occur earlier than planned, at the end of March. Since then, the frequency of my 12- and 13-day workweeks has increased, due to “emergency” call-ins from said venerable rag. I guess this is what “human resources” experts call “increasing labour productivity”.
Eventually SCMP
got serious with its efforts to bring all of its editors and writers
under one very expensive roof in Hong Kong, and adopted a new
software system called Méthode, inaccessible by anyone outside the
office. It’s early days, and this move might pay off eventually,
but by all reports the environment at the Post is miserable –
understaffed desks, overworked staff, and a huge employee turnover. A
friend who works there was planning to be in Bangkok this month for a
brief visit, but had to cancel. “The desk has been cut to the bone,
to the point that there is no cover,” he wrote to me. I passed this
on to a Canadian friend in Bangkok also “made redundant” by the
SCMP reorg, and he responded: “Chaos at SCMP, ha ha,
fuck them.” Later I asked the Hong Kong friend how the new system was working, and he said, “Well,
how do I put this delicately – it sucks. It’s so bad that it makes CCI [the old system] look good. I just haven’t understood why the system needed to be
changed, but then I am not on a seven-digit salary, what do I know.”
But chaos at
SCMP is a minor tempest in the teapot that is the demise of
journalism all over the English-speaking world. Throughout the year I
received news of more and more newspaper shutdowns back home in
Canada, and in the US. I may be biased, of course, as a three-decade
denizen of a journalism career, but I have no faith in the Internet’s
capability of fulfilling the crucial role of informing and supporting
democracy. In April I posted:
A story is making the rounds that the Gideons sent a shipment of Bibles to Nepal as “earthquake relief” ... I had a look around and it seems a number of sites have quietly spiked the story. As near as I can tell, it originated at a Canadian satirical website called The Lapine, which also appears to have taken it down.
I understand ordinary people getting sucked in by things like this, but several supposedly legitimate news organizations picked up this story. The Internet is a great invention when used properly, but much of the time it serves to confuse and misinform – and I think that’s why so many governments have allowed it to flourish.
Meanwhile formerly trustworthy media organizations are purging their editing staff, underfunding their fact-checking mechanisms, and rushing to “compete” by getting dodgy stories online before anyone else, something applauded by the “blogosphere” as “getting rid of the gatekeepers”.
Not long
afterward, the Denver Post published a good commentary on the
subject, which said in part:
Just where do you think all those free online stories come from? Elves? The fruits of real journalists’ labours are freely given and stolen away by you and our pseudo-colleagues. Edu-tainment and s-newz sites, like HuffPo, Yahoo, Buzzfeed, Google and millions of others survive on blood and tears spilled by real journalists at real newsrooms costing real dollars....
Sneer all you want, what we do is vital, because almost all of you don’t have the time, the interest or the ability to ferret out mundane crap and deep shit alike. And if you think you’ll get the straight story straight from the horses’ asses in government, at Monsanto, at Chrysler, at Blue Bell, you are oh, oh, oh so very wrong.
And yet, there
is occasional evidence that people’s hunger for the truth rises
above the share-your-ignorance blogosphere and manipulations of the
so-called mainstream media, and puts the lie to my declarations of
the death of real democracy.
Nominally
social-democratic political parties that had strayed too far from
their roots in a quest to draw in the mythical “centre” paid the
price last year, most notably in the UK and then in Canada. At least
in Canada, despite the failure of the New Democratic Party in the
October federal election, an acceptable alternative – the Liberals
– won a majority and turfed out the disastrous right-wing regime of
Stephen Harper. The Brits weren’t so fortunate, and saddled
themselves with five more years of seeing their pockets picked to
favour CEOs, bankers and tax-evading corporations, while the Labour
Party that failed to come to the rescue remains in disarray.
But the biggest
political news in Canada was in the province of Alberta, our
ultra-conservative “Texas of the north”. In May I posted: “Huh?
An NDP majority in Alberta? What’s next, a serious worldwide effort
to stop global warming? Ending the failed War on Drugs? A banker sent
to jail? Someone pinch me ...”
But as the
working class in Alberta finally woke up and lashed out against the
lies of the neoliberal Conservative Party, as their counterparts in
Britain rallied behind Jeremy Corbyn, as pro-Wall Street cardboard
cutouts like Hillary Clinton faced a serious challenge for the US
presidency from democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, reactionary
politics tightened its grip on Thailand. Upon watching Stephen
Harper’s quite gracious speech after his defeat in the Canadian
election, “I was reminded of how privileged Canadians are, unlike
the people of my adopted country, to be able to choose their own
leaders and be assured of a peaceful transition from one government
to the next.”
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| Thai police hold a press conference. |
Unlike the junta
that overthrew Thailand’s elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra
in 2006, the one that ousted his popular sister Yingluck eight years
later has shown a liking for political power. Nearly two years after
the latest coup, the junta hangs on, continually extending its
“roadmap to democracy” as even its handpicked cohorts oppose its
efforts to foist an anti-democratic constitution on the kingdom.
In June, the
first finance minister the junta appointed, the experienced and
well-educated Sommai Phasee, made some telling remarks as the World
Bank said nearly a third of Thai 15-year-olds were “functionally
illiterate”, and that unless drastic measures were taken to fix
this, Thai productivity and competitiveness would continue the
decline the country has seen since 2012.
Sommai said he
strongly agreed with the World Bank that education and human
resources were critical to the future of the Thai economy and its
political stability, but “I dare not speak up in the cabinet
because there are three ministers responsible [for education and
skills], and all are soldiers. We are still not walking on the right
track and we are still walking slowly” in these areas.
He has since
been replaced as finance minister.
Living in a
military dictatorship doesn’t affect me directly. Having to earn a
living by assisting the self-censorship of The Nation is
annoying, but not significantly worse than abetting the pro-corporate
propaganda of the Canadian papers I used to work for. And even under
the occasional democratic regimes in Thailand, one cannot – by law
– express one’s true feelings about the royalist oligarchy. Lèse
majesté convictions have increased under the junta, but the
Shinawatras were hardly more reluctant to abuse the
monarchy-protection laws for their own political ends, or to use
other means to stifle the critical media.
Still, I can’t
help but worry about the future of the country where my daughter
Natnicha was born and, in all likelihood, will have to function as an
adult, trying to eke out a decent living and provide a rewarding life
for her own kids.
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| Lukyi. |
For the time
being, though, Natnicha (better known as Lukyi) is doing OK in
school, still top of her class in English and related subjects, for
an overall grade-point average of 3 out of 4. She entered the dreaded
teens in December, but is still Daddy’s good buddy, with a fun
demeanour and good sense of humour. The other day she came home from
school and said she had done an important exam. “Did you get 99%?”
I asked. She frowned and, without hesitation, asked why I was docking
her 1%.
My
long-suffering wife Nuannoi (better known as Pong) runs the household
efficiently, copes well with continual additions to the menagerie,
nurses her aging husband back to health as required, and stretches
our baht as the cost of living rises and my income has its ups and
downs. Oh, and keeps me and the CR-V looking better than our age.
Age. I’m
against it, as I come up against it. But mostly I’m still able to
think a good thought. When I turned 63 in August, I was touched by
many of the birthday greetings I received, posting:
I was pleasantly surprised that no one said, “Hey, Dave, you’re 63! When are you going to grow up?” If anyone had asked, of course, I would have had to say “Never.
“I live in a global playground. I’ve stood on top of the World Trade Center before morons knocked it down, I’ve peered over the Berlin Wall into a bizarre world that no longer exists. I’ve marvelled at the Sistine Chapel, at the great pyramids of the Egyptians and the Mayans, Westminster Abbey and the tower of Big Ben, roamed the halls and parapets of long-dead empires in Borobudur and Angkor. I’ve partied with backpackers in kibbutzim and on Mediterranean beaches, flown within metres of a kilometre-high waterfall in Venezuela, soaked up the warmth of the Caribbean, Andaman and South China seas. I’ve raced four-by-fours across salt flats in Arabia, lost quarters in Las Vegas slot machines, bought too many lady drinks in Bangkok bars. I’ve jumped out of an airplane, and ridden the Magic Bus from London to Nice, an army truck to a Sandinista boot camp, and a vintage train to a Jamaican rum factory. I’ve gazed upon the modernity of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak and upon the devastation of Mount St Helens, and survived the Boxing Day Tsunami.
“And on top of all that and much more in 40 countries on five continents, now in my autumn years, I have the privilege of watching a little girl grow up, smart enough to flourish despite the incompetence of her dad, who adopted her long after the smart-parenting manuals were out of print.
“She might grow up, but not me. Sorry, won’t happen.”
Happy New Year.
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| Tan Yong and I enjoy a balmy Boxing Day outside our house in Pak Chong, Nakhon Ratchasima province. |
