Hot and cold about Christmas

By David Simmons

Pak Chong, Thailand

And now for something completely different – a Gringweilo piece penned on Christmas Day. Think of it as an apology for the rather gloomy year-ender I posted on December 19 that no one read (click here to remedy that oversight).

Like most converts from Christianity to the Religion of Reason, I have mixed feelings about Christmas. Actually its joy started to wane in 1973, as my mother had died late that year. No one has ever been closer to me than her, and I was grateful, then, for the faith that I would see her again in the Sweet Bye and Bye. Later I learned that “she lives on in our hearts” is more than a truism – more than four decades later, an occasional random memory of her wit, sometimes gentle, often scathing, can still make me smile.

Here in Thailand, of course, Christmas is not officially celebrated, except by the retailers in the mega-malls. For them, it’s a glitzy tinsellized précis to New Year’s, which is celebrated, with typical Thai gusto. Thais love New Year’s so much they celebrate three – January 1, the Chinese one, and their own three-day Songkran (Water Festival) blow-out in mid-April.

Here in Pak Chong, there was no white Christmas. That’s only a half-joke; frost isn’t unheard of this time of year in some of the higher-elevation provinces nearby. But “winter” this year is unseasonably warm. The high today was 33 degrees, and my computer says it’s 26 as I write this at around 8pm.

Things were quiet here at Chez Dave. The family went down to Bangkok early in the morning for a wedding, so I only had the dogs for company. The cat was here as well briefly, but after turning up his nose at his breakfast, he went out to see if the neighbours had anything more interesting to eat, and/or to boink one or two of his girlfriends. So I took a leisurely stroll through Facebookland to check out the Christmas greetings.

It’s fashionable for us Rationalists to sneer at Christmas greetings as obligatory Hallmark pap, but I think most are sincere. There’s something about this season that is comforting, like a crackling fire in a stocking-bedecked hearth.

A few of the comments were fairly close to my own feelings, both negative and positive. Two Scrooges, both coincidentally named Shane (one a retired journalist in British Columbia and the other an NGO worker based in Yangon), posted the following:

Er ... ah ... *cough* ... yes. Merry Christmas, I suppose.

and

According to BBC World News, North American Air Defence Command is yet again tracking the progress of Santa Claus. I guess he won’t be delivering gifts to Yemen, Syria, Iran, Russia or China then.

Possibly more likely to get an approving nod from a certain Nazarene carpenter was this post from my Muslim friend Salim:

My most beloved friends. No matter what your religion, whether you believe or not: I wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas. Don’t let turbulent times disturb you, nor diminish your faith in humanity. Peace to you and good health! Salaam Alaikum. It’s the birthday of the Messiah – so celebrate, religiously or socially!

But best of all was this, not on Facebook but sent by e-mail from Lorne, the only high-school chum I’m still in regular contact with, who is currently vacationing in Florence with his partner Alain:

I have lit a little candle in Santa Croce, the great Franciscan church here in Florence, in front of Donatello’s great sculpture of the Annunciation, for you and your wife and child. It is a superstitious thing to do, but ... it isn’t wrong to remember someone and his family, on the other side of the world in “the deep midwinter”, at least where he and I grew up more than fifty years ago.

Not wrong indeed, old friend.

Shock! The year-ender that polls didn’t foresee

By David Simmons

It has been another fairly uneventful year or, more accurately, more of the same. Work five days a week striving, with varying success, to convert what Thais think is English into something that can be considered nominally publishable. Striving, with varying success, to get my family to live within our means. Hoping, with fingers crossed, that our ancient Honda CR-V will live another year past its natural life expectancy.

My health has had its ups and downs, mostly the former. A digestive-system disorder that reared its ugly head about a year and a half ago is still there, though at my most recent visit to a specialist in Bangkok he opined that the symptoms now were so mild that he didn’t believe any invasive treatment was advisable, and pencilled me in for an appointment six months thence. It’s got even better since then, and I can eat (and drink, praise the Lord) nearly anything I want whenever I want now without any adverse reaction. Unless there’s a relapse, I might disappoint the doc and not show up for the appointment.

We’ve made the final payment on our mortgage, though the bank hasn’t officially transferred the deed to my wife yet (as a foreigner, I can’t legally own a house in Thailand – a policy I support, as it has kept homes relatively affordable to middle-income Thais). I haven’t yet found a third income source (the secondary one being paltry Canada Pension Plan payments). There is a possibility on the horizon, though, so my wife’s dream of replacing the ancient CR-V and/or fixing the leak in the kitchen ceiling may yet come true.

Our daughter Lukyi turned fourteen in early December, and has not yet developed the most seriously dreaded symptoms of teenageritis – she’s still fairly delightful, and consistently top in her class at school in some subjects, especially English. Her spoken English isn’t as good as I’d prefer, as she doesn’t get any practice with it outside of school except with me, but I believe she would already out-qualify at least half of the reporters I work with every day. Not that I intend to encourage her to pursue a career in journalism, should such a thing even exist once she is old enough to go out on her own.

So in other words, life continues to be relatively free of drama, comfortably dull. Not worth writing about, when considered in the context of the global events of 2016.

I recently watched on YouTube a conversation hosted by Democracy Now, one of the few remaining sources of accurate information based in the US, between Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte. Apart from the fact that these two old warriors are still so brilliant, so energetic, so insightful, what is so impressive about them is that despite all they have seen and experienced, all the disappointments they have endured, all the hopes they have seen dashed, they remain so optimistic that human civilization is not only salvageable, it’s still worthwhile trying to save it.

While I hold both of them in very high regard, I’m not sure I agree with them, on either count.

For me this year, the saddest decline has been in my own trade. Yes, of course, journalism has been in trouble for a very long time, maybe always, to varying degrees. And it’s easy to exaggerate the importance of this failure or that one, this round of copy-editor firings or that misleading headline, this irresponsible commentary or that drumbeat for the next war. But the coverage, or lack of it, of some of the most important stories of the year seemed especially embarrassing this time around to someone who has spent (wasted?) most of his working life in journalism.

As I write this, the latest obsession is “fake news” allegedly instigated by the villain du jour, Vladimir Putin. It’s pretty obvious even to the fairly obtuse that this is just another excuse to try to censor unthinkable thought, to stifle all who would dare to stray from the established view of the world. 

I’m not a strong believer in conspiracies. The apparently insoluble situation humankind finds itself in is not the deliberate result of a cunning plan drafted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, or by the oil industry, or by Wall Street or the Chinese or the Russians or radical Islam. It’s negative serendipity, a series of events, many of them random, that have unfolded as they shouldn’t have.

One of these phenomena is the creation of monsters. The most obvious recent example of this is Donald Trump. We may never know why he decided to run for president of the United States; I believe it was initially just to make his brand more valuable, or sheer, simple narcissism. I believe he was as surprised as anyone that his campaign, meant to be just another fraudulent business ploy, exploded into life. And he just kept pushing the envelope to see how many stuffed shirts he could tear down, how many disaffected and betrayed voters he could win the hearts of, how outrageous he could be before the limit was finally reached. But it never was.

The corporate media, of course, loved this. They abetted his campaign, reporting his every outrage, every salacious horror story from his past, scouring their Rolodexes for has-been beauty queens with long-ago-groped pussies, broadcasting dead air of empty podiums at Trump rallies while ignoring packed stadiums at Sanders rallies.

By the time they realized they had created a monster, it was too late. A wholesale shift of tactics to gush endless praise of Hillary Clinton, glossing over her many flaws while attacking Trump at every opportunity, failed dismally. In the end, they had no choice but to roll out the heavy artillery: Invoke Putin! And those guns are still firing, though the ship of state’s decks are awash.

It may well be that the Internet is another monster that has got out of control. It did its job for a while, flooding the Web with information both true and false, equipping the ignorant, ill-informed and just plain malevolent with the same megaphone as established news media and academia. Anyone could say anything they wanted, and it became impossible for most to tell the difference between accurate, responsible reportage and nonsense. This, it was thought for a while, was good, as people would trust their rulers, both in government and in the corporations that controlled it, because the only alternative was chaos and cacophony.

And then this year, we saw this strategy fall apart with rapidity that took even people like Chomsky, who had been predicting something like it for a long time, by surprise. Brexit and Trump were the starkest manifestations in the English-speaking West, but there were many other examples. Decades of lies that neoliberal economics and corporate-biased globalism were, if not necessarily beneficial to the great majority of people, were as inevitable and unalterable as the force of gravity were no longer acceptable. Now, in a 180-degree reversal of the way things were meant to be, millions assumed that if the establishment said this was the way to go, this was what must be, it must be bullshit.

Many, perhaps nearly all of us, on the left have recognized that our leaders have badly failed us, and that the great majority of people privileged enough to live in democracies have either stopped voting altogether or have moved in desperation toward the far right or charlatans like Trump, reasoning (if that word even means anything any more) that maybe the fire is better than the frying pan after all.

In October, while investigative journalists were busy digging up the newest grope report or trying to keep up to date on the latest FBI revelation about Mrs Clinton’s e-mail server or figuring out how to blame Putin for flooding in Iowa or the demise of the Gulf of California porpoise, one of the stories they missed was a report published by Barclays Bank called “The Politics of Rage”. The bank analysed in detail the rapid decline in faith in the establishment and anger against, in particular, corporate-defined globalism. Its main concern was the potential for this anger to hurt the bottom lines of their corporate clients, but for the rest of us, these excerpts also ring true:

The biggest source of voter rage appears to be a sense of economic and political disenfranchisement due to imperfect representation in national governments and delegation of sovereignty to supranational and intergovernmental organizations.

We find that a [deep] cause is a perception among “ordinary citizens” that political and institutional “elites” do not accurately represent their preferences amid a growing cultural and economic divide.

But this goes beyond financial profit and loss. Angry people are ungovernable people, and that makes those who live for power desperate. And desperate power is a dangerous combination.

Chomsky argues over and over again whenever someone hands him a microphone that the many problems threatening civilization are overshadowed by two potential perils that go far beyond making it tougher to put food on the table. They could destroy civilization itself, if not the human (and other higher) species: global warming and nuclear war.

On the first point, it seems pretty obvious that we are long past the point where we could have prevented radical climate change, and that the whole world should now be focusing on how to mitigate the damage. It should be preparing now for the inevitable wars and mass migration caused by famine, water shortages, and intensifying natural disasters. But that’s a long-term issue and plenty of people way smarter than me have written about it. Will governments and their corporate masters pay any attention? Probably not, but the information is there if they want it.

More preventable is Chomsky’s second fear, nuclear holocaust. He has rightly pointed out many times that it is a near-miracle, given the sheer number of these horrible weapons, many in the hands of dodgy if not completely unstable countries like Pakistan, Israel and now North Korea, that we haven’t blown ourselves to bits already. But the point remains that if and when that holocaust does come, it will probably be either by accident or by a combination of errors, miscalculations and paranoia.

That’s why the current domination of US, UK and some other smaller powers’ foreign policy by the deliberate antagonization of two of the biggest nuclear-armed states, China and Russia, is so irresponsible. Pushing a bear into corner is dangerous enough, as is pulling the tail of a dragon, but doing both at the same time is inviting suicide. It’s the politics of desperation, taken to a potentially apocalyptic extreme.

In any case, the whole thing is pointless. China has quietly taken over nearly all of Southeast and Central Asia, and most of sub-Saharan Africa, without a shot fired, by investing in all three regions’ infrastructure and industry, exploiting their resources on mutually acceptable terms, and staying out of their politics.

While the US and the European Union face a backlash from corporate-penned “free trade” deals that funnel wealth to the very top of the food chain, China has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that rivals the International Monetary Fund without any crushing “Washington Consensus” or “austerity” nonsense, and is backing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a mega trade deal designed, unlike the failed Trans Pacific Partnership, for the aims of Asian countries.

At the same time, it has made Russia a de facto client state via mutually lucrative energy deals, strategic and security collaboration via the Shanghai Co-operative Organization, and revitalization of Siberia and its vast natural resources. And it is knitting it all together with its New Silk Road policy, a huge land- and sea-based trade network stretching from Shanghai to Istanbul.

The upshot is that two-thirds of the world’s population is now in the hands of two powerful authoritarian regimes, as timid attempts at democracy like Thailand’s fall by the wayside. Even where democracy still functions in Southeast Asia, such as the Philippines, voters opt for anti-establishment hardliners like Rodrigo Duterte who middle-finger Washington and cosy up to Beijing.

So it’s unlikely there will be a nuclear World War III; there’s just no profit in it. As well, China and Russia are still restrained by the MAD principle. Those that are not – Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – still don’t possess arsenals big enough to destroy much more than their own back yards.

But I digress. Back to my main point: the sinking of my profession, journalism, into a swamp of irrelevance. None of the presidential or vice-presidential debates during the US election mentioned climate change or nuclear-weapons proliferation, not even once. Both candidates diverted attention from important issues by blaming Russia for this, or China for that. Trump may have been slightly less jingoistic than Clinton on specific potential victims, but he stated the need to “build up” the US military machine, already the most dangerous the world has ever endured.

And the media, other than independent outlets such as Democracy Now and The Young Turks, said nothing.

So with all of that going on, who could possibly care about the nasty noise the starter in the CR-V has been making, or the rising cost of feeding two dogs and a cat, or the fact that it could be months before I can trust my digestive system enough to dare a visit to Tony Roma’s?

No, can’t be bothered with a year-ender. Instead, I’ll just wish all my friends and family a very happy holiday season, and a great 2017.