Coming Home: The Year in Review

By David Simmons

Pigeons home. Dogs home. In the late 1970s we learned, in the Fawlty Towers episode “Basil the Rat”, that even Rattus homes under the right circumstances, in this case the tender, loving care of a kindly waiter from Barcelona who thinks it’s a hamster (“You have rats in Spain, don’t you, or did Franco have ’em all shot?”).

The homing instinct of cats is also renowned, although it can be as much of a curse as a blessing.

And this raises the question (purists say we’re not allowed to say “begs the question”, as its actual meaning is irrelevant to most real-world purposes): Do people have a homing instinct?

It also speaks to one of the two most significant events in the Simmons family in 2013.

Not all of us get as stubbornly attached to a domicile as cats (or hamster-impostor rats). When early this year my wife and I decided to move out of our rented townhouse in south-central Bangkok and into the house we had built a few years ago in the town of Pak Chong, in the province of Nakhon Ratchasima in northeastern Thailand, it became an issue.

We (by which I mean my wife Pong) decided that for this move, about the eighth we had endured since moving to Thailand from Hong Kong in late 2001, we would not hire movers or rent a truck but move gradually, utilizing the pickup trucks owned by her family and their friends. Since there was no rush to make the move, this took place over several weeks, and the townhouse became more and more empty.

One day I went downstairs to the main living area, looked around the barrenness and – a little to my surprise, as it was quite a nice place and we had lived there since 2005 – I felt not even a twinge of sadness. 

Outside the Bangkok townhouse.

This may have been partly due to my anticipation of moving, for the first time in my six-decade life, into a real house that I “owned”, rather than renting. The quotation marks are there for two reasons. The most obvious is that the mortgage still has a few years to go until we can finally wrest the place out of the hands of the bank. The second is that I am not a Thai citizen, and therefore cannot legally own property. The house is in the name of my wife, a Thai national.

To make this move possible, I had to get approval from my employer to work from home, as it would of course no longer be possible to commute to the newspaper’s office in Bang Na, a district of southeastern Bangkok. The boss agreed, and the paper’s tech department arranged for me to get remote access to the server, so that I could do my copy-editing job normally. I had already been doing something similar for my secondary employer, a paper in Hong Kong; nowadays with nearly universal Internet connections, the old concept of a physical newsroom is becoming as obsolete as the manual typewriter.

Before we moved, my wife’s family (who live in the same area) oversaw the construction of an extension to the house, which was to be my office. I didn’t have time to make the trip up to Pak Chong to see what was happening, and when I finally saw what they had done, I was stunned. The office extension was huge, covering nearly all of the yard. The interior was in pink tile (for no reason other than it’s a favourite colour of my wife and our daughter, as of course I wasn’t consulted on this or anything else) and very spacious, necessitating the most powerful air-conditioner in the house. It was fully equipped with Internet and satellite-TV connections.

But what about Onet the cat? What was her verdict on the move?

She generally approved, but of course didn’t confine herself to exploring the boundaries of the house itself, or the yard. She wandered down the soi (lane) to where it joined the subdivision’s main street. Then she wandered out to the thanon (main road) through the village.

Then she got lost.

She was missing for a week before an alert neighbour spotted her in a vacant lot about 300 metres down the road and told my wife. They drove back to the spot on the neighbour’s motorbike and fetched Onet, who had lost a bit of weight but was otherwise fine, and now confines her travels to parts of the soi from where the house is still visible.

Onet, party animal.

So the cat came back and lived on in comfort and health. Her master was not so fortunate.

One day I was busy in the office, struggling as I do every day to translate Thaiglish business stories into publishable English, when I noticed my left foot was swelling a bit. At first I ignored it, as this happens sometimes when I’m sitting for a bit too long. But when Onet banged on the office door and I got up to let her in, I found I could hardly walk.

At first we thought I must have been bitten by an insect (kids found a red ant in the office later), and then we thought a spider bite was more likely. Anyway, when the swelling didn’t go down overnight, Pong drove me to a nearby private hospital to have it looked at.

It turned out I’d contracted a serious infection, which had spread out of my foot and into my circulatory system, bringing my blood pressure down to dangerous lows. The doctors put me on general antibiotics, though they still didn’t know what exactly the infection was. Not wanting to take a chance on it, they transferred me by ambulance to a bigger hospital in the same chain, in the provincial capital about an hour away. There I was slapped into the intensive-care unit and poked full of intravenous tubes to fight the (still unidentified) infection and get my blood pressure back up.

Unknown to me at the time, the doctors warned my wife that if these measures proved ineffective, the infection had already spread so far that it could kill me.

Eventually they decided I needed surgery, to drain the poison out of my foot. I think it was at that point that they diagnosed the infection: necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease, which in severe cases can

only be halted by amputating the infected limb. In my case, the surgeon was able to carve out the worst chunks, and after a week or so the infection was subsiding satisfactorily, I was taken off the IV, and sent home (after excellent care by nurses not all of whom looked like the one on the right) with a bagful of oral antibiotics. A month later I was fine.

Other than that little adventure, the move into our home has been a success. As I had no medical insurance, the hospital stay blew us out of the water financially, but thanks to the assistance of a family friend, we avoided taking out a second mortgage. And despite my above-noted long-standing indifference to the concept of home ownership, I confess to a change of heart. This place gives me great pleasure.

That pleasure is enhanced by the fact that it is a very nice house; it was mostly designed by my wife, and she spared no detail to make it her personal “paradise”. She has used that word dozens of times since we moved in. She grew up in a poor farming family and has always dreamed of having her own

Lukyi and Dang.

house. Now she does. She has established a garden in the front where she grows jasmine and other flowers, and there is a small mango tree. And the climate in this part of Thailand is cooler and much cleaner than Bangkok. I’ve even started going for walks in the evening.

Our daughter Lukyi transferred from her small international school in Bangkok to a large privately run school in Pak Chong. Unlike the Bangkok school, the medium of instruction is Thai, not English, and her Thai literacy wasn’t up to snuff in the opinion of the administration, so she is repeating Grade 4. But she likes the school and has made lots of new friends, and I think she’s doing OK academically. I help her with her English reading at home.

Her biological brother Dang is staying with us. His parents have split up; his father Ut lives here in Pak Chong and comes over frequently, but his mother Nok is busy in a construction business in Bangkok and comes more rarely. They pay for his schooling, and Ut, who is an excellent handyman, helps us maintain the house at little or no cost.

View from the Floating Bar

My friend Martin and I made another trip to the Philippines in March. We went to Subic Bay this time; he is a scuba-diving fanatic and wanted to explore the shipwrecks around that former US naval base. We stayed at the Arizona International Resort, which besides a good dive shop to keep Martin happy, also featured an excellent restaurant and a floating bar. 

The best way to get to Subic Bay from Thailand is via Clark airport, just outside Angeles City, so this trip also allowed a visit with my old friend Ted, who runs an Internet cafe there.

As I write this, life is passably normal. Pong is still convinced an insect or spider bite caused my foot infection, so I’ve been banished from the office and moved into one of the bedrooms in the main house, which is deemed more bug-proof. I’m working six-day weeks to make a dent in our debts.

There is little sign here in sleepy Pak Chong of the reactionary movement that has nearly paralysed Bangkok with protests demanding “reforms” aimed at somehow preventing a succession of governments favoured by the “uneducated” rural majority. There is an excellent chance of another bloodbath early in 2014, possibly even a civil war.

But hey, it’s the festive season. Let’s keep a good thought.

Pong (Nuannoi), Lukyi (Natinicha), Dang, Onet and I wish you all a great 2014.

Why the villains win

By David Simmons

Like many baby-boomers whose fathers fought in World War II, I was mystified in my youth by how quickly the Western Allies reconciled with the Japanese, Italians and especially the Germans. In the early 1970s, I travelled around Germany to try to make sense of it. I saw Dachau, the memorials in West Berlin, the still war-damaged buildings of East Berlin.

And I met wonderful people.

Years later, I went to Israel, where I saw the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. I spent three months on a kibbutz, where I met more wonderful people, including our Israeli hosts and the Arab labourers, along with the foreign volunteers from Britain, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the US, France and Canada.

And Germany.

How could this be? How could these young Germans, these intelligent, fun-loving, perfectly normal people, be connected in any way with those monsters who slaughtered Jews by the millions? Young, bright-eyed, idealistic like the rest of us, and working hand in hand with Jews, eating, drinking and playing with them, including some who still had memories of those dark days in Europe?

And yet they were not monsters, those Hitler Youth members of the 1930s, those brave soldiers of the Wehrmacht, maybe not even the guards at Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and the rest. They were people, humans who trod a path spared others only by the grace of the gods. They loved their country but saw no hope for it to rise from the ruins and reparations of the Great War, the hyperinflation, the exploitation of the bankers, many of whom were Jews.

Until an ugly little man with a swastika on his armband stirred their aspirations, and their hatreds, with his bold rhetoric.

As I write this, I hear the television in the next room, the anti-government Blue Sky channel that my wife watches day and night, spewing bold rhetoric from an unattractive man with a Thai flag on his armband. He offers hope to save Thailand from – what? Hyperinflation? Mass poverty and unemployment? Enslavement by foreign powers?

No; the Thai economy is one of the strongest in Asia, poverty has been nearly eliminated, unemployment is less than 1 per cent, foreign investment is pouring in, factories are popping up all over and churning out cars and computer components. Wages are rising, and the worst villains of exploitative capitalism – the garment industry – are fleeing to havens like Bangladesh and Cambodia.

No; he will save the land not from any of these things but from a family from the northern province of Chiang Mai who exploited the democratic system to establish themselves in the once totally dominant Central region. He will save the land, therefore, from the real culprit – democracy itself. For it is a flawed system, empowering the lower classes to install governments that promise them a better life and, worse, spread the wealth around outside the great city of Krung Thep, the City of Angels, the seat of a quasi-divine monarch.

Western media haven’t been able to grasp what is happening. They are used to covering street revolutions, but those are nearly always struggles to rid their lands of dictators, absolute monarchs and military juntas. Here in Thailand, it’s the complete opposite.

It’s not logical. And ironically this anti-democratic, anti-unification, pro-class-war revolution flared up at almost exactly the same time as most of the rest of the world was mourning the loss of a black man who spent decades in prison for fighting apartheid, but who went on to become his country’s president and forgave his former tormenters, who preached reconciliation.

But as in 1930s Germany, logic is not the main issue. Yes the man from Chiang Mai they now demonize was a crook and a murderer, and the current bureaucracy, security forces, and Parliament itself are deeply corrupt. Yes some of the populist programs favoured by the rural majority have been ineffectual, even damaging. Yet the real momentum comes not from meaningful solutions proposed from the protest stage, but from soothing words backing the myth that the fair-skinned Central tribe with its strong Chinese ethnicity is superior to the Lao and hill-tribe-tainted Northern highlands and Northeastern plateaus, and let’s not even talk about the Malay Muslims in the South. In fact let’s not talk about anything but how much we hate that one family, and by extension all those who support them.

Let’s not focus on the usurious Jewish bankers who are getting fat on the misery of Aryan Germans, said the ugly little man with the swastika; let’s exterminate all the Jews, even our friends and neighbours and co-workers, our children’s teachers. And let’s not stop there; let’s celebrate our superiority by conquering the lower races, the Slavs and the Latins, to expand our Lebensraum. For we are not of the world; we own it.

I have often thought about what my life would have been like if I had been born thirty years earlier, and not in Canada but in Germany. Would I have been among the Righteous Gentiles who protected Jews from persecution? I doubt I would have, not just in Germany but anywhere else in Europe at that time, for anti-Semitism was rife everywhere – the Germans (and the Soviets) just took it to its logical extreme. I might have been skeptical of National Socialist fantasies and uncomfortable with its aggression, maybe. I really don’t know.

We don’t have to look far, after all, to see the power of rhetoric over logic. The Cold War was mostly based on the former, and that decades-long conflict wasn’t embraced primarily by naive little Asians or goose-stepping fanatics, but by the great democracies that dominated much of the world after 1945.

And we have not been permitted to enjoy our complacency of having survived the Cold War without nuking one another into oblivion. Now there is a new struggle, currently being lost by working people everywhere, against out-of-control corporatism and financial terrorism that threatens not just civilization, but possibly the ecosystem itself.

So there are villains everywhere, and they win by exploiting our own failings, our refusal to think for ourselves, like the whistle-blowing mobs now paralysing Bangkok. They too easily breach our weak defences against the prejudice, greed, close-mindedness inside our own hearts, that can fester into hate so quickly.

Paths to Peace: Keep the Faith

By David Simmons

The Ismaili Muslim community in Kenya is reeling from eight deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Among the dead are Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and Jews. Multiple nationalities. Multiple religions. Now it is true that Islamic terrorists are killing more Muslims than anyone. But this stunt – the sparing of Muslims for PR – is just that. They shed the blood of humanity. The majority of the Muslim world is against these people and they think they can turn the tide. They can’t. We will not let them.

This heartfelt declaration was posted on Facebook by a former newspaper colleague, a man I have always admired for his sound investigative journalism and his integrity, after the terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. A Muslim immigrant from East Africa living in Vancouver, he claims to speak for the majority of the followers of Islam when he condemns the kind of violence we saw in the Kenyan capital, and have seen in the Sunni-Shiite bloodbaths of Syria and Iraq, and during the attacks in London in July 2005, in Bali that same year and in 2002, in New York, Pennsylvania and near Washington in September 2011, in ...

Indeed, the Holy Koran says (25:63): “The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, ‘Peace!’” But many other verses call for violent jihad against infidels, such as this passage in Chapter 2:

And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And al-Fitnah [disbelief] is worse than killing ... but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah and worship is for Allah alone.

According to TheReligionofPeace.com, “The Koran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with non-believers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called ‘hypocrites’ and warned that Allah will send them to hell if they do not join the slaughter.”

So, is Islam going through a bad patch, as Christianity did in the Crusades, during the Inquisition, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland? Both Christianity and Islam are developments of Judaism, whose own holy book is full of violence up to and including genocide. Yet like the Koran, the Old and New Testaments also vehemently call for justice, love and forgiveness.

No wonder so many religionists are confused.

There is no point denying that all three of the great monotheisms are at their core intolerant; how could it be otherwise, when all three condemn to everlasting torment anyone who worships any god but Yahweh/Allah? Jews, Christians and Muslims who plead for peace are forced either to reject the fundamentalist traditions of all three, or cherry-pick those passages in their holy guidebooks that support their point of view. For their part, the jihadis/crusaders/Zionists rely on the ample support in the Bible, Koran and Hadith for condemnation of, and even violence against, the infidel.

Fundamentally, the other major religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism appear to make it easier to find spiritual support for tolerance of “alternative paths” to enlightenment, and throughout history the followers of those faiths have, in terms of sheer numbers of victims, tended to be less destructive. Yet they are not immune to the base instincts that infest militant Islam and its Judaeo-Christian counterparts, as seen in the recent anti-Muslim atrocities in Buddhist Myanmar, or the occasional extremism of India’s and Bali’s Hindu right wings.

Looking at this situation more broadly, it is possible to see that the contradictions in the great religions that call for peace and violence simultaneously are nothing more than a reflection of the human condition. The most damaging conflicts in history, the First and Second World Wars, though they (especially the Second) had some religious elements, were primarily secular.

The most violent of the current nation-states, the US, makes war on much of the planet not to convert infidels to any traditional religion, but to maintain its own wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. By so doing, the United States is merely following in the footsteps of the secular empires that went before it – the British most recently, but in a continuation of the historic course laid out most successfully by the Romans.

And so we see that for believers and unbelievers alike, the choice between forgiveness and intolerance, between war and peace, love and hate, good and evil is a personal or, by extension, a social or national one. It is not dictated by a verse in a holy book that might be contradicted on the very next page. We have seen this tendency very recently as ordinary Britons and even Americans have turned sharply, and in significant numbers, against their warmongering politicians who favour aggravating or even participating in the Syrian civil conflict.

To pursue my own brand of tolerance and pacifism, I found it helpful many years ago to abandon the spiritual/superstitious elements of my religion (Protestantism) and retain only its benign moral guidelines. My Muslim friend quoted at the top of this essay has followed a different path to the same destination, as have many more like him. And so I support his prayer (for that is what it is, not a statement of fact), “The majority of the Muslim world is against these people and they think they can turn the tide. They can’t. We will not let them.”

He Scores, Once More

By David Simmons

The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labour and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

– Psalm 90:10

The place was teeming with people; it was some sort of travel terminal, for ferries or maybe an airport.

Outside, there was a cataclysm: The Earth was collapsing into itself. We had been warned that there was no escape; the passenger terminal would be crushed within minutes, and us along with it.

There was remarkably little panic, even as the inevitable happened: The walls closed in on us, and our bodies were pushed closer and closer to one another.

My own thoughts were not fear, but curiosity: What would it feel like to be crushed to death? Would there be pain?

The answer came quickly. No pain, just a relentless sensation of squeezing on my head.

Then, nothing. Blackness.

But not quite nothing. Memories emerged from the darkness. The most prominent was the memory of breathing, that simple pleasure of drawing air into the lungs, the invisible stuff of life. How appropriate that the Latin spirare gives us both “respire” and “inspire”; the latter in the sense that the gods breathe truth or ideas into our souls.

But was it only a memory? It seemed so real. And then it was: I woke up, perspiring, my heart racing.

As far as I can recall, this was the first dream I’ve ever had in which I died. I have recurring dreams in which I am submerged in water, and in many of them I take a breath before I reach the surface, but they are Aqua-Lung–type breaths, never fatal. Normally the water is calm, though after my experience in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the dreams occurred in rivers or rapids for a while.

I write this on my sixty-first birthday, officially the day when my sixth decade of taking up unproductive space on this planet draws to a close, and a seventh begins. We are often taught that the Bible limits our time to “three score and ten” years; in fact that phrase only appears once in the Good Book, in Psalm 90, “A Prayer of Moses the Man of God”.

Forty years ago this December, I entered the hospital room where my mother was nearing the end of her battle with cancer. She was awake but her face was in an oxygen mask, so I couldn’t talk to her; only her eyes smiled at me. I left for my afternoon shift at the local plywood plant. I returned home after midnight and fell asleep, to be awakened by a phone call from my father, asking me as his voice cracked to call our pastor and ask him to come to the hospital. I did so, groggy with sleep, then crawled back into bed. Then I realized why Dad had called, got up, jumped into the car and rushed to the hospital myself.

When I entered her room, she was alone. The tubes and oxygen were gone; she lay there in peace. I tiptoed out to the hall. Dad appeared; “Did you know she’s gone?” he said quietly.

Still in my early twenties, I had not had much need to think about death; it was an abstract, faraway concept. Now it had become reality, taking from me the person with whom I had always been closest, and no one has matched that closeness since. But though of course I was sad, sadder than I have ever been before or since, the more overwhelming feeling was of gratitude that her suffering was finished forever.

I’ve not feared death since. Despite that, my own brushes with it have been very few. The most recent was last month, when I contracted a serious infection that dragged my blood pressure down to dangerous levels. But this was very brief and by the time I learned I had had one foot in the grave (literally; the left one), I was recovering. Today I begin Decade 7 in excellent health.

And so we look again at Psalm 90, this time in a modern English version, where Moses pleads:

Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Amen.

When Tyche Takes a Hike

By David Simmons

What do you do when Lady Luck leaves you?

For she is a lady. The ancients knew this; the Greeks named her Tyche, the Romans Fortuna.

Tyche was more interested in the community than the individual; she was revered for protecting the cities of ancient Greece or, I assume, blamed for not doing so when things went wrong. Like her Roman counterpart, she could dispense ill fortune as well as good.

The Romans believed that Fortuna had a thing for those of strong character; audentes fortuna iuvat, they would say, which has come down into English as “fortune favours the bold”.

That seems a bit narrow-minded to me, but imperialists usually are. The important women in my life, including Ms Luck, are forgiving (up to a point), gentle (unless scorned), loving (with small, reasonable conditions), insightful (often to an unnerving degree), good-humoured (yet dangerous when the joke is clumsy) and delightfully, frustratingly unpredictable.

I’ve always considered myself extraordinarily lucky. I’ve never won more than $50 in a lottery, and I’ve had to work for a living since my late teens; there have been no silver spoons. But hundreds of millions of others around the world must struggle every day just to survive; the fact that most of them do survive is evidence that their characters are stronger than mine. Yet Fortuna’s gentler side neglects them, while holding me in her warm embrace.

My wife is superstitious. She believes luck is a commodity doled out by spirits, and that it is earned. My good fortune is due to my jai di, good heart; she has little patience for my counter-argument that my jai is no more or less di than the average guy’s. As for her, she has always tried to do her best in what were until she met me unfavourable circumstances. Her good fortune, marrying me, is the result.

A few years ago, a former friend and colleague, who became my enemy, was murdered. I regretted that he had met such an awful end before we had reconciled, yet his funeral was a comfort; I had the sense that the poison in my soul caused by our enmity went up the chimney of the crematorium.

Not too long afterward another colleague from that same former workplace, this time a close friend, also died, in less violent circumstances (though I’ll never forget the sight of a burly orderly in the cardiac care unit bouncing on his chest trying in vain to restart his heart). A year later, his widow, also superstitious, told my wife to take extra care of me. Two of the three senior staffers of that workplace in the mid-2000s were now dead, and one year after taking her husband, the evil spirits might want to take No 3 as well. That would be me.

That conversation between the widow and my wife took place about two weeks ago. Around the same time, we initiated talks with a family friend about getting health insurance for me. But we didn’t follow through. And procrastination, as we know, is a character weakness.

My current employer recently agreed to let me work from home, and we therefore moved out of Bangkok into the house we built several years ago in my wife’s home town in northeastern Thailand. It was a dream come true, especially for her – at last, we were in our own house, and not somebody’s tenants.

A month after the move, and shortly after yet another failure to get moving on finding an insurance policy, I contracted a bad infection in my left foot. As I write this, I’m still in hospital fighting off the resultant disease, a highly dangerous one that in extreme cases can result in amputation.

One character flaw too many; Fortuna was gone.

And now, so are our savings. Family and friends are helping us get through. The biggest benefactor has been a friend we once helped out financially, allowing him years to pay us back. He apparently invested that money wisely and now has a lucrative business. He is funding my stay in a private hospital. I’ve always believed that what goes around comes around; I got lots of help when I was struggling as a young man. Later I helped others when I could, not demanding or expecting compensation. Nearly everyone I know does the same – they have jai di too.

So maybe it is all just luck of the draw, and all is not lost, yet. Perhaps I can woo Lady Luck back. I may lack character, but I have my charms.

Beyond the Clouds

By David Simmons

Last autumn at a party in New York City, a six-year-old girl named Lucia overheard two women praising Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The little girl, whose mother was a supporter of Barack Obama, marched up to them and declared, “No, Romney is a liar!” The women promptly told her that little children should not use the word “liar” and, on the verge of tears, Lucia told her mother what had happened.

The mother, a former newspapering colleague of mine who now is an artist in New York, told her daughter: “I’m very proud of you. Go tell those people, ‘liar’ is the word for Romney. It’s true, he lies all the time. And it is your right to say whatever words.”

The incident was posted on Facebook, prompting a long thread of comments, mostly supportive of the little girl and her mother. But one man, a journalist with a pro-business daily in New York, said: “Lucia, your mother is wrong. It is rude to go up to someone and call someone they like a liar. Especially not Mr Romney, who is a wonderful man and is going to make a wonderful president!There are more civil ways to express your opinion. Your mother was raised in a communist country, so she didn’t learn these things, but you are growing up in a democratic country where we can disagree and still be civil to each other.”

While it is true that this mother grew up in China, she was in fact an advocate of democracy during that period, risking her neck to support the student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, and has been a fierce opponent of censorship and eloquent backer of humanist causes since moving to the West. But was she right to support her young daughter’s “right” to use “unparliamentary” terms like “liar” when speaking to her elders? Should one so young be allowed to criticize others’ political beliefs, or should she be seen and not heard? Indeed, should we all be “civil to each other” when we disagree?

In 1946, George Orwell published an essay called “Politics and the English Language”, in which he famously slammed the political writing of his time as mere defence of the indefensible with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. This year, on January 17, Steven Poole published in The Guardian My problem with George Orwell, noting that while Orwell was broadly correct, “his more general attacks in ‘Politics’ on what he perceives to be bad style are often outright ridiculous, parading a comically arbitrary collection of intolerances”.

These sorts of debates are interesting but mostly pointless, especially in reference to English as it was spoken and written nearly seven decades ago. Poole and others wring their hands at Orwell’s preference for “plain English” based on short, stark Anglo-Saxon words over longer, more flowery “foreign” equivalents. But no good writer, including Orwell or Hemingway, would advocate total rejection of, say, French- or Latin-derived terms when they serve the purpose better than the Germanic, if only to add some Romantic colour to the Teutonic greyness. The whole point is to see what purpose is being served.

In our day as in Orwell’s, politicians, marketers, bankers and charlatans continue to confuse us with their choice of language. In the short term, they get what they want – our vote, or our money, or some violation of our rights. In the longer term, they impoverish the language itself, as definitions become vague or perverted, including such critically important words as “freedom” and “democracy”. The boundaries between lies and truth become hazy; what should be intelligent debate is an exchange of hot air.

In an era when storytelling consists of televised dramas constantly interrupted by commercial “messages”, when government policy consists of thirty-second soundbites, when the most respected and trusted commentator in the United States is apparently a comedian, the power of a true orator like Barack Obama is greatly enhanced. A stark example of this power was seen in the run-up and aftermath of his second inauguration, again in The Guardian.

On January 20, Michael Cohen noted: “Inaugural speeches, like their oratorically challenged cousins, State of the Union addresses, are fundamental to the American political system – a requirement of mandate and tradition. But both tend to be rhetorical wastelands.” He predicted that in Obama’s upcoming speech, therefore, “rather than being greeted by rousing words, you [will] get mushy platitudes, vacuous banalities and trite paeans to national unity”.

Indeed, Peace Prize laureate Obama has been a crushing disappointment to many. Not only did he break his first-day-in-office promise to close the Guantanamo concentration camp, he has underwritten a campaign to silence dissent and crush whistleblowers, an onslaught that would be the envy of Dick Cheney, with the unconscionable jailing without charge of Bradley Manning, the corporate-abetted muzzling of Julian Assange and the fatal harassment of Aaron Swartz. The reach of the US military empire has been extended to extrajudicial killings, violation of sovereign airspace with a proliferation of drones, destabilizing “pivots” into Africa and East Asia, provocation of Iran and cyber-warfare on an unprecedented scale. Yet what did Michael Cohen say after Obama’s address on January 21?

Over the weekend, I wrote for The Guardian that inaugural addresses tend to be banal, platitudinous affairs with saccharine pieties to national unity – and [that] Barack Obama’s second inaugural was unlikely to be much different. Today, Barack Obama proved that argument quite wrong.

Rather than an empty call to national unity, Obama offered one of the most full-throated defences of liberalism that this or any other president has delivered – and he did so in the shadow of unquenchable internecine political conflict.

So, what is truth, and who will direct us to it? If not The Three Princes of Serendip, perhaps another famed orator, the Prince of Peace.

Long ago, that carpenter from the town of Nazareth in northern Palestine, speaking on a lakeside hilltop to a crowd of (we assume) rapt listeners, and (as was his wont) in good seventeenth-century English, said: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”