English competence: Pride goeth before the flaws

By David Simmons

“Revering Editor, You will find me to submit a high quality opinions. I request to give me space again.....”

I received the above plea from a Pakistani whom I had earlier asked to submit far fewer articles to the website I edit for, and that he work much harder to fix up the English on those he did submit. The problem, I explained, was that his English was so poor that it took more time and effort than it was worth to make his articles publishable.

I further suggested that he request the assistance of acquaintances with “better-honed English skills” when making his writing suitable for others to attempt to read and understand. (He claims to be affiliated with Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, a public research institution in the Pakistani capital.)

The response was heated.

“The english mode, I develop my arguments, is not bad,” he insisted in an e-mail. “However, you said it is bring trouble to you. So, I want you to finish my status as an opinion writer. I have several other publication, to work with them, who give worth to my work.”

I thanked him for the offer and said it would be accepted immediately. I wished him the best with “several other publication”, noting that they must either have lower English standards than our website or large editing staffs. “I wish we did too, but wishing doesn’t make it so.”

The later e-mail quoted at the top of this article suggests he has since reconsidered his decision to sever ties with our website.

I’m not picking on Pakistanis. Since becoming an editor in Asia, I have encountered many examples of highly educated people, including university professors with PhDs in relatively well-off “tiger" states such as South Korea, apparently unaware of the poverty of their English competence. Not always – some are grateful, and say so graciously, for the effort editors expend to make their writing look good. But the tendency of some to be offended when native English speakers find their writings in need of repair is particularly startling when they supposedly hold high educational credentials in their homelands.

Certainly it is not fair that by an accident of history, much of it in the form of brutal and racist colonization, English became and has remained the “world language”. Why should Pakistanis and Thais and Japanese and Arabs and even the speakers of Indo-European tongues to whom English is not so frustratingly alien, such as Indians, Brazilians and Hispanics, need to struggle with a language burdened with a highly complex grammar and logic-challenged spelling system in order to share their wisdom with the world?

We may wish they didn’t, but wishing won’t make it so. Standard Chinese, basically the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, is gradually making dents in the dominance of English. One of its major advantages, in contrast to the shambolic nature of written English, is an ideographic/pictographic writing system that can be read by speakers of any Chinese language or dialect, many of which are not mutually comprehensible in their spoken forms. However, the fact is that untranslated Chinese still lacks strong influence outside the (admittedly very large) Chinese community.

Therefore pride and nationalism have no place in educational systems. Educators, and educational institutions, serious about preparing their students for the wider world must make high-quality English programs central to their curriculums.

A missed opportunity, and hopes for others to come

By David Simmons

Our lives are shaped by individual events, some large, some small, some dark, some beautiful. Some bring us down; some build us up.

I consider myself a member of the point-one-percent. Not in the usual sense of that term, the multibillionaires who devise global systems; on the contrary, I have worked for a living since the age of 17, nearly always paycheque to paycheque, and because of a recent health issue now find myself heavily in debt.

No, the point-one-percent to which I belong are those whose lives have been moulded far more by (usually non-monetary) good fortune and privilege than by bad breaks and injustice. Two elements of this long life of good fortune stand out: the privilege of parenthood and the opportunity to travel.

I married late in life, to a Thai woman who like me was getting on in years. Unlike me, she had always wanted a child, but making our own at our age was impractical. So we adopted a baby girl and named her Natnicha.

Natnicha, who like most Thais rarely uses her given name but goes by a nickname instead (Lukyi), is now a bright and vivacious 16-year-old. Recently through the auspices of her school, she enrolled in a national exchange-program competition. She qualified for a three-week trip to Vancouver.

Unfortunately because of my above-mentioned medical bills, we cannot afford to let her go. Though disappointed, Lukyi is grown-up enough to understand financial realities, and says she just wants Daddy to get better. I think – hope – she also understands that missed opportunities are part of life, and that new ones will arise later.

In a way, I think I am more enthusiastic about such opportunities for her than she is. Most Thais never travel outside their own countries, which tends to fuel a culture of ultra-nationalism that sometimes manifests as xenophobia and racism. Thailand has a huge and flourishing tourism industry, and many Thais encounter foreigners regularly, often as part of their jobs. But such experiences are no match for immersing oneself in an alien culture, in an alien environment.

When I was a little older than Lukyi and had just entered the workforce, saving up for university, I shocked and appalled my parents by announcing that I had adopted the theory that “one year of travel is the equivalent of one year of university”. A cousin and I were planning to fly to Europe, buy BMW motorcycles, and tour the continent.

It didn’t happen; my parents were able to persuade me to enrol in the science program at the University of British Columbia. But I had no enthusiasm for university life and did very poorly, dropping out after one year.

After a year or so (those were the days when low-skilled young people could still get good-paying unionized jobs) I was able to save up enough to fulfil my dream of a European tour. No BMW motorcycles, and no companion other than people I met on the road, and only for a little over six months, not a year. But it was the start of a life-long adventure of travel, eventually visiting about 40 countries on five continents, and finally settling overseas in a land where it never snows (another dream come true).

I no longer buy the university-vs-travel equivalency theory; those two elements are apples and oranges. And in fact I did eventually earn a university degree, and later a journalism diploma as well. No regrets there.

But the privilege of travel is nonetheless unique; concurrently enlightening and humbling. The traveller sees entire cultures and economic and social systems that are totally different from those he grew up in but which function just as well, maybe a bit better in some ways. He hears intelligent conversations and debates in languages other than his own. He may even witness the evils of war and abject poverty never seen in a country like Canada.

Every parent wants his child to enjoy the privileges he has enjoyed, and see her own dreams come true. My daughter Lukyi already has an independent nature (encouraged by her dad, less so her mum) and her dreams are not all the same as mine were at her age. But I can’t help but be pleased that she yearns to go beyond the boundaries within which she was born and nurtured.

It won’t happen this time; but it will at another time, I’m confident of that.

Progressive dreams hoist with their own damp squibs

By David Simmons

In the good old days when people used to talk to one another and debate intelligently, instead of “tweeting”, the Shakespearean term “hoist with your own petard” still meant something (even though nobody actually knew what a “petard”  was).

Recently I watched an episode of Larry King’s Politicking program on RT on which he interviewed American lawyer Robert O’Brien, who was an “alternate representative” to the United Nations General Assembly under US president George W Bush. Honest to God, this guy makes Nikki Haley look like an intellect.

King could have saved some airtime by giving O’Brien a miss and simply providing a link to the “Neocon Talking Points Handbook”. About the only semi-original thought revealed by O’Brien was that Donald Trump’s September 19 address to the General Assembly was “hard-hitting” because it “named and shamed the bad guys” – that is, those who don’t toe the line of Saudi hegemony in the Middle East, those who don’t see Israel’s persecution of Gaza as particularly wondrous, those who don’t think the US rather than China should be dominant in the South China Sea and, of course, “socialists”.

One of the first thoughts I had while listening to O’Brien’s drivel that he was hoist with his own petard – smiling throughout, he seemed sincerely unaware of what a fool he was making of himself. But that was a rash judgment on my part. For no one ever “makes a fool of himself”: People are made fools of by others capable of thinking for themselves, shunning groupthink, listening to the views of intelligent people who differ from theirs, mounting a coherent defence of their own opinions, willing to admit it when they’re wrong, and possessed of a sense of humour that goes beyond insults and clever “memes” on Facebook.

People like that are becoming as rare as the Bornean orang-utan. And, unfortunately, not just on the right.

There are many reasons for the dumbing-down of the English-speaking world. As a longtime professional journalist, I’d argue that the steep decline in quality reporting and intelligent analysis, especially on television but increasingly in newspapers as well, is one of the main causes. To cite just one recent example, reports about the height of Melania Trump’s heels during her husband’s visit to hurricane-stricken Texas easily outnumbered interviews of scientists explaining the links between man-made climate change and the rapid worsening of tropical storms.

But there are many other factors. In all of the major English-speaking countries, access to higher education has become much more difficult over the past thirty years – more than a generation – and even when it is accessible, it has become far more difficult to justify spending huge amounts of money toward a degree in the social sciences, let alone the arts. If there is not a reasonable chance of your diploma getting you a job lucrative enough to start paying down that mountain of student debt, it’s off the table. So now what passes for education, except for the very wealthy, is strictly vocational, with little room for intellectual pursuit and independent thought. This is a fundamental change that has taken place within my lifetime.

As is so often the case, technology too has proved a mixed blessing. I currently work for Asia Times,  a website that invites commentary from people of all walks of life all over the world. While editing their contributions, it is startling how often one comes across blatant plagiarism. Before the Internet, plagiarists had to do a bit of actual work, physically and deliberately transcribing stolen thoughts into their own writings, and the smarter ones would change some words here and there to cover up their theft. Now, it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting digital data. They don’t even have to read it.

However, people like that are not the norm on Asia Times – not yet, anyway. The site invites a much broader range of views than normally found in mainstream media, and hardly a day goes by when its readers – and, probably more so, we editors – can’t learn something new. But because of the site’s openness, brainless O’Brien types are allowed to share the podium with shining intellects.

One fairly frequent op-ed contributor is a mouth-foaming denizen of the US far religious right who, if an original thought ever did worm its way into his brain, he would probably write it off as a socialist conspiracy or demonic possession. I edit out most of his bigotry and, far from being offended, he has expressed appreciation for being given a voice on a media outlet that enjoys a reputation for credibility.

Recently we ran a piece of his almost completely as he had filed it, with very few cuts. My feeling at the time was very much like my reaction to the Robert O’Brien interview on Larry King’s show. Surely anyone who took the time to read the piece would be startled not by its opinions but by its veneer-thin shallowness: another neocon warmonger hoist by his own petard.

Maybe so, but this could be a bad example. The guy in question isn’t just shallow, he’s simply not a very good writer. Lefties who never leave the choir being preached to by fellow lefties, by organizations like The Young Turks who make a living off of mocking Republicans, neocons and the religious right, can be deluded into thinking all conservatives are idiots. Or, they might think that if there are some conservatives capable of forming full sentences, they only do so to twist the truth and gull the gullible, such as Canada’s Fraser Institute.

They are wrong. Nowadays the word “conservative” is very often misused to refer to reactionaries or libertarian extremists. The word more properly refers to a person who believes that even if conditions are not perfect, they could be made much worse by messing with them – especially with overly generous social programs that threaten the state’s ability to afford national security, higher wages that could aggravate unemployment, labour laws that hold back productivity or give too much protection to incompetent workers, and so forth. They want a just society as sincerely as “progressives” do; but they favour a slower, more cautious methodology. And I suspect there are a lot more of these real conservatives than the racists, science deniers and other bottom-feeding dunderheads who get the headlines.

Certainly, that is the case among Asia Times’ roster of writers.

And so, once again the progressive cause faces a dilemma. Freedom of speech is fundamental to that cause, yet petards that have become damp squibs, debate that has been dumbed down to 140 characters, the economic destruction of liberal education, and the concentration of what cleverness remains in the hands of conservatives and technocrats conspire against radical change toward a world free of poverty and war, and ruled by justice and tolerance.  

Opportunist achieves senior status

By David Simmons

Today I officially become a senior citizen. I doubt anyone could look back over sixty-five years without stumbling on a bad memory, a moment of regret. I’m no exception, but those moments, at least the ones I remember, are remarkably few.

Of course there were foolish things I said, and things I foolishly didn’t say. Friendships I pursued or maintained with insufficient vigour, or that I should not have initiated at all. But who knows how many of those errors in judgment, embarrassing missteps, and flawed choices set in motion something positive, made me wiser, even happier, days or years or decades down life’s long and winding road?

I’m not adventurous, not a risk taker, but I do like to seize opportunities as they present themselves.

I’ve had the opportunity to see some of the monuments to mankind’s cruelty and folly – Dachau, a Somosista dungeon, Alcatraz, the Colosseum, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, the Berlin Wall, even Armageddon itself  – but also to the best of humanity: the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem and the Statue of Liberty in New York, to name only two.

I’ve had the opportunity to see the icons of some of the world’s great religions – the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulchre, the Sistine Chapel, Angkor Wat and Borobodur – and great monuments to mankind’s quest to make its own way beyond the guidance of ancient scriptures: the parliaments in Westminster and Ottawa, to name only two.

I’ve been awed by the power of nature: driven through violent thunderstorms in Montana, blizzards in British Columbia, sandstorms in Arabia; gazed on the destruction wrought by Mount St Helens, stood (as long as I could) at the edge of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Climbed one of the Coast Mountains (not a very big one) in BC and stood on its peak, stood on a glacier in Alberta, swum across a lake, and snorkelled in the Red Sea. Seen bears in Banff and Jasper National Parks, macaques in Khao Yai, geysers in Yellowstone.

Angel Falls.

I’ve played slots in Las Vegas, toured movie studios in Hollywood, basked on beaches on four continents, spent months on a kibbutz, slept on a park bench in Monaco, visited a vegetarian clothing-optional commune in California. I jumped out of a light airplane, and rode in a different light plane (and stayed inside) that buzzed the world’s highest waterfall. I took a vintage train into the centre of Jamaica to sample the wares of a rum factory, and rode in the back of a truck across the spine of Central America (huddling down to avoid attracting the bullets of Contra snipers) to visit a Sandinista boot camp. I’ve driven Corvettes and big bikes and powerful boats and tractors and a Cadillac hearse, and once competed in a drag race.

Natnicha "Lukyi" Simmons.

I’ve been inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, climbed the Eiffel Tower, stood on top of the World Trade Center. I’ve seen the Mona Lisa (she’s small), Michelangelo’s David (he’s big), Venus de Milo (she’s disarming – sorry, old joke), and the Phantom of the Opera. Basked in the beerful bliss of blues clubs in Bangkok and San Francisco.

I married late in life, and adopted a little girl.

But I did miss one opportunity, and it is the only regret that stands out in my memory: the chance to circumnavigate the Earth.

Before I had the idea (and took the opportunity) to become a journalist, I was a surveyor, reaching the minor rank of junior instrumentman. In that capacity I travelled with a crew to Kuwait, where we did preliminary layout work for a telephone microwave network. Our employers, a Vancouver engineering company, paid our two-way airfare, but left it up to us which route to take on our return – they would pick up the tab for the basic fare, and if our chosen route cost more, we would pay the balance out of our own pockets.

Travelling west to east, the distance from Vancouver to Kuwait City as the 747 flies is 11,200 kilometres. We went via Toronto and Amsterdam, which totals 13,700km. If I’d chosen to keep going eastward after our job in Kuwait was done, crossing Asia and the Pacific to go back home to Vancouver via, say, Seoul, the distance would have not have been much greater – about 15,300km.

But even if I could have afforded the fare, there didn’t seem much point if I couldn’t make a few stopovers on the way (I had not yet been to East or Southeast Asia at that time). And I could not afford to do that. So it would have been a circumnavigation for no purpose but the right to say I’d done it.

Ah, well. Maybe I’ll have another opportunity. There’s still time.

Myth-making, the modern way

By David Simmons

In the ancient world, myths took a long time to percolate and, if successful, become entrenched in folklore or, if even more successful, in religious dogma. But like everything in the 21^st century, myth-making now is fast-tracked.

The most enduring myths born millennia ago probably started out as parables, the metaphoric tools of teachers and philosophers, coloured with the intricate poetic forms characteristic of, for example, ancient Hebrew. During my university years, I spent two years studying biblical Hebrew, initially out of interest in the Bible but later out of fascination with the Hebrew language itself.

I’m obviously no Hebrew scholar, but even studying it for as little as two years can shed light on how the Old Testament myths developed, and maybe even give us an inkling of how the ancient scribes and teachers who composed the great biblical stories thought. It should also put to rest the much later dogma of “divine inspiration”.

The Chinese Gun-Yu flood myth. Photo: Ancient Origins

For there is almost no evidence that the writers of the Bible had any intention of their parables becoming central to a belief system trapped in reactionary ignorance, with even wars being fought over their interpretation. In fact, some of the most powerful biblical myths, such as the flood story, were themselves reinterpretations of earlier lore from foreign cultures, rewritten with the cast of characters renamed to make them more relevant to the audience of the day.

Well, there’s nothing we can do about that now. Not many religionists want to burn people at the stake any more for suggesting that the Earth revolves around the sun, but there are plenty who still think our planet is only six thousand years old, and that destroying our environment is fine because Jesus is going to return any day now.

Once a belief, no matter how absurd, no matter how great the pile of evidence against it, gets burned into our psyches, it is very, very hard to extricate it.

Unlike those ancient scribes who simply wanted to use poetic language and metaphor to illustrate an important lesson, modern humanity has evolved a new breed of myth-makers who want to save time and get right to the indoctrination stage.

Possibly the most famous practitioners of this were Adolf Hitler and his propagandist Joseph Goebbels, advocates of the große Lüge (big lie). Though there is no actual record of Goebbels saying “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself,” there is little doubt he and Hitler employed that principle to deadly effect. But they weren’t alone. In a better-documented quote, Goebbels wrote in 1941: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

These days, that risk – of looking ridiculous – seems to concern no one. One of the most prevalent True Beliefs in recent political doctrine involves the Known Fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin “hacked the US presidential election”. Even otherwise intelligent people who know full well that “throwing” an election in such an intricately controlled system as the US electoral process is next to impossible in the short term (the system is instead manipulated and corrupted over many years by gerrymandering and special-interest bribery), opinion polls late in 2016 showed that fully fifty per cent of registered Democrats believed that the Russians had tampered with electronic voting machines.

While the Russophobia perpetuated by this and other big lies is potentially dangerous, especially if the wet dreams of the most mouth-frothing warmongers in the US Congress and the arms industry come true and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provokes Russia into war, it’s still possible that Wall Street and other non-military corporate forces will realize that there is more money to be made by making peace with Moscow. So this idiocy could be short-term.

Longer-term, however, and so far much more successful, is the war against democratic socialism. Recently in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, lamented in a piece comparing the Conservative and Labour manifestos in the current UK election campaign: “British voters look like they’re rejecting Santa and embracing Scrooge. Why?”

In a critique of Freedland’s piece, journalist Jonathan Cook argues that the answer is clear: British voters have been propagandized relentlessly for decades, perhaps from the very birth of modern democracy, that democratic socialists might be good-hearted and well-meaning, but they cannot be trusted with the nation’s treasure. This despite the fact that in rare cases when genuinely progressive political parties or movements have managed to gain power, they have nearly always spent taxpayers’ money frugally and wisely, while conservative governments have nearly always run up huge deficits by wasting money on corporate subsidies and military “toys for boys”, among other things.

Cook writes:

Here are some other pertinent questions for Freedland. How did most of the British public end up concluding – entirely counter-intuitively – that the global economy can grow indefinitely by plundering the resources of a finite planet? How did they determine that private corporations would care for them better than the state – or, for that matter, co-operatives of workers?

When did they decide that it was more important for Britain to become a “service economy”, run by hedge-fund managers, than a green, sustainable economy? How did they ever believe that a party openly representing Big Money would prioritize their interests above those of a global elite?

How indeed? Are these “alternative facts”, or poetic licence like that practised by the ancient scribes? I’m old enough to remember a time when journalists would ask questions like that.

A history of hysteria: Womb with a view

By David Simmons

The Romans believed that irrational reaction to events or circumstances was a feminine trait, and when they decided they needed a word for it, they turned yet again to that treasure trove of useful terms, ancient Greek. The solution was ὑστερικός, “suffering in the uterus”, which became hystericus in Latin.

The word has stood the test of time, not just in the European languages but far afield. Out of curiosity, I asked Google Translate to find the Thai word for hysteria, and it answered ฮิสทีเรีย. The patented Davidic System of Thai Transliteration used exclusively by this blog renders that as histeria.

Did hysterical male Romans not exist? Seems unlikely, but it’s clear they saw uncontrolled emotion as a weakness, and – like all doomed empires – subscribed to the myth that females were the “weaker sex”, and therefore to blame.

So why is hysteria a weakness? Because it muddles the mind, lets emotion obscure rational analysis. And without rational analysis, we make stupid, dangerous choices.

But it can also be useful. This is seen most clearly in the politics of fear, which with few exceptions determines the world we live in.

There are many recent examples of this. Brexit is one; the 2016 US election, especially the presidential campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton was another.

The politics of fear was used shamelessly by both sides of the debate leading up to the June 23, 2016, vote by UK citizens on whether to remain in the European Union. And after the Leavers narrowly won the referendum, the hysteria was relentless: The economy will be in ruins (as if it wasn’t already); climate change will be unstoppable (as if it isn’t already); workers’ rights will be unprotected (as if Britons haven’t ensured that by continually voting in conservative governments); the pound is in the toilet (as if the blow to the carry trade’s billionaire beneficiaries is a tragedy anyone but them should give a damn about).

Another example is Russophobia, which at the moment appears to be the only basis for government foreign policy in Western nations. It is sometimes called the new Cold War, but unlike that old hysteria about the Soviet Union, this time it has a convenient boogieman to allow it to be personified.

Every time I hear about Vladimir Putin’s latest crime, I think of Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon-cum-populist-politician who upset the applecart of establishment rule by Thailand’s Bangkok-based elite. Not only was he a despised upstart from the country’s mostly rural northern hinterland, he was a brilliant manipulator of every system he touched, outdoing every crook in the comfortable royalist elite. And unlike them, he shared that power with his rural base, diversifying wealth away from the capital and into the villages and farms of the common people. They loved him for it, cared little that he used the power they gave him to line his pockets (name one Thai politician who hadn’t done the same, or worse), and locked the reactionary opposition out of power so firmly that its only option was to send in the troops.

Since then, with Thaksin driven into exile, every ill that Thailand suffers from is blamed on him. The last democratically elected government was headed by his younger sister Yingluck, but the dominant hysteria was that in fact Thaksin “ran the country” from his suite in Dubai, while simultaneously making himself even richer by travelling the world making business deals, “buying votes” for every successive political party that rose from the ashes of bans by the corrupt courts, and even provoking a near war between Thailand and Cambodia over a little-known Buddhist temple ruin on the border.

How to stop worrying.

Like Thaksin, Putin is apparently omnipotently evil. Not only did he “invade Ukraine”, he plans next to invade Estonia, which as we all know is the linchpin of European existence. Hence NATO’s sabre-rattling on Russia’s borders has nothing to do with fattening the only US industry that is still growing, the arms industry, through lucrative sales to frightened Europeans and everything to do with “stability” and “security”.

Putin is also personally responsible for the Olympics doping scandal. And he “undermined US democracy” by helping WikiLeaks reveal the dirty tricks of the Democrat National Committee against Bernie Sanders, and by unleashing his “propaganda arm” RT to cover events ignored by the mainstream media, such as Occupy Wall Street and the dangers of fracking.

All this brings to mind a hymn that was popular a hundred years or so ago when I was an evangelical Christian, the first two lines of which are adapted here:

Vlad can do anything, anything, anything

Vlad can do anything but fail.

He’s Vlad the Unfailer.

Meanwhile hysteria, whether naturally occurring or deliberately provoked, obscures people’s ability to see real dangers. Crippling economic inequality and destruction of the environment are the results of a dysfunctional system of which the EU and both main US political parties have been primary agents. The threat of war is pushed toward boiling point by those who would profit from it, primarily the arms industry.

The womb is the source of human life, and should be a symbol of hope. Should we blame the Romans for seeing it instead as a source of unreason, a tool of the unscrupulous to obfuscate reality?

Might as well; it’s easier than dealing with genuine dangers.

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.

Genius Out of the Bottle

By David Simmons

The demon is a character of every major religion and superstition that has existed throughout history. But like humans, it has evolved over the centuries.

The English word “demon” derives from the ancient Greeks’ δαιμόνιον, and to them, such beings were not necessarily malevolent. They had another word, εὐδαιμονία, derived from δαιμόνιον, that meant “happiness”. The theory was that the happy Greek was possessed by a happy demon.

The problem with demons, in practically every religion, is that they are will-o’-the-wisps. And their ability to possess the bodies of humans makes them untrustworthy allies at best and thoroughly nasty at worst, necessitating exorcism.

In the East, people remain somewhat tolerant of these disembodied beings, especially as there is a good possibility (they believe) that they are the spirits of the dead, including their own loved ones. But while they’re treated with respect, it’s believed that it’s better all around if they stay in their own world, and not try to re-enter the land of the living. For this reason, all over Buddhist Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar), you see spirit houses, little dwellings supplied with foods and drinks to entice them to stay there, and not to enter the homes of their still-living loved ones.

That’s not how Western Christians see the situation. For them, demons have completely lost their credibility. They are not to be tolerated. This remains the attitude even as the West becomes more and more secular. The ancient concepts of Good and Evil persist, even as more people doubt (or claim to doubt) those concepts’ supernatural origins.

All this has given rise to the relatively modern phenomenon of demonization – the assignation of demonic qualities to humans, or human innovations or symbols, that are seen to be so evil or dangerous that they transcend normal humanity. In Europe, the most famous human demon is Adolf Hitler. I use the present-tense “is” because the Hitler myth remains almost as powerful, and even more ethereal, than when he was alive.

It’s probably important to say at this point that demonization is not the same as slander. There is plenty of evidence that Hitler was a very bad man, so he’s not getting a bum rap. In nearly all cases, the object of demonization is pretty bad to start with. What happens is that his wickedness gets exaggerated or over-reported to proportions that either cloud the truth or assign to him traits or qualities that he did not actually possess.

To stay with the Hitler example, it’s not permissible to question the claim, for instance, that he was personally responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews. Maybe it was only 5 million, or 7 million. And maybe he personally did not know or – more likely – did not care what was going on in the concentration camps set up by his underlings. But the 6-million figure has become such an article of faith that it is actually illegal in modern Germany, a country that claims to value freedom of speech and the unfettered examination of history, to suggest it is inaccurate.

Meanwhile, anyone who points to the fact that the German economy was a complete basket case until Hitler came to power, and that he put into motion a culture of science and innovation that led to the modern freeway, the Volkswagen, and the rockets that eventually flew to the moon – sometimes by personal encouragement and funding for people like Ferdinand Porsche and Wehrner von Braun – is taking the risk of being demonized himself.

I mentioned above that demonization can be applied not just to individual humans but also to their innovations. An example of this, again from the Nazi era, is the swastika. This is an ancient symbol that was used by many cultures, mostly in the East, before Hitler decided to adopt it for his National Socialist Party. Now it is a symbol of all of the evils of the Third Reich.

But only in the West. Most Westerners do not understand that the demonization of Hitler, the Nazis and the swastika was never enthusiastically subscribed to in Asia.

Nazi action figures in a Thai shopping mall.

In Thailand, Hitler is seen as a clown, possibly a symbol of how Europeans, who think they are superior to everyone else on the planet, and who have never understood how their colonization of most of Asia was deeply resented and remains a source of shame to this day, are in fact self-deluding arrogant fools, crooks and murderers. Every once in a while, someone in Thailand uses a Hitler image in an advertisement or a publicity stunt, and local expats freak out in rage at their “insensitivity”. And the Thais get another laugh out of it, knowing that few of the offended have even heard of Shiro Ishii, the Mengele of the Japanese Empire, or even Hideki Tojo. 

Don’t get me wrong, though – I’m not claiming that Asians are less susceptible to the use of, or manipulation by, demonization. As in the West, it is most commonly used in the political sphere. In Thailand, the guy with the horns and pointy tail is Thaksin Shinawatra, who outflanked his many enemies within the traditional Bangkok-based elite (he hailed from the country’s “backward” North) and “tricked” the rural majority into electing him as prime minister for his “populist” programs.

Of course he was just as corrupt as his predecessors, and used his power to enrich himself and his family and friends like they did. But unlike them, he also kept a lot of his promises, and put in place policies that shifted much of the country’s wealth and industrial base into the formerly solely agricultural (and poverty-stricken) North and Northeast, which remain important drivers of the Thai economy. And that in a nutshell is why Thailand now is a bitterly divided country, between the royalist Central region to which Thaksin is the devil incarnate and the populous North and Northeast, which have stubbornly failed to buy into the anti-Thaksin mythology.

And this is another important aspect of demonization. Like any mythology, it has its adherents and its opponents, and doubters sitting on the fence. In Asia, the most obvious example of this is Kim Jong-un. To most people outside North Korea itself, he is the personification of evil, who keeps an entire nation in slavery. But to North Koreans, he can do no wrong. Do they believe this because if they don’t they’ll be sent to a labour camp? For some that may be the reason, but it’s more likely to be because they have been brainwashed from birth that the Kims are quasi-deities. And that’s how belief systems work everywhere.

Whether in the East or the West, demonization is a form of delusion, an altering of facts to manipulate the believers into a certain set of behaviours. It is often a form of deliberate propaganda, but in many cases it is a spontaneous phenomenon arising from a need for self-delusion. I believe that is what is happening right now, as I write this, in the United States.

The phenomenon in question is Donald J Trump. Again, there is no need to pretend he’s a great man to make this point; obviously he is not. He is a chronic liar and cheater. But lying and cheating are the hallmarks of most politicians, especially on the right wing that Trump represents. Everyone knows this, and yet it is an inconvenient truth that must yield to the mythology that a Trump presidency would turn the US, if not the planet, into Dante’s inferno.

Consider just one recent Trump comment. During his debate with Hillary Clinton on September 26, when she pointed out that he was an incorrigible tax evader, he said, “That makes me smart.” That got the Trump Is the Antichrist brigade up in arms. But the entire American business class pats itself on the back not only for evading taxes, but for lobbying and bribing politicians into making it even easier for them to do so. Everyone knows this. But the inconvenient truth must be set aside.

Some genies are cool.

Meanwhile, Trump himself – possibly inadvertently – has bought into his own demon myth by claiming to be a genius. That’s a Latin word that originally meant a demon who oversaw childbirth and, if the kid was lucky, was his guardian angel – a benevolent genie. This genie imbued the child with the characteristics that would guide him into adulthood, and special abilities – like the knack of choosing a clever accountant to help him avoid paying taxes.

So Donald J Trump is a demon not because he evades taxes, or because he thinks fat women are “pigs”, or because he thinks there are too many Muslims, but because he says so, in so many words. To watch all the crocodile tears, you would think he concocted these antisocial ideas in the Trump Tower. That’s what you would think – unless you knew, as we all do, that it’s nonsense. These ideas are in fact embraced by millions of Americans who have been too afraid, or too hypocritical, to voice them.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud
hatch out

The 2016 US election has been criticized as post-factual. In fact, the facts were too unpalatable to contemplate, let alone deal with, long before 2016.

The United States is an intolerant, violent society where the chance of getting shot to death is astronomically higher than in any other developed culture, where for-profit prisons are packed to the rafters, where citizens are still executed. Desperate immigrants, mostly Latinos, pour into it to try to improve their lives, only to be exploited by employers so as to drive down wages, and blamed for it by white folk forced on to Food Stamps, while people like John Stumpf and Martin Shkreli and Jamie Dimon become billionaires.

But it’s not nice to talk about such things. Vote for Hillary, and more of the same – if you don’t, you’re an uneducated boor and a racist.

The subheading is a quote from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius

A Tale of Two Chelseas

By David Simmons

There has been a lot of hype about the “historic” nomination of a woman for president by a major US political party, but it’s only one of many historic occurrences during a very unusual election period, still ongoing as I write this. I don’t place a lot of importance on the gender of politicians – as in so many other ways, the US is far behind other countries in putting a woman in charge, and most of those females who have become a president or prime minister elsewhere haven’t been a marked improvement over their male rivals.

To me, the “historic” influence of a social democrat, or “democratic socialist” as he prefers to call himself, is much more important. Bernie Sanders changed the conversation of the primary campaign, not just on the Democratic side but among Republicans, with Donald Trump winning his nomination largely on the back of Sanders’ economic talking points.

But there’s another interesting historic event, one that doesn’t get much mention. There is a strong possibility of Chelsea Clinton becoming the first two-administration First Daughter in history.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to spend one’s formative years in the White House, as Chelsea and the Obama girls have done. The system seems to be set up to protect presidents’ children from their unique situation as much as possible, including the media spotlight, and it seems to work pretty well – Chelsea is evidently none the worse for wear, Malia Obama is heading to Harvard next year, and even the Bush twins didn’t turn out badly.

At a mostly unimpressive Democratic National Convention in July, Chelsea did a commendable job introducing her mother ahead of Hillary Clinton formally accepting the nomination. Her presentation was poised and apparently sincere, without inordinate tear-jerkery. During her speech, she noted that she was aware she had been born into extraordinary privilege, and that with such privilege comes responsibility. I have no reason to doubt that in this, too, she was sincere.

Much of the US presidential campaign, like political campaigns in democracies around the world, has been focused on the grotesque inequality in economic status, and hope for betterment, that has increasingly plagued the Western world since the shift against the working class under Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and others in the early 1980s. This inequity extends far beyond people’s ability to put food on the table, or get a decent education for their kids. Many people are now unable to enjoy basic justice.

A symbol of this is another Chelsea, who when her name was Bradley Manning leaked embarrassing and politically damaging information about the misbehaviour of US troops in Iraq. Since then, she has languished in a prison, one of several whistleblowers who have felt the wrath of offended power. A higher-profile victim is of course Edward Snowden, who has had to flee his homeland to avoid the fate now suffered by Chelsea Manning, while Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks distributed Manning’s information, is under virtual house arrest in London.

The huge price paid by the likes of Manning and Snowden for daring to challenge the power of empire is far from unprecedented. To the empire, the maintenance of its power supersedes all other considerations, even the values it claims to uphold such as justice. And peace.

To non-Americans, one of the aspects of the current presidential campaign that is most alarming is its jingoism. The low point was probably the rant at the DNC by retired General John Allen, who said among other things: “With Hillary Clinton as our commander-in-chief, the United States will continue to be that indispensable, transformational power in the world.... Our armed forces will be stronger. They will have the finest weapons, the greatest equipment.”

Apart from some muted cries of “No more war!” from the floor of the convention, there was very little negative reaction within the US to this call for even more aggression. One counterpunch (in CounterPunch) came from actress Margot Kidder. She wrote:

You people have no idea what it is like for people from other countries to hear you boast and cheer for your guns and your bombs and your soldiers and your murderous military leaders and your war criminals and your murdering and conscienceless Commander in Chief. All those soaring words are received by the rest of us, by us non-Americans, by all the cells in our body, as absolutely repugnant and obscene.

But that’s the whole point. We non-Americans – Kidder, like me, was raised in Canada – find it very difficult to understand how Americans think. You might as well ask why the peasants of ancient Gaul failed to appreciate the superiority of the Roman conquerors, with their advanced political system, high technology like roads and aqueducts, and the overwhelming efficiency and brutality of their military. We are mere serfs who, if we matter at all, provide some contribution to some aspect of the imperial system, such as labour or raw materials.

We criticize America’s foreign policy, its wars, its campaign of destabilization in the Middle East, its provocation of dangerous, nuclear-armed powers like Russia and China. We criticize its internal structure, its rejection of the concept of universally accessible health care, its use of capital punishment, its mass incarceration, its obsession with guns, none of which find any currency in other developed nations. But our criticisms don’t merit being argued against, or even sneered at. We are simply ignored.

That is the privilege of empire. And it is a privilege that must be defended at all costs.

There’s a famous bit from the Monty Python film Life of Brian titled “What Have the Romans EverDone for Us?” After a long argument about why Palestine must overthrow its Roman oppressors, the activists conclude:

Reg: All right ... all right ... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order ... what have the Romans done for us? 

Xerxes: Brought peace!

Reg: What!? Oh ... peace, yes ... shut up!

Apart from actual shooting wars like Vietnam and Iraq, arguably the worst crimes committed by the American Empire was its decades-long suppression of democratic progress in Latin America, with its backing of military coups and support of right-wing dictatorships and death squads. But the people who suffered the most during that period were those who resisted it. For the sullen but mostly quiet majority, life was mere drudgery, hardly distinguishable from what they now “enjoy” under democratically elected government.

Elsewhere, the developed democracies of Europe, Canada and Australasia, while they cannot avoid the effects of US dollar hegemony, crony capitalism, Wall Street’s excesses, and the political instability in the Middle East, Africa and Asia caused (deliberately or otherwise) by US foreign policy, manage reasonably well. There is far more to be gained – or less to be lost – by keeping their heads down than by opposing the empire. Even helping out in US military adventurism through such outfits as NATO makes more political sense than the alternative.

If we had a choice of which empire we belonged to, it would be a choice much like the one that will be faced by American voters in November: a known warmonger and supporter of the neoliberal economics that caused and has perpetuated the decimation of the middle class and worsened inequality, or a possibly unhinged loose cannon who has built his popularity on a campaign of intolerance, racism, misogyny and outright lies. If we could replace our imperial overlord with someone else, who would it be? Russia? China?

Best not even to ask the question. Better just to get on with our tiny little lives, in the relatively open world of a privileged Chelsea Clinton than in the dank cell of a Chelsea Manning.  

Radical nostalgia

By David Simmons

The French language has a lot of very cool expressions. Most of them have direct equivalents in English, but we use them anyway because they sound cooler. The first Fawlty Towers episode, “A Touch of Class”, points to this phenomenon in one scene where Basil says about the charlatan Lord Melbury after he accepts a complimentary dry sherry, “Such ... such ... I don’t know what,” and the Major says helpfully, “Je ne sais quoi!”

But some we use because there is no way to express their meaning so accurately, or so succinctly, in English. Examples are déjà vu, passé and cliché.

I stumbled across another of these recently: dépaysement, defined as “the feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country – of being a foreigner, or an immigrant, of being somewhat displaced from your origin”. It’s a useful description of how I feel sometimes, having been away from my homeland for sixteen years. It’s not powerful; I have a good life in Thailand, and no yearning to return to Canada. But once in a while, in a circumstance that would never occur “back home” – strolling in shorts and a T-shirt among palm trees in January, beinghonoured in a religious ceremony by people who know I’m not a believer but don’t care, being flirted with by a beautiful working girl a third my age in a bar – there is a touch of dépaysement.

It’s a useful word because it allows for the feeling’s lack of intensity, and its brevity. Other forms of nostalgia are more intense. This is often true in the political realm, where we strongly yearn for the “good old days”, whether or not they actually ever existed, at least in the form our minds have evolved them into.

Leftists like to think we are immune from this, that it’s only conservatives who want to turn back the clock. In fact, we don’t even call ourselves leftists any more – we are “progressives”. And some among us, such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, are “radical progressives”.

What escapes our notice is that the term “radical progressive” is an oxymoron. The word “radical” is derived from the Latin radix, “root”. What Corbyn and Sanders argue for – and they say so, in so many words – is a return to the root values of pro-worker philosophy, which they lament the Labour and Democratic parties respectively have strayed from.

There is historical evidence for their arguments. Not only were the values they yearn for once practised – and legislated – by such leaders as Franklin Roosevelt, but the deliberate attacks on those values, especially (and increasingly after the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the early 1980s) by corporate power, are well documented. So too is the core deterioration of former pro-worker political parties such as the Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, and the New Democrats in Canada under such people as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Tom Mulcair in the quest for power and funding.

Similar forces are at work among conservatives. Many of them are just as angry as leftists at what they perceive as theft of what they once had, or thought they had, and in fact no longer want to “conserve” anything. They want to go back home, to a world where women and people with dark skin knew their place, where a good day’s work earned a good day’s pay, where children respected their elders, homosexuals had no rights to exist, and environmentalists weren’t destroying jobs. They mythologize people like Ronald Reagan, forgetting that he recognized the US needed immigrants to sustain and bolster the economy. They forget that Dwight Eisenhower campaigned for re-election on his record of increasing union membership in his first term in office. And they rally instead to the call of frauds like Donald Trump.

Perhaps even more ominous than the spectre of a man like Trump with a potentially planet-destroying nuclear arsenal at his stubby fingertips is the “radicalization” of religious people, but it’s the same force at work. Reactionary Christians and Muslims cherry-pick the Bible and Koran, often to the point of disrespecting the founders of their religions, to justify sometimes violent efforts to go back to a “purer” age of intolerance and extremism.

Yearning for our roots is natural, and can even be a positive force. But sometimes we find that the roots have gone rotten.