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.”

Breaking even

By David Simmons

If the past year has a theme, it is milestones – those met, and those just missed.

My first post on this blog was titled simply Ten, and was a short consideration of how our reckoning of historic milestones is influenced by the accident of evolution that gave us 10 fingers. This year our family noted two decimal milestones – and one just missed.

In August, I successfully completed my sixth decade. There was nothing remarkable about this accomplishment; one of the few events that made it significant was that it occurred a few months before my adopted daughter Natnicha achieved her first decade, in December.

Nuannoi

I had been a bit concerned about her birthday, as for her ninth she got an iPad, and there was no way she’d be getting anything that pricey this year. But evidently she has not yet learned to put dollar (or baht) values on satisfaction. Much of the neighbourhood showed up for her party, and that was fun. They brought enough gifts that my wife Nuannoi, who does the accounting for our household, thought their value about equal to our costs for food and drinks.

So, we broke even.

In life’s game, or lottery, or enterprise or whatever it is, I broke even long ago. By about the age of 50, I had travelled the world, found a rewarding career, done everything I needed to do. From that point on, everything would be a bonus. If I got hit by a bus or eaten by a monitor lizard this day or the next, I would exit life’s stage with satisfaction.

As it turned out, of course, I dodged the bus and avoided the lizard, and even the great Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 did nothing more than knock me off my feet. And in the 10 years since I realized I had it all, life has got even better: marriage to a fine, loving woman who is a great cook, a few more amazing travel destinations, a few cats and, of course, Natnicha.

In dollar terms, I’m much worse off than I was in my 40s. But I never cared about that in those days, and still don’t. Like Natnicha, I don’t see how the great things in life can be quantified in that sense.

Most people are like us, with the same understanding of what is really valuable and what is not, which is sometimes hard to remember when every day there is more news of yet another scam or ripoff or Ponzi scheme perpetrated by the Masters of the Universe, the CEOs and bank executives, and their pet politicians. Huge banks laundering money for drug cartels, rewarding themselves while robbing seniors’ pension plans. “Globalized” manufacturers fattening themselves by exploiting grossly underpaid workers in firetrap factories, while the gulf between workers and bosses in the “developed” countries expands exponentially, young people can’t afford good educations and can’t find work, as the Masters fret from the back seats of their chauffeur-driven S-Class Benzes about the insupportable cost of “entitlements” like care for the sick.

I’m richer than them. For example, do they have friends like Tony Allison?

Tony Allison was a South African journalist, whom I first met in late 2001 when I moved to Thailand and took a job with the very cool news website he and fellow South African Allen Quicke operated, called Asia Times Online. Allen and I fell out eventually and I regret we were unable to mend our differences before he was murdered in 2010. But Tony, who became editor-in-chief of Asia Times after Allen’s death, and I remained friends throughout the decade.

Tony and me in Hua Hin, Thailand

Our friendship was fuelled by similarities – we were about the same age, both journalists, both expatriates in Thailand who had acquired Thai families, both fascinated by world events, both widely travelled – but also by differences. He was a sportsman, who cycled every day, played soccer with his young son, and loved kayaking. In the late 1980s, when he was an editor at Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, he was part of a five-man team who set a world record paddling non-stop from Hong Kong to the Philippines. In contrast, my idea of exercise is lifting a glass, preferably one filled with a certain amber beverage. Tony and I had as much fun with our differences as with our similarities.

But life’s lottery pays little attention to any of this. It was not my flabby body that failed first, but Tony’s toned, well-exercised, properly cared-for one. In 2011, he was diagnosed with a heart ailment that although it was not yet life-threatening, would require surgery eventually. Extremely annoyed, he nonetheless had the operation at a hospital just outside Bangkok early this year, and it appeared to be successful.

Several months later, in June, he asked me if I could edit some stories for Asia Times by remote from my home; he would be off work for a while, as his son Simon was getting married in Africa and he was going to the wedding. Sure, I said, have a good time and give my best to Simon and his bride.

Then, on Thursday, June 21, my wife woke me up and said Tony was not in fact in Africa celebrating with his son but was in Mahachai Hospital, the same one where he had had his surgery. There had been a setback, and he was very ill. The hospital was considering another operation, but was concerned about its supply of his blood type, which is quite common among Europeans and Indians but quite rare in Thais. Tony knew I also had that blood type, and was wondering if I could spare a pint if the hospital indeed came up short.

My wife and I went out to the hospital, and I was shocked at how he looked. He seemed to have aged years since I had last seen him a few months earlier. Even speaking sapped his strength. I said sure, I’ll give you some blood if you really need it, but I have a better idea.

We rushed home, and I contacted Jim Pollard, a colleague at The Nation, the Bangkok daily that is my primary employer, and asked if he could use his offices as a director of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand to send out a blood appeal. He did so immediately through his electronic links with the club members, advising them to phone me if they could help. For the next two days, my phone did not stop ringing. Scores of people wanted to help.

None of them knew Tony. None of them, to my knowledge, had ever been chauffeured in an S-Class Benz.

Looking back, I now think that there in fact was no blood shortage. Thailand has an excellent medical-care system, and the Red Cross runs an efficient blood-donor program. If Jim and I could scare up gallons of blood in a few hours, surely a hospital could do the same, and more. I now believe that the doctors already knew it was too late. The earlier surgery had got infected somehow, and the poison had spread through Tony’s body, finally hitting his lungs. My phone was still ringing when he stopped breathing that same day, June 21, 2012.

He was 59.

Less than two months later, I reached the six-decade milestone that he just missed.

Natnicha

And now as I write this, more months have passed. The world has known more evil, as little girls who want to learn have acid thrown at them, or are shot in the head; as a failing superpower wastes what few real resources it has left on pointless wars; as greed and injustice and jingoism and fanaticism create misery and premature death for tens of millions.

Natnicha knows little of this. Her world is only occupied by the kind of people who would give their lifeblood to help a stranger. She snuggles up at night in the fuzzy pink blanket with bears on it that one of the neighbours gave her for her birthday. She is driven every morning by her Buddhist mother to a school run by Hindus and staffed by Catholic Filipinos, and her friends are Thais and Indians. She is having a little trouble learning to read well, and does not yet know how to spell racism, or intolerance. She will eventually, I know. But for now, we live for what we have right now.

It’s enough.

Nuannoi Phumphok (Pong), Natnicha Simmons (Lukyi) and I wish all our friends and family another year of genuine prosperity.

Life: A laugh a minute

By David Simmons

As I walked down the soi to our place in south-central Bangkok the other day after emerging from the taxi that had brought me home from work, my daughter cruised up on her bicycle. Pointing to the moon, she said, “It’s nearly full. The full moon is tomorrow, for Loy Krathong. Loy Krathong is always on the full moon.”

I suppose a competent dad would have said something like, “Is that right? Loy Krathong happens on the full moon?” and complimented her on her knowledge. But I’m not a competent dad, so I simply replied, “Yes, I know.”

She immediately launched into what has become a sort of traditional parry between us: “How do you know?” she asked. “I know everything,” I replied. “Oh yes, you know everything,” she laughed, and rode off on her bike.

It’s funny how we use humour to compensate for our weaknesses. I don’t think I can really be blamed for not knowing how to be an award-winning parent; I didn’t try it for the first time until I was in my 50s, after nearly a lifetime dedicated solely to self. Kids are pretty good at dealing with their parents’ inadequacies, though, and my daughter has learned to use humour as a survival tool.

Like most kids nowadays, she learned how to search the Internet before she could read, and I showed her how to find Mr Bean on YouTube. Not long after that, I introduced her to one of the great developments of civilization: Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “The Ministry of Silly Walks” remains one of her favourites.

My own introduction to humour was a bit less gentle. When I was very young, after hearing the term “sense of humour”, I asked my mother what it was. She replied: “Something you don’t have.”

It’s not surprising, then, brought up by a woman whose wit consisted of stilettos and sledge-hammers, and nothing in between, that when I finally did develop a sense of humour, it was largely as a defence mechanism. A small, skinny, shy, spotty and bespectacled kid through most of my school life, I was an obvious target for bullies, but my wit (including, during one stage, satirical cartoons drawn on classroom blackboards signed by “The Mystery Humorist”) served to fend them off quite efficiently. I even managed to befriend some of them (bullies are lonely, too).

Once we survive school and enter adulthood, we find that all the world’s a tragicomedy. Canadians understand this better than most, living in a land that is at once the most privileged on Earth and the most ridiculous. Its three northern territories alone cover a third more land area than India, six times that of France, yet only 100,000 people live there. We muse endlessly about how different we are from Americans, but 90% of us live within 150 kilometres of the US border. Our climate is so bad that we travel a lot to warm places, where we see poverty and injustice, and we return home with gratitude and understanding of how fortunate we are – and turn up the thermostat. It’s not by accident that we spawned the likes of Bob and Doug McKenzie, John Candy and Jim Carrey – or Pierre “Fuddle Duddle” Trudeau.

Even for those of us whose existence is relatively privileged, life is an obstacle course, littered with challenges some of which cannot be overcome. Parenthood is one of these. My daughter’s success, if she achieves it, will be her own doing, not mine.

But though I can do very little to prepare her for what lies ahead, at least she knows already that when we fail, the best we can do is have a good laugh, and move on.

Tolerance, and a call to arms

By David Simmons

Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil wants the US and, I suppose by extension, the civilized world to “take the necessary measures to ensure insulting billions of people – one and a half billion people – and their beliefs does not happen”. This was one of the more reasoned responses in the Islamic world to the film Innocence of Muslims, a clip of which appeared on YouTube.

By “reasoned” I mean that to our knowledge, Qandil did not set fire to any buildings or kill any ambassadors.

I haven’t seen the clip but accept the word of those who have that it was deliberately offensive to Muslims, not to mention those who value good production techniques. But how exactly is a culture founded – unlike Islam – on freedom of expression to follow Qandil’s advice? How does a secular society avoid “insulting” Islam, or any superstition for that matter? The fact that the other four and a half billion of us get on perfectly well without bowing and scraping to some Arab who died nearly 14 centuries ago is itself insulting to those who cannot, isn’t it?

So what we have here is the most intolerant of the world’s major religions pleading for tolerance. To stress that point, The Onion published a cartoon designed to be extremely offensive to the four other major religions, then reported, under the headline No one murdered because of this image: “Though some members of the Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths were reportedly offended by the image, sources confirmed that upon seeing it, they simply shook their heads, rolled their eyes, and continued on with their day.”

By screaming for tolerance while themselves being intolerant to the point of murdering people such as Ambassador Christopher Stephens, whose only crime was holding the same citizenship as the makers of Innocence of Muslims, these representatives of Islam are making impossible demands on the rest of us, probably knowingly. Why not? If one’s religion makes tolerance a sin, surely it is the duty of the faithful to create pain for those who practise it.

This ploy is not the monopoly of extremists. Prime Minister Qandil does the same thing, but to even greater effect because he commands respect, unlike the mob, who command only contempt. His call for not merely the common-sense restraint most right-thinking people carry out as a matter of course, as a necessary tool for surviving in and contributing to a community, but for legislation prohibiting offence against a particular set of superstitions to which he subscribes and most others do not, is a logical impossibility, and he knows it.

The reason is that even within Islam itself, there are hugely differing views not only on what is acceptable behaviour, but what constitutes holiness. Some believe the thugs who killed Ambassador Stephens were practising jihad, holy war. Some believe the hijackers who flew jetliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were even holier. If we disagree with them, we are of course insulting a segment of Islam, and if Qandil had his way, we would presumably be punished for it.

Yet shrugging off Qandil’s pleas as nonsense doesn’t get us off the hook. Most of the civilized world has bought into the idea of tolerance as a general principle, though of course exceptions abound – most of us don’t tolerate theft or murder or child abuse, and there are grey areas such as abortion, or voting Conservative. So we cherry-pick as well, just like “moderate” Muslims.

Maybe we should take another look at the principle of tolerance and be more careful how we use the word. It comes from the Latin tolerare, “to endure”. Is that really how we want to live in our communities, simply “enduring”?

If so, life becomes quite a chore. For life is full of annoyances; the human ones alone now number about 6 billion, and on top of this we have biting insects, ill-timed rain showers, incontinent soi dogs and the occasional errant meteorite (left).

Endurance has its place, but it should not be a guiding principle. Another word comes to mind: “embrace”, derived from the Latin bracchium, “arm”. By a happy coincidence, in English the word “arm” has two completely different meanings, the first – the appendage we put around those we love, or extend in friendship, derived from Anglo-Saxon – and the other, from Latin again, in the sense of the hard and unyielding stuff knights used to don, or in modern times clads military personnel carriers, tanks, and the Brink’s vehicles delivering each day’s pillage to the one per cent.

To take this analogy just a tiny bit too far, we can argue that embracing our fellow human beings, figuratively or otherwise, is the best way of arming ourselves against evil and despair.

The Language of ‘Seamless Trade’

By David Simmons

Would the European Union work any better if it made a non-European language the official one for the bloc? Maybe Mandarin, or Arabic?

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has done something similar, making a non-Asian language – English – official for the bloc’s intra-regional business. It could be argued that UNASUR, the EU-like Union of South American Nations, has also done so: It has four official languages, none of which are indigenous but are the tongues of former colonizers Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and England.

The EU, for its part, has 23 official languages.

The ASEAN choice of English makes practical sense. The bloc is one of the most ethno-linguistically diverse in the world, and is dominated by four language groups: Malayo-Polynesian (primarily Malay and Tagalog), Austro-Asiatic (Vietnamese and Khmer), Tai (Thai and Lao), and Tibeto-Burman (Burmese). About half the region’s population belongs to the first group, but Malay is rarely heard outside Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, the four nations of the bloc where it is official, while Tagalog, the basis of the Philippines’ main official language Filipino, is only heard outside that country among its vast overseas workforce, such as the hordes of maids gossiping in Hong Kong’s Statue Square on their Sundays off.

The Philippines’ other official language is English, and fluency in both tongues is quite common, which has been important in making Filipinos highly valued as workers in other countries, fuelling the homeland’s remittance-based economy. The only other ASEAN country where English is official is Singapore, where it shares that status with Chinese (a dialect of Mandarin is mostly spoken by the Chinese community), Malay and Tamil.

Amid all this official linguistic diversity in Southeast Asia are myriad smaller languages, dialects and sub-dialects, some say as many as a thousand. But the fact remains that if you are a Thai trying to ask directions in Jakarta, or a Malaysian lost in Ho Chi Minh City, the language you are most likely to have success with is English.

I’ve written previously that the dominance of English as a global lingua franca is a rather unfortunate accident of history. Its highly complex grammar is almost impossible for Asians to grasp fully; its spelling system is bizarre and inconsistent among its dialects and sub-dialects. It was, of course, imposed on much of the world by English colonizers, and took root throughout the British Empire as a result of a combination of harsh intolerance of indigenous tongues and a belief in the importance of education, even of “savages”. As that empire decayed, another one it had spawned, the American Empire, took up the mantle of global English-language hegemony.

In the study of European imperialism, Southeast Asia again has a unique history. Of the 10 nations of ASEAN, only one – Thailand – was never colonized by a European power. The British Empire embraced four of them (Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Myanmar), the French Empire three (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), and Spain and the Netherlands one each (the Philippines and Indonesia). Interestingly (to me, anyway), the languages of the latter three – French, Spanish and Dutch – are now almost unknown in the region except among scholars. As a lingua franca, they have been completely supplanted by English.

Outside former British Malaya/Borneo and Myanmar (which was administered as Burma by British India until the late 1940s), the imposition of English has been largely the work not of Britain but the United States. In only one case, the Philippines, was this done by imperial force, resulting after the Spanish-American War in the rapid expulsion of any trace of the previous Spanish tyranny except in personal and place names. Everywhere else in Southeast Asia the embrace of American English has been a practical response to the need to survive in a world dependent on US economic power.

This process, predictably, has been far from smooth. Educational standards vary wildly across the region. The differences between American and British English also complicate matters, a situation recently aggravated by the growing influence of a third English dialect, South Asian. Outside Singapore and the Philippines, official spelling standards exist only among the highly educated and journalists, and even those two countries don’t agree on them: Singapore uses a form of British English (spiced up by non-official but widely spoken “Singlish”), while the Philippines uses the US standard (Webster). In Thailand, while businesses tend to prefer (usually extremely poor) American English, Bangkok’s two daily newspapers stubbornly cling to British English as official style.

But as in all things, Thailand has gone its own way through all of this. Even among the educated elite and in the all-important tourism industry, English-language facility is generally very poor. This has little to do with financial poverty; Thailand has the second-largest economy in ASEAN with negligible unemployment, and for decades has placed strong official emphasis on education, yet one finds better English skills even in the poorer countries of Indochina. It seems to be more a factor of Thai nationalism and isolationism. Thais want to be part of the larger world, but only if it doesn’t mean a lot of work.

In 2015, a region-wide “seamless trade” area, the ASEAN Economic Community, will be established. Most Thais, including businesspeople, know or care very little about what this will mean. Some of the private-sector organizations are rubbing their hands in glee, as it will make it easier for them to get around even the few and inadequate Thai laws protecting labourers, as the borders open up to workers flowing in from poorer countries, three of which – Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar – share national boundaries with Thailand, while Vietnam is not far off. Others, especially the hospitality industry, fear the increased competition.

The Thai government, for its part, seems to be very aware of the country’s ill-preparedness for the AEC, but as always lacks the competence, and support from the elite, to do much about it. It has, however, announced a new emphasis on language education, and to its credit, it has not confined this effort to English but is also pushing the learning of other regional languages, especially Malay. This is in addition to its previous encouragement of the study of Mandarin, for the obvious reason that Chinese trade and investment have a huge influence on the economy of the entire East Asian region, especially outside the other two powerhouses Japan and South Korea.

There is little evidence so far that the Thai street shares the government’s newfound enthusiasm for improved foreign-language skills; more than likely Thais will find themselves overwhelmed after 2015 by the influx of cheap, reasonably skilled and English-speaking labour exploited by highly efficient Singaporean and Malaysian corporations taking over the kingdom’s factories, resorts and office towers.

“Seamless trade” motivated by nothing other than corporate greed will in Southeast Asia, as everywhere else, turn out to be bad news for Thailand’s lower echelons for the most part, but these blocs often also have some (unintended) good consequences. Thailand’s quest to modernize is to a large degree held back by its passionate yet utterly unfounded nationalism, epitomized by its obsolete and draconian lèse majesté laws. The necessity of competing with the more efficient nations of the region, particularly Singapore and Malaysia, and those with far better English proficiency, particularly those two plus the Philippines, may provide a starkly needed rude awakening.

Time will tell. In the meantime, what about the original suggestion at the top of this essay, that the adoption by a regional trade bloc of a foreign language as its official means of communication could be a unifying force worth trying? Think of the money the EU could save by laying off the droves of translators necessary to handle 23 official languages, if it adopted just one.

And how about the Americas using language politics to throw off the vestiges of imperialism once and for all? The obvious choice for UNASUR would be Quechua, an Amerindian language with about 10 million speakers that already enjoys official status in Bolivia and Peru.

Such a policy would be more challenging in North America. The North American Free Trade Area has three official languages, all of them, like those of UNASUR, those of former imperial masters, in this case England, Spain and France. But in the US and Canada, native languages have been crushed into near non-existence. Even in Mexico the most widely spoken indigenous language, Nahuatl, now only has about 1.5 million speakers.

Since this was my idea, I make a modest proposal, that the official language of NAFTA herewith be Secwepemctsín, the indigenous language of the part of south-central British Columbia where I grew up. Lesson 1 would be how to pronounce its name.