Our higher power

By David Simmons

If you walk around one of Jakarta's many shopping malls, you will see women wearing the hijab along with tight jeans and sexy shoes. You will also see women in short dresses, often walking with and talking and laughing with the hijab-wearers. If you smile at any of them, they will usually smile back. Some might also want to take a selfie with you.

In the same mall, you will deal with sales clerks, male and female, who struggle – sometimes shyly, sometimes relishing the opportunity – to assist you in English.

Nearly all of them, regardless of how they are dressed, are Muslims.

When I read about people disparaging Muslims because of the vicious minority who claim to follow their faith while chopping people's heads off, raping women who don't follow their particular brand of Islam, slaughtering Parisians indiscriminately or flying airplanes into buildings, I think about those people in the Jakarta malls. Ordinary people, going about their lives, supporting their families, enjoying a shared laugh with their friends.

I think about the Bedouin guide I and my co-workers had during a survey job in Saudi Arabia, chatting about local cuisine and saying he'd like to go to Israel some day, because he thought people there are "just like us", regardless of what his government says. I think about the guy I bumped into in the middle of the Arabian desert who shared his sack of camel's milk with me, then went his way without a word.

I think about the transvestite motorbike-taxi guy in Yogyakarta who remained polite when I told him gently I wasn't interested in him in "that way".

I think about the lovely, intelligent Muslim girlfriend of my wife's oldest nephew, a nominal Buddhist.

I know it's silly to pretend that Islamic extremists "have nothing to do with Islam". I know they can easily justify their atrocities with the Koran. Like the other two major monotheistic religions, Islam espouses violence. I don't know how the many gentle, bright, educated Muslims I've met reconcile their own behaviour with the nastiness written in their holy book, but they do. Just like none of the Christians I've met would ever dream of murdering an abortion doctor, and most would never discriminate against a Jew or an immigrant, and many vote social-democratic.

Would the world be better off without religion? I don't know; probably. But it's a pointless argument, because it's never going to happen.

All we can do – we, the great majority of human beings who only want to live in peace, do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, nurture and be nurtured by our families, joke and play with our friends, learn about the wonders of the universe – is get along, cope as best we can on a planet weighed down by 7 billion people.

Leave the intolerance and hatred to the extremists.

The victimhood cult

By David Simmons

A recent guilty pleasure was the 2005 Robert Redford–Morgan Freeman sobber An Unfinished Life, which centres on a woman played by Jennifer Lopez who flees her abusive boyfriend and, out of desperation, ends up on the Wyoming ranch of her estranged father-in-law, who blames her for his son’s death in a car accident.

In one brief scene, Lopez’ character answers a suitor’s unasked question about why she stayed with her jerkweed boyfriend for two long years, endangering not only herself but her impossibly cute daughter (played by Becca Gardner) – who, predictably, weasels her way into the heart of her crotchety granddad (Redford). Lopez answers that she came to believe that she didn’t deserve anything better.

Those of us who have known abused women have heard this before, or at least surmised it. It seems nonsense, seen in its most extreme horror in the guilt felt by rape victims. But it’s pointless for those of us who will never be in such a position to try to understand attitudes like that.

For me, racism is the same, and similar prejudices such as religious bigotry, or homophobia. As a straight male Canadian WASP, I’ve lived a life almost completely isolated from such cruelties. It means I’m in equal measure appalled by such things but unable genuinely to emphasize with their victims.

But the cult of victimhood is part of the human condition. How else to explain working people freely electing right-wing governments? Every time it happens, there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, about how the campaign was a fraud, about how the electorate was lied to.

It’s a sham, pitiful excuses. If anything, conservatives are more honest than liberals about what they believe, and even when they’re not, their record is clear – most of the Western world has endured 35 years of market-fundamentalist, anti-labour economic dogma, fed the trickle-down fraud to the extent that for more than a decade, all – not some, but all – of the growth in real wealth has gone into the pockets of a minuscule billionaire elite. Only the wilfully blind won’t see this.

There’s no stopping it, not because working people in the once-great democracies don’t have a choice, but because they do.

We are all victims, because we no longer believe we deserve anything better. And we join in the same game, translating our frustration and self-loathing into victimization of others – the poor, the jobless, the hopeless migrants from war-torn Africa, Asia or the Middle East, those whose “family values” differ from our own.

I’m old enough to remember a time when people felt guilty about kicking others when they were down, but nowadays it’s vocalized more and more. Last year in Thailand, the country was nearly brought to its knees by anti-democracy protests led by the reactionary People’s Democratic Reform Committee (these outfits always squeeze “people” or “democratic” – in this case, both – into their Orwellian names). Day in and day out, ordinary Thais heard from the huge, royalist millionaire-funded stages blocking the streets of Bangkok how rural people were “ignorant buffaloes” who did not deserve the right to choose their own government, and cheers and gleeful whistle-blowing filled the air in agreement.

In the end, the self-deluded “great mass of the people” got their wish – two attempts to hold a democratic election were crushed with the help of the country’s corrupt judicial system, and a military dictatorship took over. At first it promised a “roadmap to democracy” after ill-defined “reforms”, which everyone knew would be designed to ensure “ignorant buffaloes”, if they voted at all, would not be able to reshape the nation the way they wished. Now, to the surprise of all who would not see and would not hear, the junta has settled into its cushy seats of government indefinitely.

The only democracies that have made even a feeble effort to oppose Thailand’s coup-makers have been the United States and the European Union, both of whose credibility has become a joke over the years. Thais are no longer ignorant rice farmers, whatever the PDRC says – they have Internet access, they know what’s happening in the world (if not in their own country, because of harsh and long-standing laws against freedom of expression). They, and everyone else in Asia, are fully aware of how US lawmakers are bought and paid for by Wall Street, oil companies, the Koch brothers and their ilk, and how market fundamentalism and “austerity” have caused poverty and unemployment to balloon in Europe.

Don’t tell us your brand of democracy is any kind of path to the kind of society we want – in that, if in nothing else, most Thais – probably most Asians – are agreed.

Feudalism survived for centuries, and is enjoying a resurgence, not only because of brute force but partly – nowadays, I would argue, largely – because of our own victim mentality. Those who rise to the top, the Kochs, the Donald Trumps, the Putins, the Ukrainian oligarchs, the Shinawatras, the Thaugsubans, do so because they believe unshakably they have the right to do so. They are the exceptions to the victimhood norm – they are the victimizers, and any rare apology they may make for it is transparently insincere.

The victimhood norm – that’s where the rest of us languish. And here we will stay until, as revolutionaries have done briefly in the past, we are persuaded of a better way.

Doggie Doings (random thoughts)

By David Simmons

I like dogs but never owned one until recently, because they are so much more labour-intensive than cats. And the mutt living at my expense now is not a real dog, just a Pomeranian.

Still, they are fascinating creatures. Ours is called Khao Pan, because when he was a pup he resembled a bowl of sticky rice (a staple Thai dish) more than a living being.

His intelligence is quite remarkable. Cats are probably just as bright (debate rages on the subject) but are so self-centred it’s hard to tell. Dogs are an open book.

Khao Pan is less than a year old but understands the distinct personalities of everyone in our household, and modifies his behaviour accordingly. He knows I’m way too old and out of shape to play with him like the kids do, so after I get tired of tossing his plastic ball around after two minutes he understands and settles down.

He gets up before everyone else and my wife lets him outside to play in the garden, yelling at him later for destroying her jasmines. When the kids get up for school, he probably messes around with them and probably rides with them as my wife drives them to school – I’m not sure, I’m still in bed at that hour.

When I do get up, he comes in, fusses around until I pet him, lies on his back so I’ll scratch his belly, then curls up under my desk as I check e-mail, watch the news, and avoid doing much else until my shift starts in the afternoon.

I still miss my cat Onet, who got run over shortly after Khao Pan moved in, too soon for us to learn if the two would ever become friends (it seemed unlikely at the time). But this ball of fluff, this quasi-canine, has been an acceptable, maybe even welcome, addition to the family.

Believe It, or Not

By David Simmons

When Thailand’s popularly elected government was overthrown this year, an English expatriate friend who lives in the country’s Southern region – the only heartland of the royalist anti-democracy movement outside Bangkok itself – rejoiced that with “Thaksin out of the way”, badly needed road repairs were finally taking place in his town.

It’s easy to laugh at the suggestion that the exiled billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, himself turfed out as prime minister by the military in 2006, has the time and energy – while continuing to “bleed the country dry”, usurp control of the offshore petroleum fields in the Gulf of Thailand, and “run the country” via Skype from his apartment in Dubai – to interfere personally in the pothole-repair program of a small beach town in Prachuap Khiri Khan province. But one of the most bizarre aspects of the polarization that tore Thailand apart in the first half of 2014 and, arguably, nearly resulted in civil war was the extent to which expats bought into the Thaksin personality cult – pro and con.

The fact that a large minority of Thais, predominantly in Bangkok and the South, swallowed wholesale the largely fantastical demonization of Thaksin during the six months or so of political chaos that ended with the return of the country to military dictatorship was not surprising. Most Thais, even wealthier people with the benefit of a foreign education, are deeply superstitious, and are brainwashed from birth to believe their monarch is a demigod. So believing that a telecom tycoon – especially if he hails from the primitive Northern region of which the mysterious city of Chiang Mai is the capital, and is excluded from the favours of the royal court – can be possessed of devilish powers is no great leap of faith. His worshippers, by extension, in the North and Northeast are part of a lost tribe that not only must be excluded from a role in choosing their own national leaders, but (as suggested by the since-resigned Miss Universe Thailand, among others) should be “executed” as enemies of His Majesty the Demigod.

A few years ago I wrote a blog piece (Dream State) about how everything in Thailand centres on dreams, and not the boring practicality of most Western states (of which, of course, the boringest of all is probably my own homeland). This dream state is largely what makes Thais, and their country, so charming, but also so challenging, even frustrating, to live with.

This became a glaring reality during this year’s anti-democracy campaign spearheaded by Suthep Thaugsuban, the alleged mastermind of the 2010 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok during the previous unelected government of Abhisit Vejjajiva. His campaign this year was alarming to most of us on the pro-democracy side not because (as was often alleged) we had any fondness for Thaksin, a renowned thug and crook in his own right, but because of its fascistic elements. Day after day invective, lies, slander and incitement to hatred and violence were hurled from the huge stages Suthep set up in the middle of Bangkok’s main intersections, funded by big business and applauded by the media, the police prohibited by the corrupt courts from shutting him down and getting the capital operating again. But arguing this to our friends on the opposite side of the debate was pointless; the whole scenario was based on belief systems, not logic or even hard economic data.

Well, what about us democrats? Weren’t we “true believers” as well, choosing to overlook strong evidence that democracy had failed not only in Thailand but elsewhere in Asia? Or the world, for that matter?

One does not have to look very far afield, after all, to find compelling evidence of the failure of democratic experiments. India, the world’s most populous democracy and the oldest in Asia, is still largely backward and wallowing in poverty. If the main purpose of a governmental system is to improve the people’s economic status, there is a good argument that the communist dictatorships of China and Vietnam, at least over the past couple of decades, have done a far better job. The Philippines was in some ways more prosperous under the Marcos dictatorship than it has been, until very recently, under democratic regimes. Discounting the absolute monarchy of Brunei as an anomaly, the richest countries in Southeast Asia – Singapore and Malaysia – are only quasi-democracies. Indonesia is a lone success story among the relatively young democracies in the region, and there are questions about its stability too.

All of this is not lost on educated Asians, who say, “Southeast Asia is where democracy goes to die.” The reason, many argue, is that the democratic systems Asians have experimented with have been based on those of alien cultures, primarily the United States and Europe, and what is happening over there? Those countries’ political systems have been hijacked by the financial industry that with impunity nearly destroyed the global economy in 2008; youth unemployment in much of southern Europe is as high as 50%; millions of Americans languish below the poverty line, with their offspring’s massive student-loan debts ensuring a lifetime in the economic doldrums; elected legislatures are dominated by millionaires totally out of touch with ordinary people; and more meaningful democratic entities such as trade unions have been decimated.

So why do we still believe in democracy? More to the point, why do we believe in anything? Is there such a thing as empirical fact?

Ninety per cent or more of climate scientists say the planet is warming to dangerous levels because of humans’ misuse of the environment, but television stations can always find a few to say it ain’t so. As I write this, the Israel Defence Forces are slaughtering Palestinians by the hundreds, yet millions of people who nominally detest violence and support human rights say it’s just fine because Israel “has a right to exist” according to millennia-old myths. Do you support the anti-Russian regime in Kiev or its opponents in eastern Ukraine? Depends on your belief system. What about the Rohingya – are they victims of unjustifiable persecution by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority or just a bunch of ragtag “Bengalis” who should go back where they came from? Depends on your belief system.

I like to submit that my own belief system is based more on evidence and logic than on myth, personality cults and wishful thinking. I oppose the kind of military dictatorship Thailand now has because I know of the excesses of similar types of regime in this very neighbourhood, notably the Khmer Rouge, which was at least mercifully short-lived though the damage it did was not, and the longer-lasting State Peace and Development Council in Myanmar – whose very name has been reflected by Thailand’s National Council for Peace and Order. Thais, for now, are only grateful that their capital has been cleared of Suthep’s thugs and the pro-Thaksin “red shirt” hotheads have been subdued for the time being, and they can return to their beloved shopping malls in peace. The emerging megalomania of the dictator concerns no one, for now.

Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” He didn’t even mention evidence and logic. Funny, that.

Checkered Flag for Democracy

By David Simmons

Turn the sound down on the TV set and you will be hard pressed to tell the difference among the current street protests of Kiev, Caracas, Athens and Bangkok, or the earlier ones in Dhaka, in Cairo, Dublin, Madrid ... the list goes on, and on. This is no coincidence.

While the motivations of these protests vary in detail, underlying all politics worldwide today is the economic failure of democracy. After a brief spurt of progress in the most successful democracies of Europe and North America, the economic situation of working people went into decline in the early 1980s. That, of course, was before democracy had even had a shot in much of Asia, South America or Africa, and by the time places like Brazil, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia emerged from dictatorship, it was too late. The global forces of reaction had won the day.

Everywhere we look, the picture is the same. Wealth that briefly had begun to be redistributed toward the working class has massively reversed. The income gap is vast everywhere, and growing. No one disputes this, not even the ruling class, whose most insightful economists can see this situation is unsustainable on a small, overpopulated planet with dwindling resources and where the very ecosystem is being disastrously mismanaged for the infinitesimally temporary gain of a tiny few.

The great majority of people in a growing number of regions see what is happening and are lashing out in frustration. Every class is threatened; for the very poor, the goal is the same as it ever was, simple survival. For the middle class, it is to hold its ground, stop the slide back into poverty and disempowerment, battling against foes real and imagined. For the ruling class, it is to stay in power, sometimes in the belief they can do actual good, but increasingly for power’s own sake, and whatever security can be found in their gated communities.

There is no middle ground, and no competent or incorruptible peacekeepers to call in. As we see this week in Bangkok and Kiev, the police just make things worse. Here in Thailand the right wing who perpetrated the current political clashes have always counted on the military to restore order – which, by their definition, is disfranchisement of the working and rural classes – and it now appears imminent that they will get their wish.

But it is simplistic to blame the right wing. Democracy by definition is rule by the people, and the people – mostly in the West – dropped the ball. We shirked our responsibility. We accepted payoffs by wealthy corporations, tolerated wage slavery abetted by (sometimes well-meaning) labour unions, believed the lies of “fiscal conservatives”, and ignored the signs of creeping rot in the just society our forebears had sought.

As I watch the hourly newscasts, interspersed between the images of violence in Kiev, Bangkok, Homs, and much of Africa are those of drought on the US west coast, and ferocious winter storms on the east coast. Huge sinkholes are swallowing entire forests in England, and some motorways are closed for fear they will be next. Ninety per cent of the world’s food fish are gone. New technologies like fracking are celebrated as more efficient ways to hasten the demise of civilization, if not Homo sapiens itself.

Oh well, who cares. The new Formula One season begins in a few weeks, and I’ll be out of this bad mood.

In Praise of ... Facebook

By David Simmons

Good old Henry Ford, he was a hard-working man.

He worked all night and all day.

I said, “Henry, watcha doin’?”

And Henry, he said, “I’m inventing the Chevrolet.” 

He said, “I’ve already built twenty-five models, 

One for each letter from A to Z.” 

I said, “Henry, you fool, there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet.”

He said, “Good heavens, I forgot the Model T!”

– Allan Sherman, “Good Advice”, 1964

Those of us who have never developed or innovated anything of importance often find solace in disparaging those who have, finding fault with their inventions or, after enjoying them for years or decades, remarking their unintended consequences, and lamenting how much better the world would have been if these geniuses had, like us, just stayed home and watched videos.

Sometimes this is easy. Weapons “improvements”, for example, can be seen as evil by nature. Less clear is how we have or have not benefited from Henry’s mass-produced Model T, which eventually took us down the road to a complete revamp of how we urbanize, and how we pollute the planet.

In recent years the world has changed again, revolutionized by the microprocessor and the personal computer. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are the Henry Fords of our era.

Zuckerberg’s contribution, of course, was Facebook, and oh how we love to hate it. It invades our privacy, we note (in our Facebook comments), and tries to sell us stuff we don’t need. It encourages us to form virtual communities that lure us away from the real world, real relationships with real people.

But like everything else in our “real” lives, much of our moaning is unimaginative, repeating in poorly spelled textspeak what our FB friends have already said, or, if we really get around, what they “tweeted”.

But hooray! A couple of Princeton University researchers, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, have given academic body to our fuzzy musings and likened Facebook to an infectious disease. And like an obsolete bird-flu virus, they declare, FB will lose 80% of its users by 2017.

Permit me to go off on a tangent for a minute. One of my pet peeves is “studies” that make precise forecasts about the future, and even name the date when they will be proved right. And when that date arrives, does anyone check the accuracy of the forecast? Never.

End of tangent.

The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi gave a scholarly explanation of how Cannarella and Spechler arrived at their conclusion:

The Princeton researchers make their case via epidemiological modelling, acronyms, and lots of formulae where the γI terms in equations 1b and 1c are multiplied by R/N to give equations 3b and 3c. Quite frankly, this means the sum total of F/U+C*K all to me.

All right, we can have fun with this stuff, but what about the real issue? Is Facebook a positive force in the universe, or another symptom of the impending demise of Homo sapiens as a species? More important, as Mahdawi asks, is it cool?

Cruising through the reader comments under her piece, there seems quite a bit of evidence that it’s not. Said one: “Never saw the point of it myself. I couldn’t care less if a very good friend of mine is having roast chicken for dinner, let alone a fleeting acquaintance of a friend of a friend. I just find it a platform for posting about really mundane daily stuff, or showing off about something. Frankly I couldn’t give a toss.”

But is that really an accurate description of what most people use this tool for? If so, I would argue that it’s not the tool that is at fault but the people wielding it, like trying to build a front porch with a hammer handle.

Out of curiosity, I did an analysis of my own Facebook friends, of which there are currently 66, about a dozen of whom are inactive. Here’s the rundown:

Nationalities: 35 Canadians, eight Thais, seven British, seven Americans, three Australians, two Hong Kong Chinese, and one each from mainland China, Italy, Ireland and Germany.

Place of residence: 25 Canada, 17 Thailand, six Hong Kong, four US, two Netherlands, two UK, two Australia, and one each in Myanmar, Indonesia, Honduras, the Philippines, the UAE and Italy.

Occupation (some are retired): 36 journalists, five labourers, three NGO workers, three educators, two webmasters, two retailers, two homemakers, two office workers, one artist, one DJ, one student, one chef, one photographer, one travel agent, one food worker, one promoter, and one agriculturist.

Eight are family members, and two I’ve never met in person.

These people provide me a steady stream of personal, political and professional news from all over the world that would have been technically impossible twenty or even fifteen years ago, especially for a languid sexagenarian firmly and comfortably seated in his pleasant home in a small town in northeastern Thailand. They introduce me to brilliant examples of writing, analysis, photography or art, engage me in lively debates, and make me laugh. And only one updates me on his weekly roast-beef dinners.

Our Princeton researchers may be right that within a few years, in Arwa Mahdawi’s words, “the only signs of life left on Facebook will be toothpaste brands wondering why nobody likes them, and Nick Clegg”. But will the cure be as good as the disease?

Take My Word for It

By David Simmons

When I originally started this blog, the theme was meant to be language and linguistics, harking back to my undergraduate studies and eventual degree, and reflecting my career as a moulder and manipulator of words.

It is said that language is the main, perhaps the only, thing that distinguishes Homo sapiens from the “lower” animals. Of all the tools we have developed or exploited, from pointed sticks to fire to supercomputers, it is the most versatile, and the only essential medium of all else we have accomplished over the millennia, good and evil.

Yet so often, it is so pointless, so empty, significant of nothing.

I’m no intellectual, so I make no apologies for stating here that I am a fan of the original Terminator trilogy. In the second film, Judgement Day (1991), Sarah Connor has a recurring dream in which she tries to warn families in a playground of the coming holocaust, but her cries are muted, and the families are deaf and blind to their approaching doom. The missiles land, the nuclear blasts obliterate all vision, and Sarah is consumed by flames as hot as the sun before she awakens.

That scene keeps popping up in my memory as I watch from my comfortable bubble in northeastern Thailand the disaster being perpetrated on this pleasant little country by villains, vying for power that they say they will use to “reform” the nation but which of course they will use as they always have, to enrich themselves at the expense of their yellow- and red-shirted sycophants. Plenty of people see the truth, and cry a warning, but are neither heard nor seen.

Voranai Vanijaka wrote in the Bangkok Post last week:

When [the Shinawatra siblings] Yingluck and Thaksin say reform, rest assured they mean to do nothing short of changing the system to afford their family and cronies more power. When Suthep [Thaugsuban] speaks of reform, rest assured he means to rid Thailand of the Shinawatra family’s political power and put said power in the hands of his own clique and cronies. That is the meaning of reform, and both sides know it. That’s why they are not sitting down together at a table to discuss reform. Nobody would be able to keep a straight face.

The only people who are fooled are the people still believing either side has the best interests of Thailand as a priority. Fortunately for Thaksin and Suthep, there are millions of such people. These are otherwise good and intelligent people, but goodness and intelligence too often don’t stand a chance against a tide of anger and hatred, plus tribal loyalty. Humans are emotional creatures. Add effective propaganda to righteous fervour, and suffer the fool.

My wife is one of those fooled, lapping up the lies and propaganda of the doublespeak-moniker Democrat Party’s Bluesky Channel, as the pro-dictatorship People’s Democratic Reform Committee (amazing how these outfits don’t see how abusing the word “democratic” places them in the same ilk as the DPRK and GDR) “shuts down” Bangkok and drives the already struggling economy toward oblivion (the Thai Chamber of Commerce, no fan of the Shinawatras’ “populist” policies, warns that the PDRC’s actions are costing the economy up to a billion baht – more than C$300 million – a day). Meanwhile the activities of the corrupt palm-oil oligarch Suthep are emboldening the red-shirted fans of the corrupt telecoms oligarch Thaksin, now gathering like storm clouds on the outskirts of the besieged capital, awaiting the next chapter in this tragic saga.

Western commentators smirk at all this. So silly, these Thais, caught up in their superstitious worship of their monarch, utterly unaware that the underlying purpose of the dispute they are fuelling and funding with their eagerly proffered 500-baht notes is to determine who is in the seat of power during the fast-approaching royal succession, greedy hands outstretched to welcome the new ruler’s largesse. So silly, as they revel in their tribal self-delusions that those outside their own circles are “stupid buffaloes” not worthy of suffrage, or that they are Western-corrupted urbanites who have abandoned His Majesty’s “sufficiency” philosophy and honour of the hard workers of the rice paddies.

Meanwhile in the West, sophisticated folk flock to the polls to elect “fiscal conservatives” who, as these voters would know if they bothered to do even a few minutes’ research, have neither the competence nor the desire to improve the lot of anyone but themselves. These sophisticated folk embrace the “consumer economy”, wilfully ignorant of the destruction they are wreaking on the very ecosystem that supports them, and of the injustice and inequality that history (if they bothered to recall it) teaches can only lead to violence and destruction.

Words. So many words, in this “information age”, flying around and then disappearing into the void, forgotten and pointless.