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.  

True believers

By David Simmons

One tends to select Facebook friends who are like-minded, so it’s not very efficient as a forum for debating opposing views. And when we do, points tend to be intelligently argued, sometimes posing a needed challenge to a viewpoint that, we find, had not been sufficiently thought through, or had been affected by changing circumstances that had escaped our notice.

But once in a while we run across a “friend of a friend” by whom we inadvertently get barraged with a load of nonsense. The best way to deal with such encounters is to move on and leave such people to wallow in their ignorance or superstition, but sometimes we foolishly allow ourselves to get mired in a debate that cannot possibly go anywhere.

This happened to me recently when I ran across a True Believer in the Rothschild Conspiracy. As I knew little about the subject, I did a bit of research, and found that this mysterious Jewish family is allegedly responsible for controlling and manipulating every central bank on the planet except two (Cuba’s and North Korea’s, and they are next), funding the Holocaust, founding the State of Israel, and putting Barack Obama into the White House.

Busy bunch.

I was tempted to dismiss this as yet another anti-Semitic fantasy, but apparently it is cherished by some who are only dimly aware that the Rothschilds are Jewish, or if they are aware of it, don’t particularly care. They would be just as opposed to a single family controlling the bulk of the world’s wealth if those rascals were, say, Norwegian or Lower Slobovian.

Conspiracy theories abound, of course; Mel Gibson even starred in a movie about them called, not surprisingly, Conspiracy Theory. They thrive on a widely held trait: gullibility, the willing embrace of nonsense.

We see this all the time in politics. The most obvious example at the time of writing is Donald Trump, but his entire party has thrived for decades on voter gullibility. How many times do working people have to be shafted by the trickle-down principle before they stop electing its perpetrators? How could Americans put George W Bush in the White House not just once, but twice? And it’s not just Americans – David Cameron, Stephen Harper, and many more stand as other examples.

So, in the face of this, are small-d democrats not also True Believers, gulled by a nonsense drilled into us all our lives, that people have the right to choose their own rulers, even when said rulers are felonious, incompetent, thoughtless, corrupt, or a combination of these?

In most democracies, the dream of perfecting the human condition is routinely sabotaged by political graft and stupidity. And in almost every such country, there exists a powerful minority bent on abolishing democracy, seeing it as a system every bit as failed as the trickle-down principle. Like the hula hoop, it was fun while it lasted, but it’s time to move on – or, in the view of most anti-democrats, move back to feudalism, when timeless values such as the Divine Right of Oligarchs were firmly in place.

Most wouldn’t put it like that, of course. Many reactionaries and fascists are probably not even aware that they are fundamentally anti-democratic; no no, they would argue, we only wish the Great Unwashed would elect politicians who are not felonious, or incompetent, or thoughtless or corrupt. And until they do, we’ll use our resources to manipulate the electoral system so the Right People are put into power. (And, perhaps they add, we’re not even Rothschilds.)

In Thailand where I live, the anti-democratic movement in recent years has become more and more efficient. Barely fazed by the establishment Democrat Party’s chronic failure to win elections, the big-business-backed royalist elite has stacked the courts, the National Anti-Corruption Commission, the Election Commission and myriad other “independent organizations” with co-conspirators to drum up novel ways to sabotage and overthrow nearly every popularly elected government since the early 2000s. And when these ploys fail, as they did in late 2013 and the Democrats’ ultra-reactionary wing launched street protests that threatened to wreck the economy irreparably, they send in the tanks.

Thailand has had plenty of military regimes before, but the current one seems more sure of itself than its predecessors. Like all dictatorships, it relies heavily on draconian repression of dissent, but also tosses goodies to the feared rural majority to keep them quiet. Meanwhile it has spent the past two years drafting a constitution designed to ensure that genuine democracy will never again rear its ugly head, and that the Right People run the country and re-entrench timeless values, Divine Rights and so on.

Heavily influenced by the most successful dictatorship in Asia, if not the world, namely China, the Thai junta does little to hide its contempt for democracy. Yes we’re draconian; yes we do things our way and brook no opposition. Why should we? We tried it your way and peace and order (the two gods of the military cult) broke down. And with some justification, much of the generals’ venom is directed not at the populist rural-based Red Shirt movement despised by the Bangkok-based elite, but against the establishment Democrat Party, rightly mocked as weak and incompetent.

Are the Thai generals right? Does democracy deserve to be beaten down once and for all? If we grit our teeth and look at the state of the world objectively, it’s hard not to see that they have a point.

Here in Southeast Asia, there are only two democracies worthy of the term, and both are relatively young. They are Indonesia and the Philippines. In the former, political Islam is the major force of reaction threatening to destroy the progress the country has made since the end of the Suharto dictatorship, while in the latter, rampant corruption has been the most irascible foe of progress.

But one does not have to look to Asia to see the failure of democracy to take root in a meaningful, progressive way. While democratic systems did flourish for a time in Western Europe and North America, corporatism has successfully taken them over to the extent that economic and political inequality, along with species-threatening environmental degradation, have taken over. European and American democracies were, briefly, beacons on the hill of despair, promising a way out of global poverty, ecological disaster and war. No more.

In Thailand, the people were robbed in 2014 of their chosen government by men with guns. They were powerless to prevent it. Yet in the United States in 2004, there were no tanks or men in uniform calling the shots; the people had the freedom to oust George W Bush from the White House, but failed to do so. Much more recently, the people of the United Kingdom had the freedom to turf Prime Minister David Cameron, but chose instead to give him even more power to wreck what little is left of the hard-fought social reform instituted since the end of World War II.

So, in the face of such damning evidence, by what logic do we continue to support the right of people to choose their own rulers? Is there logic at all, or only True Belief?

Fine print and bootstraps

By David Simmons

My late father said if somebody promises you something for free, read the fine print.

– Hillary Clinton

On the same day that the front-running US Democratic presidential hopeful cited conservative Republican Hugh Rodham to put down her rival Bernie Sanders’ campaign plank of free college tuition, about a dozen members of my wife’s family showed up at our house to perform a traditional Thai New Year water-bathing ritual for me, and for me alone. This consisted of me sitting in a chair on our front patio, while they all took turns pouring flower-scented water on to my hands and feet, amid prayers for my good health.

They did this for free.

A lot of Westerners who have married into Thai families have found themselves treated like an ATM. I’ve helped my wife’s family from time to time; why wouldn’t I? Their needs have always been modest, and I can afford it. They have also been there for me when I’ve been sick, or we needed help with a move, or whatever. But even if they didn’t, I’d back them up if they needed it. I don’t believe in fine print.

It has been like that for me from my earliest memories. I have plenty of flaws, and I’ve changed belief systems several times over the decades, but I’ve always been clear-eyed that “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” is logical nonsense, a defiance of the law of social gravity. Okay, I’ve worked for a living since I was seventeen. Okay, I’ve never been on government welfare. I paid my own way through university.

But I had the opportunity to do all those things. I had the good fortune of being born to parents who, though not well off, sacrificed to ensure I got the best health care during my frequent childhood illnesses, who supported me in my interests even though they changed every other week, who took me seriously when I was older and shifted from their belief systems, and encouraged my inquiring mind even when it led me to debate with them.

I had the opportunity to spend a decade and a half floundering through the postsecondary education system, shifting from sciences to arts, dropping out for years to travel aimlessly, until I finally found a career I could live with, and that could live with me. I had the opportunity to do that because my young adult years were the 1970s, that brief period when tuition was affordable and good-paying unionized summer jobs were plentiful.

Sure, I’ve been inordinately fortunate all my life. But I don’t believe there is anyone on Earth who can’t point to similar examples of good fortune, even if they are far fewer in number.

The only fine print I see is that the bootstrap brigade are wilfully dismissive of their own luck, of the many people who helped them when they needed it, picked them up when they were down, without expecting anything in return. They use their own ignorance as an excuse to tread on the already downtrodden.

If my heart were as big as it should be, I would feel sorry for them.

Sawatdee Songkran.

Motoring into 2016

By David Simmons

There is a kind of synergy between my physiology and my faithful old Honda CR-V. It and my body function OK most of the time, and get where they need to go. But the CR-V makes some nasty noises most mornings when it’s started up for the first time, as if in protest; it had most of its engine hoses replaced last year; some of the interior lights have gone out, apparently permanently; the clock tells the right time only occasionally.

As for my bod, it developed an ailment eventually diagnosed as achalasia, a failure of the esophagus to function properly. This resulted in increasingly painful upper-chest pains, inability to swallow food or even liquids easily, and a general downgrade in my lifestyle as I gave up coffee, tea, beer, eggs, anything oily or spicy, and on and on.

For most of my life I’ve enjoyed good health, perhaps undeservedly given a lack of exercise and studied ignorance of dietary advice. The downside of this is that when I do get ill, I become very impatient, irritable and, in extreme cases, depressed. The same happened after the achalasia developed.

Despite an irritating lack of co-operation from the hospital in Bangkok I approached for treatment, the condition has largely improved on its own, thanks to careful food intake, better exercise, and nitrate medication. This has put me in a better mood to write a year-in-review piece, about a month late much to the disappointment (I’m sure) of my many fans.

Another flaw I like to blame on advancing age, although to be honest it has never been a strong point, is a weak memory. Facebook came to the rescue, as I scrolled through the timeline to remind myself of the great events of 2015 before writing this piece.

The major development has been a burgeoning pet population. Khao Pan the Pomeranian joined the family in 2014, just before my cat Onet was run over and killed. Then in March 2015, Khao Pan got all excited when a tiny kitten somehow fell into our yard, and he fussed until we followed him outside to investigate. Named Tan Yong, the cat quickly became fast friends with his canine saviour.

Around the same time, a third member of the not-officially-human part of the family arrived, a Pomeranian-Chihuahua cross named Tam Lai. She had originally been brought to our place temporarily to mate with Khao Pan, and eventually moved in permanently. In April, she gave birth to a pup, but it died after only two days.

Toward the end of the year, Tam Lai got pregnant again, and this month she gave birth to an amazing (for a Pom) litter of six. One was stillborn and another died shortly after its birth, but at this writing the four survivors are doing well.

As always, another major aspect of my life last year was work. My main employer continues to be The Nation in Bangkok, for which I work by remote from home. At the end of 2014, my secondary employer, the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, announced it would begin phasing out offshore editors, foreshadowing a pretty big blow to my income, as the Post pays a lot better than The Nation. As in the past, however, the SCMP’s “reorganization” didn’t go smoothly. On March 22, I posted on Facebook:

The horror! The horror! Just as I was getting used to having two-day weekends again, the very same venerable Hong Kong broadsheet that sent us offshore editors packing with a cheery “good luck with your new endeavours” a mere three weeks ago dropped a frantic e-mail in my inbox this afternoon calling me in to work this evening. Ah well, the unexpected HK$1,800 will come in handy during my next trip to Bangkok on the Easter Weekend, where lo, I shall rejoice and fellowship with visitors from Hong Kong and Victoria, BC.

And on May 17:

Six months ago, I was warned that because of a “reorganization”, my weekend moonlighting gigs at a certain venerable Hong Kong newspaper would end, as it embraced more enthusiastically the Online Information Age. Three months later, I was advised that the “reorganization” was so successful that my lay-off would occur earlier than planned, at the end of March. Since then, the frequency of my 12- and 13-day workweeks has increased, due to “emergency” call-ins from said venerable rag. I guess this is what “human resources” experts call “increasing labour productivity”.

Eventually SCMP got serious with its efforts to bring all of its editors and writers under one very expensive roof in Hong Kong, and adopted a new software system called Méthode, inaccessible by anyone outside the office. It’s early days, and this move might pay off eventually, but by all reports the environment at the Post is miserable – understaffed desks, overworked staff, and a huge employee turnover. A friend who works there was planning to be in Bangkok this month for a brief visit, but had to cancel. “The desk has been cut to the bone, to the point that there is no cover,” he wrote to me. I passed this on to a Canadian friend in Bangkok also “made redundant” by the SCMP reorg, and he responded: “Chaos at SCMP, ha ha, fuck them.” Later I asked the Hong Kong friend how the new system was working, and he said, “Well, how do I put this delicately – it sucks. It’s so bad that it makes CCI [the old system] look good. I just haven’t understood why the system needed to be changed, but then I am not on a seven-digit salary, what do I know.”

But chaos at SCMP is a minor tempest in the teapot that is the demise of journalism all over the English-speaking world. Throughout the year I received news of more and more newspaper shutdowns back home in Canada, and in the US. I may be biased, of course, as a three-decade denizen of a journalism career, but I have no faith in the Internet’s capability of fulfilling the crucial role of informing and supporting democracy. In April I posted:

A story is making the rounds that the Gideons sent a shipment of Bibles to Nepal as “earthquake relief” ... I had a look around and it seems a number of sites have quietly spiked the story. As near as I can tell, it originated at a Canadian satirical website called The Lapine, which also appears to have taken it down.

I understand ordinary people getting sucked in by things like this, but several supposedly legitimate news organizations picked up this story. The Internet is a great invention when used properly, but much of the time it serves to confuse and misinform – and I think that’s why so many governments have allowed it to flourish.

Meanwhile formerly trustworthy media organizations are purging their editing staff, underfunding their fact-checking mechanisms, and rushing to “compete” by getting dodgy stories online before anyone else, something applauded by the “blogosphere” as “getting rid of the gatekeepers”.

Not long afterward, the Denver Post published a good commentary on the subject, which said in part:

Just where do you think all those free online stories come from? Elves? The fruits of real journalists’ labours are freely given and stolen away by you and our pseudo-colleagues. Edu-tainment and s-newz sites, like HuffPo, Yahoo, Buzzfeed, Google and millions of others survive on blood and tears spilled by real journalists at real newsrooms costing real dollars....

Sneer all you want, what we do is vital, because almost all of you don’t have the time, the interest or the ability to ferret out mundane crap and deep shit alike. And if you think you’ll get the straight story straight from the horses’ asses in government, at Monsanto, at Chrysler, at Blue Bell, you are oh, oh, oh so very wrong.

And yet, there is occasional evidence that people’s hunger for the truth rises above the share-your-ignorance blogosphere and manipulations of the so-called mainstream media, and puts the lie to my declarations of the death of real democracy. 

Nominally social-democratic political parties that had strayed too far from their roots in a quest to draw in the mythical “centre” paid the price last year, most notably in the UK and then in Canada. At least in Canada, despite the failure of the New Democratic Party in the October federal election, an acceptable alternative – the Liberals – won a majority and turfed out the disastrous right-wing regime of Stephen Harper. The Brits weren’t so fortunate, and saddled themselves with five more years of seeing their pockets picked to favour CEOs, bankers and tax-evading corporations, while the Labour Party that failed to come to the rescue remains in disarray.

But the biggest political news in Canada was in the province of Alberta, our ultra-conservative “Texas of the north”. In May I posted: “Huh? An NDP majority in Alberta? What’s next, a serious worldwide effort to stop global warming? Ending the failed War on Drugs? A banker sent to jail? Someone pinch me ...”

But as the working class in Alberta finally woke up and lashed out against the lies of the neoliberal Conservative Party, as their counterparts in Britain rallied behind Jeremy Corbyn, as pro-Wall Street cardboard cutouts like Hillary Clinton faced a serious challenge for the US presidency from democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, reactionary politics tightened its grip on Thailand. Upon watching Stephen Harper’s quite gracious speech after his defeat in the Canadian election, “I was reminded of how privileged Canadians are, unlike the people of my adopted country, to be able to choose their own leaders and be assured of a peaceful transition from one government to the next.”

Thai police hold a press conference.

Unlike the junta that overthrew Thailand’s elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006, the one that ousted his popular sister Yingluck eight years later has shown a liking for political power. Nearly two years after the latest coup, the junta hangs on, continually extending its “roadmap to democracy” as even its handpicked cohorts oppose its efforts to foist an anti-democratic constitution on the kingdom.

In June, the first finance minister the junta appointed, the experienced and well-educated Sommai Phasee, made some telling remarks as the World Bank said nearly a third of Thai 15-year-olds were “functionally illiterate”, and that unless drastic measures were taken to fix this, Thai productivity and competitiveness would continue the decline the country has seen since 2012.

Sommai said he strongly agreed with the World Bank that education and human resources were critical to the future of the Thai economy and its political stability, but “I dare not speak up in the cabinet because there are three ministers responsible [for education and skills], and all are soldiers. We are still not walking on the right track and we are still walking slowly” in these areas.

He has since been replaced as finance minister.

Living in a military dictatorship doesn’t affect me directly. Having to earn a living by assisting the self-censorship of The Nation is annoying, but not significantly worse than abetting the pro-corporate propaganda of the Canadian papers I used to work for. And even under the occasional democratic regimes in Thailand, one cannot – by law – express one’s true feelings about the royalist oligarchy. Lèse majesté convictions have increased under the junta, but the Shinawatras were hardly more reluctant to abuse the monarchy-protection laws for their own political ends, or to use other means to stifle the critical media.

Still, I can’t help but worry about the future of the country where my daughter Natnicha was born and, in all likelihood, will have to function as an adult, trying to eke out a decent living and provide a rewarding life for her own kids.

Lukyi.

For the time being, though, Natnicha (better known as Lukyi) is doing OK in school, still top of her class in English and related subjects, for an overall grade-point average of 3 out of 4. She entered the dreaded teens in December, but is still Daddy’s good buddy, with a fun demeanour and good sense of humour. The other day she came home from school and said she had done an important exam. “Did you get 99%?” I asked. She frowned and, without hesitation, asked why I was docking her 1%.

My long-suffering wife Nuannoi (better known as Pong) runs the household efficiently, copes well with continual additions to the menagerie, nurses her aging husband back to health as required, and stretches our baht as the cost of living rises and my income has its ups and downs. Oh, and keeps me and the CR-V looking better than our age.

Age. I’m against it, as I come up against it. But mostly I’m still able to think a good thought. When I turned 63 in August, I was touched by many of the birthday greetings I received, posting:

I was pleasantly surprised that no one said, “Hey, Dave, you’re 63! When are you going to grow up?” If anyone had asked, of course, I would have had to say “Never.

“I live in a global playground. I’ve stood on top of the World Trade Center before morons knocked it down, I’ve peered over the Berlin Wall into a bizarre world that no longer exists. I’ve marvelled at the Sistine Chapel, at the great pyramids of the Egyptians and the Mayans, Westminster Abbey and the tower of Big Ben, roamed the halls and parapets of long-dead empires in Borobudur and Angkor. I’ve partied with backpackers in kibbutzim and on Mediterranean beaches, flown within metres of a kilometre-high waterfall in Venezuela, soaked up the warmth of the Caribbean, Andaman and South China seas. I’ve raced four-by-fours across salt flats in Arabia, lost quarters in Las Vegas slot machines, bought too many lady drinks in Bangkok bars. I’ve jumped out of an airplane, and ridden the Magic Bus from London to Nice, an army truck to a Sandinista boot camp, and a vintage train to a Jamaican rum factory. I’ve gazed upon the modernity of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak and upon the devastation of Mount St Helens, and survived the Boxing Day Tsunami.

“And on top of all that and much more in 40 countries on five continents, now in my autumn years, I have the privilege of watching a little girl grow up, smart enough to flourish despite the incompetence of her dad, who adopted her long after the smart-parenting manuals were out of print.

“She might grow up, but not me. Sorry, won’t happen.”

Happy New Year.

Tan Yong and I enjoy a balmy Boxing Day outside our house in Pak Chong, Nakhon Ratchasima province.

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.