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.

Policies of Privilege

By David Simmons

“Honesty is the best policy,” some of us still try to teach our kids. A few of us may also throw in “Cheaters never prosper,” but it’s getting more and more difficult to say that with a straight face to a trusting little girl.

By now anyone not comatose realizes the extent to which cheaters are not only prospering, they are denying prosperity to anyone not in their tiny clique of schemers, scammers and kleptocrats, elected and otherwise. But this shouldn’t have been a surprise. If the laws against theft – the ordinary kind, shoplifting or boosting a flat-screen TV or Beemer – were repealed, would your personal moral code keep you honest? Maybe; but many would say to hell with it, I’m grabbing what I can while there’s still something left to grab.

And that’s all the bankers have done. Governments – elected by us, the 50 per cent plus one – legalized the finance industry’s more sophisticated but far more damaging brand of theft, allowed the financiers to stack the ratings agencies and securities commissions and other so-called regulators with their accomplices, and so they went on a rampage. Wouldn’t you?

And if you were an elected official hungry for a lucrative corporate directorship upon leaving public service, would you do anything that could derail the gravy train? Ask Tony Blair.

All ethics are situational. My wife and I are from two wholly different cultures; I from a wealthy Western democracy, she from a farm in a poor Southeast Asian country that has had nearly as many military coups as elections. I’ve worked for a living since I was 16, but my work was rewarded. In her world, just surviving took a struggle; rewards were what she and her family dreamed could happen some day, with the right combination of smarts and good fortune. And, if necessary, cheating a bit.

She bought me a fancy designer leather wallet one day, proudly revealing that she had paid a fraction of what it was worth, because it had been stolen and recycled into the black market. She still doesn’t understand why I refused to accept it. She tried to make another deal for an air-conditioner for the house we have built upcountry; a former brother-in-law is in the delivery business, and a proportion of the deliveries “go missing” as a matter of routine. No one, certainly not the police, asks many questions if he or she gets a nice new TV or rice cooker once in a while at a nice discount.

I’m no saint. I do follow the “honesty is best” policy in theory, and it usually stands me in good stead: Friends and employers trust me, which is rewarding in more ways than one. But if it’s clear the theory is not going to work in a certain situation, I change lanes faster than Lewis Hamilton.

How does one work through such contradictions when bringing up a child in the way she should go? Cheaters do prosper; people who don’t accept “discounts” are losers, we see that more and more. Is there any point in clinging to a philosophy, nurtured in the formerly privileged West, that increasingly appears based on little but wishful thinking?

I suggest that there is. Morally decadent societies have always collapsed in the past, resulting in massive human misery, sometimes for centuries before those societies could resuscitate themselves; sometimes they never do. In the modern ultra-connected world, the preservation of a survival morality, based on human rights and co-operation, not on theft, is more crucial than ever. And yet it appears to be under threat from powers more formidable than we have seen since the falls of fascism and Soviet communism.

It might be up to the privileged to carry the torch of survival morality.

According to my analysis of modern Thai history (an analysis with which my Thai wife heartily disagrees), the most meaningful reforms were instituted by a man of great privilege, Thaksin Shinawatra. Let’s make no bones about it, Thaksin is the poster boy of the argument against the “cheaters never prosper” adage. His enemies hate him not because he was a crook, but because he was far better at it than they were. And after he weaselled his way into the premiership, he used his power to make himself and his cronies even more wealthy. But – and this is what really irked the elite – he also introduced reforms that reduced poverty, and installed a universal health-care system many Americans could only dream of.

I’m privileged too, always have been. I like to think I came by my prosperity more honestly than Thaksin did, but that might be gilding the lily. Just being born in Canada gave me advantages denied to most of my fellow human beings; a good family, a good education, good health, supportive mentors all came my way like warm breezes, welcome but not summoned, perhaps even undeserved. Warm breezes, while others endured blizzards of hardship and tragedy.

It’s still like that. I’m not wealthy by Western standards, I work six days a week to support myself and my family, but we have a nice life. Under the recently increased minimum wage in central Thailand (bitterly opposed by the Mercedes-driving right wing), a labourer working six days a week would earn about C$230 a month. Most months I net more than 13 times that.

So I can afford to turn down the black-market leather wallets and discounted “missing” air-conditioners, and still give my little girl a good education. And as long as I can in a world desperately short of role models, that curriculum will include “honesty is the best policy”.

That’s my privilege.

M’aider! Drowning Rats

By David Simmons

As is so often the case nowadays, I had to be reminded by a glance at my Facebook feed that as I write this, it is the May long weekend back “home” in Canada, a country I haven’t seen for more than a decade.

I couldn’t even remember the official name of the holiday; had to look it up on Wikipedia. (It’s the Victoria Day weekend.) More and more, the Internet is my only link to my homeland.

But there is much more than that to the disconnect I experience between my old home and my adopted one, something that occurred to me during a much better-known May holiday, on the first of the month: International Workers’ Day. Here in Thailand, it is a public holiday known in English as Labour Day. In Canada and the United States, that name is applied to a completely different holiday on the first Monday of September.

In the US, the difference derives from the reluctance of president Grover Cleveland to recognize a workers’ holiday that commemorated a massive act of anti-worker police brutality, the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886. But while the September workers’ holiday in Canada was not officially declared until 1894, it commemorates an earlier, Canada-only event that eventually led to the repeal of anti-union legislation. Outside Quebec, May 1 has never been very important to the Canadian labour movement.

It is unfair to disparage the North American Labour Days as “fake” simply because they do not coincide with the internationally preferred date, but the dichotomy has come to symbolize for me the great gulf between the lot of workers in East Asia and those in North America.

On the most recent May Day, there were sporadic protests in some North American cities, variously viewed as a resurgence or a death rattle of the Occupy movement. While the goals of Occupy are noble, they do seem to be too little too late. Wealth and power have gradually shifted from workers to a tiny oligopoly centred in the towers of the financial industry, and to profit-addicted mega-corporations that happily export jobs to other countries where workers are easier to exploit, while elected governments in Canada and the US look the other way, and the people who elected them are bought off by the resultant cheap goods in Wal-Mart.

What we have in North America is massive, probably irreversible, erosion of workers’ well-being. The word “erosion” derives from the Latin rodere, “to gnaw”; the word “rodent” derives from the same Latin root. The image presented is one of rats in $1,000 suits gnawing away ordinary people’s jobs, savings and pensions, and North Americans for the first time face the spectre of their children’s futures being less prosperous and rewarding than their own.

This could have been avoided. If workers had lived up to the spirit of Labour Day and marched and struck to preserve their rights, as their forebears had faced up to police truncheons and bullets and tear gas to win those rights, instead of merely using the first Monday of September as a last chance for a summer picnic with the family, if they had paid attention to what was going on around them, seen beyond the pro-consumer hype of free-trade agreements, had resisted the emasculation of the media by corporate monopolies, and had not squandered the great gift of the ballot box by electing anti-worker governments that allowed university tuition to rise beyond their children’s reach without accumulating huge debts, allowed banks to cook up “complex instruments” with which to sabotage the economic system while stealing from pension plans and enriching the oligarchy, and weakened unions.

But the wealth we in the “developed” world used to enjoy before the Wall/Bay Street mafiosi plundered it didn’t come out of thin air, nor was it “generated” by our own hard work, at least not entirely. Much of it was stolen in the first place from the “developing” world. That word “developing” began as a euphemism, but in the process of robbing their own middle class, the Western oligarchs and lapdog politicians have inadvertently enriched the East. And so we have “emerging economies”.

And here we find another Latin word, mergere, “to dip”, which gives rise to both “emerge” and “submerge”. In the past, Asia was forced underwater by the European colonizers and its own corrupt mandarins who enabled the exploiters. Now, old-fashioned colonization has vanished from East Asia, most recently in 1999 when Portugal returned Macau to Chinese rule, two years after the sun set on British Hong Kong. Globalization was supposed to be the new colonization, making theft of resources and enslavement of people more efficient through technology and deregulation.

To some extent, that has turned out to be the case, but there have been unintended consequences. China has become the new leader of Asia, and may soon take over the world. It has done this by manipulating the West’s two great modern economic systems, capitalism and communism, into a unique form of planned economy that has used Asian values (including corruption and brutality) to amass great power, while real wages of its huge population have gone up notably (admittedly from a very low base) at the same time as those in the West are dwindling. Underpinning this is the unsustainable debt that is rocking the foundations of Europe and North America, of which China is the main creditor.

Similar economic shifts have occurred elsewhere in the region, but much of Southeast Asia, while in various measures inspired by and benefiting from the “Chinese miracle”, has departed from that model by embracing democracy. Again, these are democracies with Asian characteristics, which means primarily that they brook a level of corruption officially frowned on by the West, though as the collusion between the corporate/financial mafia and political leadership becomes more blatant, Western frowning is now increasingly shrugged off as mere hypocrisy.

In the early 1980s, while I was working for the British Columbia Ministry of Highways trying to scrape together enough money to go back to college after Milton Friedman’s economic theories started destroying jobs everywhere – and had dried up opportunities in what had previously passed for my career – the right-wing provincial government tabled a sweeping set of anti-labour bills branded as “restraint”, very similar to the “austerity” plague that has infected most Western economies these days. This inspired something called the Solidarity Movement, as unionists around the province rebelled against the government.

A mass rally was called in Vancouver’s Empire Stadium, and the government initiated a campaign of threats against any provincial employees who attended. Many of us, including me, ignored the threats and exercised our right of free assembly. Government goons came to my workplace to see if anyone was missing; my boss told the goons I was indeed absent but on a legitimate “flex time” day off (which was true) and that he neither knew nor cared how I spent my free time (which was only partly true). About 45,000 attended the rally.

Union bosses met with the government and won some concessions, averting a general strike in exchange; but it was a last gasp, for the Decline of the Western Empire initiated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was well under way. Canadian workers kept their head above water better than many others, but in the end its was submergere for all but the privileged Rodentia order.

The Solidarity Movement took its name from the concurrent Solidarność in Poland. Of course the two were very different; one group fighting to obtain rights from a Communist dictatorship and the other fighting to prevent a right-wing holocaust from stealing the rights they already had. In the same way, the modern Occupy movement claims inspiration from the Arab Spring, but the needs and aspirations of the two are very different, and it remains to be seen whether either will achieve anything in the end.

Meanwhile here in Southeast Asia, workers are emerging as a force. It’s early days, and just like in the West, a well-funded right-wing minority is wielding its power to keep working people down. In Thailand, the Chamber of Commerce fights tooth and claw against the “populist” measures of the Shinawatra family brought to power by the once-oppressed rural majority of the North and Northeast regions, while the elitist Democrats hold power in the capital, Bangkok. Over the past few years we have seen a military coup and deadly riots, and the once-lively media have run for cover. But more sober observers than the Chamber and its allies in the Federation of Thai Industries recognize that Thailand is empowered by its workers, not its corrupt elite and certainly not by its “revered institutions”. Parasitical industries like the garment trade are fleeing for greener pastures in still-oppressed Cambodia and Myanmar, while the automotive and electronics industries flourish – and provide decent-paying jobs and career opportunities.

Back in the ’80s, we thought we had it all, but our leaders let us down. To turn back the tide, to repair the erosion, would take a lot of effort and willpower. I think it’s too late “back home”, but this old leftie sees reason to hope in emerging Asia. That hope will be dashed, again, if the workers of East Asia drop the ball like we did.