MISSISSIPPI SAMADHI: YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN… BUT YOU CAN’T STAY

Don’t go looking through your cookbooks for this one, trying to find what comes after masala, trying to figure out just how this guy might mix and mash a single metaphor for public consumption without resorting to various linguistic chutneys and high-flying adjectives that might be seldom used and therefore perfect for describing the indescribable, the little upward-flowing diverticula of consciousness and lapses in synapses that occur when a sentient being becomes caught in the cross-fire between his responsibilities and his desires, his past and his future. No, samadhi is meditation, pure and simple, hopefully, and more than a little appropriate considering my own Asian leanings, precariously toward the horizontal, and the birthplace and birth race of my wife. Every people get the religion they need I suspect, and meditation founded in Hinduism and grounded with Buddhism, certainly fills the bill. If anybody needs to stop the internal dialog and take a chill without taking a pill, it’s them, and by extension me. It could have been disastrous, after all, taking my copper-toned slanty-eyed succubus of a wife home to meet the homies after years of whisperings and wonderings and educated guesses gleaned from the pages of National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Of course most people don’t know the difference between Thailand and Taiwan, so facts tend to be half-baked at best, three minutes in the microwave of public opinion, stir, then serve liberally, for Mississippi at least, with ketchup, as in catching up with the present. She charmed them of course, just like she charmed the pants off me seven years ago. The Asian dragon-lady image is the stuff of downtown Hollywood after all, not Thai Town, and anybody who has tasted the forbidden fruit of inter-racial Biblical knowledge knows that those fetching displays of exotic product are much more likely to have a stuffed animal lying on the bed back home than whips and chains or pipes and papers.

Broken English itself can even be charming at first byte, full of wild gesticulations and broad non-grammatical vocal inflections full of heartfelt if inarticulate meaning, washed down with frothy smiles. That shit gets old of course and there’s no substitute for correct grammar, something few Asian immigrants over the age of thirteen ever accomplish. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, climbing ladders and accomplishing through wiles and intuition what she lacks in vision and technical expertise, gaining more by standing under than by understanding. That’s not the history they teach in books of course, full of wars and conflicts, generals and majors, general snafus and major disasters. It’s the history of cultural drift, following paths of least resistance and imitating successes, long before anybody thought about writing it down and claiming credit. The Industrial Revolution may have had its heroes, but the Agricultural one didn’t, just people following their instincts and their neighbors, to better pastures and a better future. Governments notwithstanding and frequently falling, Asia is more a continent and culture of accommodation than enforcement. That’s what’s held China together for millennia, the culture in continuous transmission, outlasting and even absorbing hostile governments. That’s the basis of ancestor-worship, essentially time-worship, dedication to a lineage extending back into time immemorial, all converging on a single point presumably. If many cultures pride themselves on their individuality, Asia prides itself on its conformity. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, favoring compromise and conciliation over conflict, the perfect breeding ground for either Buddhism or Communism; take your pick. Asia’s pretty cool, but can become stifling and over-stuffed, silly and superstitious. It can become full of itself and full of IT, the smell of decay overwhelming.

So can Mississippi. If LA reminds my wife Tang of Bangkok, then Mississippi reminds her of Chiang Rai, my home of birth reminding her of hers. I guess there’s some poetic justice there. Her parents didn’t come from there originally any more than mine came from Mississippi. My grandmother was born in Harlem back when it was full of German immigrants. They came south for opportunity and land. Tang’s probably did the same, except north, and from Lampang. Ironically while Chiang Rai is relatively prosperous nowadays by Thai standards, Mississippi still lags in most standards of US development. That’s not all bad of course. Land prices in Mississippi and Chiang Rai are similar right now. Wages are not. If anything Mississippi is more beautiful, probably the greenest place I’ve ever seen, including Brazil and Ireland. It has its problems of course, not the least of which is a crime rate in Jackson that must rival that of Johannesburg in creativity, if not sheer numbers. The latest fad is car-jacking. The thief pirates your car while you’re still in it. That way the engine’s running and you can open the door for the new recipient of your old car. It saves time that way and you get to inspect the sidewalk. That somewhat mitigates the circumstances of the other major problem: a police-state attitude toward law enforcement. If that only applied to the mugger fuggers of course then no problem. But no, it applies to me. They wait on the highways at night like fishermen monitoring a pole for any slight wiggles in an imaginary line which represents your trajectory from the immediate present into an indeterminate but well-defined future. They can help you with that; no meaningless infinities allowed here. Ever had a gun held on you by Bozos in Blue talking like the characters on ‘King of the Hill?’ I have. I’ve got a witness. It ain’t pretty. They had the wrong guy. Imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d been the right guy. Imagine infinity.

Mississippi has come a long way since ‘the nigra problem’ and its attendant bifurcation of society into rednecks, blacks and so-called ‘nigger-lovers,’ i.e. me and a few others with errant DNA. There were also a few ‘Uncle Toms’ but they usually didn’t last long. It’s truly gratifying to see blacks and whites working together at all levels of public service and if they aren’t mixed together at all levels of society, that’s mostly an economic problem, not a racial one. White flight to the suburbs didn’t start in Jackson nor will it end there and many blacks are counted in those numbers also. As a friend says, “every murder in Jackson means six new residents of Brandon,” my old country home and now suburb. Still old habits die hard and some whites just don’t know how to act around blacks as equals. Mexicans have arrived in heavy numbers also, presumably doing many of the jobs that blacks used to do, or as the president of Mexico once famously said, “even blacks won’t do.” Old habits die hard. Thais are routinely scared of black people and excess body hair. It’s as much esthetic as racial. Thai women spend millions trying to whiten their skin and pluck those pesky underarm hairs religiously. You heard it here first. They’re scared of ghosts, too. As for Mississippi, the few Thais there pretty much got the run of the place. There’s only one Thai restaurant in Jackson so sales are good while the food is uneventful by Thai standards, ditto with Mexican food. Good things take time. Coming back to LA is like landing in Bangkok for Tang, Thai Town a half-way house for recent immigrants. She can even speak northern Thai dialect there, eat Northern food, and talk Northern gossip. I can even be an ex-pat in my own country of birth, hell of a deal. It saves on flight costs. It’s a way of life, crossing borders in minds if not on maps.

Globalization Reconsidered

America is a hard subject to talk about, because though I may be a warm-weather expatriate, I’m not an ex-patriot. I defend America against cheap shots all the time. If you want to take your shots with me in hearing distance, it’ll cost ya’. Mostly though I don’t want to make light of a tragic situation, but I’m more often accused of being ‘too heavy’ than ‘too lite’, so I’ll forge on. In my wildest dreams I’d like to shine some light on an increasingly tragic situation. Since my creative MO tends to be to put something heavy in a light format, please don’t misunderstand. My heart goes out to all those affected by the most recent mass murder on a college campus, as it went out to all those who went before, as it goes out to all those affected by the tragedies of Iraq, as it goes out to anyone who has ever been the victim of a death for anything other than ‘natural causes.’ I mean my heart really goes out. I mean my heart really really really goes out, to the point that I’m not sure if there’s anything left. I let my ‘virtual heart,’ a hypothetical entity constructed of memory and algorithms, cover most of the mundane tasks just to protect the real thing for emergencies. Marriage will do that to you. Some of the most intense love I’ve ever felt was when I was single with no prospects nor any desired, intensified through non-fulfillment I suppose. I could find love in a child’s smile, a kitten’s purr, or under a rock. “If tears could turn turbines… ,” but I’ve said all that before. The American golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” that’s sex. The Chinese equivalent, “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do unto you, that’s marriage.

So the body count of American mass murder victims and Islamic suicide bomber victims would seem to be in about a psychological dead heat, if not a statistical one, so maybe it’s time to ask just what the Hell is going on. Is this as much a part of our modern era as video-on-demand, universal wi-fi and low-carb diets? Have we come this far forward only to collapse in upon ourselves for lack of a compass to show us a better way? It’s not just Imperial America, nor Islamistan. It’s the whole world, nations and cultures becoming caricatures of themselves, either for lack of imagination or better options. Call it cultural drift. For example, when or where could you go in Latin America and not see political demonstrations, blocked roads, mass marches, or tin-horn dictators, both left and right, making fancy speeches that accomplish absolutely nothing? I’ve traveled in Latin America for thirty years and that has only increased with the increased freedom to do so. What has changed is the emergence of a middle class due largely to closer economic and political cooperation with the US, where many of their citizens have been and continue to go. I’m sorry if that’s not politically correct; I call them as I see them. All the labor strikes and political manifestaciones accomplish little.

Asia, where such things are generally proscribed by law or tradition, has surged far ahead economically from far behind a century ago. They’ve got other problems, though. When or where could you go in East Asia and not find stifling individual conformity, monopolistic greed, obsession with status and prestige, and educated women unwilling to look beyond the kitchen and the bedroom for self-fulfillment? None of that’s going away any time soon. The first thing ex-premier Thaksin did as premier of Thailand was to propose a law that would put all his competitors out of business. Nice guy. His political disciples were just re-elected while he celebrated in Hong Kong. When or where could you go in South Asia and not find a racist caste system, assembly-line prostitution, crushing poverty, and systematic social injustice? Though the caste system was abolished by the Indian constitution, it persists. Most temple prostitution was ended by the British during their rule, though it is rumored to still exist in the south. Literacy in India now hovers around fifty percent with women in lopsided disparity. Many historically have opted for Islam, where there is at least some caste-less dignity, especially for the darker-skinned people.

When or where would you go in the Arab or Muslim world and not find the subjugation of women, restricted personal freedoms, religious hypocrisy, and near enslavement of the lowest classes? This shows no improvement with the rise of religious fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia finally outlawed slavery in 1962, though Mauritania didn’t get around to it until 1980, and it is rumored to still exist. Though politically sensitive to discuss, much of the current problems in Darfur and Chad relate to the ongoing ‘Arabization’ of the Sudan and Sahel which tends to further reduce the status of African blacks, even when Muslim. It also reflects traditional rivalries between herders and planters. As elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the world and other historical times, herders tend to dominate their sedentary agricultural subjects, in some cases adopting the culture of the ruled, the better to rule them. When or where could you go in sub-Saharan Africa and not find the world’s worst poverty, a double-digit AIDS rate, and political corruption that creates and sustains the worst problems? Options are not much of an option when you’ve got a life expectancy about equal to that of a gorilla in captivity. Hit songs in Nigeria tell about duping Western suckers in the numerous scams that long pre-date the Internet.

Europe may offer the most hope these days, given their self-reinvention as a unit, if indeed that succeeds after two disastrous World Wars, seventy years of Communism and subsequent ‘ethnic cleansing’ that has left scars that will not heal any time soon. Northern Europe leads the world in political liberalism, social justice, and economic well-being, largely made possible by low population densities, high education levels, and lack of social divisions, but that’s not the half of it. The South and East are still locked in a medieval past of Machiavellian morality and Mafia-like institutions. Where would you go in the former Communist heartland and not find archaic industries, environmental degradation, massive unemployment, and political instability? Women are the biggest export these days except in a Soviet Union and Central Asia lucky enough to have significant oil deposits. If America is any different from the rest it may only be in the fact that you can find some of almost all the other pluses and minuses in one single country. The Pacific Northwest is as politically, environmentally and socially liberal as anywhere in the world though, like Scandinavia, short on ethnicity. The South has yet to rid itself totally of the same instincts that fostered slavery. The Rust Belt has environmental degradation and high unemployment to boot. Wall Street is second to none in corporate greed, nor Microsoft slack in its love of the Monopoly board.

Isn’t the danger of globalization the homogenization of culture and loss of traditions? If that means loss of prejudice, intolerance, degeneracy, and injustice, then it seems like we could use some of that if there were some reasonable standards of what to expect. Generic development is probably not a bad start, if socially and environmentally enlightened. Ironically America and Islam share some of the most dubious traits- religious fundamentalism, violence, and oil-based politics. At least America can still put a little ‘fun’ into fundamentalism; it goes down better with a little lead guitar. Those Muslims got no sense of humor. Maybe people will get so depressed that they will stop reproducing. That might be a blessing in disguise. Lower populations could likely solve all of our problems except one, racism. That’ll take some creative inter-breeding. Sounds good to me. We all started out as one people before the diaspora. Why not re-shuffle the deck?

Thailand’s F***** word

Farang: 1) person of European extraction, 2. anything of European extraction, 3. guava. So here in Thailand potatoes are man farang, white people are khon farang, and Christmas is trut farang, ad infinitum.

So go the Thai dictionaries, talking much and explaining nothing, not least of which is the origin of the f****** word. It follows you around like a bad smell if you’re a white person in Thailand. It speaks volumes if you’re Thai. It explains why the weather’s hot and the food is not. It explains why some cars are big and so are some bellies. In fact, there’s not much that can’t be described as either Thai or Farang, or maybe sometimes Chinese, but that’s a sore subject, because Thais are sure of nothing so much as that they’re NOT Chinese, even though, genetically, well, you’d be hard-pressed to find the chromosomal difference and in raw immigration figures, well, that’s OK, because they ‘become’ Thai, if not in the first generation, then at least by the second or third. That’s convenient, since their features are largely indistinguishable facially and racially. It’s even more convenient since they run the country. Chinese names are forbidden to be used by Thai citizens and Chinese language is only recently making a comeback because of its obvious commercial utility and the success of the China Dolls’ song ‘Wo Ai Ni’ across the sub-continent in both Thai and Mandarin languages. Thais are nothing if not pragmatic. The number of pragmatists walking the streets of Pattaya after midnight would shock the socks, and maybe more, off Jesus, Muhammad, and Hasan-e Sabbah, too. The Buddha just smiles. He’s seen all this before.

Farangs are different, regardless of what you call them, be it Gringo, Gaijin, or Lao Wai. They have to mess with everything, sticking their big noses where they don’t belong, Africa, Asia, and America, building factories and building fences, drawing lines and claiming countries. The last Mexican governor of California Pio Pico probably said it best as he saw his state being overrun by Yankees “cultivating farms, establishing vineyards, erecting mills, sawing up lumber, building workshops, and doing a thousand other things which seem natural to them, but which Californians (i.e. Mexicans) neglect or despise.” And he was Spanish, a European mind you, so the distinction is as much cultural as racial. This has always been my objection to the term ‘Farang’, in that the white skin itself means nothing, and says much more about the person using the term than the persons referred to. Does a Russian really have anything in common with a Portuguese person? In most cases the people referred to are northern European of course, they of the Industrial Revolution and the Big Bang for your buck, the same ones who forced China and Japan’s ports to open at gunpoint. Farang. They mess everything up. The nay-sayers have a point to be sure, the list of transgressions easily filling the narrow zone between Iraq and a hot place. But Farangs also brought “liberte’, egalite’, and fraternite’”, democracy and doughnuts, on their wish list. So the problem, if there is one, is largely academic, and depends on the tone of voice to establish its intent. Any word can be insulting if it’s said in an insulting way, and of course if I want to use the word, then that’s fine, just as any black American feels free to use the ‘N’ word.

My objection to the term ‘pahsah Farang’ (Farang language) has been especially vitriolic, objecting to the former Premier’s use of the term as especially misguided. “There is no such thing as Farang language! It’s English,” I would object. On this I concede defeat. There is a ‘pahsah Farang’ and long has been, likely even being the origin of the term in Asia. It started in the Crusades, when all Europeans were considered ‘Franks’ by the homies, and their language was the ‘Frankish language’ or lingua franca, literally ‘pahsah Farang’. This was not French, mind you, but a mixture of French and Italian and anything else handy in the Mediterranean region, maybe a final attempt to re-unify Latin. Marco Polo wrote in it, or something like it, it being fluid by definition. The term now means ‘compromise language, used when there is no common language’. The common jargon typically spoken by Thais with foreigners would hardly qualify as real English, but it would certainly qualify as Farang language. It’s as though nothing has changed except that Pidgin English has supplanted Pig Latin as the axis of Western civilization moved west, and the rest is history. And so is the mystery also solved as to where the term ‘Farang’ comes from. Most have assumed a derivation of ‘France’. Well, close, but not exactly, for those were the days of the Holy Roman Empire and nationalism was still but a racial wet dream. Thus those Romanized post-Gallic Germanic Franks left their imprint on the footnotes of history. They must have had a lot of gall.

Of course the issue is not so academic when you have to hear the word all the time, usually directed at you, if you’re of European extraction. It’s not so insulting as it is tiring, until somebody gets the bid idea to charge you ‘Farang price’. Now we’ve got a problem, and it’s hard to avoid when the government itself does it, as in Laos. Well, OK, maybe foreigners shouldn’t get the socialist subsidized rate on public transportation. I doubt they’ve signed on to the WTO. Vietnam even charges three rates, one for locals, one for foreigners, and one for returning overseas Vietnamese. Communist Vietnamese don’t miss too many tricks at turning a buck, usually at your expense. If the street vendor smiles too largely, beware! He’s probably ripping you off! Thailand should be beyond such nonsense, but don’t be too sure. Prejudices die hard, even petty ones. The local ChiangMai-ChiangRai bus at one point printed on the ticket, in Thai of course, that ‘full Farang price’ was paid. Huh? (I don’t make this stuff up btw.) Interestingly, I never found any proof that there was an actual price differential, so the issue, as usual, was one only of principle and symbolism and good manners. These things matter. Ask Kramer. The blurb was eventually removed at someone’s behest other than my own btw. I persevere, and have developed a non-responsive psychological ‘blocking mechanism’, which is basically a way of ignoring problematic speech and behavior. Ignore the ignorance! Now there’s some useful symmetry for you.