The Incredible Sinking Dollar

Just when you think the dollar couldn’t suck any more or any worse than it already does, then it starts going down again, kind of like London Bridge, I guess. You stateside people could care less, right? I can’t blame you. Any effect there only shows up in higher prices, especially oil, whose producers are very aware of ‘real’, that is, stable Euro-based, value. Considering that the US has some of the lower free-market prices around anyway, those effects are somewhat mitigated. So what’s the cause of the once-almighty dollar’s slide into oblivion? That’s the $64K question. The simple answer is that people are buying fewer of them. So why are people buying fewer of them? There are many reasons, including lower interest rates, better options elsewhere, and the likelihood that China has bought about as many dollar-denominated securities as it can reasonably justify. Another reason is that the US is spending them like crazy, and borrowing like crazy, the other side of the flow chart. This is largely due to ‘the war’, always a pricey expenditure, hardly the economic justification of war that conspiracy people like to make it out as. Then there are the low-tax policies that are doctrine for the Bush administration in general. Unfortunately low taxes mean high borrowing. The resulting flow makes the dollar weaker and creditors richer, trickle-up economics. Republicans like to pretend they’re rewarding entrepreneurship and fiscal responsibility by keeping taxes and welfare benefits low, but there’s no shortage of welfare for the rich when Bear Stearns is about to go belly up, nor any excess responsibility when predatory lending practices create a mortgage and credit crisis that ends up affecting us all, innocent bystanders included. Fortunately talk is cheap, but knowledge short, and scuttlebutt thicker than Beijing smog when it comes to economics. How are we supposed to figure it out when the ‘experts’ are just making it up as they go along? There is no science of economics, only theory.

I think the main thrust of capitalist theory is that as long as the economy keeps growing, then any wrinkles will get smoothed out with time if not inflation. In other words, it’s a confidence game. As long as everyone keeps the faith, then the economy keeps growing. They may very well be right. I used to be very skeptical of such theory; after all how can an economy keep growing when resources are limited? I tried to imagine our culture spreading through outer space in some sort of metaphorical expanding universe, but no matter how romantic the image in its appeal to me, space travel is probably more of a drain than a boon to the economy. The advent of the Information Age has shown the limitations of my skepticism and earlier lack of vision. In the computer age knowledge truly is power and there are no limits to resources when you’re talking about intellectual property. But without Communism to keep it honest, capitalism no longer is. Europe’s even getting in on the act now, with eight-figure annual CEO disbursements, predatory lending practices, mortgage scandals, the whole schmear. Not surprisingly England is at the lead in this, but others are learning quickly. Ironically Russia, hardly the richest country in Europe, has by far the most billionaires, highlighting the inherent injustices. This makes you wonder what their Communist era was really all about, apparently little more than a police state to reign in the wildest impulses of the rich and corrupt. France and Germany both have conservative business-oriented governments anxious to dismantle suffocating welfare states that took years to build. For their part labor unions are famous for claiming their piece of the pie without ever really considering the possibility that maybe they should share a piece of the investment risk also. The labor/management dichotomy is critical to labor’s dinosaur way of thinking.

So what does all this have to do with the shrinking dollar? Maybe we should be asking why the dollar was so high in the first place. It hasn’t always been in fact. During the last war, yes the famous V-fingered war, the dollar fell as low or lower than this, and inflation rose much faster. This followed the Bretton Woods agreement of 1972 in which exchange rates were allowed to float instead of being fixed rates. This was after previous B-W agreements pegging rates to the dollar as opposed to gold, which some diehards still long for as currency as if its value were transcendent. In reality it only became useful as currency when there was plenty of it and its value well known, like silver before it, beads and shells before that, and tobacco in times of war. So dollars became world currency after WWII, but it wasn’t until the ‘Reagan Revolution’ that the dollar rose to new stellar heights. Whether the US wanted it that way is debatable I guess. Does a queen bee ask for workers to stuff her with royal jelly? It’s a privileged position, but entails loss of freedom for the royal fat-butt, not to mention the nauseating task of laying eggs for the whole world’s use. In the currency metaphor, the royal jelly is consumer goods and the eggs are dollars. To export to the US was to mine for gold. The US is the only country in the world that can’t re-value its currency, at the total mercy of the others, who need dollars to do business. Increasingly that means China, the modern world’s workhorse whose own currency is virtually useless outside its own borders. China has always demanded one-sided trade, payment in currency rather than a two-way flow of trade. This is what provoked the Opium Wars of the 1800’s, since that was the only other currency acceptable to the celestials, however illegal. I guess it made them more celestial. In all fairness opium was routinely given to British children in the early 1800’s to quiet them down. It worked like a charm. Things only came to a head when the balance of trade turned in Britain’s favor.

Now China buys T-bills and other US securities denominated in US dollars. Though much scuttlebutt has been bandied about Internet and conspiracy circles about ‘the loan’ or ‘loans’ ‘propping up’ the US economy which they can ‘call in’ anytime they want, I can’t find any of this anywhere, just one-way trade and large holdings in specie. Call it Chinese-style communism. So what’s the bottom line here at Ground Zero? Well, with China saturated with dollars and the Thai baht stable, you can bet they’re buying plenty of these now, too, strengthening the local currency. That and high oil prices are fueling inflation like I’ve never seen here, at the same time that the economy is flat from governmental neglect. Thus with the dollar weak and the Thai baht strong, a simultaneous double whammy, much of the economic advantages here have faded. Couple that with increasingly restrictive and arbitrary visa policies, and the bloom is off the rose. With the US real estate boom now faded and hotel rates moderating accordingly from their highs of a year or two ago, while prices in Thailand are inflating rapidly, a room in LA doesn’t cost much more than one in Bangkok. Food costs are less here, but so are portions. The buffet lunch in downtown Chiang Rai isn’t much cheaper than a Chinese buffet in Flagstaff, AZ, cities of similar size. Gasoline in Thailand is about four bucks a gallon, the US cheaper, depending on your location. Most traditional Third World countries have gasoline prices higher than the US, so who’s complaining? Everybody, of course. More importantly, who’s doing anything to change it? I notice a lot of new LP gas stations popping up in Thailand. I haven’t noticed them anywhere else.

So Thailand is not so cheap anymore and the US is not so expensive. The US is in fact looking better all the time. US wages are getting a boost for the first time in years and we might very well have a responsible presidency on the horizon. Interest rates are dropping drastically, so it’s a bad time for saving, but a good time for doing business. Housing prices are lower than they have been for several years. Foreclosures are rampant, bad for the original owners, but good for someone looking to pick up a bargain. A cheap dollar makes US products more attractive overseas, possibly moving it to a more favorable balance of trade. Maybe it’s time to give the US another look. Since my wife just got a K-1 visa, I think I will, for a while at least. There are still places there I haven’t been, like Puerto Rico, maybe? Hmmm…..

Last Days- About a Boy called Kurt

It’s probably a few days too early to remember Kurt Cobain on the fourteenth anniversary of his death April 5, but it’s never too early or too late to celebrate the appearance of a half-way decent movie on TV, even cable, which seems to be a bit lamer in Asia than elsewhere. It’s even harder when you’re stealing the signal from the Philippines so have no monthly guide to what’s on that month and your remote control’s on the blink so you don’t even know what’s on that day. You have to be alert. The worst part is always catching a movie in progress and maybe seeing it several times before you finally get it all in the right order. Fortunately some movies give the title at the end also. Unfortunately some don’t. In a way it’s good since it forces you to judge a movie on its own merits and your own critical skills, rather than advance reviews and sales figs. I’ve discovered a few gems on my own that way, like ‘Crash’ before it got flick of the year and ‘Babel’ copied it stylistically, or ‘Donnie Darko’ before it became a cult classic or the director’s cut came out or Jake Gyllenhaal became a major star and frolicked with Heath Ledger in Mr. Ang’s classic Brokebutt Mountain.

So I was so desperate for some true creativity that I welcomed a strange movie that came on at ten in the evening the other night. The best ones typically came on later than that, or earlier depending on your reference point, but that only works when jet-lagged or insomniac. Still I usually crash at ten or shortly after, so need some impetus to add some wood to the fire and stay up later. That came from a strange movie that started off something like an update version of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, though it quickly became clear that these were drug-addled meshes, of a young rocker avoiding responsibility and his friends and almost everything else but his own fantasy world. When he finally gets carried out of his house, in pieces, in the last scene, parallels with certain historical figures became obvious, and quickly confirmed when closing credits named Gus Van Sant as the director of Last Days, loosely based on Kurt Cobain’s ultimate demise.

The movie is worth seeing, if not for the biography of Cobain, which it’s not, then for the sheer artistry of Van Sant’s work. While it may seem exploitative to concentrate on an artist’s downfall rather than his highlights, it’s also enlightening. Van Sant certainly has a right, being a Pacific Northwesterner himself with subculture credentials in Drugstore Cowboy and other films, and an outspoken homosexual himself. Anybody who would put William Burroughs in cameo appearances is okay in my book. Perhaps more to the point was that Cobain himself wasn’t so enamored of his own highlights. While some critics may feel that the work was ‘oddly disjointed’, that’s probably the case with heroin addiction itself, isn’t it? If the work was not a biography, then neither was it a documentary, but rather a work of art. Is Picasso’s work not ‘oddly disjointed’? People are so accustomed to seeing film as a medium the visual equivalent of pulp fiction novels that they’re closed to other uses of the medium. The same is true of music, in particular Cobain’s music. While a simple take would consider grunge a successful blend of heavy metal and punk, Cobain himself was at heart a poet, or he wouldn’t have had fans the likes of Patti Smith, nor me for that matter. It’s no coincidence that grunge all but died with him.

While some may criticize Cobain for his failure as a role model, that’s certainly a role he never asked for, and frankly, any culture that looks for role models in rock-and-roll musicians probably deserves what it gets. To say that maybe they take themselves a bit too seriously would be an understatement. The ‘Death Cab for Cuties’ leader said a couple years ago that it was his job to interpret the world and its politics for his listeners. That’s nice work if you can get it, but the main job is to entertain, pure and simple. The fact that Cobain never aspired to be a culture hero is a credit to him. The fact that others did may have been what killed him. Looking in a mirror can be scary sometimes, especially when it’s weirdly distorted and lots of other people are looking, too. A friend of mine said school let out early that day in Japan. I became a fan from watching the ‘Live Unplugged’ gig, but mostly posthumously. If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly is clear now that many of the most famous artists and entertainers of all time got there not necessarily by skill alone, but equally by luck. My off-hand five-finger calculation is about equal parts skill, marketing, longevity, timing, and pure dumb luck. If that’s not obvious by how many underdogs rise to the top, it’s certainly obvious by how many industry darlings fall flat. Feature films may have always been and will forever be dominated by ‘the industry’, given their high production costs and massive organization required, but everything else is fair game.

Pop music, including rock, blues, jazz, hip-hop, salsa, merengue, cumbia, ranchera, mawlam, gantreum, luke toong, rai, bhangra, etc. is just that, people’s music, and left to its own devices, will likely stay that way. It was only when ‘the industry’ took over American/English pop music in the mid-70’s that the non-English-speaking world really became aware of it. Apart from the Beatles, who were marketed under a Thai name, the rest of the 60’s oeuvre was discovered in Thailand only after the mass marketing of The Eagles, John Denver, and the Bee Gees had opened doors. I assume it was similar in the rest of the world. This in turn inspired and revived a Thai music industry that thrives to this day. Still the live entertainer in Thailand is little more than a human jukebox and little more is expected or him than to faithfully reproduce a song exactly as it was recorded and played ad infinitum on the radio. Accordingly Thais clap as a song starts, at the point of recognition, not at its end as a reward for a job well done. Radio’s even more psychologically numbing, sometimes repeating a song immediately after its first play. If a song is judged by your inability to get it out of your head, this’ll put it over the top. How groups like Carabao ever did truly creative work makes their success even more amazing.

Maybe Hollywood, whether the film or the music industries, is no place for the truly creative individual, alone with his art in a sometimes hostile world. The emphasis these days is certainly more on attitude than art, more on technological posture than technical perfection. Thus technology gives and technology takes away. Accordingly I deplore the ‘dumbness’ inherent in the new mass media while admiring the democracy. But is the new Internet democracy capable of creating anything significant? Much work has been processed through the ways and means of Internet, but does anything owe its existence to it? Communism was great at distributing wealth but never created much. It would have been interesting to see where Cobain would be in his career right now if he’d survived. Most of the Grunge set have dropped from the public eye if not from life altogether, all except Chris Cornell, ex-Sound Garden. He always seemed a bit more ‘commercial’ than the rest, though I can appreciate his giving Artis the Spoonman some publicity. Kurt himself dismissed Eddie Vedder as ‘corporate’, but it’s not always easy for a poet to understand a story-teller, kind of like John and Paul. Twenty-seven seems to be the magic age for rock suicides, the age where you either straighten up or check out, doesn’t it? That’s the age I finally left Mississippi ‘for good’, so the psychological profile fits.

If Cobain were still alive I could see him singing some severe gutter blues, where his angst and anguish really lay, and a direction that fellow Grunge junkie Scott Weiland drifted toward. Maybe with time he would’ve drifted toward a more country-style blues like his hero Leadbelly, but we’ll never know, will we? With an oeuvre that consists of a scarce few works, we’ll never know how far he could have gone, but he was certainly more than a flash in the pan. I think history will see him as a latter-day Robert Johnson who sold his soul so he could play guitar, a tragic figure imbued with tragedy. Maybe one day a computer will channel his spirit and we’ll get the posthumous collection. Meanwhile see the movie. It’s got no Nirvana music, nor biographical information, but unflinchingly follows the downward slide of a US hero and heroin shooter, all without any graphic images. The movie’s been out a couple years by now, but better late than never.

Technology’s Rainbow in a Dumb-Down World

So now there’s a TV show called, “Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?” I’m glad people find our current ‘dumbing-down’ humorous. More accurately it should probably be called ‘dumbing-up’ since it doesn’t imply cultural backwardness. On the contrary technology seems to be the cause of the new ignorance. With so many machines to do so much of your thinking for you, why bother doing it yourself? Though statistics and percentages seem rather out of place when discussing degrees and states of consciousness, still it seems reasonable to see the brain as a muscle like any other, subject to atrophy with disuse. The greatest invention of the last century, the computer, has been reduced to R & R hero-worshippers getting their thrills being virtual friends with each other on MySpace, FaceBook, and others, saying brilliant things like, “Thanks for the add, man,” as though it’s only logical that someone’s sense of self-esteem would be dependent upon acceptance into a club open to anyone. Mostly it’s just harmless juvenile buddy stuff I figure, and beneficial in that some isolated alienated teenage potential artist/intellectual growing up in, oh I don’t know, say Bumfug, Mississippi, can find friends with common interests in other places that he’s having trouble finding at home. The only disturbing thing is that that kid may very well be in a highly diverse place like Berkeley, CA, with poorly developed social skills as a result of having adopted the computer as a surrogate friend and the Internet as a way of life instead of having normal relationships with normal people, real live girls in particular. As a tool the computer is incredible, as is Internet as a central database bringing together every sort of information from every conceivable source in one common space and format, available to random access in real time. It’s only as an end in itself, a way of life, that it all begins to look trivial and absurd and downright dangerous. But if it’ll make more people more content with a more compartmentalized life and save the vast Nature scenes for me, then it’ll all work out fine I guess. Don’t fence ME in.

The best part about the new social Internet is the expansion of democracy implied and intended, mostly in the fields of entertainment but also in politics. It’s certainly not inappropriate for YouTube to sponsor a presidential debate- though I’m sick and tired of seeing stupid video clips take over spaces formerly given to text- and it’s not inconceivable that ‘Internet revolution’ could at some point as easily refer to a revolution by Internet as one of Internet. Mostly though the most discernible impact is in the field of entertainment, whether good or bad it’s too early to tell. The recording industry is in a shambles. Is that bad? They’ve been in bed so long with the film industry that it’s hard to tell whether you’re watching a music video or a film trailer. That was when there were music videos, now mostly displaced by filler and fluff. So now they try to play FTSE with the fashion industry, as though we’re all just dying to see what Fergie and Will I. Am are going to be wearing at the Grammys. Three years ago Black-Eyed Peas were playing street fairs; now they’re waiting in line to host game shows, after having issued state of the union addresses from Moscow to Beijing. This is obviously the degenerate mop-up phase of urban music, long after ‘old school’, ‘new school’, and ‘classic phase’. Should I get some vicarious thrill at seeing self-proclaimed fashionistas wearing Calvin K.’s with their guys in penguin suits? These are the ‘alternative’ musicians, for God’s sake, preening and posing like Britney and Christina and Justin. I’m glad P. Diddy and Jay Z have as much money as Elton and Mick and God in less than half the time while espousing street values and ghetto revenge, but what happened to the music? That’s what you go to MySpace for. Everybody’s equal there. The Beatles stand right next to Townes Van Zandt right next to muddy Waters right next to the garage band down the street. You’re only as good as your stuff. YouTube’s doing the same with film and video. Want to finally see that Kenneth Anger film that you studied back in film school? It’s there, with Stan Brakhage, Jean Cocteau, and all the others, all for free. The written word, both literature and journalism, might be next, if anybody really cares. Neither of us, you or me, would be right here right now otherwise.

The bad thing about the continuing saga of ‘Net-head’ life is that social gaps in the world are getting wider and wider and some people, the vast numeric majority, are being left further and further behind. Less than twenty years ago I was sending and receiving telegrams, telegrams!, to and from Mexican towns that maybe had only one community phone. Wonder why cell phones have done so well in the third world? Creeping consumerism, maybe? How about no phone at all otherwise? Welcome to Cambodia. As advanced countries move into computer-based music formats such as MP3 and such, cassettes continue to sell well in Thailand, hardly the most backward country in the world, typically occupying about half the typical music store. Good luck finding a music store at all in Mali. Cassette vendors wheel their product through the streets on push-carts with the help of a car battery to blare their wares. The main division between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in the world is still two-dimensional- the gap between rural and urban gradually replacing the gap between rich and poor countries- but more and more the gap is becoming three-dimensionally vertical- one of access to technology and psychological conformity to the emerging international culture it promotes. This increasingly means intercommunication in fewer languages, with English far in the lead. On the other hand it also allows inter-communication among widely scattered but massively numerous communities of Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Malay, Quechua, Turkic, Swahili, and Slavic speakers, to the extent that they wish to do so. The first five certainly have and do. Whether the less typically ‘colonial’ and more typically ‘minority’ languages will take advantage of new technology to unite and strengthen their cultures remains to be seen. It will be hard if they have little or no access to the new technology.

‘Reality TV?’ Hand me a barf bag and an old-fashioned sitcom. The only ‘Reality TV’ I’ve ever seen that I liked was in Dublin about five years ago when I wasn’t even sure what reality TV was. Baile Atha Cliath? No wonder Gaelic is a dying language, and calling it ‘Irish’ doesn’t help. On screen were on-going scenes of a family, a real family, under constant surveillance. Tired of watching the teenage daughter sleep? Wait a few hours until she wakes up. Want some company while you clean house? Wait until Dad leaves for work, all on cable TV from the privacy of my hotel room, like ‘The Truman Show’, but real and without artificial plot points imposed, Reality, slow boring and infinite. For a spicier reality, I’ll take world music? I can’t get enough. What’s the bottom line on the intellectual future of the species? There is none. My Thai in-laws can’t use an ATM, log on to the ‘Net’, or even program a digital alarm clock. My wife’s son can, but can’t multiply up to the 10’s nor score above a ‘0’ in Chinese class no matter how slanted his eyes, and cheats his homework with impunity. A downtown bar girl can communicate with smile and innuendo where she leaves off with grunts and groans, but couldn’t find the countries she’s visited with her faan on a map, nor likely even know what continent they’re part of. Words fail and concepts fall short. Theories of relativity only go so far. Some things you just can’t plot on a graph or pie-chart. Is it a brave new world or a new world order or just same ol’ same ol’. You tell me.

CR in CR- Death by Thai Food

My father-in-law is dying. I tell him he’s not, but he is. They’re killing him, not some vast faceless conspiratorial capital ‘T’ “They”, but the very faceful wife, daughter, and doctors surrounding him. I took him to Chiang Rai general hospital five days ago complaining of chest pains. They checked him over, declared him normal, invoked the diabetes clause (anything they don’t know the cause of they blame on Diabetes, a family of musicians in Mali I think), and then released him, in and out in less than two hours. How’s that for service? Would we have taken him in if he were normal? Yesterday he complained again of the same chest pains, only worse. We took him to a different private hospital, where they put him on a pacemaker after a pulse reading dipping below forty and a blood pressure reading up to a hundred-ninety-plus over a hundred. Did I mention that he’s been in the hospital at least once a month for the last six months with the same symptoms? So what does he do when he gets one of these attacks? Typically he’ll start walking down the street, clutching his chest all the while, ignoring my commands to lie down, as if he’d rather see the Homies one last time than actually try to ease the offending condition. If there’s anything worse than watching someone grow old, it’s watching someone refuse to, a warning to myself included. When someone goes into the hospital with the symptoms of old age at sixty and then gets the brilliant idea to start exercising, it’s probably better to save the brilliance for something else. It’s too late for anything but tai chi. Anything else and you could hurt yourself.

Stupidity and stubbornness are not usually listed as causes of death, but they probably should be, along with denial. That’s the longest river in the world, and seems to run through every country, drowning millions in its frothy waters. Thai food could even be considered a contributing cause of death in many cases I think. I told them all the first time that he’d have to give up salt, including fish sauce, totally- anybody knows that- and cut sugar and oil back sharply too. That means Thai food in general. For you people down south the local food up here’s a bit raunchier, hotter and nastier. Central Thai food can pass as health food in the US. Don’t try that with northern food. If you don’t believe me try some nam ngieow sometime. The doctors didn’t say anything about diet, either for his heart condition or diabetes. They never do, even though anybody who knows anything about diabetes knows that diet is the crucial factor. They gave him pills. They always do. He takes them religiously as his condition worsens. Guess what they feed him in the hospital? You guessed it, Thai food. That’ll keep ‘em coming back. Every kind of Thai food has sugar in it btw, in case you were wondering what that secret ingredient is. Variations on the combinations of sugar, salt, and red pepper pretty much define Thai food and are condiments ladled liberally on everything, even sugar in noodle soup, yes that’s right. Every one of those delicious curries has sugar in it, as does even fried rice. If it’s too hot, add sugar. If it’s too sweet, add chile or salt. It’s a vicious circle. Why not just add little or nothing and concentrate on creative combinations? After a trip to Penang, northern Malaysia, with food very similar to Thai, obviously a branch off the same culinary DNA, my wife’s only complaint was that it was too jeut, not sweet enough, salty enough, or hot enough. Guess what my complaint was? Thai food’s too much of all of those.

I told them I’d foot the bills for my father-in-law’s medical treatment if they’ll keep all the salt and sugar out of his diet, added salt and sugar, that is. It’d be almost impossible to totally remove it of course. I’ll probably keep my part of the bargain with a simple promise, but I doubt they’ll keep their end. Most Thais would probably rather die than eat ‘Farang’ food. I can understand the sentiment but it wouldn’t have to be so extreme if they could just cut back and the lower the ‘intensity’ of flavor in their food. In general they can’t. They live for that intensity, so even de-fanged Thai food won’t work. They pride themselves and compete with each other on threshold levels of intensity. They don’t eat for health; they eat for entertainment. Welcome to Italy. The idea that food has anything to do with health is totally foreign to their way of thinking. If you want to take something for health, you take pills, simple. Old men walk around villages selling out-of-date pills that they’re not even qualified to throw away, much less prescribe. Sales are brisk. Aside from that everybody’s got a favorite home remedy, ranging from the bizarre to the bazaar. In Hammurabi’s day in ancient Babylon patients had to run the gauntlet of people giving cheap advice, they say. Actually it was the other way around and the patient had to sit or lie there and endure these quasi-eulogistic epithets, whether as punishment or sincere advice would be hard to determine. I firmly believe in self diagnosis. Who knows your symptoms better than yourself, after all? But that doesn’t extend to the advice of any Barney or Betty who claims to be able to cure gout with apple cider vinegar. It’s not that easy. Self-diagnosis only goes so far also. At some point you have to surrender to the long loving arms of- not conspiracy, not science, but faith- and hope for the best.

If you go into (the) hospital in the US with kidney pains, the first thing they’ll ask is, “Do you have health insurance?” “No.” “Drink lots of water.” That’s it, cold and brutal. They don’t even ask, “Visa or Mastercard?” The credit limits don’t go that high. Thais have a more unnerving way of objectifying your health conditions- you don’t exist when you’re incapacitated. When I was laid up with a cracked coccyx, the little neighborhood girls who used to play with the hairs on my chest (shut your dirty mind) wouldn’t even look at me, kind of like ex-lovers forced to share the same old friends, even when I called to them in the same room. I finally had to make jokes about the diapers I was wearing- I prefer foreign-made Pampers over the local Momy Poko’s- just to break the ice with girls I’d known for months if not years (shut it, I said). The diapers were there ‘just in case’, since I couldn’t feel anything ‘down there’ any way. I’m better now. Ever wonder what it’d be like experiencing ‘the first time’ all over again? Ever see ‘Dante’s Peak?’ Actually being laid up half conscious in a hospital in Thailand for a Thai is probably a lot like being a Farang. They like to talk about you behind your back right to your face. It’s unnerving. Hospitals in Thailand are surrounded by coffin shops. Sales are good, even though they’ll only be burnt in the fires of cremation as the corporeal body (redundancy intended to simulate three dimensions) reverts to primordial hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen- one or six or eight electrons to an Adam- in preparation for the Big Recycle/Reincarnation/Rebirth.

The Big Moment for any Thai cremation is the moment when they open the coffin right before sliding it into the fire and anybody who can, the younger the better, rushes up for one last look at the body, imitating the facial gestures and bodily contortions of that ‘mere vessel.’ The coffin’s usually been on display for a week by now btw, if the family can afford the party. Carbohydrates or hydrocarbons? Alive or dead? Consumed or consuming? On the rocks or straight up? These are the choices for organic chemistry. You draw the lines and choose sides. As I watch the lines on my pa-in-law’s bedside EKG- I’ve never seen one before btw- I explain to the village people about the pulse and pressure readings. I might as well have been pointing to ancient hieroglyphics. They’re telling him to eat hotter spicier saltier food to ensure good health. Just for fun we each try the pulse-o’-meter on our own index fingers. I’m in fine shape in the high sixties and the wife’s okay for a woman in the low eighties. Her mother tops ninety, going going going… uh oh, it’s looking like another rehab, but I say no no no... Suicidal tendencies might help cut health costs, true, but it really shouldn’t have to come to that now really, should it?

WiFi Addicts Just Want Your Current, not Your Currency

Airports in America these days are starting to look like something out of The Matrix or Naked Lunch or something, fleshy mugwumps attached to triple-pronged sockets, sucking the black meat of power through long black cables. You can see them coming, eyes lowered to about a foot above floor level, scanning the walls back and forth looking for open sockets. They’ve got that look in their eyes, the psychological need for a plug-in. The longer they have to look, the worse it gets, eyes dilated, pulse throbbing, veins bulging with anticipation. These are about equally divided between computer laptop users and cell phone chargers. Of course laptop users are usually looking for a wi-fi signal too, and those usually aren’t free in airports, though Phoenix and Taipei are notable exceptions. JFK has free data ports, but how many people carry wires with them these days? You can cop a freebie in BKK down on the mezzanine level across from the airline offices. Don’t try this in Europe btw. Even if you can find a wi-fi signal, you’re not likely to find a socket to plug in to, even in places advertising ‘free wi-fi,’ of which there aren’t many. That’s not a bad idea actually, since many wi-fiers abuse the privilege and act like they have ancient rights. Some places limit the time allowed, but that can get messy if the user doesn’t voluntarily comply. Some have a code and use programming that counts your time down, but that requires a program. Limit the user to the charge capacity of their battery and you’ve solved most of the problem.

Of course a café doesn’t have to offer the service in the first place but it is a way to attract customers in a crowded coffee market until all your competitors do it also, and then you have to do it just to remain competitive. It’s a good deal for everyone as long as it’s not abused, because anybody who really wants a signal free can just walk or drive around until he finds one unlocked, not too hard in any country I’ve been in. ‘Wi-fi cafés’ are distinguished between those who offer the service free (w/ purchase) and those who don’t, but the former can be found in Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, Canada, and I presume many other countries in addition to the US. The latter can piss off. Why would anyone pay for two or three usages of anything that he could get at home for a month? Yeah, right, I forgot, stupid question. Europe is way behind on this, in both signals and plugs. Part of the reason is just that space is more dear in Europe, as in New York, and places frequently charge extra to sit down to drink that coffee rather than just standing at the bar. This is contrary to the spirit of wi-fi, which wants you to sit down and hang out, which in turn draws others, which in turn creates a dynamic pub-style entertainment, all in broad daylight without alcohol. The mullahs okayed coffee long ago, after much deliberation, to keep us awake during our long prayer sessions. Uh huh.

Still in New York you pay more to sit down at a table and listen to jazz than you do to sit at the bar, so prospects there are dim, though I did find it at the whole foods store down in Soho. Food was expensive; coffee was cheap. The situation with electric outlets is worse. They just don’t exist in public places in Europe, and sometimes not even in the cheapest hotel rooms. When they do, they may very well have locks on them. That’s right, locks on electrical outlets. I found one in the train station in Barcelona and guarded it with my life, not because I was afraid someone else would take it, but that someone would come charge me or tell me to de-plug. In America they’re frequently all taken even when widely available, even where the wi-fi isn’t free. When I was wi-fiing in the park in Barcelona, people seemed genuinely surprised at such a rare display, for while America was going bonkers over Internet, the rest of the world was going bonkers over cell phones. And while America is now catching up on the ultimate democracy of ‘one man one phone’ the rest of the world is still way behind on the net-head way of life. Maybe it’s better that way. Isn’t the sight of grown men and women attached by electric lines to the grid a bit of a scary sci-fi scenario anyway? It’s truly scary. I love it. It’s ironic. Not many years ago my supreme goal was to get off the grid. Now my goal is to get on.

Traveling with a laptop is a revolution and a revelation. What it adds in its own weight, it reduces in the weight of any books you might be tempted to travel with, if you’re so inclined. A 100GB hard drive can hold many books in memory, especially if you don’t need pictures. If you’ve got access to a wi-fi signal, then you’ll need even less, as you can get live up-to-date info all along, reserving rooms and flights as you go. While wi-fi cafes are certainly not universal, nor wi-fi hotels either, the signals themselves are, and many places don’t bother to lock them. Getting a cheap hotel next to a more expensive one is not a bad tactic, nor is getting upper rooms capable of receiving signals from many directions. You might find them easier at one time of day or the other. In countries where TV is scarce or negligible, this adds a whole new dimension to entertainment, also. If you’re actually going to watch DVD’s on your laptop, then a larger screen is preferable, but the novelty of that seems to be wearing off, and laptop sizes seem to be down-sizing accordingly after an earlier bump-up. I personally couldn’t imagine doing much Internet surfing from a telephone-size screen, but that’s just me. When traveling you’re carrying bags anyway, so that’s not an issue, and I personally prefer about a page-size laptop with accordingly light weight for most flexibility. This is a music machine also, but that doesn’t take much space. Of course you can burn or rip CD’s in addition to just playing them with a laptop, not to mention downloading if you’ve got a fast enough signal. In Europe many bands now have a laptop on stage, doing just what I’m not sure of, probably adding the trance-like effects so popular there.

Bottom line for me is that I write, so that’s the crucial size determinant, and a box too small is just not comfortable for that. Personally I don’t see much future for desktop computers regardless, considering their unattractiveness and the fact that those towers enclose mostly empty space. It’s just a matter of cost really. If laptop size is pretty well defined by its keyboard, then once components are small enough that that seems big by comparison, you shouldn’t have to pay a premium in cost or lack of quality any more. That day shouldn’t be far off, depending on which direction computers take in the coming era. Convergence of all media and communications- TV, radio, film, telephone-- into one Internet-accessible-and-dependent format-- is a likely guess since it’s already happening. At that point size is the only thing that matters, maybe a large box for the living room, smaller ones for remote locations and briefcase-size portability, and pocket-size one for constant access. Beyond that it’s anybody’s guess. Integration into personal adornment and even one’s body is not out of the question. At that point the Holy Grail of computerization, virtual reality, may be ready for a comeback, its previous incarnation but a wet spot on the bed of creativity and its true future only you-know-who knows how many years away. How far it will go and what it means to us as a species is another question. It sounds better than gene-splicing in any case. If we’re here for nothing more than to play with ourselves, let’s experiment with something we ourselves created, (self-) consciousness, and leave DNA alone. That’s not ours to mess with; we’re its. For now I’ll just keep slinking through the shadows of lightly-traveled streets looking for a rogue wi-fi signal so I can keep sending these messages in bottles to remote corners of scattered universes. My battery’s getting weak with age, but maybe I can find shore power somewhere. I may not be a star, but that’s not because I’m not shooting.

The Epiphany of Language- It’s Only a Medium, Neither Rare nor Well Done

The American lady got on the Taiwan to US leg of my trip, where I stopped to change planes. She spoke fluent Chinese, even reading it in her spare time, which there’s plenty of from Asia to the US, even with a tail wind. If you were blindfolded I doubt that you could’ve picked out the non-native speaker from the group. I felt sorry for her. She may have even been a native speaker, for all I know. That would be insult to injury, because no matter how good she spoke, the flight attendants would always switch back to English the first chance they got, even though they probably knew no more than a hundred words of English each and the American lady probably had a Ph.D. in Chinese language. That’s just what they do. Welcome to Thailand. A South American flight attendant once explained to me, in Spanish, that they’re trained to look at people to make a determination of what language needs to be spoken. She did that after telling me, “I assume you don’t speak Spanish,” to which I promptly answered, “porque no?” Of course she was right if referring to native language, which does tend to follow traditional racial and facial patterns, which works until someone finds himself on the wrong side of a line, or until a person speaks multiple languages, the more diverse the more bizarre. I felt sorry for the American lady regardless, Chinese to the end, making calls in Chinese while the plane was still taxiing on the runway. I would’ve liked to have gotten more of her story but wo bu shi zhongguo ren.

Would multiple languages imply multiple personalities? Could you invest your identity in more than one or two languages even if you wanted to? Score one for Chomsky. French-speaking Belgians like to refer to the Flemish (Dutch)-speaking areas as something totally distinct culturally, though as a matter of historical fact, the ‘Dutch’ are merely Franks who remained un-‘Romanized,’ in a poorly-documented process that continues to this day, though Belgium itself was born in the early 1800’s European confusion of Spanish succession and Napoleonic conquest. If there is indeed a cultural difference between Germanic Franks and Germanic Dutch, then it could certainly be reflected in the language whether or not a direct result of it. Score one for Sapir and Whorf. Notwithstanding their linguistic imaginary Maginot line against the creeping onslaught of English in Quebec and elsewhere, the French are guilty of the same in Belgium where the line of ‘Romanization’ crawls northward, claiming Brussels already with no end in sight. What would Chomsky say about that? Feel free to comment, Noam, or I’ll vent my spleen about you making me parse sentences as a grade-schooler. How many of you even knew that Chomsky used to be a linguist? I suppose political commentary pays better, considering that foreign language is more typically the realm of hotel clerks, taxi drivers, and ladies of the evening looking for pick-ups with stick-shifts. Thus some of the best-educated people in the world know the fewest languages, it being a muddy field without even the most rudimentary maintenance, while a tribal person may know five or six, being largely unconcerned with technical perfection, and more focused on the means to an end. Certain sounds bring a certain result; that’s the important thing.

Thais seem to think language is a racial thing, largely disallowing it in a person of foreign extraction unless it appears that they may be ‘half-breed Thai.’ Not only do they allow that, but revel in some of the unique combinations that might arise. Those chosen many, both bastard and legit, find ready work in the entertainment industry, singing and dancing and acting in soap operas. In a sense Thailand is almost like a giant breeding experiment, not unlike the produce section in your local ‘fresh market’ or Big C. There you’re likely to find at least three or four varieties of ordinary fruit like papaya, orange, banana, pineapple, and mango in addition to exotic mangosteen, jackfruit, guava, tamarind, custard apple, durian, litchi, and others, some of which you might find in Spanish or Latin American markets, but likely never in the ‘super’ markets of Northern Europe or the USA. Top-of-the-line oranges are invariably the ‘honey’ line, juicy and thin-skinned with no fiber but very sweet, like honey I suppose, until they go bad. Any comparison to Thai women would probably be inappropriate here. If faced with a foreigner speaking Thai well with no obvious genetic relation, Thais will even be satisfied conceptually if the foreigner has a Thai wife, as if traits that couldn’t be passed along blood lines might instead be passed along in other bodily fluids. In reality the typical Thai woman is frequently hostile to her partner speaking the local language, as inexorably linked with status as it is and the Thai obsession with such. Even when sympathetic the Thai woman herself might hardly qualified to teach beyond the elementary level to which she herself has probably studied, maybe not enough to satisfy a Westerner truly looking to master a language. Modern ‘pop’ Thai has so much English in it that speaking Thai correctly frequently involves learning how to speak English incorrectly.

I’ve often wondered if my slowness in picking up the French language was because I just wasn’t ‘French’ enough. In reality it probably has more to do with finding a French-speaking place that I like enough to hang around and learn the language. It’s hard to learn the language of a place you don’t especially like. There are very few places in the world where French, and French only, is spoken, especially since its quirkiness inspires simplified pidgins around the world, not necessarily mutually intelligible. French-as-a-second-language is only partially effective, also, since it’s the ability to comprehend the speech of others that is the true measure of one’s progress. Speech fluency itself is totally subjective, and subject to shifting motivations. If a Thai bar girl decides she doesn’t want to condescend to speak Thai with old man Chomsky, then he effectively can’t speak Thai, no matter how much he may indeed know, no matter that he may indeed be the ‘smartest person in the world.’ Many women also may see it as their duty to adopt the language of her husband when they’re from different backgrounds. Maybe that’s the ‘something borrowed’ being talked about. In Thailand if a girl has a checkered past and would rather play chess the acquisition of a foreign husband and/or some English language is one way to turn a pawn into a queen in a country where such things carry high status. In many other countries it would carry low or no status. In Asia ‘marrying up’ seems to have a long history which remains unchallenged to this day, whereas in the West such notions are largely discredited. About the time American women were declaring that they don’t want to be sex objects any more, Asian women were declaring, “We do!” The rest of course is history.

It’s hard to shut a foreigner out verbally, of course, when he can understand every word the locals say and jump into their conversation any time he wants. I personally like to watch the evening news to test myself and my comprehension in countries where I want to learn the language. The language of news is correct, well spoken, and getting the content itself is a motivation factor. The scuttlebutt was that Margaret Mead in fact couldn’t speak Samoan worth a damn, so what does that say? If true does that diminish her work? Do the sexual mores of Samoa depend on her command of the language? Take a lesson from the taxi drivers- if you see a short cut, then take it. What the American lady maybe didn’t realize is that to a Chinese person all languages are Chinese, whether the words are or not, nouns and verbs like meat and vegetables prepositioned into word-ordered recipes, chopped and stir-fried in a blazing hot wok, sparks gently slapping your face in light hot licks, and then emptied in front of your face on to the plate, a little pool of oil draining off to lubricate the rice. It’s all digital now; anything is possible when you can count to ten in base two and get 1010 without a bunch of ritualistic magic squiggles intervening. The complicated old conjugations and declensions are a thing of the past, outmoded formulas ‘going Chinese’ for greater speed and adaptability, isolating and analytic, every word equal and multi-tasking. English has long led the Germanic languages in this direction, as French has somewhat less for the Romance, coincidentally each the strongest nation in its linguistic family. Does heterosis, hybrid vigor, occur in language? Let’s ask Noam.

Thailand Redux: Jet Rag, Medical Tourism, and Government by Goons

Home is where the heart is, they say. I figure they’re right, so my idea is to make as many places in the world feel like home as possible, something of a network of safe havens, you know, just in case… just in case all that apocalyptic symbolism becomes more than a metaphor; just in case things don’t work out like I have planned for my life; just in case I have a case of incurable wanderlove and feel like I’d be happier following the sun than following orders… ouch! Somebody pinched me a little too hard there! Where am I anyway? Searching searching searching… for a memory, a point of reference, anything… oh yeah, I remember now. If it’s Sunday, then this must be Thailand, and if this is Thailand, then that pinch in the butt must have come from (sound of blankets rustling) aha! The memories come flooding back now. That was a pleasant dream, though, the little bit that I can remember through my jet lag haze. Obviously all safe havens are not created equal. You wouldn’t want to try this at home anyway; concepts of home and nomadism are mutually contradictory. In reality it turns out to be not much more than a travel ethic, to feel like you’ve lived in a place you visited, as opposed to just seeing the tourist sites. I’m the lousiest of tourists actually. Friends come visit the Golden Triangle region of Thailand, where I’ve lived more than half of the last ten years, and see more in one day than I’ve seen in my whole time here. I’m jealous. My ethic may or may not be more ethical, but being a tourist is probably more fun.

People travel for all sorts of reasons now. I almost feel like everyone’s following me around, or maybe I’m following them. First there was simple backpacking, back when you’d actually carry a sleeping bag with you, and maybe even a tent. Then there was adventure travel, seeking out remote areas simply because they’re there. Then there were the world craft searches, seeking out interesting ethnic arts for sale to the Homies back stateside. Then there were the blue gene tours, looking for potential recombinant DNA possibilities. These days medical tourism is catching on quickly, not surprising given the disparity between Eastern and Western medical costs and the fact that we’re all getting older. If the US Democrats get elected and institute a health care system, Thailand may be out of a job. Don’t worry; I’m sure we can find some other work for them to do. When the cost of a simple tooth extraction can mean the difference between a few dollars or a few hundred, the logic is as simple as the arithmetic. The opportunities are endless- root canal tours, hair transplant holidays, sex change vacations, etc. The only problem is that many procedures require multiple visits, that and the fact that a day-long trip to Thailand is usually counter-indicated for emergency care. If you may need multiple visits, of course you could just hang around a while, and voila! Another new industry is born, retirement care. Bring on the private nurses! The average nurse in Thailand with ten years experience makes about three hundred dollars a month, is between thirty-five and forty years old, single, speaks enough English to get past first base, and has a little smile cute enough to melt hardened hearts. Interested? Keep checking for a Google Ad to appear somewhere on this page, and then click on it. The robots and web spiders don’t seem too smart, though. I told you I’d help you cheat the Eurail Pass, and then their ad shows up a day later, so go figure. No matter what I talk about, the ads for Thai girls keep coming up, so that seems like a growth industry. I only wish I’d clicked on ‘Timbuktu- Know Before You Go,’ before I went.

Tourists can’t get the same rates for medical care as the locals here, part of Thaksin’s legacy, but you probably wouldn’t believe it if you did. Appendectomy for six dollars? I’d be scared maybe they left a lug wrench inside or something. Even so, my wife’s scar wasn’t pretty, but it was cheap. To some extent, you do get what you paid for. Going to an American dentist after my Thai dentist was like riding in a Cadillac after a VW beetle, but guess which one I can afford the easiest? I wouldn’t advise buying into the whole Thai system of health care, though. Conceptually it can be a bit disturbing, particularly in the overemphasis on antibiotics. The EU called them on it when they started using them as food preservatives in export food products, though. The dairy industry anywhere in the world is no better of course. Livestock feed routinely includes antibiotics. Still, Thai conceptions of health are quirky. For some reason, Thais get a form of diabetes that seems to come and go. It’s typically a contributory cause of death also, usually one of four for some reason. Maybe they’re right and there is no single cause of death. I advise just taking the mechanical treatments and leave the high concepts to others, maybe yourself. I passed a remote hospital in the Isan outback once advertising brain surgery. I’d pass on that, but some Bangkok hospitals are getting a world-wide reputation, and Chiang Mai’s certainly acceptable for most procedures. I went in to a hospital in Chiang Rai a few days ago to get my kidneys checked and it was okay, if a bit factory-like. X-rays and medical advice for less than ten bucks is hard to beat.

The health care is better than the government; that’s for sure. At least Thaksin’s regime had some bright faces and some bright ideas, even if the main man was, and is, a megalomaniac who brooks no competition, nor criticism. His second-team cronies are like a re-visit to the dark side, Darth and the boys. The premier seems to think nothing really happened back in the student massacre of 1976. He must be studying conspiracy theory like others study The Art of War. But you’re supposed to wait longer than thirty years before re-writing history. Even Germans alive during WWII do it, though, using logic to make the Nazis seem more human, even though Nazism wasn’t especially logical. They like to rationalize that they wouldn’t have treated their workers ‘like that’, as though Jews had applied for work at the day labor office for temporary assignment to Auschwitz. The new Thai Interior minister is father to the son who executed a police officer point-blank in a crowded bar a few years ago for the crime of stepping on his foot. After a long runaround giving his father time to grease palms he was cleared because no one really saw anything. Now it’s payback time for daddy I guess. Mix me a Molotov.

Anything sounds better than jet lag right now. For the uninitiated, that’s something between a hangover, an attack of sleeping sickness, and Coriolis effects. I’m writing this in the dark by the light of the TV in my room, in some new take on the Lincolnian ethic. The best movies on cable TV come on in the wee hours of the morning btw. When’s the last time you saw ‘Nashville’ or anything by Robert Altman for that matter? I miss him. I love it, a kind of signature American film, even where it falls short. It’s long and sprawling, funny without really trying too hard, meaningful while trying even less, just like the America he manages to capture perfectly in the rear-view mirror. Did you know that everyone wrote the songs they sang in that movie, even Henry Gibson? And the metaphor is perfect, too. I love America most through the rear-view mirror.

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?

Sic Transit America, Schizoid and Free

Pardon the triple entendres, but those who know about these things say we triple Geminis are like that, chewing up and spitting out words the way others eat chips and dips. While the rest of you are slicing and dicing cucumbers with your HSN miracle chopper, we toss and mix metaphors into alphabet soups and salads that are sometimes hard to digest. I myself know little of astrological apocrypha, except that the Thai system and the European system are essentially the same, except with dates offset about three weeks. This would seem to undermine the credibility of the whole system since dates are supposedly the crucial determinant of the astrologically inherited traits. This is not to be confused with the Buddhist Triple Gem/Three Jewels of sangha (religious community), dharma, and Buddha, which I know a little bit about but again not much. Jainism, the other religion evolved in India from the native Hinduism, also has Three Jewels, but they’re different, right knowledge, right faith, and right action. I know that because I researched some Jainism after I picked up an interesting book in the Atlanta airport a few days ago called ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’ by Sam Harris, whose qualifications I’m not certain of. I literally picked it up, at no cost, off the seat, where someone had left it, probably a Christian expecting further vindication of his faith. He didn’t get it. In it Mr. Harris does exactly what he accuses “Christians like yourself” of doing, “cherry-picking the Bible… to justify every impulse...”.

In the book, which I doubt I’ll finish, he proceeds to excoriate the three-thousand-year-old Old Testament for not being modern and politically correct, specifically in its defense of slavery. Should it have also correctly predicted the rise and fall of cigarette smoking and the increased tolerance of homosexuality? But those are still controversial issues, aren’t they? He makes no mention of the fact that the Jews themselves were long enslaved, hence opinion-worthy, nor that classical Athens was the original slave society, dyed in the wool, lofty notions of freedom and democracy developed in the leisure time allowed by double-digit slavery. Rome was founded on the same principles, only gradually supplanted by the slightly more modern notion of colonialism. I don’t mean to shift the blame, either to Greece or Harris, only to make the point that slavery really wasn’t such a big deal back then, more like the answer to the question, “So now what do we do with the prisoners?” The system only became morally repugnant when slaving became an end in itself and better options became available. In Asia not that long ago people sold themselves into slavery to pay off their debts. Variations on this theme still exist. Are Judeo-Christian motives suspect because they didn’t correctly predict the tides of history? But he goes even further, labeling America, and America alone, a ‘lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant.’ However true that may be, I hope he doesn’t exempt himself from the criticism. He probably does, since the whole treatise is directed ‘in-your-face’ style at ‘you Christians,’ only slightly mitigated by the fact that the occasional reference equally castigates Muslims, while allowing that we should know better since we’re a developed nation. Maybe we should and maybe we shouldn’t.

While laughing in Christians’ faces for wanting to believe in ‘intelligent design’, he makes no mention of the fact that all the most prominent physicists of our era not only believe(d) in God but anxiously scour the heavens looking for radio signals that would be proof of what? Intelligent what? A good Darwinist wouldn’t, nor would I frankly. The chances are about one in… how many planets are there out there? There may not be creationism in Evolution, but there may very well be some creativity. Can you really explain the difference between humans and chimps with only a two percent difference of some thirty thousand genes? I was taught that a good theory could be used for prediction. Tautologies like ‘survival of the fittest to survive’ may explain much of history beautifully, but predict little or nothing. Genetic drift and generalized neoteny may predict much, however incrementally, but that’s not Darwinism. He further attempts to diminish Christianity by comparing it to the superior doctrine of Jainism, a minor if articulate Hindu reform movement that today numbers some four million. That’s like comparing Buddhism to Sufism, or Islam to Unitarianism. Harris allows no feathering of edges- if Jesus was not divine, then Christianity is bunk. Is this enlightening? If someone can read the Sermon on the Mount and feel nothing resembling inspiration at some of the finest words and ideas ever written or spoken, as original as they are universal, as valid today as they were two thousand years ago, then I truly feel sorry for that person.

‘Conspiracy people’ go much farther than Harris in their indictment of America, but their arguments tend to more circular and un-provable. That’s the beauty of it. While indicting George and Prescott Bush and the entire Bush Brothers Band and every bird in every Bush going back to the Crusades for every evil from the hypothetical but invisible New World Order to the price of gas in Flagstaff, then they proclaimed in 2004 without the slightest trace of self-consciousness that, “we need four more years of Bush.” You need it, bro’; you need it more than me. I sense rising unemployment in conspiracy circles with a Democratic victory. So the whole world hates us and now we even hate ourselves. America is sick, very sick, mentally ill, to be exact. The fact that others may also be is little or no consolation. The fact that there seems to be no concern about it is even less so. Where is the clamor and outrage at the copy-cat mass murders of college students by college students? When Charles Whitman climbed the tower at UT Austin and proceeded with his slaughter some decades ago (immortalized in Kinky Friedman’s ‘Rumor of a Tumor’) it was a big deal. It should be a big deal! Mass murder is not normal! Ignoring high gas prices is one thing. Mass murder is another. Remember the first time gas prices jumped up over fifty cents a gallon in 1973 and laws were passed reducing speed limits to 55mph? Those laws persisted into the 90’s if I remember correctly. Nobody talks about that now with gas over three bucks a gallon, and it’s more than twice that in Europe. It’s the same with gun laws. Gun control used to at least be discussed, for God’s sake! But that was back when ‘liberal’ was not a dirty word, even though the same word used to apply to those same name-calling Republicans back when the freedom in question was free enterprise.

When those planes hit those towers, they must’ve been aiming straight for our psyche. Starting before that but given new impetus, we have truly lost our way as a nation. America is being ripped apart at the seams, not the divisions between states or regions, races or genders, but the divisions within each and every one of us. America’s future is uncertain. That’s not uncommon for a teenager in the throes and throws of growing pains, used to being the bully on the playing field, now reduced to threatening to take its ball and go home, and hearing the other kids cheer. The only defense of our militarism is that we’re naively trying to make things better in Iraq and Afghanistan, however misguided. It’s only a coincidence that we most frequently stick our big noses in where oil is at stake. So we lose ourselves in music and movies, bored with our lives and our wives, dreaming of fame and wilder sex. Hip-hop artists are among the richest entertainers in the world, while singing about their life on the streets. Our precious freedoms and way of life are reduced to the freedom to pursue wealth and conspicuous consumption. We have the finest health care system that money can buy and a level of obesity that would make a fry-bread-eater blush. There are no easy answers in a consumer society, because it’s not likely to be found in a box or a capsule. It’s more likely to be found in a book or a long walk or a long talk with your spouse, or maybe even a little religion, either ol’ time or New Age will do. You gotta’ believe in something, something else.