Being Un-American

I can remember the exact moment that my worldview changed.  It was on May 13, 1960.  After watching a movie at a theater on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley where I was a student at the University of California, I walked outside to find the next morning's San Francisco Chronicle on sale with this photo on the front page.  It showed students being washed down the steps of City Hall by police with fire hoses.  Their "crime" was protesting the hearings being held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  Many were seriously injured.  They were students from Cal, Stanford and other Bay Area colleges.  Notice the headline: the battling cops are the subject and the "mob" the target.  There was no sympathy for anything radical back in 1960.

I was shocked.  How could this happen?  I knew little about HUAC and even less about politics.  Eight years before I'd proudly worn an "I Like Ike" button.  My mother loved his chosen successor, Richard Nixon, and affectionately called him "Tricky Dick," the moniker given him by his enemies.  I would turn 21 in July that year and the 1960 presidential election would be the first in which I could vote.  I had assumed I was a Republican since I was middle class and white.  My parents had voted for Eisenhower's reelection in 1956 against the swarthy Democrat, Adlai Stevenson, who was not considered quite "our kind," whatever that was.  I lived in a new suburban town north of Los Angeles where ranch houses had replaced orange groves and most on my block had swimming pools in their back yards.  But our house was the smallest on the street and my father was a plywood salesman.  I was a teenager in the Fifties, a self-identified "juvenile delinquent," and life couldn't be better.  Until I saw that photo.

Thus began major changes in my life, an exodus from thinking of myself as "American."  I switched my major from English Literature to Journalism and joined the Daily Cal.  And I became a member of Slate, the radical campus organization that laid the foundation for the Free Speech Movement which would take place after I was gone.  We organized an all-night vigil on the steps of Sproul Hall and I was the publicity coordinator.  And we demonstrated against war at a military parade in downtown Berkeley.  I met students who claimed to be communists or Maoists and I was encouraged to attend the Helsinki Youth Festival that summer sponsored by the Russians, but my father refused to fund the trip.  With veterans of kabbutzim in Israel I learned to dance the Hora (in those days all the Jews I met were radical socialists).  My best friend and former roommate distanced himself from me (he later claimed to have worked with the CIA in Asia even though he was only a Navy dentist in the Philippines).  While passing out fliers at Sather Gate for some political activity, a former fraternity brother (I pledged Sigma Chi but quit before initiation) asked me if I was volunteering for the Young Republicans.  That's as radical as he could conceive. I was pro-Castro and anti-Dulles.

America was motherhood and apple pie, baseball, hot dogs on the Fourth of July, and the waving flag, Old Glory.  Americans believed in God, freedom and democracy, and the right to make a financial profit any way possible, which included crushing the competition.  In the Fifties it meant short hair, a crew cut.  But JDs wore their hair long and greased back in a duck tail. I sported pegged pants, white bucks, and a pink shirt that disturbed my mother.  When I expressed the desire to become an actor like my Uncle Ted, they were afraid I might become a (gulp) homosexual (although that word was never uttered, even around Ted, my father's twin brother, who was as gay as they come I learned much later).  I stayed out after curfew with my friends and was twice brought home drunk by the cops.  This may all sound like a typical rebellious teen, but when I got to college and became radicalized by that photo, I determined to reject my white bread roots.

Music was my mode of escape.  I played the clarinet and alto sax and dreamed of joining Stan Kenton's orchestra, until I discovered black jazz and rhythm and blues.  Norman Mailer's essay, "The White Negro," was about me.  I wanted to inhabit jazz clubs and smoke tea.  At night I listened to R&B with sexually-charged lyrics played on radio after midnight, and even visited Huggy Boy's show at a record store in the LA one night to make record requests.  We danced the "dirty boogie" at parties where the alcohol had been stolen from the liquor cabinet of the host's parents.  After Jack Kerouac published On the Road, I read it and became an instant beatnik.  Driving down Grant Street in San Francisco's North Beach with my parents one night, my mother rolled up the windows and locked the doors for fear we sightseeing straights would be attacked by rampaging beats.  I was appalled and ashamed.

Most of my junior high school and high school friends found their way back to the American mainstream by the time they married and had children.  I took my first wife to England to live in "swinging" London during the Carnaby Street period.  I read books from the Holburn High Street library on occult religions and politics, and was particularly interested in learning about the troubles in Southeast Asia that included the French defeat by Vietnamese in 1954 and the current (it was 1965) entry of Americans into the conflict in an attempt to stop the spread of communism.  By the time we returned to the U.S. with our young son in the late Sixties, the hippies had risen from the ashes of the beatniks and were spreading from the Sunset Strip in Hollywood to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. I desperately wanted to be part of it but was a reluctant member of the married middle class.  So I refused to vote Republican.  I campaigned for Gene McCarthy, the progressive senator from Minnesota who wrote poetry.

These days, I am an expat in Thailand.  I left America more for financial reasons than political (it's cheaper to live here on Social Security).  But the un-American identity I assumed after seeing that photo in 1960 on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle remains.  It's affirmed in my exchanges on Facebook with friends from the past.  Why did so many from the Pasadena area become ultra-patriotic conservatives?  I've been de-friended by more than one for my criticism of American politics, war mongering, and support of Israel.  There are times even when I think of giving up my American citizenship (which might throw a monkey wrench into my retirement income).  I tell sympathetic friends online and in Thailand that I love the American land and the people, although lately the 50% that espouse and support fascist ideas and causes gives me pause to reconsider the latter.

I've been thinking about issues of identity while rereading Thongchai Winichakul's wonderful book about  the discursive construction of Siam (Thailand since 1941) by means of the technology of geography and mapping.  Yesterday I gave a PowerPoint synopsis of Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (1994) to our political discussion group.  Tongchai has been a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin since 1991 but speaks here frequently, twice in the last month, about "Thainess," the political ideology of nationhood.  "Thainess" is the equivalent of "American" but it carries more urgent weight in Thailand where the government is described as a "democracy with the King as head of state."  With the succession looming, the monarchy is seen by some as requiring a strong defense (not from un-Thainess but from a perceived Republican conspiracy, which is much the same).  Thongchai describes these supporters from the miltiary and elite classes as representatives of "royalist democracy," and describes their efforts to inculcate "Thainess" by means of "hyper-royalism," a series of invented rituals and traditions that serve to strengthen devotion to the King.

Living in a foreign country, without speaking the language very well, prompts the outsider to question their identity, and to even wonder why identity seems necessary.  Who am I?  When I was younger, while  traveling abroad, there were times when I claimed to be Canadian to avoid any criticism directed at Americans (which is half true since my mother was born in Winnepeg).  The "ugly American" is a cliché, but I've seen enough loud-mouthed, obnoxious American tourists to see its truth (these days, particularly in Pattaya, it's the Russians).  All Westerners in Thailand are called farang by the natives.  Some expats object to this as racist but it's never bothered me (it probably originated with the Indo-Persian word farangi for foreigner).  It describes me but it doesn't feel like an identity I can embrace.

Well, for starters, I'm an elderly male, possessor of a certificate which allows me to preface my name with "Dr." (or append "Ph.D" to my surname).  Getting a doctorate was a stroke of brilliance which seemed hard work at the time.  Here in Thailand it gains much respect.  I know my superiors are proud of having an American doctor on their faculty.  And as a farang, I'm wealthy in the eyes of most Thais.  It's true, since my retirement income is over four times the average wage of a Thai clerk or salesperson, and vastly higher than that of a day laborer. I'm married to a younger Thai woman and we live high up in a condo building. I can afford to visit Starbucks every day.  It doesn't matter that, never having invested in property or putting much savings away, I feel poor compared to the folks back home.  "Home"?  There is a sense that in my consciousness I will always be an American far from home.

Buddhism Without Buddha

When I first visited Thailand almost eight years ago, I thought I understood Buddhism fairly well.  After all, I'd read a ton of books about Asian religions, had been a student of Zen and Vipassana Buddhism and a meditator for over 20 years, and I carried The Dhammapada (translated by Eknath Easwaran) and Karen Armstrong's biography of the Buddha in my backpack.  But I was sorely mistaken.  And now, after having lived in Bangkok for nearly five years, I feel I know less about the religion Thais practice than I did when I first arrived.

In the photo above, a devotee is paying homage to an image of Mae Nak, the legendary mother who became a murderous ghost but who is still honored for the love and faithfulness she showed to her husband and child.  The shrine to Mae Nak is at Wat Mahabut, a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok near where she might have lived.  The temple is always crowded, but the Buddha image there is less popular.  At left, behind Wat Srisudaram where I teach, is a giant statue of Somdet To, a 19th century monk who is famous for his magical powers, which included convincing Mae Nak to stop haunting and killing villagers and retire permanently to the land of the dead.  While Somdet To may be currently the most popular of Thailand's monk saints, the images and photos of other monks known for their healing and protective powers are on view everywhere.  Statues and paintings of Thailand's kings, from the 16th century's Naresuan to the present Rama IX, are objects of devotion in many temples.  Buddha seems to be outnumbered on the ubiquitous shrines outside houses and office buildings by icons of Brahma and Ganesha, and numerous sacred trees wrapped with colored ribbons, not to mention the white string you see around people's wrists and even whole buildings, give evidence that pre-Buddhist animism along with Hinduism is alive and well in the Land of Smiles.  What's going on here?

Justin McDaniel has chosen to focus on Mae Nak and Somdet To in his fascinating new book, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand.  An associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the former Catholic altar boy has studied Buddhism in Laos and Thailand for over a dozen years and even spent time as a monk.  He also taught Pali and Sanskrit at my university.  His challenging book does more than just account for the Thai cultural practices that are deemed religious by most outside observers.  It provides a critique of all religious scholarship that looks at texts and institutions to the exclusion of what people actually do.  He deconstructs favored dichotomies, such as those of urban and forest monks, "engaged Buddhists" and the conservative Sangha Council (each of whom wants to return to an imagined purity of the distant past), textural and popular Buddhism, and modernizers upset by the commercialization of Buddhism.  By the time McDaniel is finished, you'll begin to suspect that "buddhism" is about as real as a unicorn.

"I hope," the scholar writes, "to offer a study that makes describing Thai Buddhism in any general way an exercise in hesitation." While intending to look closely at individuals, texts, biographies and images, he admits in the conclusion to having made "somewhat nervous forays into the realm of general statements." These include speculations such as: "There is no core of Thai Buddhism," perhaps normative Theravada "is actually not found anywhere outside of textbooks," and  "modern Thai Buddhism isn't even a subject."  He questions "the very usefulness of metacategories like Buddhism, Brahmanism, animism, local, translocal, Indic, Chinese, Thai, and the like."  Despite attempts, even at my university, to define and create a world Buddhism, McDaniel thinks there "has never been a purely translocal or nonlocal Buddhist sect or school of thought."  And this goes especially for attempts to control local diversity by a centralizing Thai authority.

In the introduction to his book, McDaniel announces his intention "to take individual Buddhist agents seriously and listen to the cacophony of their voices."  And he concludes that Thai Buddhism, "when not studied solely through institutions, doctrines, codes, and the canon...may indeed seem messy."  Like most scholars, he began looking for the "true" story of Somdet To and Mae Nak, only to discover a "history of ambivalence" where "having multiple and conflicting voices adds both to the prestige and intrigue" of his subjects' legends.   Many Thais, he learned, are "comfortable with ambiguity."  To understand individual events, agents and objects rather than systems or religions, McDaniel developed a "pragmatic sociological study of cultural repertoires."  A repertoire he defines as including the "words, stock explanations, objects, and images that a social actor can 'draw' upon while engaged in meaning-making 'on the ground' in the context of interacting with others." This helped him examine what Thai Buddhists do rather than attempt to determine what they believe.

In addition to an Introduction and a Conclusion, there are four sections in The Lovelorn Ghost: 1.  Monks and Kings (people), 2. Texts and Magic (texts), 3. Rituals and Liturgies (actions), and 4. Art and Objects (material culture).  The first chapter covers the stories about Somdet To and Mae Nak, and he notes that the monk remains popular today "in part because he is a mystery."  One curious aspect about these figures and the devotion towards them is that they exhibit little of the qualities affirmed in most dhamma teaching, in particular, nonattachment and impermanence.  They are "buddhist" primarily because their stories have been incorporated into the narrative accepted by mainstream Thai Buddhists.  In chapter 2, McDaniel argues that the primary feature unifying elite and folk Buddhism is "the so-called esoteric traditions and texts" rather than any Vinaya-based orthodoxy that Western writers think is the hallmark of Thai Buddhism.  "Magic may be bad science," he observes.  "It might be inefficient health care.  However, does that make it bad religion?"

In chapter 3, McDaniel examines the "cacophony of liturgical traditions" and finds that there is no one way of defining a Thai Buddhist ritual or liturgy.  As a monk, he learned to bless houses and cars.  "There is no national, standardized Buddhist ritual calendar," he writes, "and there is no standard national Buddhist liturgy."  Thai Buddhism looks less and less like a form of Vatican-controlled Roman Catholicism.  The variety of shrines throughout Thailand, he says, "reflects a lack of concern with religious boundaries."   Shrines," he notices, "are not permanent monuments but stages vibrating with a subtly shifting yet ever-growing numbers of characters and props." McDaniel says that Thai Buddhism is "resistant to orthodoxic and centralizing tendencies, even though it presents itself (and has been so designated by foreign scholars) as normative, traditional, and exceedingly well behaved."

Thais can alternately use the liturgies and rituals to protect their bank accounts, settle their anxious minds, fulfill familial obligations, realize enlightenment, impress their neighbors, assuage their guilt, relax, or protect themselves from being hit by a bus.

While people, texts and rituals in Thai Buddhism have been thoroughly studied (if not fully understood), McDaniel argues that the "history and creativity of Thai Buddhist material culture have largely been ignored." In chapter 4, he writes that "Thai Buddhist repertoires are, in large part, material and sensual...Beliefs are articulated through objects" which have been overlooked in most studies of religion.  Even art historians remove images "(through photography or physical movement to museums or shops) from this ritual context and are seen as objets d'art."  He has particularly heavy criticism for those who lament "the commercializing of religion, the creation of an 'occult economy' or the materialistic corruption of spirituality." McDaniel sees material objects "as something cherished by Buddhists that ought not to be ignored, reduced or lamented," and he also see them as "expanding the study of Thai religion beyond Theravada Buddhism."  It's impossible to know where culture ends and "religion" begins.

Religious themes are often absent in murals painted on the inside of Buddhist monastic buildings! This would be like seeing murals of individual and disconnected episodes of Shakespeare's King Lear mixed with disconnected scenes from Beowulf or the Iliad inside a Catholic cathedral.

"Why is consistency of orthodoxy seen as ideal?" he asks, a not entirely rhetorical question for the legions of scholars of religious studies among whom McDaniel is now a heretic. But he takes seriously the religious diversity and individual agency in Thailand, and, to do this, he has written "a book about Thai Buddhism where the Buddha is not the protagonist."  This may perhaps bring him more criticism from his academic tribe than any description of unorthodox monks and ghosts, magical texts, localized rituals and material (even commercial) objects of which he writes.  He is one among a growing number of writers who are deconstructing the idea of a monolithic Buddhism, traditional or modern.  They deny that there is any one textural standard against which a sect's purity can be measured.  Like McDaniel, they see all "buddhisms" as local (what he writes about in Thailand could be researched in Japan, Korea or Tibet). This will be unsettling to the legions of Western Buddhists who think they've found the Holy Grail (if only the superstitious accretions can be purged)!

McDaniel's observations seem familiar to me now that I think of Thailand as my home.  Although the world of spirits, from whom I may need protection via merit-making rituals and the wearing of amulets, is not yet one I inhabit comfortably, I choose to respect the practices of my neighbors rather than treat them condescendingly as "superstitions."  I do believe the world is a far stranger place than it seems to our blinkered eyes.  I have long been dissatisfied with the metacategories and boundaries of religious scholarship, and the holier-than-thou attitude I sometimes encounter among Buddhists of different stripes.  Growing up in America, I was taught that religion is a matter of propositional belief based on sanctified texts, and that you can be religious (or spiritual) without doing much of anything (and that includes moral behavior).  That the transactions between humans and the mystery of the universe might involve something more physical, and even mundane, is a tantalizing prospect.

Disconnecting the Dots

Sometimes life doesn't make sense.  It's just one damn thing after another (like history).  Normally, it's human nature to look for significance and meaning in the tea leaves of our existence.  And we quite often use religious language to describe what we find.  Two survived the plane crash because of the grace of God, it's claimed, while ignoring the other 128 who died because of...what, God's anger. We define our success and failures according to the script our culture has handed us, though values are increasingly globalized and homogenized.  First books, then movies, taught us to look for the plot.  Who are the heroes and who are the villains?  Politicians are very good at this.  But in our quiet moments of honesty we might at least admit to ourselves that no one's holding the hand of fate.  There is no puppeteer, just the blowing winds of chance.

I've been using Antoine de Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince to teach English to my graduate students of linguistics.  Last year we read it in the BuddhistPsychos discussion group and found it a useful book for expressing some truths of the Dhamma.  I've long believed that truth, the kind that means something deeper than scientific fact, can best be conveyed through stories, the ones we hear and the ones we tell ourselves.  I was hoping the simple sentences in The Little Prince, translated from the original French, would help my students with their English. And I also thought they might find the prince, the pilot, and the other characters in the book appealing.  Finally, I wanted to use its language to illustrate the different descriptive tools of linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.  It was a big task and I'm still assessing the results.

Most of the messages I got from Saint Exupéry's now-classic story were missed by my students in their weekly papers which included the linguistic analysis of a sentence from the assigned reading.  They didn't connect the dots I laid out for them.  They didn't understand the author's criticism of the narrow-minded thinking of grown-ups which is emphasized throughout, perhaps because of Asian respect for elders.  They didn't get the idea of relationships as a kind of mutual "taming," nor the claim that what is really important is invisible -- "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly."  They were enthusiastic about the idea of pills to quench thirst in order to save time, a proposal I saw ridiculed by the author and the prince.  But they did get the importance of water for a story that takes place in the desert, and I think they understood the prince's love for the vain rose.  I wanted them to appreciate the insight that love changes the way we see the world -- "The stars are beautiful because of a flower that cannot be seen." -- but it seems they have difficult seeing metaphorically, at least in English.

It's not important that my students agree with my interpretation of The Little Prince.  I told them at the first class meeting that I was not a teacher who could open up their heads and pour knowledge inside.  They're used to learning by rote and critical thinking is not emphasized in Thai education.  To help them understand the story, I encouraged them to look at the Thai translation of the book, showed them portions of the 1974 musical film, and circulated an audio version.  A few copied opinions from the internet, but most grappled with the reading in order to express a few ideas in English.  It's a weekend MA program and students take five classes with considerable homework in each.  I'm happy with the conversations we've had in class and look forward to their final paper, a review of the book as a whole.

This February is a leap year and the extra day has thrown me off balance.  What's it all about, Alfie?  Thais love Valentine's Day and the stores were filled with displays of hearts while the press wrung its hands over fears that young people would use the holiday as an excuse for sex.  There was even a curfew.  Nan and I exchanged cards and had a delicious buffet dinner at You & Mee in the Erawan Hotel.  A group of Iranians celebrated that day by blowing up their rented house and one man lost his legs when a bomb he threw at a police car hit a pole and bounced back.  While Israelis interpreted the whole fiasco as part of an international plot (with anti-Semitic bombings duplicated in India and Georgia), observers in Bangkok found it odd that the "gang-who-couldn't-shoot-straight" partied in Pattaya, getting their photo taken and displaying Iranian cash, before they came to the capital and accidentally set off explosives.

The march to war with Iran over their nuclear ambitions, with Israel's Netanyahu as drum major followed closely by Republicans campaigning for the presidential nomination, dominates the news these days.  Along with accusations that Obama is conducting a "war on religion" because of his policy that Catholic hospitals and schools cover employes for contraceptive health costs, the stories coming from the U.S. press make one wonder if someone hasn't put something into the water (in addition to the poisons seeping into the ground from the practice of fracking).  While I scan the headlines, I look for worthwhile commentary by writers like Paul Krugman, Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky.  The division between social and economic conservatives virtually assures Obama's reelection, but that is only mildly good news, given that he sold his soul after Inauguration to the money manipulators, proponents of Empire, and Israeli interests.  I find him on many issues to the right of Clinton (no favorite of progressives) and even Bush.  It's mildly depressing and a good reason to take a break from the internet (which I've not yet been able to do).

Thailand's political situation remains murky.  Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her Pheu Thai government have apparently reached an accommodation with the military and the royalists which may avoid a coup but which could eventually bring a confrontation with her red shirt base in the provinces.  The campaign against 112, the draconian lese majeste law, led by a group of lawyers from Thammasat University, continues despite threats from the right.  Thongchai Winichakun, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, spoke at the Foreign Correspondents Club last week and said increasing use of the law and stiff penalties was due to an ideology of "royalist democracy" and "hyper-royalism" expressed through new rituals which arose in the 1970s and has increased dramatically since the 2006 coup.  Although freedom of expression around issues concerning the monarchy has been drastically curtailed, Thongchai felt the current public conversation about 112 was a small sign of hope.  Conditions have changed since the 1970s, he said.  "Thais love electoral democracy, they realize that politicians can be good for them, and this implies a direct confrontation with royalist democracy."  The backdrop to the current struggle over 112 is uncertainty about the succession (and at this point the cone of censorship descends).

After eye surgery, my vision improved and I've ordered new glasses.  But the arthritis in my knee is worse and I'm going to have it x-rayed this week to see if anything short of an operation can help relieve the pain while walking.  Aging is a gradual degeneration of the necessary parts of the body needed for socialization.  It is hard to stay present while your senses are failing.  I sit on our comfortable couch and judge the nominees for the Oscars to be awarded next weekend, with the aid of subtitles even for movies in English.  My favorite film is "A Better Life," and I wish its star, Demian Bichir, could nab the Best Actor statue, but both are long shots.  His role in the film is very different from the drug czar of Tijuana he played in "Weeds," and I barely recognized him.  Every border conservative should be forced to view this film about the plight of defenseless undocumented workers.  I also liked "Extremely Close & Incredibly Loud" and "The Help."  And I hope the animation award goes to the incredibly wonderful "Chico & Rita" about entertainers from Cuba, old and new.

I have nothing to add about the tragedy of Whitney Houston.  Such a waste of a promising life.  I played a music video of "I Have Nothing" for my linguistic and 3rd year English students and let them guess the missing words in the lyrics marked by blanks.  I did the same when Amy Winehouse died, and hope I never have to do it for Grammy's big winner last week, Adele.  Fame eats its young.  Nicky is on tour in Europe with Hanni El Khatib, with 11 days alone in France where he has a girlfriend now.  I hope they can deal with the stresses and strains of celebrity.  Fame is not what it's cracked up to be.  The dots we connect for the lucky recipients of society's awards rarely remain connected.

Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Do not go gentle into that good night, 

Old age should burn and rave at close of day, 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Dylan Thomas)

A few days ago, a man I knew casually at my university was shot and killed by a jealous ex-husband who also murdered the woman he was with before hanging himself.  My friend's name was Ittipol Buachart but I knew him as Paul, a debonair and well-traveled man who spoke impeccable English.  He was manager of customer relations for the Language Institute at my school and he led me to believe he was politically well-connected when he offered his help if I had any problems with my visa or work permit.  He also offered me a job after my short stint with the Language Institute ended for lack of paying students.  MCU's main campus is in Wangnoi, an industrial area near Ayutthaya, and the Language Institute was developing English classes for factory workers.  Because classes were scheduled in the late afternoon and commuting from Bangkok would be difficult, I declined.  Twice, Paul gave me rides in his car which he parked on campus, once to the Labour Ministry and once to a local hotel after a conference at school.  Even though I didn't know him well, his violent death came as a shock.  Raw news footage circulating on Facebook graphically showed all three bodies in a cluttered house in Lopburi.  No one would have figured that kind of ending for Paul.

Paul was probably in his early 50s, a young man, speaking relatively.  His violent death is yet another reminder that we cannot choose the way that we go.  Or when.  Death is not a comfortable subject (Thais pronounce all four syllables of "comfortable" with the accent on the second, and correcting my students is a ritual each term).  How easy it is to get distracted by life!  But "Death" in the title of a blog would be a turnoff.  Friends in my cohort are mostly in their 70s now and reading obituaries and noting the age of the deceased is a regular habit for us  Those younger have postponed indefinitely any speculation about the manner and timing of their passing.  But when someone we know dies, it's hard to avoid.

I still think often of my son Luke who died over two years ago in his mid 40s.  Since he was an obstinate alcoholic, it was a slow suicide.  Dear Holly, almost my age, died quickly in Bangkok last year from a fast-moving cancer that allowed her to sip champagne the night before her death.  But my cousin Ted died slowly from a rare disease that caused paranoia and dementia.  Joe, however, who lived not far from Ted in Oregon, died instantly from a heart attack; both he, Holly and Ted were in their late 60s.  Peter, my closest friend in Santa Cruz for many years, died in his early 60s of prostate cancer, the same disease I was diagnosed with over 10 years ago.  I don't know why it claimed Peter's life but has so far spared mine.

I'm not sure why Dylan Thomas gives me comfort and the courage to look mortality in the face.  That old reprobate certainly hastened his own demise at the age of 39.  After a month of sickness and excess in 1953, he died at a New York hospital of acute alcohol poisoning and pneumonia.  Did he "burn and rave at close of day" and "rage against the dying of the light," even though he was far from old?  Would he reaffirm that "death shall have no dominion" as he headed towards the grave?

The infirmities of old age are cumulative.  They creep up on us, a thief in the night, and rarely announce their appearance like a gunshot or a terrible pain in the chest.  Over the years, I have discussed suicide pacts with several different friends whereby we will assist each other in avoiding the indignities of a long terminal illness.  One of them was later diagnosed with Parkinson's and now he sits mute in a wheel chair, his life constricted by medication and caretakers.  Yet the twinkle in his eye when we're together tells me that he's not ready to go.   My father, who used to brag that he had never visited a doctor in his life and didn't get sick, ended his days companioned with an oxygen tank for his emphysema, sitting on a bench in the mall, envious as the elderly walkers strolled by him.  His twin brother, Ted, however, took his life with pills when his emphysema got too bad.   How can we know when it's time?

The three days I spent in the hospital last month jolted me out of my complacency.  When you ignore it for long as I have, the body exacts its revenge.  And I had prided myself for embracing a material spirituality, one that looked for no consolation in metaphysics or an afterlife.  Coming to live in Thailand was my way to affirm and celebrate the pleasures of "this one wild and precious life" (Mary Oliver).  Falling in love with and marrying a much younger woman was, I thought, not an escape from aging and death but a passionate acceptance of the pleasures of sensuality.  In this view, all physical life is sacred, and there is nothing particularly ennobling about the immaterial soul.

This goes against the accepted wisdom that old age is the time to prepare for death.  Phra Cittamasvaro, the British monk, who could be the closest I have to a guru here in Thailand (though not for the reasons he might think), has faulted me for the pursuit of worldly pleasure when I should be getting ready for the end of it.  Buddhists generally believe that the moment of death is important and it would be well to be meditating mindfully when it happens.  Other than as a stress reliever (and perhaps good for the heart), I no longer find myself much attracted to meditation (this may change, just as atheist soldiers always pray in foxholes).  And now we're back to speculating on the manner and timing of one's passing.

My right knee is giving me some grief.  Years ago I was told I needed an operation to repair it, but now the cost would be too great.  I'm on the lookout for a nifty cane.  For the last few months my left eye has been not been carrying its share of the work of vision; I've self-diagnosed it as chronic conjunctivitis but this could be wrong.  My fingers and a few toes are twisted by arthritis but remain able to walk, grip and type despite the sting and ache.  Of course my innards are as much trouble as always, with mysterious twinges and pains, and erratic (and colorful) bowel movements.  Although my weight has remained consistent at 81 kilos (up 5 since I came here 5 years ago), my stomach expands and sags.  Wrinkles abound and my neck resembles a turkey's.  You don't want to ask an old man how he is.  The boring recitation could go on indefinitely.

"Be Here Now" was good advice when Ram Dass published in 1971 his influential book on the spiritualism of the hippies, a movement that celebrated the physicality and potentiality of life.  I'm still a hippie at heart (although I was a worker with family responsibilities during the 1960s).  Even though Sakyamuni began his journey toward awakening upon learning about sickness and death, thinking about our own death takes us away from the here and now and prevents us from seeing the cracks where the light comes in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

--Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

Then should we "rage against the dying of the light" when our time comes to go?  If by "rage" you can also mean passionately embracing life rather than its absence, then I suppose so.  In the book of Deuteronomy in the Bible, God says:

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.  So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants.

I hope to choose life always, even at the moment of leaving it.

The Ethics of Internet Piracy

As someone who occasionally has not fully respected the Intellectual Property Rights (IPS) of content producers and providers, I feel I can offer an insider's perspective on the intense debate over censorship and piracy that led last week to the defeat of anti-piracy legislation in the U.S.  In one sense, it was a battle between behemoths: the music and movie conglomerates, threatened by the loss of ticket, DVD and CD sales, against the major gatekeepers of the internet, Google and Wikipedia foremost among them, who believed the proposed bills would introduce government censorship.

Among my friends have been numerous writers and musicians who make their living by selling their creativity to the public.  Replication of original work has been a possibility, and hence a threat, ever since the invention and widespread use of photography, copy machines and sound duplication devices.  In Vietnam and Cambodia I've seen children selling poorly-copied reproductions of bestselling books on street corners.  Counterfeit DVDs and CDs are on sale at sidewalk stalls everywhere tourists and Thais gather in Bangkok.  This also goes for fake Prada and Gucci items.  Somewhere a designer, singer and author are being short-changed by these criminal replicators.

Then there are the poor students and other cheapskates who have become accustomed to the internet and all its offerings being free.  Digital items are insubstantial, ethereal.  My copying of anything digital, from a photo to a pdf article or a selection of megabytes that constitutes a book or movie, is effortless, an instant of shoplifting that goes unnoticed in the grand scheme of things.  The problem comes when I download a book that I might have bought at the neighborhood store (or Amazon), or I grab a new CD or song at a BitTorrent site online that I might have purchased from iTunes or one of the few music outlets still surviving.  Copying becomes theft when it precludes a physical purchase, thus denying its creators their livelihood.  You might also argue that piracy contributes to the decline of bricks-and-mortar stores if the legal online megasellers had not already done that.

When I moved at 13 to California, the first friend I made in junior high school took me to the downtown area one Saturday where we browsed comic books at a cigar and news store (a type of retailer that has gone the way of the Dodo bird).  Paul was a man of the world and he stuffed a comic in his pants and strolled toward the door.  "Hey you!" shouted the clerk, and gave chase.  Appalled and fascinated, I ran alongside Paul until we outdistanced the man.  In high school I was always too scared to shoplift but I knew girls that stole cosmetics and boys that took 45rpm records from Woolworth's.  Years later, I was in a bookstore in Berkeley with the woman who was to become my second wife.  She took a hardback copy of Andre Codrescu's autobiography, The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius, and stuck it in her purse.  Again, I was appalled and fascinated by the willfulness it takes to steal.  A little later, at the KPFA studios where Codrescu was doing an interview with my friend Pat, we showed him our trophy and he was duly impressed.  It was not long after Abbie Hoffman had written Steal This Book, a title which I'm sure did not make the publisher happy.

While working in the music business in the 1970s, I encouraged established photographers to take pictures of our artists and sell them to magazines and newspapers.  The enfant terriblé Jim Marshall used to drop by my office to look through my collection of books and magazines to see if anyone had used his highly regarded photographs without permission.  It was rumored that Marshall carried a gun which he had once used to someone's regret.  He was always cordial to me, and I hired him one year, all expenses paid, to take photos at Willie Nelson's 4th of July picnic. A few years later, when I was art director at Guitar Player, a photo came from the Grateful Dead's office for a story on Jerry Garcia and I used it, assuming that Marshall had been paid.  Apparently not.  When the issue was published, he called me and screamed for an hour, threatening to blow my head off.  At the record company, I often paid photographers a flat fee for publicity photos which would then be reprinted widely in connection with record reviews and interviews.  Each use, of course, meant less of a market for the photographer's original work.

Internet piracy is called theft, but it's the possible future lost sale that constitutes the loss since copying diminishes nothing.  If I copy a CD that I borrowed from the library, I add to the items in the world.  The library doesn't suffer.  My brazen girlfriend's theft of the book damaged the store by depleting its inventory, just as Woolworth's suffered from the raids by teen shoplifters on their stocks of cosmetics and records.  Codrescu could care less that his royalty statement would be shortened.  If she taken it out of the library and loaned it to me to read after finishing it, that would not constitute theft even though it means that I would not buy the book.  Confusion and contradictions abound over exactly what is theft when it comes to replicated products that were mass produced.

The historian in me cannot help but point out that in the 19th century, French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Prudhon claimed that "property is theft," which is an interesting way to looking at the todays charges that the piracy of intellectual property is theft.  And he was preceded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who wrote,

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. 

Ownership is a modern concept.  Claiming authorship or of being the creator of words and notes for a piece of music parallels the the period of patronage when royalty basked in the glow of the artists they supported.  The rise of capitalism promoted individualism over community (and anonymity) and there were few creators who did not want to be remember by posterity.

The invention of photography was a disaster for portrait artists and painters renowned for their realistic works of art.  The camera could reproduce reality more faithfully.  So artists turned to more abstract themes in order to depict meaning from within rather than merely represent the external world.  Recording companies were threatened by the rise of radio in the 1920s, thinking that no one would buy records if they could hear them for free.  Fifty years later the Sony Walkman made it easy to record and share audio tapes.  Predictions of doom, however, failed to materialize.

The consolidation of content providers has raised different questions.  Huge entertainment and publishing corporations control most of the world's music, movies and books.  They finance and distribute the products of an increasingly homogenized global culture (with significant local variations, such as Korean pop, which is hugely popular throughout Asia but not America and Europe).  The "content producers" (a disagreeable name for creative artists) are often at the bottom of a hierarchy run by lawyers and businessmen (mostly).  It's hard to say how much an illegally downloaded movie, CD or book impacts their livelihood.  If the situation were different, if the writers and musicians could deal directly with their readers and audience, then stealing their work would be more ethically noticeable, and perhaps the idea that everything on the internet should be free would slowly change in the thinking of many consumers.

A new paradigm is needed for artist and audience.  The Occupy movements are showing a growing dissatisfaction with a world controlled by corporations.  Many are rejecting the notion that property takes precedence over people, and ownership over justice.  The concept of "intellectual property" is enormously flawed, allowing agribusiness to patent seeds developed over centuries and pharmaceutical companies to patent the gene sequences of indigenous people without their knowledge.  It was designed by corporations to maximize profit.

Musicians and writers must extricate themselves from this system which epitomizes the destructiveness of the global economy.  Both Amazon and Apple, through its iBooks program, have announced ways for writers to produce their own books and sell them online.  While both large companies must be treated with suspicion, the idea of creators taking at least some initiative and control is a good one.  Many musicians, including some like Radiohead, are learning how to use the internet to reach their listeners directly, cutting out the established music provider.  Music companies, like newspapers, will cease to exist in their present form.  YouTube has made it possible for film artists to reach a wider public and I'm sure high speed internet connections will allow filmmakers eventually to promote their creations outside of the corporate studio and distribution systems.

Internet piracy does not usually conjure up an image of Jack Sparrow in the Caribbean. But if I'm correct, the destruction of the old system of linking creators with their audience will pave the way for something new, just as capitalism did when it destroyed the old patronage system which funded composers and artists for centuries.  Rather than focus on the unethical counterfeiters in Asia, duplicating blockbuster movies on DVD and CDs by hit singles artists, we should think of the thousands of interested computer users who currently are illegally downloading movies, books and music as primed and ready to communicate directly with internet artists.

(For a more critical look at piracy, read Danny Goldberg's essay, "Kill the Internet -- and other anti-SOPA Myths," in The Nation.  He spent many years in the music industry after I left.)

In Defense of Sensual Pleasure

Gérard de Lairesse's Allegory of the Five Senses (1668)

Three days in the hospital with pneumonia makes one appreciate the pleasures of the senses.  Discharged on Christmas morning, I reveled in the warmth of the Bangkok sun as I got into the taxi.  Even the pollution smelled good.  At home I indulged myself by listening to Christmas songs, sipping soda and eating Oreos.  The familiar feel of our pseudo-velvet couch was comforting.  The very air taken in by my somewhat worse-for-wear lungs was nectar of the gods.  I was alive and loved it.

Pleasure gets a bad rap from all religions which see the physical as something to flee rather than embrace.  The body is the source of temptation, the root of evil intentions and bad deeds.  Despite my appreciation of many of the teachings of Buddhism and the Catholic Christian tradition, I cannot abide their distaste for the physical.  The mostly male priests and monks shun the opposite sex in order to preserve purity.  Each religion has an otherworldly, metaphysical goal: enlightenment for Buddhists and heaven for Christians.  And each contains doctrines that encourage renunciation of the world and the avoidance of physical temptations that appeal to the senses.

Buddhism advocates a middle way between indulgence and mortification of the senses, as my friend Phra Cittasamvaro points out in "So What is Wrong with Sense Desire?"  Even though "desire causes suffering" (one translation of the Second Noble Truth), not all desire is harmful, he believes.  Unrestrained desire is the problem.  Refined sense pleasures, for Mozart, Picasso, Shakespeare and the like, are "often blameless," although equal to coarser pleasures in their ability to distract from one's true goal.  And aspirations, desires for qualities such as compassion, patience and wisdom, as well as enlightenment, should be cultivated.  It's OK, he writes, "to enjoy nice food, good company or stroking your pet cat," but through meditation one sees that "sense pleasures are really a temporary cover for a deeper discomfort in the heart."

Since the Greeks, Hedonists have claimed that pleasure is the only intrinsic good.  Philosopher and gay rights advocate John Corvin disagrees:  He believes there are goods beside pleasure.  "But from the fact that pleasure isn't the only good, it does not follow that pleasure isn't good at all." He calls this argument the "Prude's Fallacy."  "To deny pleasure's value is just silly."    I doubt that many Buddhist teachers will ever see pleasure as a distinct good rather than a distraction from the only true good of enlightenment.  Buddha founded a community of renunciants who abandoned the world to concentrate on awakening from samsara as their teacher had done.  Today's sangha of monks in Thailand follow in that tradition.  I have no problem with anyone's choice of the robe and renunciation, and the practice of ritual and meditation to support that life.  Some of my best friends follow that path.  But I cannot agree with teaching that rejects the sensual pleasures which I feel help to make us fully human.

Prudes often argue that the senses require selfish gorging.  If food tastes good, the sensualist will gorge himself until he is bloated.  Even when there is someone hungry in the room, the glutton will feed his own desire to the exclusion of others.  The same goes in spades for sexual desire which is interpreted as inherently self-centered.  But arguing from extremes is to draw up a straw man, a figment of the prude's imagination.  People, as Phra Cittamasvaro suggested, learn to restrain their senses from an early age.  Delayed gratification, partly for the heightened sense of pleasure it can provide, is a basic lesson on the road to maturity.  But the most important factors that undercut the prude's argument are the developed virtues of compassion and sharing.  Contrary to the survival of the fittest crowd, human beings are designed to cooperate more than compete.  (I'll save footnotes for the book)  In the fulfillment of our sensual desires, most of us take others into consideration.  And we don't even need religious rules and threats of punishment to comply with this universal achievement.

I'd quote Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller or Allan Ginsberg here, but I think I've made my point.  Along with my skepticism about karma and rebirth, this belief in the value of sensual desire restrains me from becoming a committed Buddhist.  Or at least it did until recently when I began reading numerous books and articles about the history of Buddhism and the current modernist interpretation of doctrine that has dominated east and west thinking since the 19th century.  Thai Buddhism with its infusions of Brahmanism and animism has fascinated me since I moved here in 2004.  Its iconography and rituals do not seem to fit within the western narrative of Buddhism, and I've discussed this anomaly in various blog posts.  Last week I attended a conference on Buddhist Studies at Chulalongkorn University where Justin McDaniel presented a radically different view of Thai Buddhism in his talk and in remarks at the launch of his new book.

The Lovelorn Ghost & The Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand focuses on the practices of Thai Buddhists rather than history, doctrine and the institution of the monastic sangha.  McDaniel tells of the mostly legendary exploits of Mae Nak, vengeful mother and ghost, and popular 19th century monk Somdet To.  "Now it is painfully clear that any major study of Thai Buddhism is simply ludicrous," says McDaniel, "if these two are not prominently featured.  Ignoring them is ignoring what millions of Thai Buddhists know and value."  He aims to write about what Thai Buddhists do rather than explain what they believe or the meaning of their actions. And this involves him in "astrology, protective magic, fortune-telling, ghost belief, 'Hindu' deities, multiple Buddhas, [and] amulets," while "many scholars still dig and dig looking for their idea of Theravada buried under the weight of Thai culture...Looking for the Theravada, the Buddhist, and the authentic often prevents scholars from seeing what is going on."

I've only just begun reading McDaniel's book and cannot provide a proper review (for that, see Chris Baker's review in the Bangkok Post).  It's obvious to me this he is on to something with this radical approach.  A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, McDaniel has studied Buddhism in Thailand and Laos for many years and even wore a robe as a monk.  This is his second book and one I think that will prove controversial.  Nan and I maintain an altar of icons on top of our bookcase and freshen it with flowers and water for every Wan Phra.  We often  make merit at a nearby temple by taking gifts and lighting candles and incense while the monk chants a blessing over our goblets of water (which are then poured on the nearest bush or tree).  My western-educated brain is caught up in debates about beliefs and reality which make pure deeds difficult.  From my observation of my wife and her family, however, I do not see that concerns about sensual desires play a role in their practice of Buddhism.  More important for them is the practice of generosity and the metta prayer that all beings be happy.

As my body slowly recovers from the megadoses of antibiotics and steroids in the hospital to kill the infection and jump-start my lungs, I am enjoying the turning of the world after the shortest day at the Winter Solstice.  The sunrises have been spectacular lately and I try to capture the colors of the sky while waiting for my morning coffee to brew.  The dawn sun had moved a few degrees to the right of the Rama IX Bridge spire and is now moving back to the left.  This is all that I can know of the seasons in Bangkok, although occasionally the mornings are chilly (to Nan more than me who puts on a sweater).  Up north several provinces have been declared disaster zones because of temperatures that yet remain above the freezing mark but can kill Thais without heaters or warm clothes.

School resumed last week and I took the Mahachula pink bus to Wangnoi in Ayutthaya past fields still filled with garbage that floated in on the flood last month.  Many trees had died. Our classroom building has electricity but neither air conditioning nor functioning elevators (fortunately my classrooms are on the 2nd floor).  I learned that the subject of my new class for 4th year students is translation which might be a stretch for someone without one of the two languages needed.  For their first assignment, I asked them to find a short poem by Sunthorn Phu, considered Thailand's greatest writer, and translate it into English.  My usual class of 3rd year students in Listening & Speaking English has been cut in half and I will teach 14 students with a new Thai teacher taking an equal amount.  I'm not particularly happy about this non-sensical split but it will mean less papers to grade.  Only one student showed up the first day.  The graduate class in linguistics continues on Saturday mornings and students seem to be enjoying The Little Prince which I'm using for a text in hopes that it can provide examples of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.

The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence is continually affirmed as my body continues its relentless journey toward oblivion.  I learned last week of the deaths of my cousin, Ted Ballard, and my friend Joe Hudgins.  Coincidentally, both were 67 years old and lived near Ashland, Oregon.  Ted died on my birthday last year of Lewy Body dementia, a horrible mix of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.  He'd built his own home on 140 acres in Gold Hill and was an accomplished master carpenter.  In college Ted was gardener for painter Morris Graves at his Eureka retreat and is mentioned in a poem by Graves' friend, John Cage.  Ted played the banjo, disliked the internet, and is grandfather to his step-daughter's son with Foo Fighter Nate Mendel.  His mother, my aunt Margaret, was an important mentor when I was falling in love with literature.  I miss them both.  Joe had the dubious fame in his youth of playing Dr. Flexi Jerkoff in the cult film "Flesh Gordon" (He's at 20 minutes to the hour in the poster).  In recent years he sold real estate and taught others how to sell.  Joe had a distinguishing laugh that you could hear miles away. He was a founder of the non-profit KSKQ in Ashland and hosted the first transmitter on his property as well as various radio shows. I'm happy to hear that he enjoyed himself at a New Year's Eve party the night before the heart attack that killed him.  R.I.P., Joe and Ted.

While I'm feeling better, a few aches and pains remain.  But impermanence was reinforced last week when I lost my wallet.  It either dropped out of my pocket, or it was picked from it during a crush of people getting on a bus after the conference.  I lost several thousand baht and a few important cards, but so far no one has charged anything.  The following night, as if to make sure I'd learned the lesson, I lost my house keys.  Needless to say, it took awhile to transcend upset and the fear that I really am losing it in general.  But, with the help of a good woman, I eventually was able to see that I'll never really lose it.  May all beings and especially my family and friends have a wonderful New Year in 2012 (or 2555 here, pronounced "song ha ha ha" which is quite funny).