I just got the below message at my blog, as sent by Blogger/Google. Should my blog of +13 years be terminated from additional flags or "violations," SubStack will be my only home. So be it, for I'm not going to censor myself.--Linh
Hello,
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The lunatics are indeed on the grass. I hope it blows over. Of course some of your comments had to be explained to me so I guess you were courting danger. That doesn't give anyone the right to censor speech so I hope no one suggests reeducation.
I'm always intrigued by where you write about and often look at google earth to see the surroundings. In this case it's true that the US Ambassador's residence appeared to be an anomoly in the middle of a chaotic city but it used to be a large colonial house on a lake. https://th.usembassy.gov/cmr-history/
"By the late 1800s, the area east of Rattanakosin was filled with verdant rice fields, interlaced with large and small khlongs and dotted by small, scattered farms.
...
Personifying Bangkok’s boom growth was English engineer Horatio Victor Bailey. By 1913, Bailey was a well-connected Bangkokian, having worked for Bangkok Dock Company and later as Engineer-In-Chief to the Royal Mint Department. Bailey then founded his own engineering consultancy and an import company.
...
Bailey sited his house at the back third of the property, in view of but at a discrete distance from the dirt road that inevitably would be developed someday. Walking on a path from the front drive south of the house, Bailey’s prominent bathing sala would come into view, and adjacent to it, Bailey widened and deepened the western and southern border canals to form a large, square bathing pond.
...
For the main house architecture, Bailey chose a playful combination of European colonial, restrained gingerbread and tropical Malaysian designs, harmonized with Siamese architecture’s elegance, intricacy and neatness. His design was consistent with several other houses built in Bangkok at the time."
Annoying as it might seem to us that one man lived in such luxury (before he turned 40!), all credit to the Americans for retaining the historical building for as long as they did, having bought it in 1927. However looking at the latest aerial photos it's evident that they've now demolished the house, filled in the lake, destroyed the surrounding parkland and are in the process of erecting an abysmal edifice in its place.
To me, nothing is as edifying about a culture as watching how it treats the historial buildings it 'owns' and, if it demolishes them, what it erects as their replacement. The American, British and French attitude towards the architectural heritage they have been bequeathed is often lamentably philistine.
Where I am, in Egypt, there are no masks, no vaccines and no Covid. In fact, there is not Covid in all of Africa - and there never was any Covid. Africans many have a lower IQ on average than East Asians, but they hack a lot more common sense.
Two: the African Continent has had enough of "Collective Waste" hubris and their larger IQ is beginning to reveal itself against the declining CW's IQ of Hegemony Projection.
It doesn't take much of an IQ to resort to criminal violence.
Three: the CW's influence has sewered towards ZERO.
Reminds me of this article I came across the other day- "Notre Dame Cathedral to Become a Woke Disneyland ‘Theme Park’, According to Leaked Renovation Plans" and "Macron’s Wife Wanted to Build Giant Golden Dick in Front of Notre Dame"
"In France, the Yellow Jackets are mounting protests against inflation and lower standards of living, but street rallies won’t do anything. Only with forceful disruption to business as usual can we even begin to hope for change."
Hello Linh... Without a doubt. Unfortunately my fellow modern moron slaves aren't still aware that these types of protests won't get them anywhere.
What clearly is preventing us (herds of modern moron slaves) from ACTING in a way that cause an actual disruption to business as usual is the fact that deep down majority knows that we aren't able to live without "business as usual", and we aren't willing to CHANGE.
The embassies and consulates are not the only places that the US has turned into fortresses. Have you taken a gander at recent pics from good old Washington DC? Several houses of government, including the White House, Congress, and (I believe) the Supreme Court are all surrounded by fences, K-rails, armed soldiers, etc. DC is starting to resemble the Baghdad Green Zone. There’s nothing like a government that rules with the consent of the governed…
CNN and other corporate media outlets go on with more of their BS about what's happening in Ukraine. But at least a few in high places are starting to worry about what will happen when Russia wins and the vast majority of the public realizes how badly it’s been lied to. The big shots know that gaslighting people about "safe and effective" is much easier than concealing a Russian victory that many have had a ringside seat for.
Incredibly, I’d say close to a quarter of the people I see still walk around even outdoors on a beautiful day with N95 masks on. But I would at least cut the Asians a bit of slack on their motives for masking, given that many in Asian cities wore masks for other reasons long before the Age of Covid, and are more acclimated to the practice.
I don't have much to say or add, but I always come away from one of your articles with more good things to read or watch. Well worth the price of supporting you. I am always delighted to find another LD article in my inbox. I absolutely hate the masks. But since Covidtopia woke me up and I quit my absolutely useless federal intel job, in a way, I have to admit the masks are useful. A person walking outside by themselves wearing a mask, is not someone worth engaging. I have been feeling off and on these past few years that I am in a "Body Snatchers" world, that most people around me are Pod People. But in many ways I am living my "best life" now. A major contention within myself is whether I should spend time trying to improve this world and fight the Dark Side, as in, shoulder the burden of society, or if I should "follow my bliss" and simply pursue my hobbies and interests purely for their own sake. (I am trying for the middle right now, but lately, it seems my most of my time is taken with fixing things and helping my two grown sons. The fridge died last week, and I used the internet to learn how to fix it myself.) For example, I bought most of the Covid truth books, at least to support the authors, but the truth is I don't want to spend my precious reading time on them. Who am I kidding, do I think I am going to debate a Covidiot, and convince them of anything?
So much in this I can relate to. Life has called me into service just when I was totally happy to potter about the garden and try to improve my drawing and painting skills upon the death of my husband who has left a legacy of a large workshop full of welding and metal cutting implements that need to be disposed of. There are many things I take a passing interest in and at least momentarily think I would like to learn more about but I have never evinced any interest at all in learning more about the used prices of machinery suitable for welding or cutting large pieces of steel, or indeed the rise in prices of the steel itself. But that seems to be my fate for the next few months.
I shouldn't grumble, its all worth money.
I just reviewed the many authors I follow on Substack and have realised that, like cookbooks, there is just not enough time to read them and at the same time clean out the workshop. So out they go, except Linh.
If you happen to live near Tennessee, maybe I can help you find a buyer for your late husband’s equipment. It does seem hard to sell things lately, I have also been trying to declutter. I also gave up on reading everything on the stack.
Yes half a world away. I appreciate your offer though. Currently i have drawn a dark curtain over that unruly mess and am enjoying blythe summer down at the beach.
Linh your corkscrew eyes don't miss a thing - very interesting how you noted the strong presence of gay men in the US State Department. I had such a friend and saw this with my own eyes. Of course, it's only fairly recently that these men could be open about their preferences - homosexuality had to be hidden and could be used for blackmail. Ambitious gay white men have always been useful tools for the Powers That Be, illegal or not.
I enjoy your letters Linh especially now you are back in Thailand where I once used to live for a few years myself, off and on.
I first arrived there in 1957, at age 21. I had an older brother living there who worked in the shipping department of Diethelm, a Swiss firm long settled in Bangkok. I believe they are still there.
What does one do when one is 21 - one goes after the women. But in my case not any woman. I had my heart set on finding the woman who is called Vital in Jack Reynold’s novel A Woman of Bangkok which had just recently appeared then (and is still available in Kindle).In the novel as in real life she was a bar/good time girl and reputedly still in business, not under the name Vital but the more alluring one of “The Black Tiger”. I found her in one of the nightclubs back then, called Copacabana. She seemed quite a bit older than me - I looked even younger than my age then and well meaning white ladies accompanying their husbands in that club (Bangkok was still that type of place then) advised me “You better go home boy”. I didn’t.
There were not many nightclubs back then because Bangkok was not yet a destination for mass tourism. In fact most of the foreigners then seemed to be living and working there. The city itself looked far more “oriental” than it does now. The high rise buildings were not there yet which made the temples look more predominant. Many of the klongs had not been filled in yet which earned Bangkok the somewhat inflated title of “Venice of Asia”. .
About eight years after my first visit to the country, when I was living in Chiang Mai (at Thanon Rajviti if I remember correctly) I met a foreigner there who had been living in Thailand since 1896. It was old Mr.W.A.R.Wood who had joined the British diplomatic service in Bangkok ar the tender age of 18 and had, 25 years later (according to his Wiki), achieved the rank of British Consul General in Chiang Mai. There he also had a judicial function because Britain still enjoyed extra territorial rights then and there was even then a sizable community of Britishers in Chiang Mai, working inter alia for two large companies, the Bombay Burma Company and the Borneo one. People could also choose to put themselves under British protection and hence forward only be adjudicable in a British Court, in this case presided over by Mr.Wood. I understand that it was mainly foreign merchants (Chinese, Indian, Burmese) who made use of this option.
I visited Mr.Wood at his home that was presided over by his wife, reputedly a Shan of aristocratic descent. Wood has given in his book A Consul in Paradise an amusing tale of how he won her. When I say “presided over” I mean it literally. She hovered around us while we were talking, giving me dirty looks when she thought I was staying too long and tiring out her aged husband. Wood was 87 then. I thought him as old as the hills then and now I am exactly that age myself I cannot conceive how and why I thought that.
I might indeed have stayed too long. Wood was a very amusing and eager talker and his wife might have known the limits of his strength better than he knew those himself. One of his tales that has stayed with me is how easy it was for a white man then to contact the king. Well a white man then was a rarity there in itself, and this white man had, hovever junior then, the prestige of the British Empire in its full flowering behind him. Wood said “ I simply had to knock on the palace gate and then you got a message the King is brushing his teeth or something but he will be presently with you.
The contrast with how his own subjects were allowed to approach him couldn’t have been stronger.
For most of Wood’s time in Bangkok the reigning monarch was Chulalongkorn,Rama V (1853-1910), who is regarded as Thailand’s greatest king and its moderniser (though that process had already started under his father, king Mongkut, the king of “Anna and the King of Siam”). There is a substantial statue of Chulalongkorn at the entrance of Lumpini park (when your taxi driver goes past that you have to watch him because he might be inclined to take his hands off the steering wheel and raise them in a wai).
I treasure as a keepsake Wood’s History of Siam with his signature. His Wiki says that when it appeared (1926) it “was regarded as a standard work of the time"[1] It doesn’t specify who regarded it so. The book has no scholarly value whatsoever and it would have been a small miracle if it had. Wood was too isolated up there and had too little training in the field to make a valuable contribution to the history of Southeast Asia.
This comment is becoming too long. I hope to continue it later.
There was still a British consulate in my days in Chiang Mai (i.e. in 1965) but it had long since lost its judicial function. This had been entirely taken over by the local Thai court of whose activity we were reminded every morning. We happened to live opposite it and heard an early chain gang of prisoners go by to receive what that court had in store for them. I found the sound of their foot shackles’clinking on the pavement pretty lugubrious.
The British consulate then, still housed in the same beautiful old building with a statue of Queen Victoria as a reminder of the days of yore, was manned by a Mr.Gibson, a dwarfish hunchback with a sharp tongue as we found out when he invited my then girlfriend and me for a meal. Why did he invite us? Not because he deemed us in any way important but presumably he had heard that I was doing some research there and he wanted to find out what I was up to. I strongly suspected him of bringing into circulation a tale, later spread further by an Australian anthropologist, that I was doing research on corruptiion in the Thai bureaucracy and started my interviews with civil servants with the question : “Are you corrupt”. I had in deed discussed Thai corruption with him, as who wouldn’t, but, needless to say, my research activities were of a rather different nature.
The atmosphere in Chiang Mai then was rife with suspicion. The Vietnam War was going on and there were rumours that the Americans were trying to weaponize the “montagnards”, the Vietnamese hilltribes, for their own nefarious designs. It was strongly suspected that quite a few of those who claimed to be anthropologists doing research on the hill tribes just north of Chiang Mai were in fact CIA agents.
Mr. Gibson wasn’t the only one who wanted to know what I was up to. Not long after we had settled in at Rajvithi Road an American visited us uninvited. He claimed to be a former tenant of the house who had lost his cat in moving and wanted to see wether she was still in or around our house - a perfect pretext for snooping around. He didn’t seem a cat lover to me.
I had received a small grant in aid from a Rotary club in Perth, Australia. When I came to present their letter of recommendation to the local chairman of Rotary he took a big book from a shelf, consulted it and pushed my letter back with an air of triumph. The Perth chairman had a different name in his out of date book than that in my letter.
I won’t go on. There were compensations. I managed to obtain a long term lease for a little shop that could be transformed into a hairdressing salon for my Thai girlfriend. So we left Rajvithi Road but because I couldn’t stand being behind that shop the whole day I rented a barely furnished cheapie for myself in a neighbourhood without electricity. That meant no tv, no radio or recordplayers, hence without that bane of Southeast Asian countries, noise pollution. The only disturbance came from my neighbour, a Thai policeman who kept two roosters. I solved that problem by buying them from him for a good price. He did me a favor by not buying new ones as long as I lived there. In his eyes I was an Acharn (teacher, scholar) living in all simplicity as Buddhist ideals will have it. I found that there is a lot to be said for those ideals.
We had some European acquaintances though. We were friendly with a local painter, a German called Gerd Barkofsky, who made a living by making sketches of the hill tribes and travelling to Bangkok every so often to sell them to tourist shops. He was a cheerful character but his cheer was to some extent inspired by his addiction to Thai whiskey, Mekong, which he drank throughout the day. I visited Chiang Mai again, many years later,in 1992. It was flooded with mainly young tourists then and almost unrecognisable from the rather sleepy place I had known more than 25 years earlier.I got hold of a little book, called De Mortuis, published by a R.W. Wood, obviously a local descendant of the retired British Consul General W.A.R.Wood whom I had visited many years before. The book gave short biographies of people buried at the European cemetery in Chiang Mai. It mentioned that Barkofsky had died at age sixty two of liver cancer. Mr. W.A.R. Wood had died in 1970, at the age of 92, five years after I visited him in 1965..
We knew, through Barkofsky, another painter in Chiang Mai, a Swiss called Theo Meier. I found him far less pleasant than Barkofsky. overbearing and convinced of his own importance. Accordingly he has now somewhat of an international reputation (as is clear from an internet search) whereas Barkofsky has remained totally obscure. Meier lived in a beautiful traditional Thai house, built of local teak, opposite a Buddhist temple. An enviable house and env iable spot. In the outskirts of Bangkok I have lived opposite a temple myself. They are of all religious institutions the least obtrusive.You hear only the soft tinkling of the temple bells and from time to time the muffled sound of a gong. If you live opposite a mosque, by contrast, you better get accustomed to early morning hours. Here in Australia we live opposite an Anglican church. We have made peace with its loud and needless indication of the hour but only after it stopped doing so throughout the night.
I spoke about my research in Thailand. It resulted in a thesis on its “education and social mobility”. Later I came to look at a quite different topic. Here is a taste of it:
MERIT, HIERARCHY AND
ROYAL GIFT-GIVING IN TRADITIONAL
THAI SOCIETY
Festivals, rites and processions, already the subject of extensive comment
in the reports of early travellers and ethnologists, have retained their
great importance in the analysis of traditional states. Anthropologists
in search of manifestations of political power have continued to focus
on "religious" rites, cremations and festivals, i.e., on phenomena which
ostensibly have nothing much to do with administration and politics.
Though Geertz has complained that in their concern for these matters
anthropologists are "like theologians firmly dedicated to proving the
indubitable",1 he himself also emphasizes that it is in ritual that we
can find "the public dramatization of ruling obsessions",2 inter alia
the obsession with specific "secular" social ties.
To study "obsessions" or, in different terms, "value systems" via ritual
has an obvious advantage: the strength of the obsession, as Norbert Elias
has hinted, can be correlated with the length, frequency and elaborateness
of the ritual.
Those who feel inclined to taste more of this can download a PDF file through this link:
I omitted to mention in my previous post that during the three weeks I was in Bangkok in 1957 the bloodless coup of Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat took place. The only thing I saw of it was paratroopers coming down somewhere in the distance - that and the fact that next morning the police appeared on the streets without weapons. Supposedly they were regarded as a support base for his predecessor, Pibul Songgram.
When I came back to Bangkok in March 1963 for a much longer stay he was still in charge. Though I was not personally affected by his authoritarian regime I found the atmosphere it had created rather depressing. Sarit’s portrait looked at
you from almost every shop window or interior and since he looked every inch the oriental dictator (see his Wilki) the “Big Brother is Watching you” effect that created was unmistakable - to me at least.
My then girlfriend’s fearful tales contributed to this as well. She told me for instance that the Bangkok police had the standing order to look out for shapely girls who could be drafted for Sarit’s harem.
When he at the end of that year unexpectedly died when still in his fifties it gave me a sense of relief that he was safely deposited in a drip pot to prepare for his cremation months after. Because his son and official wife got embroiled in a fight about his inheritance many unsavoury details became public about the fortune he had amassed and his methods of gaining it. The newspapers also published a list with the names of about a hundred women who thought they had a claim to his fortune because they had shared his bed, obviously not just for a one night stand. There probably were quite a few more who avoided the publicity. The fearful tales of my girlfriend about his harem turned out to have a ground of truth.
Assuming that ambassadors are chosen because they're in any way knowledgeable about the country in question is apparently appallingly naive. All they need to know, as Zelensky's choice shows, is that pyramid schemes work, that shiny objects are valuable, and that sex sells.
I have never worn a face rag, observed any lockdowns or social distancing bullshit. Nor shall I. I dare any spineless jackass doing any of that to whine about it too, let alone interfere with my progress through the day. Who'd have thought that a man could become ten feet tall by doing nothing but what he always did, without being cowed into doing stupid shit? I'd rather the occasional fight over it than crawling around like a fucking pissant. I was last in Thailand in 1987, but for six months. maybe why I can also recall Krup kun Krup and Krup kun Kra for ladies. My favorites Buddha was at Surat Thani. Maybe it is time Zelensky the penis musician had his photo up next to the reclining Buddha.
"Moving through countries constantly won’t likely make your wife happy, and it’s also child abuse, so a high percentage of American diplomats are gay."
That's an interesting hypothesis. But is it true? Thailand seems gay-friendly, but Tunisia and Kenya a bit less so, not to mention, say, Afghanistan. So it's a risky business if you don't have any say on where you go.
In any case, being shuffled around to completely different countries is weird. I met a few people working at Embassies and Consulates. I knew one who was being moved from Los Angeles to some city in Colombia, I think. I don't think he was gay, but I don't really know.
Years ago (but I don't think that happens anymore) writers were many times given jobs as ambassadors or consuls. For instance, famous Brazilian poet (and singer) Vinicius de Moraes was a vice-consul or similar, first in Los Angeles, then Paris and then Rome. Not the worst places, at least at the time. Other writers did it too. Nice gig if you can get it.
p.s. Vinicius was certainly not gay - he married 9 times, not counting lovers etc.
Luckily basically nobody is masked here in rutabaga land, just a few hysterics. I've never used one. Btw have you been to the crime forensic and medical historical (?? or whatever) museum at Siriraj hospital? If not you have to go, its great.
I'm pretty sure I got Covid in Tirana in March of 2021. Although it was the most miserable month of my life, I resisted going to the hospital. I recount that experience in these two pieces:
'Life's too short to take a stand against brainwashed zombies.' Made me feel like having it screen printed on t-shirts! Interesting to hear what getting Covid is like for the unvaccinated as I have so far not had it, despite having two people stay at my house for two days who tested positive several days later. However, as soon as I heard the bad news I began popping Ivermectin and rinsing my nose with iodine solution and was astonished to be unaffected a few days later, despite attending a public function with them and quite a few others who tested positive.
Interesting about the weather as well. Crowded House's lyrics: 'Always take the weather with you everywhere you go ' becomes ridiculously prophetic ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ3Ck43m_ZY). Summer in the land of Oz and hardly a mask in sight.
Hi everyone,
I just got the below message at my blog, as sent by Blogger/Google. Should my blog of +13 years be terminated from additional flags or "violations," SubStack will be my only home. So be it, for I'm not going to censor myself.--Linh
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The lunatics are indeed on the grass. I hope it blows over. Of course some of your comments had to be explained to me so I guess you were courting danger. That doesn't give anyone the right to censor speech so I hope no one suggests reeducation.
I'm always intrigued by where you write about and often look at google earth to see the surroundings. In this case it's true that the US Ambassador's residence appeared to be an anomoly in the middle of a chaotic city but it used to be a large colonial house on a lake. https://th.usembassy.gov/cmr-history/
"By the late 1800s, the area east of Rattanakosin was filled with verdant rice fields, interlaced with large and small khlongs and dotted by small, scattered farms.
...
Personifying Bangkok’s boom growth was English engineer Horatio Victor Bailey. By 1913, Bailey was a well-connected Bangkokian, having worked for Bangkok Dock Company and later as Engineer-In-Chief to the Royal Mint Department. Bailey then founded his own engineering consultancy and an import company.
...
Bailey sited his house at the back third of the property, in view of but at a discrete distance from the dirt road that inevitably would be developed someday. Walking on a path from the front drive south of the house, Bailey’s prominent bathing sala would come into view, and adjacent to it, Bailey widened and deepened the western and southern border canals to form a large, square bathing pond.
...
For the main house architecture, Bailey chose a playful combination of European colonial, restrained gingerbread and tropical Malaysian designs, harmonized with Siamese architecture’s elegance, intricacy and neatness. His design was consistent with several other houses built in Bangkok at the time."
Annoying as it might seem to us that one man lived in such luxury (before he turned 40!), all credit to the Americans for retaining the historical building for as long as they did, having bought it in 1927. However looking at the latest aerial photos it's evident that they've now demolished the house, filled in the lake, destroyed the surrounding parkland and are in the process of erecting an abysmal edifice in its place.
To me, nothing is as edifying about a culture as watching how it treats the historial buildings it 'owns' and, if it demolishes them, what it erects as their replacement. The American, British and French attitude towards the architectural heritage they have been bequeathed is often lamentably philistine.
Where I am, in Egypt, there are no masks, no vaccines and no Covid. In fact, there is not Covid in all of Africa - and there never was any Covid. Africans many have a lower IQ on average than East Asians, but they hack a lot more common sense.
𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐇𝐚𝐬 𝐂𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐃 𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚?
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/01/12/why-has-covid-spared-africa.aspx
One: Too much natural Vitamin D!
Two: the African Continent has had enough of "Collective Waste" hubris and their larger IQ is beginning to reveal itself against the declining CW's IQ of Hegemony Projection.
It doesn't take much of an IQ to resort to criminal violence.
Three: the CW's influence has sewered towards ZERO.
Reminds me of this article I came across the other day- "Notre Dame Cathedral to Become a Woke Disneyland ‘Theme Park’, According to Leaked Renovation Plans" and "Macron’s Wife Wanted to Build Giant Golden Dick in Front of Notre Dame"
"In France, the Yellow Jackets are mounting protests against inflation and lower standards of living, but street rallies won’t do anything. Only with forceful disruption to business as usual can we even begin to hope for change."
Hello Linh... Without a doubt. Unfortunately my fellow modern moron slaves aren't still aware that these types of protests won't get them anywhere.
What clearly is preventing us (herds of modern moron slaves) from ACTING in a way that cause an actual disruption to business as usual is the fact that deep down majority knows that we aren't able to live without "business as usual", and we aren't willing to CHANGE.
The embassies and consulates are not the only places that the US has turned into fortresses. Have you taken a gander at recent pics from good old Washington DC? Several houses of government, including the White House, Congress, and (I believe) the Supreme Court are all surrounded by fences, K-rails, armed soldiers, etc. DC is starting to resemble the Baghdad Green Zone. There’s nothing like a government that rules with the consent of the governed…
CNN and other corporate media outlets go on with more of their BS about what's happening in Ukraine. But at least a few in high places are starting to worry about what will happen when Russia wins and the vast majority of the public realizes how badly it’s been lied to. The big shots know that gaslighting people about "safe and effective" is much easier than concealing a Russian victory that many have had a ringside seat for.
Incredibly, I’d say close to a quarter of the people I see still walk around even outdoors on a beautiful day with N95 masks on. But I would at least cut the Asians a bit of slack on their motives for masking, given that many in Asian cities wore masks for other reasons long before the Age of Covid, and are more acclimated to the practice.
I don't have much to say or add, but I always come away from one of your articles with more good things to read or watch. Well worth the price of supporting you. I am always delighted to find another LD article in my inbox. I absolutely hate the masks. But since Covidtopia woke me up and I quit my absolutely useless federal intel job, in a way, I have to admit the masks are useful. A person walking outside by themselves wearing a mask, is not someone worth engaging. I have been feeling off and on these past few years that I am in a "Body Snatchers" world, that most people around me are Pod People. But in many ways I am living my "best life" now. A major contention within myself is whether I should spend time trying to improve this world and fight the Dark Side, as in, shoulder the burden of society, or if I should "follow my bliss" and simply pursue my hobbies and interests purely for their own sake. (I am trying for the middle right now, but lately, it seems my most of my time is taken with fixing things and helping my two grown sons. The fridge died last week, and I used the internet to learn how to fix it myself.) For example, I bought most of the Covid truth books, at least to support the authors, but the truth is I don't want to spend my precious reading time on them. Who am I kidding, do I think I am going to debate a Covidiot, and convince them of anything?
So much in this I can relate to. Life has called me into service just when I was totally happy to potter about the garden and try to improve my drawing and painting skills upon the death of my husband who has left a legacy of a large workshop full of welding and metal cutting implements that need to be disposed of. There are many things I take a passing interest in and at least momentarily think I would like to learn more about but I have never evinced any interest at all in learning more about the used prices of machinery suitable for welding or cutting large pieces of steel, or indeed the rise in prices of the steel itself. But that seems to be my fate for the next few months.
I shouldn't grumble, its all worth money.
I just reviewed the many authors I follow on Substack and have realised that, like cookbooks, there is just not enough time to read them and at the same time clean out the workshop. So out they go, except Linh.
If you happen to live near Tennessee, maybe I can help you find a buyer for your late husband’s equipment. It does seem hard to sell things lately, I have also been trying to declutter. I also gave up on reading everything on the stack.
Oh I see, you’re in the Anti-podes! Hahaha. Oops
Yes half a world away. I appreciate your offer though. Currently i have drawn a dark curtain over that unruly mess and am enjoying blythe summer down at the beach.
This is probably the best strategy.
Linh your corkscrew eyes don't miss a thing - very interesting how you noted the strong presence of gay men in the US State Department. I had such a friend and saw this with my own eyes. Of course, it's only fairly recently that these men could be open about their preferences - homosexuality had to be hidden and could be used for blackmail. Ambitious gay white men have always been useful tools for the Powers That Be, illegal or not.
Adrian
I enjoy your letters Linh especially now you are back in Thailand where I once used to live for a few years myself, off and on.
I first arrived there in 1957, at age 21. I had an older brother living there who worked in the shipping department of Diethelm, a Swiss firm long settled in Bangkok. I believe they are still there.
What does one do when one is 21 - one goes after the women. But in my case not any woman. I had my heart set on finding the woman who is called Vital in Jack Reynold’s novel A Woman of Bangkok which had just recently appeared then (and is still available in Kindle).In the novel as in real life she was a bar/good time girl and reputedly still in business, not under the name Vital but the more alluring one of “The Black Tiger”. I found her in one of the nightclubs back then, called Copacabana. She seemed quite a bit older than me - I looked even younger than my age then and well meaning white ladies accompanying their husbands in that club (Bangkok was still that type of place then) advised me “You better go home boy”. I didn’t.
There were not many nightclubs back then because Bangkok was not yet a destination for mass tourism. In fact most of the foreigners then seemed to be living and working there. The city itself looked far more “oriental” than it does now. The high rise buildings were not there yet which made the temples look more predominant. Many of the klongs had not been filled in yet which earned Bangkok the somewhat inflated title of “Venice of Asia”. .
About eight years after my first visit to the country, when I was living in Chiang Mai (at Thanon Rajviti if I remember correctly) I met a foreigner there who had been living in Thailand since 1896. It was old Mr.W.A.R.Wood who had joined the British diplomatic service in Bangkok ar the tender age of 18 and had, 25 years later (according to his Wiki), achieved the rank of British Consul General in Chiang Mai. There he also had a judicial function because Britain still enjoyed extra territorial rights then and there was even then a sizable community of Britishers in Chiang Mai, working inter alia for two large companies, the Bombay Burma Company and the Borneo one. People could also choose to put themselves under British protection and hence forward only be adjudicable in a British Court, in this case presided over by Mr.Wood. I understand that it was mainly foreign merchants (Chinese, Indian, Burmese) who made use of this option.
I visited Mr.Wood at his home that was presided over by his wife, reputedly a Shan of aristocratic descent. Wood has given in his book A Consul in Paradise an amusing tale of how he won her. When I say “presided over” I mean it literally. She hovered around us while we were talking, giving me dirty looks when she thought I was staying too long and tiring out her aged husband. Wood was 87 then. I thought him as old as the hills then and now I am exactly that age myself I cannot conceive how and why I thought that.
I might indeed have stayed too long. Wood was a very amusing and eager talker and his wife might have known the limits of his strength better than he knew those himself. One of his tales that has stayed with me is how easy it was for a white man then to contact the king. Well a white man then was a rarity there in itself, and this white man had, hovever junior then, the prestige of the British Empire in its full flowering behind him. Wood said “ I simply had to knock on the palace gate and then you got a message the King is brushing his teeth or something but he will be presently with you.
The contrast with how his own subjects were allowed to approach him couldn’t have been stronger.
For most of Wood’s time in Bangkok the reigning monarch was Chulalongkorn,Rama V (1853-1910), who is regarded as Thailand’s greatest king and its moderniser (though that process had already started under his father, king Mongkut, the king of “Anna and the King of Siam”). There is a substantial statue of Chulalongkorn at the entrance of Lumpini park (when your taxi driver goes past that you have to watch him because he might be inclined to take his hands off the steering wheel and raise them in a wai).
I treasure as a keepsake Wood’s History of Siam with his signature. His Wiki says that when it appeared (1926) it “was regarded as a standard work of the time"[1] It doesn’t specify who regarded it so. The book has no scholarly value whatsoever and it would have been a small miracle if it had. Wood was too isolated up there and had too little training in the field to make a valuable contribution to the history of Southeast Asia.
This comment is becoming too long. I hope to continue it later.
Adrian
There was still a British consulate in my days in Chiang Mai (i.e. in 1965) but it had long since lost its judicial function. This had been entirely taken over by the local Thai court of whose activity we were reminded every morning. We happened to live opposite it and heard an early chain gang of prisoners go by to receive what that court had in store for them. I found the sound of their foot shackles’clinking on the pavement pretty lugubrious.
The British consulate then, still housed in the same beautiful old building with a statue of Queen Victoria as a reminder of the days of yore, was manned by a Mr.Gibson, a dwarfish hunchback with a sharp tongue as we found out when he invited my then girlfriend and me for a meal. Why did he invite us? Not because he deemed us in any way important but presumably he had heard that I was doing some research there and he wanted to find out what I was up to. I strongly suspected him of bringing into circulation a tale, later spread further by an Australian anthropologist, that I was doing research on corruptiion in the Thai bureaucracy and started my interviews with civil servants with the question : “Are you corrupt”. I had in deed discussed Thai corruption with him, as who wouldn’t, but, needless to say, my research activities were of a rather different nature.
The atmosphere in Chiang Mai then was rife with suspicion. The Vietnam War was going on and there were rumours that the Americans were trying to weaponize the “montagnards”, the Vietnamese hilltribes, for their own nefarious designs. It was strongly suspected that quite a few of those who claimed to be anthropologists doing research on the hill tribes just north of Chiang Mai were in fact CIA agents.
Mr. Gibson wasn’t the only one who wanted to know what I was up to. Not long after we had settled in at Rajvithi Road an American visited us uninvited. He claimed to be a former tenant of the house who had lost his cat in moving and wanted to see wether she was still in or around our house - a perfect pretext for snooping around. He didn’t seem a cat lover to me.
I had received a small grant in aid from a Rotary club in Perth, Australia. When I came to present their letter of recommendation to the local chairman of Rotary he took a big book from a shelf, consulted it and pushed my letter back with an air of triumph. The Perth chairman had a different name in his out of date book than that in my letter.
I won’t go on. There were compensations. I managed to obtain a long term lease for a little shop that could be transformed into a hairdressing salon for my Thai girlfriend. So we left Rajvithi Road but because I couldn’t stand being behind that shop the whole day I rented a barely furnished cheapie for myself in a neighbourhood without electricity. That meant no tv, no radio or recordplayers, hence without that bane of Southeast Asian countries, noise pollution. The only disturbance came from my neighbour, a Thai policeman who kept two roosters. I solved that problem by buying them from him for a good price. He did me a favor by not buying new ones as long as I lived there. In his eyes I was an Acharn (teacher, scholar) living in all simplicity as Buddhist ideals will have it. I found that there is a lot to be said for those ideals.
We had some European acquaintances though. We were friendly with a local painter, a German called Gerd Barkofsky, who made a living by making sketches of the hill tribes and travelling to Bangkok every so often to sell them to tourist shops. He was a cheerful character but his cheer was to some extent inspired by his addiction to Thai whiskey, Mekong, which he drank throughout the day. I visited Chiang Mai again, many years later,in 1992. It was flooded with mainly young tourists then and almost unrecognisable from the rather sleepy place I had known more than 25 years earlier.I got hold of a little book, called De Mortuis, published by a R.W. Wood, obviously a local descendant of the retired British Consul General W.A.R.Wood whom I had visited many years before. The book gave short biographies of people buried at the European cemetery in Chiang Mai. It mentioned that Barkofsky had died at age sixty two of liver cancer. Mr. W.A.R. Wood had died in 1970, at the age of 92, five years after I visited him in 1965..
We knew, through Barkofsky, another painter in Chiang Mai, a Swiss called Theo Meier. I found him far less pleasant than Barkofsky. overbearing and convinced of his own importance. Accordingly he has now somewhat of an international reputation (as is clear from an internet search) whereas Barkofsky has remained totally obscure. Meier lived in a beautiful traditional Thai house, built of local teak, opposite a Buddhist temple. An enviable house and env iable spot. In the outskirts of Bangkok I have lived opposite a temple myself. They are of all religious institutions the least obtrusive.You hear only the soft tinkling of the temple bells and from time to time the muffled sound of a gong. If you live opposite a mosque, by contrast, you better get accustomed to early morning hours. Here in Australia we live opposite an Anglican church. We have made peace with its loud and needless indication of the hour but only after it stopped doing so throughout the night.
I spoke about my research in Thailand. It resulted in a thesis on its “education and social mobility”. Later I came to look at a quite different topic. Here is a taste of it:
MERIT, HIERARCHY AND
ROYAL GIFT-GIVING IN TRADITIONAL
THAI SOCIETY
Festivals, rites and processions, already the subject of extensive comment
in the reports of early travellers and ethnologists, have retained their
great importance in the analysis of traditional states. Anthropologists
in search of manifestations of political power have continued to focus
on "religious" rites, cremations and festivals, i.e., on phenomena which
ostensibly have nothing much to do with administration and politics.
Though Geertz has complained that in their concern for these matters
anthropologists are "like theologians firmly dedicated to proving the
indubitable",1 he himself also emphasizes that it is in ritual that we
can find "the public dramatization of ruling obsessions",2 inter alia
the obsession with specific "secular" social ties.
To study "obsessions" or, in different terms, "value systems" via ritual
has an obvious advantage: the strength of the obsession, as Norbert Elias
has hinted, can be correlated with the length, frequency and elaborateness
of the ritual.
Those who feel inclined to taste more of this can download a PDF file through this link:
https://brill.com/view/journals/bki/131/1/bki.131.issue-1.xml
Adrian
I omitted to mention in my previous post that during the three weeks I was in Bangkok in 1957 the bloodless coup of Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat took place. The only thing I saw of it was paratroopers coming down somewhere in the distance - that and the fact that next morning the police appeared on the streets without weapons. Supposedly they were regarded as a support base for his predecessor, Pibul Songgram.
When I came back to Bangkok in March 1963 for a much longer stay he was still in charge. Though I was not personally affected by his authoritarian regime I found the atmosphere it had created rather depressing. Sarit’s portrait looked at
you from almost every shop window or interior and since he looked every inch the oriental dictator (see his Wilki) the “Big Brother is Watching you” effect that created was unmistakable - to me at least.
My then girlfriend’s fearful tales contributed to this as well. She told me for instance that the Bangkok police had the standing order to look out for shapely girls who could be drafted for Sarit’s harem.
When he at the end of that year unexpectedly died when still in his fifties it gave me a sense of relief that he was safely deposited in a drip pot to prepare for his cremation months after. Because his son and official wife got embroiled in a fight about his inheritance many unsavoury details became public about the fortune he had amassed and his methods of gaining it. The newspapers also published a list with the names of about a hundred women who thought they had a claim to his fortune because they had shared his bed, obviously not just for a one night stand. There probably were quite a few more who avoided the publicity. The fearful tales of my girlfriend about his harem turned out to have a ground of truth.
Speaking of Ambassadors, there's this: "Zelensky appoints sexologist pyramid schemer as ambassador to Bulgaria" by Alexander Rubinstein on The Grayzone. https://thegrayzone.com/2022/12/28/zelensky-sexologist-pyramid-schemer-ambassador-bulgaria/
Assuming that ambassadors are chosen because they're in any way knowledgeable about the country in question is apparently appallingly naive. All they need to know, as Zelensky's choice shows, is that pyramid schemes work, that shiny objects are valuable, and that sex sells.
Have you seen this? A compendium of idiocy: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/top-20-most-cringeworthy-zelensky
I have never worn a face rag, observed any lockdowns or social distancing bullshit. Nor shall I. I dare any spineless jackass doing any of that to whine about it too, let alone interfere with my progress through the day. Who'd have thought that a man could become ten feet tall by doing nothing but what he always did, without being cowed into doing stupid shit? I'd rather the occasional fight over it than crawling around like a fucking pissant. I was last in Thailand in 1987, but for six months. maybe why I can also recall Krup kun Krup and Krup kun Kra for ladies. My favorites Buddha was at Surat Thani. Maybe it is time Zelensky the penis musician had his photo up next to the reclining Buddha.
"Moving through countries constantly won’t likely make your wife happy, and it’s also child abuse, so a high percentage of American diplomats are gay."
That's an interesting hypothesis. But is it true? Thailand seems gay-friendly, but Tunisia and Kenya a bit less so, not to mention, say, Afghanistan. So it's a risky business if you don't have any say on where you go.
In any case, being shuffled around to completely different countries is weird. I met a few people working at Embassies and Consulates. I knew one who was being moved from Los Angeles to some city in Colombia, I think. I don't think he was gay, but I don't really know.
Years ago (but I don't think that happens anymore) writers were many times given jobs as ambassadors or consuls. For instance, famous Brazilian poet (and singer) Vinicius de Moraes was a vice-consul or similar, first in Los Angeles, then Paris and then Rome. Not the worst places, at least at the time. Other writers did it too. Nice gig if you can get it.
p.s. Vinicius was certainly not gay - he married 9 times, not counting lovers etc.
Luckily basically nobody is masked here in rutabaga land, just a few hysterics. I've never used one. Btw have you been to the crime forensic and medical historical (?? or whatever) museum at Siriraj hospital? If not you have to go, its great.
Where is rutabaga land? Never heard that one before.
Sweden
Hi Jam n' Spoon,
I'm pretty sure I got Covid in Tirana in March of 2021. Although it was the most miserable month of my life, I resisted going to the hospital. I recount that experience in these two pieces:
https://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2021/03/dying-thoughts.html
https://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2021/04/fred-reed-joe-biden-and-john-cassavetes.html
Linh
'Life's too short to take a stand against brainwashed zombies.' Made me feel like having it screen printed on t-shirts! Interesting to hear what getting Covid is like for the unvaccinated as I have so far not had it, despite having two people stay at my house for two days who tested positive several days later. However, as soon as I heard the bad news I began popping Ivermectin and rinsing my nose with iodine solution and was astonished to be unaffected a few days later, despite attending a public function with them and quite a few others who tested positive.
Interesting about the weather as well. Crowded House's lyrics: 'Always take the weather with you everywhere you go ' becomes ridiculously prophetic ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ3Ck43m_ZY). Summer in the land of Oz and hardly a mask in sight.