Bangkok Dangerous

Borrowing a title from the less successful remake of what (I hear) was a good film may seem desperate, and it is.

I just couldn't come up with anything better to describe this sprawling, vibrant, discordant city.

Bangkok is dangerous, but not for fear of personal harm - at least no more so than Mexico City, or Los Angeles even. This alternate City of Angels is dangerous by the way it changes your view on the World. It's dangerous by virtue of forcing you to experience the gulf between wealth and poverty prevalent in this part of the globe. It's the same gulf that exists in the US and Europe, but it is stealthier in those places. Here in Bangkok it's right upon you and unmissable.

Visiting Bangkok, and more especially if you venture outside the city to other regions of Thailand, you realize how central this land and it's people are to the Asian economy. And we all know by now just how important the Asian economy is to 'western' countries.

But even more than economic impact, Bangkok looks and feels like a cultural nexus; a place where problems will be met and solved, if they are to be solved at all.

And that is why this city is 'dangerous'. If events go wrong here there will be repercussions across the region, and perhaps the World.

Phonely

Since the dawn of the new electronics-as-umbilical age, I have only been SWAP (Stuck Without A Phone) once. I left my mobile phone in my car at the Catalina Express dock in Long Beach and had to spend a weekend in Avalon incommunicado.

Tried to use a pay phone lately? Good Luck finding a working example.

Today my daughter called to tell me she'd left her cell phone in our car when I dropped her off at the airport. She'll be spending the next two days SWAP, and Phonely.

For those of you out there old enough to remember living the 80's as grown-ups (or at least as fully-fledged teenagers), you can appreciate both the despair and the risibility of being Phonely. Our modern model of constant communication provides a reassuring sense of safety and connectedness, so when it fails we feel more acutely alone than we ever would have felt in the 80's pre-cellular World, where disconnection was the norm and as a result not scary.

Just like, as children, we once could spend an entire summer's day playing on our own, or with kids our age, without our parents getting alarmed (until you missed dinner), we once could spend hours a day without even thinking about phones; without feeling compelled to call, or be called.

Now, with mobile phones as the crutch without which we can barely function, the loss of connectivity is as keenly felt as being stranded on a desolate highway with a broken car. More so, since if our car broke we could always use the mobile to call for help.

In a very real sense, life here is emulating art: in our cellular mobile hyper-connected World, we are becoming hive mind Borg, requiring the constant contact of other minds; abhorring the independence of even transient solitude.

And Phoneliness is the result when connectivity fails ...

(So DON'T forget and leave your phone in the car!)

Oh, Mexico

Leaving my hotel, located cheek by jowl to the US Embassy, I jumped in the waiting black SUV and rolled into some of the worst traffic it's possible to experience outside of Moscow, Rome, or Sunset Blvd in Beverly Hills at 5 on a Thursday.

As my driver inched (millimetered?) us along the Place de Reforma and onwards to our ultimate destination, my mind wandered (as it will when it has an hour of forced inactivity to kill): what would it be like to live in this city? How much does one of those nice three-story townhouses in the Palanco cost? What? Too much! What about something cheap in the suburbs? A shack near the waste dump? Renting?

It's not like I'm planning to become an expat in Mexico. After all, the only Spanish I know is what's on the menu at El Torito. It's just I can't help wondering what it's like to live in places I visit.

And the sheer size and importance of Mexico City makes that wondering more intense. After all, what the Cuidad is today, Los Angeles might be tomorrow. Actually, chunks of LA are already like Mexico City, absent the beheaded corpses and interesting architecture.

Strike that next to last comment. There were no headless victims in MC. That carnage is further north, or further south, or somewhere other than the capital. It's hard to imagine anyone getting enough privacy to behead someone in Mexico City.

But the architecture is interesting. Mostly because I couldn't believe any of it was still standing is such an active earthquake zone. There it was, however, either putting the lie to the idea that 17th century building techniques were inefficient, or testifying to the patching power of cheap cement and a little stucco.

But I digress. My driver got me to my destination. I worked - in a tough situation - with some of the nicest people I have ever met, and then I was safely deposited back to my hotel.

And as I slept a sleep that only comes after eating not wisely but too well in Mexico City, I could only dream of a bright and hopeful future for that messy but easy-to-love metropolis.

And to it's inhabitants I wish good water pressure, safe commutes, freedom from corruption and gangs, and an endless supply of Zantac.

Radioactive

When will I stop worrying and learn to love being ... radioactive?

Will listening to The Firm's 1980's hit by that name calm my shattered nerves?

Will cookies with a glass of iodine 131 laced milk?

If you have been tuned into the horror show that is the Fukushima Dia-ichi nuclear plant disaster, you may wonder how I can voice concern from 5000 miles away, given the far more dangerous levels of radiation exposure local to the plant. What we are getting here in California is barely noticeable in comparison, right?

Well, maybe so, but it's not my nuclear plant. Neither I nor any other of the 39 million (or so) Californians, and the millions more in Oregon, Washington, and the rest of Western North American (and Mexico), ever received a single watt of power from that facility. We got none of the good, so getting even a little of the bad is a galling proposition. And I'll bet the folks in Japan who DID receive plenty of benefit from the plant's power production still bristle at the contamination with which they now must contend.

You may well wonder if I've lost my reason, given the news releases claiming how low, low, low the levels in our Milk are. Even the Huffington Post got into the act with their rehash of the no-threat claims.

But I stand by my paranoia. In my totally non-scientific but logical assessment, even a little radiation in a form (e.g., iodine-131) that, when consumed, concentrates in a particular part of the body (thyroid), and sits there for up to 80 days frantically emitting a shower of DNA-shattering energetic particles (which might lead to cancer) is not desirable.

I wouldn't be afraid to take a bath in our contaminated milk, but drink it? No, not regularly anyway; except in coffee, which I like to believe has magical anti-radiation properties (don't disabuse me of this notion, please. I need the caffeine, and I like it with milk).

No, I won't regularly drink tainted milk other than in coffee, or the random amounts that may splash accidentally into my mouth while bathing in it - not until Dia-ichi is safely contained and the radioactive clouds stop drifting our way.

Hurry The Day ...

Poetry Break: Do-Over

The Prez is out to Run Again

In 2012

For Hope and Change

(but we hope not the Mayan world-ending kind of change ...)

We praise his choice but fear it too,

since we are having some trouble with trust.

Will Obama version 2 be continuation and completion,

Do-Over, or Bust?

And if the Tweets, Pokes, Likes, and Viral Vids don't carry the day;

If Mr Obama must go away

We will miss his genial grin and earnest look;

His thoughtful mind; his open (check)book

We will miss his naive belief that change can be willed,

or if not, then bought and later billed

Will Obama version 2 be continuation and completion,

Do-Over, or Bust? (It seems a choice between dirt and dust)

Can Republicans do any better?

Not if they drink Tea at their Party

Are there Democratic competitors who may arise?

No, none visible (yet) to human eyes

So I guess we must hope to see

A Re-Do, Done Completely

Go, Go, Mr Obama, version 2

We may be tired, depressed and more than a bit disappointed, but we'll (probably) still vote for You.

Sad Guitar

I have a friend I see only rarely. But that's not a bad thing, since the friend I'm talking about is a guitar, and I only visit this friend when I am anxious or sad.

I used to have ambitions to play music, but those quickly subsided to using guitar as a form of therapy - some (my wife and many previous roommates) might call it obsessive-compulsive noodling, but it's therapy to me. And when it comes to bringing me out of a funk, my guitar is an effective friend.

I said I've only seen my guitar rarely, and that's true. It's been mostly sitting in a closet, because I've mostly been happy.

It has been used though:

It came out and helped me on 9/11. I strummed it from time to time when GWB's government started some 'war' somewhere; and I held it during thankfully infrequent, if terrible, natural disasters. It also helped when the 'recession' swept away most of my retirement. (I think my fingers, absent the calluses of persistent players, bled on that one.)

But lately I find myself picking it up at least weekly, and not out of some resurgence of juvenile rock dreams. The progress (or lack of same, I guess) with the 'war' in Afghanistan, and now the new 'war' in Libya; the Japanese Quaketsunamimeltdown; and a death in the family.

And there's general anxiety too. I am not sure why I feel it, when there is so much specific to be anxious about, but I am feeling a nonspecific unease that won't let up. Maybe it's a side effect of the failure of Hope - once promised but increasingly unlikely to be delivered by President Obama.

But perhaps not. It might be that I am getting older and not feeling any wiser. Or worse, that I feel there is a decrease in wisdom in the World in general, and there is nothing I can do about it.

Except play my guitar ...

War on War

Now, the politicos and the press aren't calling what we just started in Libya a 'war'. At least not yet.

And it's not a solo effort. It seems we found a couple of allies this time around, both eager to go at it. And we have the 'backing' of 'Arab nations'.

And I do believe He-Who's-Name-Is-Spelled-A-Thousand-Ways is a despot, a tyrant, a dictator, and as many other synonyms for autocratic madman as you can muster. He's also a self-proclaimed sponsor of terror, and a complete nutcase.

But I am stumped at what 'international law' (as claimed by Mrs. Clinton), Mr. Ghaddafi has violated (in the current situation). He's broken a million moral and ethical beliefs, but what law has he violated? Is what he is attempting genocide? What's the test for that?

At what point does a dictator's suppression of internal rebellion become something other countries have to stop? Why do we go and get him now, but not before when he blew up our people over Lockerbee? Why not back when we tried to assassinate him? Why this time and this moment?

I guess the answer is written somewhere in that 'international law', and our strategists must have puzzled through the labyrinthine wording to come to their conclusion.

Or maybe they are just stepping in to keep the oil flowing?

To the Libyans in the middle of all this, the reasons ultimately won't matter. In the end we will either have given them 'freedom', or we will have killed many of them with kindness, much like we have the Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis. They will either end up saying 'Thanks (now please leave)", or "Thanks for nothing (and wait till we come and get you)".

To us (if not our allies), this will come as no surprise. It'll be business as usual. But I fear the broader implications.

I fear we may have entered an ironic phase in the War on Things game. In years past we have declared War on things broad, nebulous, and multi-faceted, like Poverty, Cancer, and Terror. Now we may have declared War on 'War'. What the heck - they fight fire with fire, right? And what did Ghandi know anyway - his act was so 1940's.

I'm not going to lose any sleep worrying over it, what happens happens. And it will be interesting to see who or what replaces the Old Crazy Bedouin. I just wish whoever is really running this world would put a consistent act together.