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  hardie karges 11:28 am on July 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: PROSTITUTION ( 4 ), Thailand ( 82 )   

  The real problem is the dark side: 

  child prostitution, sex slavery, AIDS, etc. Even in modern almost-ready-for-prime-time Thailand, such unsavory situations still raise their ugly heads and lower their ugly butts on to the fresh silky-smooth forms of young girls that can only be described as flesh-candy to the mostly lower-class local male population. Everybody gets in on the deal in a situation in which women routinely get the short end of the stick in a society where the first male child is the unquestioned crown prince. Old habits die hard in a Chinese-descended culture. Parents don’t want to pay to educate a girl who’s going to marry and never use it. Many women love the idea of playing housewife to the big strong male, at least until he dumps her for some teen-ager, and she’s left to fend for herself. It’s a vicious cycle. Of course, there’s also another Dark Side: long dark hair and big dark eyes. That one’s easier to swallow. Ignorance lures eternal, twitching its cute little butt with a rhythm akin to salsa, a universality akin to ketchup. All you need is the missing link.

   

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  hardie karges 8:38 am on July 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: PROSTITUTION ( 4 ), Thailand ( 82 )   

  Thailand’s imperfect mix 

  shows its smiling face to the modern world as a fait accompli with little knowledge of the particular punctuations in its cultural evolution, and semi-deliberate masking of some of its more onerous social problems. Many, if not most, third world countries have grievous social problems. It might even be considered a rite of passage into a higher orbit of civilization if the bumps in the road weren’t so painful sometimes. Unlike the problems of racism, drug economies, violence, corruption, and stealth that other third world countries suffer, the main social problem in Thailand is the ‘victimless’ crime of prostitution, and its convenient scapegoat, poverty. Like other victimless crimes such as gambling and drug use, prostitution is especially difficult to eradicate since it can be a selling point for tourism that brings in the much-needed hard stuff, cash, that is. The much-needed physical love that so many Western men lack in their own ‘femi-nazied’ countries gets filled by professionals in the service of industry, so no one gets hurt. At least that’s the idea. The reality of course can be somewhat different. For one thing, most up-for-grab Thai women aren’t especially professional. Many wear their hearts right on their sleeves, and those hearts can get hurt or hardened. For another thing, the tourists go home, usually. The Thais are left in a society where Buddhist merit making frequently takes second priority to materialistic meretriciousness. Of course, many tourists decide to stay and live or retire, and many Thai women go abroad with their newfound boyfriends and husbands. I wouldn’t say they’re Thailand’s largest export yet, but their numbers are significant. But that’s not the real problem, of course.

   
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  hardie karges 11:01 am on July 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ENGLISH ( 7 ), language ( 242 ), THAI ( 5 )   

  THAI LANGUAGE 

  Thailand enters the modern world with multiple role models, as the cultural DNA of language readily shows, like not-so-parfait with American English on top as the current business-role model. Below that is Indian Sanskrit in its own and Khmerized forms as the religious and pre-modern model, corresponding to the French/Latin influence in English. Deeper still is the Chinese and Thai tribal past, the racial and linguistic underpinnings of the entire race, overlaid on a Mon pre-history, analogous to the Anglo-Saxon and later Danish incursions on a Celtic/Pictish sub-strata. Somehow it all gets mixed and mashed into a fairly uniform system of pronunciation that is recognizably Thai regardless of the origin. For a modern newcomer to the stew, sometimes the hardest part of learning the language is learning how to correctly mispronounce English. I wonder if Indians feel the same way about the manipulation of Sanskrit into forms unrecognizable. I’m sure that French feel the same way about English, but that probably says more about them than language considering what they themselves did to Latin. I know it’s hard to learn the language of a people that you don’t especially like. That’s for sure.

   
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  hardie karges 8:26 am on July 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), sitcoms   

  The thing that separates America from the rest of the world, 

  more than Hollywood, more than rock-and-roll, are sitcoms. No one else even comes close to the slices of life that roll off the prime time sandwich line every night at retail for the homies, wholesale for the rest of the world, at least for those who ‘get it’. Most don’t. Most countries that produce their own shows go for news, variety, games, soap operas, even historical dramas, but few can come up with a true sit-com, endless variations on a non-variable context, essentially doing the same show over and over again, always different. Formerly the butt of jokes from the intelligentsia, sitcoms now draw some of Hollywood’s cleverest writers and has truly established itself as an art form to be reckoned with. As an abstract format largely divorced from current events and local issues, they do especially well in rerun and export, forever immortalizing the phrase, “the one where”.

  America » Travel America: Tourist Guide is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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  hardie karges 9:22 am on July 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), Christmas ( 11 )   

  The American dream is of Chinese trinkets, 

  mass consumption, two cars in every garage and a bird in every oven, Sunday dinner and Christmas presents. As a child I could never sleep on Christmas Eve, not because I was waiting for Santa Claus (nobody believed that shit), but because I couldn’t stand the suspense of waiting to see what would be in my possession by next morning. Possession is 9/10 of the law, remember. Those are the halcyon days of pure memory, pristine and distinct, etched and beveled by space and time to a fine sheen and polish that belies the exigencies of the given situation. By my teens Christmas might be more like hopping in the car to go run off to the lake to watch the early morning stream rise off the water as the steam rises off my brain from some senseless argument. Family is elusive, as is friendship, just because of all the choices involved, I guess. Freedom is dangerous; role-playing is safe; love is always just out of grasp. I think maybe relationships kill the love that otherwise grows wild in vacant lots. The minute you incorporate, the business goes south.

   
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  hardie karges 11:28 am on July 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), history ( 42 ), migration ( 3 )   

  America is the happy hunting ground of myth and legend, 

  milk and honey on the mind’s tongue, horses and camels for the taking, more than that for the leaving. For millennia, the smart money went north and east, following mountains, following seacoasts, following herds, trekking Siberia. The farther they went, the bigger the payoff. When they went as far as they could go, they went even farther. That’s where the big payoff was, on the other side, mammoth and mastodon, bear and deer, buffalo and cows as far as the eye can see. There’s only one problem: you might not get back. That water level’s a bit finicky. On the other hand, you might not want to go back. Happy hunting grounds are nice, if you’re the hunter, not the hunted. The stupid animals act like they’ve never seen a spear before, just standing there, waiting to take it in the gut. Just wait until the summer and wait until the tide’s out and you can walk right across. Then one summer the men had to wade across to get to the animals, since they wouldn’t come across on their own anymore. Then it just kept getting deeper and deeper. On both sides the animals just headed south for the winter and didn’t go back, so the people did the same. They just followed the animals. Domestication of animals was probably accidental. Once big game was cut off from its endless source, the extant stock was probably selectively corralled for future use. One surprising result of this was likely the realization that the animals became tame in captivity. You could even put reins on some of them. The rest is history.

   
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  hardie karges 8:19 am on July 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 )   

  America is the queen bee, bloated and pregnant, 

  laying eggs in the shape of dollars. When the honeycomb is full, then it’s time to expand the line and found new colonies. Bred on royal jelly and raised on traffic jams, she only leaves the hives in swarms, for maximum protection. America thinks she rules the world, but in fact the world rules her. When she’s outlived her usefulness, the worker bees of the world will abandon her like a sinking ship, and find another frisky cow with big tits and big attitude and big hair. The workers win by default, but only as a historical group. Individually they live and die with the frequency of sunrise, constantly occurring at all times somewhere in the world. America is a concept, a role model, playing the role of empire for the sake of history. It’s nasty work, but somebody’s got to do it. If America did not exist, it would be necessary to create it, a bloated self-assured queen bee kept fed and fucked for common benefit, laying the eggs that the rest of the world needs to pay their bills. When the rest of the world doesn’t need her any more, then they’ll start investing elsewhere. They’ll stuff a new lowly commoner with royal jelly until she lets it go to her head and starts acting like a queen, throwing her weight around and printing money that the rest of us can speculate on.

   
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  hardie karges 7:13 am on July 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 )   

  The smile of a sheep-killing dog defines the Bush administration, 

  the look of a pampered pet thinking he’s getting away with something. Hey, it’s hard ruling the world, very hard. It has to be hard for proper penetration. America’s got her hands in too many pies, her fingers in too many tight spots. You can’t control everything everywhere all the time. It’s simply not possible. The harder she tries, simply the more resentment she engenders. It’s always better to lead by example. Truth, beauty, and goodness will always be attractive. Lies, coercion, and evil will never be. The end result will be the same regardless, justice seeking a path to the light, regardless of how much turbulence has to be endured in the process. Injustice is simply not a workable system in the long run. Truth stands there like a monument to the future, a leather-bound book, a cruel teacher with cane in hand ready to force compliance. Still it works, just like good old-fashioned punishment, forcing the unrighteous into submission.

   
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  hardie karges 8:42 am on July 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Crusade, Iraq ( 2 ), ISLAM ( 69 )   

  The Iraq war drags on and on endlessly, no end in sight. 

  They don’t want us there, so why don’t we just leave? Politics. We can’t leave until we’ve created something there in our own image and likeness. All for the love of oil we dust off our ideals and polish our principles. Unfortunately it’s much bigger than Iraq. It’s the new Crusade between Islam and everyone else. They want the world in their image and likeness every bit as much as Bush. There may not be a compromise possible to the Muslim issue. It’s hardball politics. They’ve got oil-derived wealth and intend to use it for political leverage. They feel they have a right to convert moderate Islamic states into religious theocracies with medieval fundamentalist overtones and undercurrents, regardless of who is inconvenienced and aggrieved. The situation reminds me of the American Indian’s encounter with Europeans. There is a just a fundamental clash of goals and values. Only now the stakes are higher, with Soviet-era surplus nuclear weapons unaccounted for. We’ll just have to wean ourselves from oil first, and then let the politics sort itself out. We’ll have to do it sooner or later anyway, so the sooner, the better.

   
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  hardie karges 6:51 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), Europe ( 19 )   

  America itself has seen better days. 

  It’s lonely at the top, pretending to know what’s best for everybody else when you can’t even solve your own problems, pretending you’re on the side of history when you haven’t even read the book. It’s lonely at the top, bullying the rest of the world into submission for their own good, whether they like it or not. I want my revolution back. I want the moral upper hand. I want to carry the flag of peace, love, and understanding through the streets demanding justice. I want to solve the world’s problems and still maintain the standard of living to which I’ve become accustomed. Europeans have got the best of all possible worlds right now- high standard of living, cheap Slavic labor, and potentially the world’s most powerful single government, if and when they decide to commit. Let the US fuck up first; there’s no hurry. I guess they deserve it, after all they’ve been through. It’s hard being the world leader. Nobody appreciates it; everybody resents it. But it seems like somebody’s got to take the lead, and I can’t say who I’d rather have, except maybe Europe. I fear the US is falling behind Europe intellectually. Country people may be the nicest people in the world, but that doesn’t mean they’re the smartest. Now that Europe has finally and unequivocally thrown off the yoke of the Church and the Party, they’re the standard bearer for liberal democracy, while the US increasingly looks like a frumpy old housewife and her grumpy old redneck husband. Processing kids through school, pass or fail, does not set new standards of excellence. Society pays for it in the long run. Urbanity does not guarantee intellectual achievement any more than rural life prevents it. It’s a matter of intent and discipline. There’s no shortcut to intellect; you gotta’ do the work.