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May 17, 2008 Bangkok Returning to the scene of the crimes by Fred Reed
Bangkok -- I got here two nights ago, out of Taipei into Bangkok's new airport, Savannapun. It's huge, well-designed, classy. As always when I come to these parts I think, "Holy rikshas, Batman, this place is on a roll." Just so. There is a dynamism in much of Asia that you don't see in Latin America. Below the Rio Grande you find a couple of modern countries, Argentina and Chile for example -- almost the only examples. Yet the whole region seems stagnant, as if it already is what it is going to be. Not here. Asia rocks. Peoria hasn't noticed but, I promise, it will, and that before long. We hear that China is booming. It is. But so are other places. Thailand can no longer be called a third-world country. The Sky Train, the elevated rail system, swooshes above the city in air-conditioned comfort, efficient and built by Thais, not some international contractor. The new subway works. The normal Third-World attitudes have left for other climes. Call this place Second World and climbing. Some things don't change. The city still has its three notorious Disneyland-for-gringos districts, Patpong Road, Soi Cowboy, and Nana Plaza. All are internationally celebrated as sex parks, and are. They, some of them, are also expat hangouts. In bar after bar by day you find nothing but male round-eyes, some of them ballsy young journalists battening on the latest floods in Burma and flying off to cover this tsunami or that rebellion. It's a fun life. I did it for a few years. By night the clubs abound in sleek lovely Thai girls preying on the gringos. Or the other way around: It isn't always clear. They are so very pretty and make Western women look like camels by comparison -- this being the universal view of Caucasian men here. In general, prostitution runs from not-pretty to ugly indeed. As practiced in Bangkok's gringo bars, it is perhaps as benign as it gets. The regulars among the expats at any rate get to know the girls at their favorite joints and the atmosphere is pleasant, almost familial. The problem is what happens when the girl gets too old for it. She has maybe a kid, no income, and no obvious way of getting one. Another problem is sadistic Japanese sex tourists. Life is not all ham hocks and home fries for the expats. In the bars you find the aging drunks who show up on the same stools day after day, talking about the old days. They bore me unutterably. You hear the same stories about the same people, mostly extinct spooks with this or that special-ops group or intel agency or Air America: Lansdale, Jack Shirley, Tiger Rideberg (however you spell him) of the now-gone Lucy's Tiger Den, on and on. They can't let it go. It's all they have. Occasionally one dies of cirrhosis. He then becomes one of the stock legends. I don't fit here any longer. A friend in Mexico, formerly of various misadventures of my life, was here to do something or other involving television. We went to the Foreign Correspondents' Club for a beer. Reporters don't change. They always exhibit the same assertive, self-involved shallowness, the same readiness to charge off to any disaster with a camera crew. They are gutsy, resourceful, smart, and very good at what they do, which isn't quite journalism. Brash and egotistical, they go for spectacular footage, not for the truth, which isn't a journalistic concept. Thoughtful they aren't. They are usually good-humored and have good stories to tell, but maybe I've just heard, and told, too many. I met Father Joe, a Catholic priest who works with people with AIDS. This sounds cloyingly virtuous, unless you have AIDS. More on him in another column. But I thought, "A Christian who acts like one. What a concept." I'm accustomed to thinking of Christians as mean fundamentalist Protestants who want to kill anyone they can find in the name of Jesus. I realized that I had grown to think of the whole religion as a species of fraud. Here was a guy who apparently took the New Testament seriously. Tough as a boot sole, razor smart, swears like a sailor. If he isn't careful, he's going to give Christians a good name. I mentioned Thai women. Despite the sordid reputation arising from the sex industry, Thai women are no looser than any others, and in fact most of them aren't accessible at all to westerners who don't speak Thai. To a close approximation, this means no westerners. But the Thai women are, well, ladies. By this I mean not that they went to finishing school, but rather that you can distinguish them from drunken sailors or abandoned mattresses. They are not crass. They dress well. They seem to regard themselves as women, not as wannabe men, and even to think that being a woman is a good thing. Thank god. This could equally be said of Mexican women of Chinese women, of most women everywhere, except North America. Now, if I were the only man who took a very dim view of American women, it would be reasonable to dismiss me as a crank. In fact it would be unreasonable not to. It becomes more interesting when the judgement is nearly universal among large numbers of men -- and it is. Everywhere I go outside of the US, the American men I meet speak of their horror of sexless, hostile, ill-bred American women. Sure, there are exceptions and degrees among the gringas. Most unfortunately, exceptions is what they are. The delight with feminine foreign women is given, over and over, as a major reason for expatriation. (The other big reason is disgust with governmental regulation of everything in the US.) I have friends married to Thai, Filipina, Chinese, and Mexican wives, all delighted. Me too. How did this come about? I don't know, but I'm not imagining it. Come evening I went with a long-time buddy who lives here to run the bars. I didn't greatly want to drink nor was I interested in the rows of bored and probably drugged-up peasant girls gyrating around brass poles. I was just returning to the scene of the crimes of my youth. The roaring and clanging of bad music on worse speakers must appeal to someone, but I'm not sure who. We ended up in one of the quieter clubs where my friend knew the waitresses and barmaids. I really like the Thais. Allowing for the low base-line of humanity, they are good people, and theirs is a fine country. But I no longer belong here.
Copyright 2008 by Fred Reed and reproduced here by permission of the author.
Fred Reed is a Marine combat veteran, police reporter, amateur biochemist, former long-haul hitchhiker, and part-time sociopath living in Mexico. Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times. He has been published in Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, National Review, Signal, Air&Space, and suchlike. He has worked as a police writer, technology editor, military specialist, and authority on mercenary soldiers. He is by all accounts as looney as a tune. Visit the "Fred on Everything" website to read his previous columns and sign up for his regular e-mail feature.
Because The Radical Academy publishes essays and articles on its website does not imply acceptance or approval of the comments or opinions expressed by the author of the material. Nor is the Academy responsible for any misrepresentation of the facts included. It is your job to be a critical reader.
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