Sex, Power, Sin - Thoughts on Spitzer

Why do people like Eliot Spitzer have sexual liaisons that jeopardize their reputations and their positions of power?

The number of men whose lives have been rocked by sexual adventures beyond their marriages is significant enough to raise questions about the wisdom of our (United States) national norms about sex and marriage. Wikipedia has a long list (scroll down past political scandals to sex scandals.) Bill Clinton, Larry Craig , Jim McGreevey, Mark Foley, are just a few well known recent ones. We also have clergy. Among the Christian evangelists, some of the famous names include Ted Haggard, Jim & Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. The Catholic church is still reeling from the impact of clergy having sex with young boys and girls.

Why does this happen?

• Lust. Some male readers are shaking their heads, I'm sure, that I would have to ask such a question. Sex is an instinctual drive that can take over someone, blocking out all other pulls on one's conscience until it is satisfied.
  

This surely explains some of it. But there are other factors too, I suspect, acting in various combinations with lust.

• Power. Why do we know about some people, but not about others? I'm sure that some sexual adventurers believe they are so powerful that nothing can touch them. In part this goes along with the belief that they won't get caught. And politicians' sex lives were not covered in the past the way they are today. John F. Kennedy's liaisons were known by the press, but were off limits. John H. Summers writes in the abstract of his article that

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, by contrast, revelations of sexual turpitude among the most prominent elected officials had begun to disappear from public life. Whereas Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and other members of the nineteenth-century political elite negotiated their reputations among a broad array of publics, in the new era men such as Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy benefited from this more circumspect pattern in political speech.

Surely, Bill Clinton assumed, when Monica Lewinsky presented herself in the Oval Office, that no one would find out. And when they did, he used his power to hang onto his office. I assume that Larry Craig assumed know one would know who he was and that he would not get caught.

For some politicians, everything is about power, and getting the power to do what you liked, even flaunting it. Certainly, the Congressman Charlie Wilson, portrayed comically by Tom Hanks in the recent movie, didn't hide his sex life from the world. But he had the advantage of being a bachelor.

But I think there is also another category worth considering.

• Guilt. I'm not sure this is the right title. This is the category for the men who are feeling conflicted by the gap between how they present themselves and how they really are. Hypocrisy. This is probably the major issue for married homosexuals. In 1980, when we spent a year in Washington DC, Robert Bauman (R-MD), was caught cruising for gay prostitutes in the car with his official Congressional license plate. Bauman was known for his anti-gay rhetoric. I can't help but think that, at least subconsciously, he wanted to be outed. And Gary Hart challenged the press to cover him closely if they thought he was having an affair - and they found him boating with a woman other than his wife. It's easier for some people to have the cover pulled off than to take it off themselves. Or maybe the risk makes it more exciting.
  

So what is Spitzer's story and should he have resigned? Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings like the one he used. Perhaps he thought he understood how things worked well enough that he could get away with it, perhaps he thought he was too powerful. But it seems Spitzer was a real moralist. From LoHud.com

This guy was ostentatiously Mr. Morality," says Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "This is feet-of-clay kind of stuff. Like, 'Boy, this guy has been telling us how pure we ought to be - look at him!' "

Some have argued that moral crusaders are out there to cover up their own sins. The repeated use of the word 'shocked' in the news responses to the disclosures about Spitzer certainly confirm his success in this.

My guess is that Spitzer's motives were a combination of all three of these. But should we continue to go after politicians for their sexual transgressions? Shouldn't we consider that part of their private lives as most of the rest of the world does? The basic argument - if he cheats on his wife, he would cheat on the rest of us - may hold some validity. But for everyone who has succumbed to their own personal vice - here's a reminder of Catholic Church's seven deadly sins

* 1.1 Lust (Latin, luxuria)
* 1.2 Gluttony (Latin, gula)
* 1.3 Greed (Latin, avaritia)
* 1.4 Sloth (Latin, acedia)
* 1.5 Wrath (Latin, ira)
* 1.6 Envy (Latin, invidia)
* 1.7 Pride (Latin, superbia)

Since I'm not a Catholic, I had to look up some of these vices to determine to whether there are degrees or whether these are considered either/or. It appears that with lust, if one's action is voluntary, that lust is always a mortal sin. But the Church also seems to consider it particularly tempting:

The pleasure which this vice has as its object is at once so attractive and connatural to human nature as to whet keenly a man's desire, and so lead him into the commission of many other disorders in the pursuit of it.

The others - gluttony or wrath or sloth - for example have different degrees. So, eating another two or three brownies does not carry the same weight as lust, but perhaps if you understand the pull of those brownies and their irresistibility, you can understand the pull of sex too.

But this is something of a diversion since the US is not bound to Catholic teachings and Spitzer is not a Catholic. According to Wikipedia, he's a not particularly observant Jew.

But then the Old Testament figures dealt with the need for sexual adventure by having more than one wife. And some of the greatest Old Testament figures had many, many wives. So we are judging them by a different standard than we judge modern men who are expected to stay faithful to one wife for a lifetime.

He has now resigned his post. Was that the right thing to do? In terms of his office, should he be compelled to resign because of a personal act that is not necessarily related to his position as governor? I've written about when someone should resign in a previous post. I listed three reasons for resignation:

1. They've abused the public or their employers' trust through misuse of their position - they've used their office for personal gain, and/or they have made decisions based on personal criteria, not the objective, professional criteria required.
2. They have caused harm or damage through neglect, incompetence, or other inability to do the necessary work
3. A significant portion of the public and/or the people who work with or for them no longer trust them or have confidence in them to the point that it affects the credibility of the agency or company

The key is the link between the violation and the office and the impact of the violation on one's effectiveness. If a law maker breaks a law that is more than a minor technical infraction, it seems to me that he or she has an obligation to resign. Lawmakers have an even higher obligation to obey the law than the rest of us.

I don't know that any of the three standards I proposed unambiguously would require him to resign. Sure, for some people, any moral transgression, whether it directly affects his job or not, would be reason to resign. I'm not aware of polls that suggest a significant portion of the public felt he should resign. And I'd guess many of those who did, felt that way, not because of the activity, but because he'd pissed them off somehow enough that they wanted to see him publicly harmed. Perhaps there is a law that was violated that Spitzer knows he will be indicted for.

One factor that isn't included in those three standards above is hypocrisy. If there is a reason for Spitzer to resign it would be that he was so moralistic and had gone after prostitution rings and the men who used them. This is certainly a factor people have used, say, in the Larry Craig case. It isn't that he solicited gay sex in the rest room that they saw as such a problem, (well many did) but that he did so while being an outspoken anti-gay advocate.

Spitzer's resignation does quickly remove a political cloud over New York, allows the state to focus on business and not on scandal, and also allows him time to make amends to the people most directly affected by his actions - his wife and daughters. In that sense, he has taken a road that too many others have not taken.

For a different perspective, recently a Thai politician, the Governor of Bangkok, resigned.

Apirak Kosayodhin decided to suspend his work as Bangkok governor on Thursday after the Assets Scrutiny Committee (ASC) decided to press charges against him in connection with the controversial fire trucks and boat procurement for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.

The Thai newspaper, the Nation, has an online poll on what people think about the resignations of Apirak and Spitzer.

I think it is good when a politician shows responsibility. I really like Apirak. He has been working well for Bangkok and I hoped he would not resign. However, his case cannot be compared with that of the New York governor because he has been found guilty, Apirak has not.

Sopidnapa Chumpani

Actress

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The moral degree of our politicians, I believe, is below zero. They're shameless. We're in a 'demon'cracy, not democracy. I'm working on a series of paintings called 'Dark Period' to satirise these shameless powerful men.

Vasan Sitthiket

Artist and founder of the Artists Party

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People will forgive politicians if they admit their guilt. But the bottom line is people are more concerned with what these politicians do for the country. Their personal life is secondary. Take Clinton, for example. People seem to forget his scandals as his actions spoke louder.

Tamarine Tanasugarn

Tennis player

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What the two have done is right. It will allow investigators to act

without interference. Top officials, if found guilty, should be punished more than ordinary people. But, I don't think Spitzer needed to quit. He should just apologise to his wife.

Chantawipa Apisuk

Empower Foundation

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Politicians caught in a scandal don't have to resign. Clinton did not quit over his relationship with Lewinsky. Unlike Apirak, other indicted people are not serving in posts linked to the fire-vehicle scandal any more.

Pongthep Thepkan-chana

Spokesman for Thaksin Shinawatra

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I admire Apirak. His self-suspension will set a new standard. I think Spitzer's quitting will remind others to restrain themselves over sex. However, Thais don't pay much attention to the sexual exploits of high-ranking officials. I want the public to condemn this.

Supensri Pungkoksung,

Friends of Women Foundation

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If Apirak quits, it means he might be involved in corruption. If he was not, he should not fear investigation.

Meanwhile, the New York governor's resignation was a show of responsibility, even though buying sex is normal for men. But it was not appropriate.

Wantee Supada

Bangkok street stall owner

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Though politicians are believed to be involved in corruption, I am not convinced Apirak is in this case; he was forced to follow procedure.

The New York governor's resignation is a good example of politicians taking responsibility for their mistakes.

Bongkotrat Chusai

University student

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Politicians should wait to be convicted before resigning. How can the country develop if politicians have to quit in order to fight allegations?

Sombat Nongkomma

Cobbler

Daily Xpress

ห้ามจอดควาย - No Buffalo Parking

(The picture came from a Thai music website. I'm not sure if it is the cover of a commercial album or a self made album.)

I'd been in Thailand over a month this trip before I saw my first Kwai - or water buffalo. This was a day or so after I saw my first elephant. When I first came to Thailand, you could almost see kwai from the airplane landing at Don Muang airport, which was surrounded by rice paddies then and kwai were everywhere. Now they have been replaced by 'iron kwai' or tractors. The pictures below are from 1967 or 1968, from the pictures I digitized and left in Kaphaengphet for the school museum last weekend.





This farmer walked his Kwai by my house every day. Here, one of the students who lived with the teachers is testing it.








This was one of the most common sights in Thailand then. Kids swimming with and bathing the kwai.









And here's why everyone had a kwai, and why they don't today. They were used to help plow the fields. Now there are tractors. That's progress and people don't have to work as hard and they can produce more. But
you don't have (well most of us wouldn't) have the same kind of relationship with a tractor as you would with your Kwai.




According to Bing, these kwai, which we passed coming back from the land meeting Wednesday, are on their way to the slaughter house, the main use for kwai today.














Elephants weren't as common a sight in the old days. They too played an important work role - getting timber - mainly large teak logs - from the forest to the river where it could be floated to a town, or to a road where it could be trucked out. Now the elephants you see are beggars, with their out of work human companions.

The one we saw was walking down the street in downtown Chiang Mai. We were in a vehicle going the other way and I couldn't get a picture. Yesterday was National Elephant Day.

Back when I was teaching in Kamphaengphet I asked my students to let me know when the elephants - which traveled the country - were in the area clearing teak logs. Here are a couple from the digitized batch I took when my students took me out to the forest to see them at work.




































Yes, that's yours truly, testing his elephant handling skills.


Boy, looking at the old slides compared to the new picture, I'm going to have to pull that old Pentax out again when I get home.

Land Conflict ความข้ดแย้งเรึ่องที่ดิน

Consider this a work of journalistic fiction for the time being. I was there, I understood some of what was said, some was explained, during and after, but I still have lots of questions.

Monday, Bing asked if I wanted to go back to the second village we visted Monday. They were going to resurvey the land. I always say yes. I usually have little or no idea where they are taking me. I'm starting to ask more questions.

Summary

Here's a brief synopsis of what I think happened. The 'rich' (I'm hearing the story from the farmers' side, so it is the poor farmers having their land stolen through the corruption of the rich) companies were having the land surveyed. The farmers blocked the survey in the morning. We arrived around noon, took about seven of the villagers about 20 kilometers to the district land office. About 50 more villagers were already there. The group went into a large open air hall where the land office was clearly ready. The spokesman for the farmers put up some charts, took the mic and started into his articulate arguments. Then the head of the land office replied. He was polite, he listened carefully when S spoke, nodding his head demonstratively and smiling on occasion. He spoke with deference and authority at the same time. He said
กฎหมาย (law) often, which I took as a bad sign. He was apparently referring to the law, and I'd been told that the rich guys had an official title to the land, but which the farmers alleged was fake and bought from corrupt officials because they already owned the land.

Some people from the audience spoke and/or asked questions which the official answered , again seriously and with deference. A representative of one of the companies spoke and answered a few questions.

The audience applauded politely for all the official speakers.

Then farmers went back to the tree outside the building, where there was some thank yous and discussion of what happened. Then people got back into pickups - I saw three with at least ten in the back of the pickups - plus ours. We dropped people off back in the village where they went through copies of land titles, and then drove home.

The conversations with Bing afterward led me to believe that the representative of the company (who apparently wasn't with the company when the land was acquired) said that the company thought they were buying forest land and it is possible that they were swindled by the person who sold them the land. If that is an accurate description of what Bing said, then it was a concession to the farmers. But I have no idea of how Thai law works, except I do know that powerful people tend to win over people who have no power. Not much difference from other places.

That was easy. I should do more summaries. OK, now I'll add the pictures, video, and some details of what I think Bing said happened.




Bing in the driver's seat.












This huge reclining Buddha is on the mountain side where you turn off the highway into the area of the village.









Although, it is still the dry season, areas near rivers are able to irrigate for rice. Other fields wait dry for the rains.










We are almost at the headman's house.















The headman had lunch ready - not for us - and invited us to join him.













Bing had brought some maps of the village area and the men gathered there looked through them and picked out the two that covered most of the land.





We drove to the land office with three people in the bed of the pickup and three more (besides Bing and me) in the front. About 50 farmers were already there waiting for us under the big tree.





We all went into hall, took chairs, and sat down.

























The village spokesman spoke.












Here are several pictures of the land office official responding and the audience listening. I thought I had a picture of the company representative, but I must have erased it. I did save some on another computer and maybe I can find that for the video.


















Afterwards, people gathered under the tree again, piled into the pickups and left.







We took some people back to the headman's house where they dug out old land documents to review what they had. Then we left.

Brief Update

Yesterday Bing and I went back to the second village - where they grow the mangos. They were going to have surveyors come to resurvey the land. We got there around noon, had lunh with the headman of the village and then took about seven people to the public lands building where about 50 other villagers were waiting as well as the lands people. I got home about 8 again last night and after we walked down to Suthep Road (about 5 minutes) for dinner, I lay down on the bed at about 9:30pm for a few minutes. I got up again this morning at 7 when my alarm went off. As they say, pictures and vidoes later. Here's a preview - close up of lunch (with sticky rice) on the headman's porch. The white vegetable is a kind of eggplant.

Two Villages

Met Bing at the office at 7:45am. Not sure where we were going, something about villages and a van.

Turned out we went to the village I went to earlier with Doc. Well, not quite. This village has two locations. Old and New. Last time I went to the fair at the old location, today we went to the hill top location - after picking up a Japanese professor from Rikkyo University, a program coordinator, their post doc student, a Japanese student doing her doctoral thesis in Chiang Rai, Thailand, and a Japanese-Thai translator.

This is the meeting space at the first village. It was nice to see familiar faces, including a couple of guys who had gotten pretty drunk at the fair. I have a lot to write about these two visits and the stories of the villages. Here, the "occupied" the land 6 years ago to the day today. I'm posting this late March 11 Thailand time - it's actually slipped into March 12 while I've been working on this. The leader of this group - the man whose house I slept at when I went to the village last time - explained the issues and the translator translated. I asked Bing a lot of questions. It's sort of how I expect being very hard of hearing is. You catch some of what is being said, but the stuff you fill in may or may not (more likely) be correct. So in mixed Thai and English, Bing would fill in. Basically, some 'rich' man owned the land and had subdivided it and was going to sell it for housing development. The farmers in the neighboring land needing nearby land as their children grew up and their land was already barely enough for a family, took over the land and started planting. Eventually, the government bought the land and sold it to the farmers with a 50 year mortgage. I know I'm missing a lot here and the justification for taking over someone else's privately owned land seems sketchy. There are issues of the impact of globalization, the commodification of land and the resultant loss of farm land for the farmers. And questions about the economic structure that enables some families to get wealthy and others not. Corruption plays a role as well. It's a long story which I don't have completely straight. Or even partially straight. But I'm going to try to get it written down in English. And, apparently the legal issues are not yet over, though if I understood right, in four years they will have been on the land long enough for it to be their own.

Here we are inside as the leader talks - he's in the white t-shirt to the right of the map. Since this is the 6th anniversary of getting the land, they were preparing for a big feast. I'm not sure how many pig heads were in this pot.




















During the meeting Bing showed me his cell phone "hot news" screen. This was how I learned that oil had hit $108/ barrel. After 108, dollars and barrel are written phonetically in Thai.







We had lunch at a restaurant not far away. I couldn't help, as a loyal Alaskan, snapping this picture advertising dried salmon skin for 15 Baht per little bag. (about 50 cents.)







And in case one had trouble reading the Thai, and interpreting the little man, the bathroom had a more graphic sign.






After lunch we drove south to Lampoon to the second village. Here people are again being introduced and then discussion of this village's land problems. They were given this government land - divided up among the various villagers. After they had it for ten years, according to what I learned today, some rich Thais - both individuals and companies from Bangkok and Chiang Mai - produced a deed to the land and charged them all with trespassing. The explanation was 'corruption.' The poor, relatively uneducated farmers never got documentation when they got the land and these others then got the officials who were in charge later on to forge new documentation and they planned to build a resort here.


You can see the mangos growing - a major crop for them - and these should be ripe in about three months.




When this man showed up a little late, it was obvious that he was 'the man.' There was something about him, just like the leader at the last village, that commanded attention. I just knew, this was the man who knew things. (My boss confirmed this later when we got back) He also has served about 8 years in prison over a longer period of time for trespassing. The case is still on appeal. I did get to ask him if any of the original government officials were still around who could vouch for them. He said they had all died off. Again, it is not clear what the basis for appeal is, though he did say that when asked who they bought the land from, the first people they claimed to have bought it from denied it. The others all turned out to be dead. There is a receipt that they paid for anything only for one small parcel. Or so I understood from the discussion.

This guy also asked the visiting Japanese sustainability experts, why a Thai mango that a friend had bought in Tokyo cost 25Baht there, when they sold for 9Baht a kilo in Thailand. Surprisingly, while I understood the question immediately, the Japanese interpreter, whose Thai is much better than mine, had trouble understanding this one.

We didn't get back to the office until 7:30pm. The lights were still on so I went in and talked to my boss a bit. I'm going to give some more seminars - people from the other organizations in the compound will be invited to some, and for those we will get an interpreter so that when I get to the more complicated abstract concepts, I can get help with the Thai.

Lots of thoughts are swirling through my head, but I'm going back to the second village tomorrow with Bing - 9am this time - because they are having someone come to survey the land. Bing and I had lots of time to talk in the van and at the villages today and that was good.

He said, "When we have English speaking volunteers, their Thai always gets better, but our English stays the same." So we used a lot more English today. He also asked how I was doing. I told him I'm fine and I'm having a great time, but I'm concerned that I'm not giving the organization enough value. He quickly said not to worry, that he was learning a lot just through our conversations. I asked for an example, because I was a bit surprised. He mentioned a discussion we'd had last week about his work with some women in a village who sew clothes for sale. A rich man gives them cloth and needles and thread and buys what they sew and sells it for 300% more than he pays (less markup than the mangos.) Bing thought they should sell the clothes themselves and make more money. In part of that discussion I told him about the proverb "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." Only I added, in this case, you aren't even leading them to water, you are only telling them about water. The horse story was the example he gave.

I told my boss, when I got back tonight - he was still working at 7:30pm and didn't seem ready to leave when I left at 7:50pm - that I was learning a lot and really should come back in November, after the US elections. He said, that sounded good, but I could save the airfare by just staying. So, I think we're getting along well, though the more I know, I discover there is even much more that I don't know. But then that was the case when I first came to Thailand as a Peace Corps volunteer. Today my Thai wasn't quite as frustrating as it was last week. Many of the words I've been studying were used in the discussions. Enough. I doubt too many people will get this far anyway. Congrats if you did.

Gary Gycax - Out of the Game

Adam Rogers comments on the death of Gary Gygax last week in an op-ed in the NY Times.

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

Gycax was the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, a game that still lurks in boxes in our house. Rogers credits D&D as the model for the digital world of today

Gycax co-created Dungeons and Dragons in 1974. I don't know whether I would have been attracted to the game if it had been around when I was a boy and teen, but I know that my son became a big D&D fan. Whenever he had gathered enough money, he was off to Bosco's to get another hard cover volume of the the D&D series.

I'm not qualified to judge Rogers' assessment of Gycax's impact on the content of our world today.

Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)

But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.

The idea that we all play roles in life is not something that Gycax created - it's been around in literature and psychology and anthropology and even management for a long, long time. And slaves just doesn't seem like the right word. As Americans, are we slaves to the crafters of the US Constitution?

But I can attest to the impact of D&D on the life of at least one geek. My son got totally wrapped into D&D but there weren't enough others he knew he could play with. So I got recruited, very reluctantly (on my part.) I had a lot of things I was doing and interested in and playing D&D just wasn't one of them. But J was so insistent. And the media had all sorts of hype linking D&D with Satanic rituals and other bizarre and sometimes deadly activities. I needed to know what my son was involved with. But there were about 12 volumes he wanted me to read so I would know how to play. Another big obstacle. I finally told him to make me reading assignments - no more than one hour a day - so I could learn enough to play. Focus on the essentials. He did, and I did my assignments.

And I was amazed at the sophisticated world that was there. Particularly, I was intrigued by the attributes of the various characters. Essentially, Gacyx created a model of human beings (well, he included other vaguely human like characters such as wizards,haflings, and gnomes) that were similar in structure (if not quite in content) to similar models of humans in the field of management. Essentially he identified key traits such as

Strength
Dexterity
Constitution
Charisma

I don't remember how many there were altogether. You had to roll the strange dice (were they 12 sided? I don't remember) to fill in points for each trait. High points in certain traits worked best with certain 'races' of characters. It was an analytical tool that I'm sure taught many people about such modeling, even if they didn't know that was what they were doing.

And we did play some, but I'm afraid I never became an enthusiastic a player.

My son also used the computer - we're talking Vic-20 and Commodore 64 if I recall right - to create tables to keep track of the points of his characters and those of his imaginary opponents.

It also gave him refuge from a world that he didn't seem to fit into very well at that time. As he moved on to other games, I used to ask him why all the games he played had as their goal to kill and maim as many people as possible. Why didn't they have games to find ways to feed the poor or find ways to overcome cancer?

All the skills he developed to support his gaming have come in handy as he grew up - the point that Rogers is making. And I suspect that his one time passion for Buffy may also have been linked to the supernatural world of D&D.

So, thanks Gary. You were at the right place at the right time and millions have learned a lot and had great fun from your creation. Sorry you had to leave us so soon. And perhaps you didn't have to.

In an interview with Gamespy after his stroke in 2004, Gycaz said, when asked about his health:

Gary Gygax: I feel pretty good now. I just can't exert myself too much. I'm still too overweight, though. I shouldn't even be smoking these cigars. I also quit smoking a pack of camels a day.

I know that George Burns was still smoking cigars when he died at 102 or 103, but he was a statistical outlier
.

Price of Gas and Election Payoffs

Sunday (It's Monday morning Thai time as I post this) was the mayoral election in Kamphaengphet Candidate #2 was the front runner according to Mook. But Sunday word was out that at leat two candidates were paying people 500 Baht each for their votes. Mook was upset about this, but his father, when we visited him, was asking how come he didn't get his 500 Baht. That is the same amount J and I had to pay each to get into Burma - about $15.

Meanwhile, the price of gasoline ranges around 30 Baht per liter for 91 octane. At about 3.8 liters per gallon and 32 Baht per $, that's about $3.50 per gallon. This is a little higher than gas was when we left Anchorage, but given that everything else is much cheaper than in the US, gas prices at US levels and above are extremely expensive for Thais.

Back in Chiang Mai

[still having trouble loading photos - there's a brief video of the hilltop temple below.]

Bus to Kamphaengphet from Chiang Mai. Comfortable and easy. Got to the bus station early so got on the earlier bus. Roads are really first class, four lane divided highway. But as we descended from the higher altitude of Chiang Mai into the lowlands, we got pushed to the left and the right as we zoomed downhill around the curves, I was reminded of taking this route when I first arrived in Thailand in 1967. The Peace Corps volunteers in the North were all sent up to Chiang Mai by train after a week of orientation in Bangkok. We left Chiang Mai in the evening. Then the road was not paved, two lanes, and I recall careening around the curves in the dark, lit up regularly by bright flashes of lightening which let me see the pouring rain outside. I remember that vividly still today as I just accepted that I would survive or not and that would be my fate.

In Kamphaengphet, Mook took us to the P Resort. The river across from the town is now lined with ‘Resorts” - we’d call them, motels, though each seems to be its own unique style. They had specially reserved an oval room for us that was over the river with windows about 200 degrees around the circle. It was pretty spectacular. We rested a bit enjoyed the view until he picked us up to go for dinner.

We went to an upstairs room at a Chinese restaurant owned by the children of a good friend of Mook’s father - they had come to Kamhaengphet about the same time.

Who’s Mook? I didn’t have Mook as a student in class - he was in grades above the ones I taught. But he did live with me for a while so he could practice his spoken English before taking the American Field Service (AFS) examination in 1968. There had never been an AFS student from KPP province, but he passed the exam. I got to know him and his family well during that time. He went to Iowa in 1969-70, a small rural town where he fit in very well. His daughter has also been an AFS student and now is living in Los Angeles. He’s been back to the US several times over the years, got an MPA in Bangkok and works at the HINO truck dealership. His family banana farm from the old days is now a huge sugar cane concern and Mook is head of the Sugar Cane growers association of KPP.

At the restaurant were Manoo and Sittiporn, two former students of mine. Manoo was an English teacher until he bacame an administrator at his primary school. Sittiporn is also a teacher. Both were good students when they were in my 7th grade English class.
There were also a few other people. One of the current English teachers at the school who is very enthusiastic and whom I promised last year I’d digitize some slides from 1967-68 of the school and of Kamhaengphet. They were very happy with the dvd - I played a slide show at dinner on my MacBook - and with the old student newspaper which had stories by Manoo and Sittiporn as well as Mook.

After dinner Mook had contaced Somprasong - one of the Thai teachers of the year - who was on a bus bringing students back from visiting the sea. His students live in the mountains and I imagine few if any had seen the sea. They were on their way back to Umphang and Mook arranged for us to meet them at a gas station as they were passing through Kamphaengphet. It was great to see him and his wife and son again. There were two big tour busses with 92 kids! Somprasong had gotten some businessman to donate the busses for the trip. But the big busses would not be able to go the small road to Umphang, so when they got to Maesot by 1am or so, they would have to switch to the small pickup trucks with benches in the back for the last three hours.

Right now I’m on the bus back to Chiang Mai. We had a lazy Sunday. We switched to the Techno Riverside Resort because the big room we were in wasn’t available for Saturday night. This motel was closer to town and also nicely situated on the river, but we didn’t have the great view we did the previous night. But they did have internet connection in the lobby so I could check email and make a post yesterday. Breakfast came with the room in a nice indoor-outdoor setting. Mook and his wife Aow came by with their 8 months old grandson. He was well fed and well slept, so he was in a good mood and we had fun. A real cutie.

Then off to Mook’s son’s (and wife’s) tutoring business. They have over 300 students who get tutored in English, math, and other subjects. Weekends are their busiest time. There we met Carlo, one of their English teachers. He’s a 48 year old Italian who was born and raised in Germany and is married to a Thai woman and lives 25 kilometers out of town.

Then to Mook’s house to drop off his wife and the baby. Then we stopped by a nearby wedding that Mook had been invited to. He dropped off an envelope with money and apologized to the bride’s (or was it the groom’s?) mother for not staying. Then we stopped at a spot on the river where his father first had a house when they got to KPP and where Mook and his brothers and sisters learned to swim. There were some people fishing and we also got to see the pens where they raise farmed fish.

Then we got out of town and onto the old main highway - the one that was the highway when I was teaching here. It was so much more quiet, the narrow two lane road going through fields along the river. Even though it is the dry season, there were bright green fields of new rice, irrigated by river water. And we stopped at a small temple - cemetary at the top of a litle hill. This was litterally a little hill as though someone had made it with a giant bucket of dirt. It gave us a a great view of the area, and there was another wedding loudly going on in the village just below. Mook said today was an auspicious day for a wedding and we must have passed three or four.

We got to Tak about two and had another great lunch. It is a little embarrassing because I’m not allowed to pay for anything in Kamphaengphet. Manoo slipped in and paid for our hotel room the night before - after Mook had told me it was already taken care of. Sutin and his wife paid for our hotel room last night I later learned. And this last lunch Mook would not let us pay. We had orginally planned to see the big dam in Tak today, but it was getting late and Mook has a meeting in Bangkok tomorrow morning, so I said we should skip the dam and just go to the bus station.

It was a little after three pm and we just missed the Chiang Mai bus and we could catch the four o’clock bus, but it might be 4:30. Mook said to just wait and see which bus came first (one from Bangkok or one from the Northeast) but I was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough seats. I should have taken Mook’s advice. The Bangkok bus came first, was a nice new bus with lots of empty seats. It left about 4:30. The Khonkhean bus from the Northeast came later and didn’t leave til 5pm. And it was pretty full. Our seats turned out to be broken and after a bit, someone got off and we got other seats. But we are making a lot of little stops - not like the direct bus we were on going to KPP. It’s almost dark (6:35pm right now), but I was able to get my battery charged fully before the busride. So I’ll end this post and work on another one that will be less travelogue and more things we’ve found out in the last couple of days.

Burma Thoughts

[Blogger's having problems posting pictures. I'll add more tomorrow]


[This is a little disjointed, but I just don’t have the energy to make it more coherentGoing into Burma felt a little strange and exciting. The contrast between Thailand and Burma - just walking over the bridge over the river Moei (in Thai, the Burmese call it something else) you could feel it. It is a major entry way in both directions for goods. Lots of Chinese things come in from Burma to Thailand. I’m not sure what all goes the other way - though we did see a couple of trucks loaded with plastic garbage cans.

And our guides told us that a lot of motorcycles - mostly used - come to Burma where they are repaired and sent back to be sold at a profit. I wasn’t sure to what extent the motorcycles were old clunkers they were salvaged or bought, or whether some where stolen and brought over the border. There’s a picture of a repair shop in yesterday’s post.

And Burmese drive on the right side of the road. Unusual for a former colony and with neighboring Thailand driving on the left. Our 'guide' said it happened in 1967 when the prime minister decided the left side was a British legacy he could do without.

But I felt uncomfortable at first going into this country where the elected president has been under house arrest for years and a rich ruling class supported by Western companies that extract natural resources from Burma - including US oil companies - and by the Chinese government. On the Burmese side there were far fewer motorized vehicles. A lot of men wore long sarongs, and things just seemed much slower and seedier and poorer. They also had goats which you don’t see that much in Thailand. Joan and I had to pay 500 (about $15) Baht each to enter Burma. Mook and Manoo, as Thais, had to pay 20 Baht each. They kept our passports at the border crossing at the end of the bridge and gave us a receipt for them and Mook and Manoo’s day passes.

Already on the bridge we got picked up by two Burmese men, one who spook good English to me and to Joan and one who spoke good Thai to Mook and Manoo. Actually our ‘guide’ spoke good Thai too. No agreements were made, but each guide began explaining things as we went along. They tried to get us into little tricycle carts to ride to the temple we’d decided to visit, but we wanted to walk so they walked along with us.

The temple was very nice. There was scaffolding around the pagoda, but even the scaffolding was aesthetic. And the pagoda was very similar to the one we’d seen next to Manoo’s house earlier that morning. It was in the temple that the English speaking guide started opening up more. Well, he did tell us about how hard he works and his son in college and daugher in high school and the rising cost of housing as people are now speculating that Myawadi land will get much more valuable as the Asian Highway - driving east to west from Hanoi to New Delhi - becomes a major route. It made me think about the movie Bagdad cafe which is just inside the Iran border and caters to the many truck drivers of all nationalities who need a place to eat. He never asks for money, but leaves that up to the people he guides. If I understood him correct, he said there was a group from the Discovery Chaneel that morning. Seems I’ve written about them already not too long ago.

Part of me wanted to ask lots of questions about the political situation, and part of me felt that wasn’t a good idea. But we saw a guy in a military uniform in the back of a pickup truck and a machine gun over his back. This was not the Burmese military, but a KMT ???? Soldier. I expressed surprise he is riding around so openly. There’s a cease fire and both can be open now in the province. Eventually we got to talking about the government. There was a sort of verbal dance as he gently tested me out and I him. But, ‘we have to be careful, there are spies everywhere.”

Everyhouse had a two story bamboo pole with a flat piece of metal maybe 10 inches by 8 inches. These are used to put out fires we were told. I guess if you see the fire right away and can beat it out this might work.

We had no Burmese currency and everything was quoted in Thai Baht.

I posted a picture yesterday of some kids playing footbal on a field that had a white stone monument on the right end. The Thai speaking guide told me it was in honor of Aung San Suu Kyi and that there were monuments like that in every province. But they weren’t allowed to clean them up or otherwise maintain them. But I got the sense that just having it there was enough.

And then we got to the Burmese immigration office. I gave them the receipt and they gave us our passports and the two Thai day passes back and we walked back over the bridge. I gave my guide 200 Baht, Mook gave his 100 Baht. We didn’t see any other Westerners during the time we were in Burma - maybe 2 ½ hours - and Mook said there weren’t that many Thais either. People were friendly. In one case my guide pulled me away from someone who was getting too friendly - he was pretty drunk. Alcohol was one thing, I was told, that was very cheap.

Back from Burma with 30 more days

We've done about a weeks worth in the last 48 hours and I don't have time to post much. Here are some pictures of today (It's Saturday night, March 8, 11pm in Kamphaengphet, Thailand). But I have another 30 days I can stay in Thailand in my passport. (Ropi, that should answer your question.) My first 30 days is up tomorrow. J and more time because she came later and then went to Singapore. But we both went with Mook and Manoo, two former students of mine.



We woke up looking at the sun over the River Bing from our hotel room.




After breakfast, we went with Manoo to see the Burmese style Chedee near his house. I know this temple from many years ago, but only recently did it get covered with gold paint.




Mook met us at Manoo's house and we drove to the border town of Mae Sot. There we had lunch before crossing the border. This was the fish that the restaurant was known for.


And here we are at a Burmese temple.
















This is a motorcycle wash and repair shop in Myawaddy, Burma.






Our unofficial guide, who picked us up as we crossed the bridge into Burma said that the grey stone monument on the right end of the football field is for Aung San Suu Kyi, but they aren't allowed to maintain it. But there is one in every province in Burma. This was after about an hour or more walking around that we finally got to these topics.









I've cut this really short and here we are back in Thailand on the way to Tak from Mae Sot stopped at the Musor Hill Tribe market.




And we got to stop to visit Maliwan, whose husband died a year ago - just days after we arrived in Thailand last year and before we got to see him. Idiris and I were teachers together when we were both very young men. My no flash policy didn't work out well here.

There's lots more but that will have to satisfy your for now