Shutdown Shutdown Bangkok

I came to Bangkok for my annual medical checkup, despite the deadly confrontations last Tuesday. On Thursday afternoon, I inadvertently shopped my way through two of the Shutdown Bangkok, Restart Thailand protest sites. I’m told that the demonstrations really get going during the evening hours, spending the daytime in a holding pattern. By 4:30pm at a protest site in the midst of Bangkok’s Chitlom shopping mall cluster, the stage was busy with speakers, singers and a rock band, ignored by all but a handful of the hundreds of protestors in the tent village under tall temporary roofs. The stage scenes were broadcast around the protest sites, extending to the dozens of vendors selling tee-shirts, bags, whistles, even tents, a veritable street fair in the middle of what would normally be some of Bangkok’s busiest streets.

Walking through the protest area, a profound sense of sadness swept over me. It’s not only that the opposition’s proposals to break the power of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and oust his sister and proxy Yingluck Shinawatra, are predicated on thwarting democracy, since the opposition can’t win at the ballot box, and that neither side seems ready to respond to what other observers say is the end of Thais’ willingness to tolerate rule by their purported betters.

I hoped that Tuesday’s deadly violence, including the explosion of a grenade in front of a police line and gunfire from both sides that left five dead and dozens injured, would have woken up leadership. I hoped they’d ask themselves whether the nation shown on that stunning BBC footage of the grenade explosion was Thailand they wanted to live in and the one they want the world to see. My old Thai hand friends assured me that the leaders don’t care about such things. Friday night’s explosion at a protest site, injuring six, and Saturday’s night’s attack on an anti-government rally in eastern Thailand indicate my friends understand the situation better than I do.

What made me sad at the Bangkok protest sites was the unseriousness of the scene, despite the specter of violence and the high stakes. Reforming Thailand’s basic governing institutions is difficult and serious work and it won’t get done sitting in a tent in the middle of a boulevard or selling key chains any more than it will by throwing grenades. Shutdown Bangkok is no way to run a revolution.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

King, Hong Kong rabbi offer hopeful praver

My Hong Kong rabbi, not a euphemism in this case is, wrote to our congregation about a recently unearthed speech by Dr Martin Luther King, delivered in 1962 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Receiving the email was a reminder of the historic ties between blacks and Jews, in part due to a shared heritage of slavery. In the US, many Jews joined hands with blacks in the struggle for equality, perhaps most famously and tragically in the 1964 murders of civil right workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The killings by members of Ku Klux Klan formed the basis of the film Mississippi Burning, galvanized mainstream US public opinion in favor of civil rights legislation, and began a 40 year fight to convict the killers, vividly recounted in Howard Ball’s Murder in Mississippi and Justice in Mississippi.

Long before the final conviction, black-Jewish ties had frayed, as my friend Jonathan Kaufman explains in his book Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America. Nelson Mandela’s passing provided reminders that Jews were also active in the African National Congress, even though Israel collaborated with South Africa’s apartheid regime. I thank United Jewish Congregation of Hong Kong’s Rabbi Stanton Zamek for giving our members a subtle reminder of the historic affinity between these two minorities. During Black History Month, it’s especially appropriate to remember Dr King and his struggle for equality and justice for all.

Though segregation remained a fact of life in much of the US in the US in 1962, Dr King powerfully stated the case for equality.

In the final analysis, racial injustice must be uprooted from American society because it is morally wrong. It must be uprooted because it stands against all of the noble precepts of our Hebraic-Christian heritage. It must be done because segregation substitutes an I-it relationship for the I-Thou relationship, and relegates persons to the status of things.

The struggle against discrimination was being waged in the equivalent of hand-to-hand combat and trench warfare in 1962, yet Dr King elevated the discussion to a higher level. His words provide a stirring reminder of work that remains undone on so many fronts, perhaps even more relevant today than they were a half-century ago.

We are at one of history’s crossroads. Our technological creativity is almost boundless. We can build machines that think. We can dot the landscape with houses and super-highways teeming with cars. We can now even destroy our whole planet with the nuclear weapons we alone possess. We have wrought distance and placed time in chains. And our guided ballistic missiles have carved highways through the stratosphere. In short we have the capacity to re-build our whole planet, filling it with luxury – or we are capable of destroying it totally. The shocking issue of our age is that no one can confidently say which we will do. Whether we survive indeed depends upon whether we build moral values as fast and extensively as we construct material things.

Like the great man of faith he was, despite the dark days ahead, Dr King left listeners with a hopeful prayer.

And so I close by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher who didn’t quite have his grammar right, but uttered words of great symbolic profundity and they were uttered in the form of a prayer: “Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

Amen.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

‘Going, going, gone, goodbye’ to Ralph Kiner

A Hall of Fame slugger who dated Hollywood stars and made it big in New York, Ralph Kiner, who died Thursday at age 91, lived a life that others dream about. Yet unlike so many other big name athletes, Kiner knew the world wasn’t all about him. Like his baseball royalty contemporary Yogi Berra, Kiner had an innate sense of humility that comes not just from excelling at game where failing seven out of ten times makes you a star but from being comfortable enough with who you are that you don’t need to prove anything.

One of the most revealing things about Kiner, which I didn’t see in any of the tributes to him, was the story he told about an autograph seeker who asked him, “Didn’t you used to be Ralph Kiner?”

Kiner led the National League in home runs for his first seven seasons with the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates. After one season, Pirates general manager Branch Rickey presented Kiner with a contract calling for a pay cut. According to Kiner, Rickey told him, “Son, we can finish last without you.” Kiner became an ardent campaigner for improved pensions for players,

I grew up with Kiner in his role as one of the New York Mets original broadcasters, along with Lindsey Nelson and Bob Murphy. Referring to a Philadelphia Phillies outfielder, Kiner made another lasting addition to the baseball lexicon: “Two-thirds of the earth is covered by water. The other third is covered by Garry Maddox.”

There wasn’t any aspect of baseball and good living that Ralph Kiner didn’t cover, and the game was greatly enriched by his association with it. Now, stay tuned for Kiner’s Korner.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

New mainland visitors invigorate Macau

Macau’s gaming revenue topped $45 billion last year, about seven times the house take in Las Vegas. But the real excitement is about where visitors are coming from.

The majority of mainland visitors to Macau, 18.6 million last year, no longer come from immediately neighboring Guangdong province. Travelers from more distant parts of China are arriving in greater numbers. As I wrote in Journey to the South (page 68, payment required), that’s a very welcome development.

Sources interviewed for the article in the January issue of Macau Business pointed out that these guests, mainly from northern and central China, tend to stay longer and spend more. They’re more likely to treat their trip to Macau as a vacation, or at least an occasion, rather than a surgical strike on baccarat tables.

Half of the visitors to Macau don’t even stay a night, walking back across the border into Guangdong or taking a ferry back to Hong Kong. Visitors traveling from greater distances are more likely not only to stay in hotels, but take in Macau’s sights, eat in its restaurants, and maybe even sample its small but growing roster of entertainment options beyond the casino floor.

Even more mainlanders will be heading south with the arrival of Chimelong, a popular mainland theme park operator, on Guangdong’s Hengqin Island, within spitting distance of Macau’s Cotai casino cluster, its version of the Las Vegas Strip. Chimelong’s International Ocean Kingdom, phase one of five resort development plan, opened last week, just in time for the Chinese new year holiday. Analysts at Union Gaming Group estimate Chimelong will attract up to 2 million visitors this year, and Chimelong officials have targeted 20 million annually when it’s complete. China’s official news agency acknowledged many Chimelong guests will cross the bridge to Macau as part of the trip.

Macau and mainland authorities have long urged Macau to diversify its revenue beyond gaming, hoping that it can someday mirror Las Vegas, where casino resorts record most of their revenue from non-gaming sources, including hotels, shows clubs and restaurants. Visitors from northern and central China nudge Macau’s needle in that direction.

But it’s a faint shadow of what the authorities wanted when they brought the creators of modern Las Vegas, Wynn Resorts founder Steve Wynn and Las Vegas Sands founder Sheldon Adelson, to Macau. Officials expected they’d transform Macau into an international travel and convention destination. Instead, ten years after Adelson opened Sands Macao to begin Macau’s boom, getting mainland visitors to travel a few hundred miles to get there constitutes cause for celebration.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.