An Odd Inventory in Bangkok

Two members of my tour group and I were walking down one of the main streets of Bangkok. It was probably Sukhumvit Road, often billed as the longest street in the world, stretching through Bangkok all the way to the Cambodian border. Like many of Bangkok’s busy streets, this was a formidable, 6-lane expanse. It certainly wasn’t like the streets in the old sections of European cities where tourists wander.

The sun beat down on us along the treeless stretch. Occasionally we’d see a person hurrying along, wearing a mask, an obvious precaution against Bangkok’s notorious smog. The street was not particularly pedestrian-friendly not only because it posed such a hazard from traffic exhaust, but also because it couldn’t be crossed. When some shop on the other side of the street caught our attention, we looked in vain for a way to get to that other side. We found that there aren’t frequent traffic lights in Bangkok as there are in most U.S. cities. There was no question of trying to dodge across those six lanes of traffic. That would have been a death-defying, Evel Knievel feat. We saw we would have to walk the equivalent of four or five blocks in order to get to one of the steel bridges that span the street at rare intervals. So we contented ourselves with what was on “our side.”

We imagined the people whose shops lined the sidewalk would similarly make the distinction between “our” side and “their” side.” The traffic lanes created two different turfs with very little easy, friendly interaction between the two. We even fancied that if you were born to parents with a shop on one side of the street, it was likely you might never venture to that other side, a permanent “terra incognita.”

But there was plenty to see and do just sticking to the one side. The work-a-day world is much more open to view in places such as Thailand than it is in the U.S. where work and home are strictly separated and where work is most often restricted to shops and offices behind closed doors. In that sense, Thailand is the ideal setting for home-schoolers. Children can see what their parents do for a living and can even participate in the work, learning “on the job.”

We passed by a number of mechanics’ shops. Greasy engines and auto parts spilled out onto the sidewalk, looking like a bunch of captives making a break for it. The cars that the engines had come from were also often astride the sidewalk and were being operated on by individuals sprawled under them. So we had the interesting experience of stepping over supine bodies as we walked along. Sometimes it wasn’t cars being operated on, but tuk tuks, Thailand’s famous electrified rickshaws.

Some of the shops had roll-up doors raised as if inviting an audience to view a stage show on which the curtains had been raised. We saw a woman pedaling furiously at a fabric being fed through an old-fashioned treadle sewing machine. Another shop featured a performance by two workers dipping rolled T-shirts and scarves into vats for tie dying. Some of their finished products were pinned up, brightly waving at us. In still another shop we saw a blender whirring away on a counter making bubble tea to which tapioca pearls would be added.

Farther along, we saw a man engaged in some dovetail joinery project. He was deftly attaching wooden boards to each other at right angles, obviously making some sort of box. As we paused, he looked up and gestured us to come in and watch. We gleefully took the chance to make contact with a real native. The man spoke perfect English and we immediately started to pepper him with questions about what it was like to live in Thailand. He was apparently a more affluent entrepreneur because he told us that he sometimes would take the summer months off, get away from steamy Bangkok, and go to his second home in Germany. We later learned this was a common practice among wealthier Thais. There’s a mass exodus from Bangkok in the summer as everyone who can afford to goes to relatively cooler Germany or other European countries.

The man stopped his work and escorted us down a breezeway to the back of his building to see his garden. He proudly pointed to the frangipani, hibiscus, and rhododendron that were in lush line-up along the borders of his yard. It was hard to focus on the beauty of these blooms though because our conversation was being conducted to the accompaniment of a steady, loud chorus of yapping. One side of the man’s yard was taken up by a dog run which had several scrawny dogs racing up and down its length, directing their fusillade of noise at our intrusion. The man explained that he often took stray dogs off the street. He said he tried to do something for them, but it was hard because there isn’t a strong tradition of adopting dogs as pets in Thailand. Dogs are left to scrounge and suffer injury on the streets against a background of most people’s indifference.

As we walked back through the shop, we noticed several racks of umbrellas standing at attention against one wall. The senior member of our little troop commented on this array and especially admired one frilly, flowered parasol. The man smiled benevolently at our companion. He took the umbrella off the rack and handed it to her with a little bow of respect. He said, “Here Madame, it is yours. No charge. It is such a hot, sunny day out. You need something to protect you from the sun.”

Our friend thanked him profusely, but then wondered how he came to have so many umbrellas for sale.

The man said that he came by all these used umbrellas at funerals. He said that mourners often carry umbrellas to shade themselves when they walk behind the casket as it is taken to the place of cremation. During the days of chanting and other rituals that precede the cremation, people often put down their umbrellas and forget them. If they were not very expensive umbrellas, no one ever comes back to claim them. So the man said he retrieved those umbrellas and sold them as an adjunct to his business.

Our friend was a tad less enthusiastic about her umbrella now that she knew it had been connected with a cremation. The man had said these umbrellas were left behind by mourners. But we could imagine that sometimes an umbrella might have belonged to the actual deceased, part of the individual’s worldly belongs that were shed. However, our friend was still appreciative of the present. But she wondered how the man happened to attend so many funerals.

“Oh, I thought that was clear,” he said, surprised at the question. “That is my main business. I make coffins.”

We looked at the “box” we’d seen him fashioning with tongue-in-groove precision, and now recognized it for what it was to become. It was the start of another coffin to be added to his inventory of coffin boxes we newly noticed stacked up in an alcove of his shop.

“Yes,” he summarized. “That is my business. I sell coffins and umbrellas.”

We exchanged a few friendly farewells, and then went back out onto the sun-drenched sidewalk. Our friend opened her parasol and twirled it coquettishly as we proceeded down the street. We laughed in celebration of the glorious incongruity of our encounter. What an incredible inventory of goods the man sold. Imagine! Coffins and umbrellas! Somehow that seemed to sum up Bangkok - a wildly unpredictable mix of livelihood and life.

College Bound - The College Admissions Scandal

The real shame behind the current scandal over parents’ manipulations to get their children into Ivy League colleges is not so much the cheating they’ve been doing. It’s the fact that they place such importance on getting into prestigious schools in the first place.

These parents have such tunnel vision. They are locked into struggling to achieve something that doesn’t matter or that shouldn’t matter. The fact is that having a degree from an Ivy League University is usually not necessary to lead a happy, productive life. In fact, graduating from Harvard might actually limit one’s possibilities in some perverse way. The high school drop-out might feel psychically limited to flipping burgers. He feels the job of being a corporate executive is closed to him. But the MBA from Yale is equally psychically limited. She doesn’t feel able to entertain taking a long-term job as a burger flipper. She feels that she must be on the fast track to advancement in the corporate realm.

I’m reminded of the Mary Tyler Moore sitcom. Once Mary’s TV character became fully established and successful in her career as television producer, she felt she really had to move out of her convivial studio apartment with its pull-out bed – into the sterile, removed high-rise apartment we saw her occupying through the last years of the series. The only reason her home life continued to have any interest at all is that she imported many of the characters from her old, still congenial, work life into it.

As it went in fiction, so it typically goes in fact. The poor man might feel he will never be free to drive a Mercedes and live in an 8-bedroom mansion in the suburbs. But the rich man probably will never feel free to drive an old Toyota and to live in an apartment over a tavern in an ethnic neighborhood. Each one is operating under certain ultimately self-imposed constraints. A Yale education, or the lack thereof, doesn’t necessarily have much to do with an individual’s prospects. In the relatively prosperous and safe United States, it’s the extent of each person’s imagination and spirit that will play the biggest part in determining whether he or she is successful in ways that count.

Just looking at practicalities, it’s not true that a degree from a notable university is the only on-ramp to a distinguished career. I went to a 4-year State-supported community college that didn’t have much cachet in the larger world. I went for the fun of it, not caring about what it would do to advance my earning capacity or my status farther down the road. However, my closest cohort in college, Linda Winer, was perhaps a little more concerned about what she could do when she graduated.

As it turned out, our school’s status had absolutely nothing to do with her eventual success. In her senior year as a music major, she saw an ad announcing a seminar that was being offered in California to train music critics. She wrote the requisite autobiographical essay and sample critiques of some local musical performances she attended. She had the ability to encapsulate opinions in snappy phrases. The rather indifferent production of the Puccini opera she saw got the title “Blah Bohéme.” She bundled up all this application material and sent the packet off to Martin Bernheimer, the already established critic who would be heading the panel conducting the seminar. She was accepted, and off she went for a season in Los Angeles.

Her ability was recognized; her student articles got circulated beyond the confines of the seminar. When she returned to Chicago, she was readily taken on as a second-string music critic for The Chicago Tribune. But it wasn’t too long before she became one of the Tribune’s lead music/theater critics. From there she went to on become the music/theater critic for New York’s Newsday. Along the way, it mattered not one whit what college she had attended. I don’t think anyone ever thought to ask her. That’s probably the way it is for most people who have independently launched themselves by one route or another. Their schooling becomes largely irrelevant.

The irrelevance of a college degree becomes even more apparent when I consider the “home-schooled” people I know. Not only did most of them never go to any college, prestigious or otherwise - but most of them never went to any high school or even any grade school. Their resumes are blank on that score. However, not one of them that I can think of ever had any trouble getting any job he or she sought.

It’s true that none of them attempted to practice medicine, engineering, or any profession where public safety is significantly at stake and where formal educational credentials are therefore necessary. None wanted to burst in off the street and claim a position in the higher echelons of a Silicon Valley corporation. None wanted to jump into practice at a prestigious law firm, although there is still a means of becoming a lawyer without attending law school. Four states still allow aspiring attorneys to take Abe Lincoln’s route to that career. They allow individuals to enroll in apprenticeship programs with established lawyers (at a cost of a few hundred dollars a year), and then to take the Bar Exam. If they pass the Exam, they’re qualified.

So perhaps my home-schooled acquaintances were simply lucky that they didn’t want to engage in an occupation for which a degree is immediately required. But none of them “settled.” They are all working at jobs they truly enjoy. One is head of the accounting department in a California casino. Another one, a self-proclaimed “car nut,” is working at his dream job. He is chief mechanic for his city’s police department, responsible for maintaining and repairing all their rolling stock.

Surprisingly, these home-schooled individuals generally didn’t encounter any difficulties when they applied for their respective jobs. If anything, their lack of any formal education might have given them an edge in the application process. The novelty of those blank spaces on their resumes got their applications kicked off the normal assembly line assessment process. That home-schooling background suggested they might have the kind of “fresh approach” to offer that so many bosses say they are seeking. So, while other applicants’ resumes were tortuously being processed through computer-aided elimination protocols – my home-schooled acquaintances got right in to see an actual human being who assessed them personally from the start. Then their enthusiasm, their articulateness, and the scope of what they had learned independently, won the day for them.

A number of the candidates running for President this year are adding weight to the false idea that a college education is the royal road to success. They are perpetuating the myth that a college diploma is the only way to boost a person’s earning capacity over a lifetime. These candidates are strengthening that unimaginative, limiting assumption by making “free college for all” a major plank in their platforms. When Herbert Hoover promised voters “a chicken in every pot” if he was elected, he was promising something that truly was necessary for a person’s well-being. He was promising FOOD! If our current crop of candidates really wanted to make a freer, more equitable America - instead of promising free college, they would advocate spending those taxpayer billions on providing people with a plentiful variety of healthy food, decent shelter, an urban landscape with a well-maintained infrastructure, a clean and safe environment, and access to free, unlimited learning through well-stocked libraries.

Alternatively, the politicians could work to bring the cost of going to a liberal arts college down to earth by recalling the basics of what learning entails. Hardly anyone has ever gotten a better liberal education than Socrates’ students. This simply involved their wandering around under the trees with Socrates, engaging in conversation with him and their fellow students. That kind of ideal and idyllic education could be replicated for mere dollars today. What has caused universities to elaborate themselves into massive building programs and bureaucracies, and consequently into massive expense?

Even in those cases in which an individual’s career ambitions do require a college degree, particularly a degree from a college with some expensive facilities - it still rarely matters which school an individual attends, as long as that school is accredited. Most of the Doctors I had to choose from on my HMO plan have come from rather obscure foreign universities – medical schools in the Philippines, Mexico, or the Middle East. But they maintain their patients’ loyalty and are generally being advanced within their departments according to their attitude and skills, not according to the prestige of the schools they attended way back when.

My mother graduated from Northwestern. But thinking back on it, she realized that as she subsequently applied for and got jobs such as translator in the foreign department of a large commercial firm – not once had anyone made an issue of which university she’d attended. Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether she had gone to Northwestern, Harvard, or Podunk U.

Again, the key is to get in to be interviewed at the outset by an actual human being, just as the key to getting any problem a person might be having with a company (regarding billing or service or the like), is to get past the robo-menu on the phone and to get through to an actual human being. Instead of spending thousands upon thousands of dollars bribing and cheating to get their children into top-flight universities – ambitious parents could just spend a few dollars on a “hack” book that tells how to get through to a live person. Then of course another hack book might be helpful in telling the applicants how to present themselves once they are seated in front of a hiring executive.

Coincidentally, just before this college admissions scandal broke, I had finished reading a book co-authored by Northwestern’s current President, Morton Schapiro. The book is cleverly titled Cents and Sensibility. Its main theme is an advocacy of letting the humanities more fully inform the study of economics. But along the way, the authors offer some astonishing hacks about getting into college and getting good deals on tuition.

For example, they reveal the little-known fact that most universities will charge students different tuitions (or, what amounts to the same thing, will offer them different sorts of scholarships and other attendance stipends) depending, not on need, but on the way the student approached the university. If the student scouted the university by coming on campus with parents for a tour – that student will likely be offered few incentives to matriculate. In short, they will be charged more if they end up attending. That’s because the student showed an obvious interest in that university, an obvious preference for it. If accepted, that individual would be much more likely to choose to enroll there than a student who had not shown such previous depth of interest. There’s no need to offer scholarships or other incentives to the tour-taker. Such a student will likely find a way to afford the university without aid.

But the main point I want to make in this essay is not that it can be easier and cheaper to enroll in the university of one’s choice than most people imagine. Nor is my main point that it doesn’t matter in the long run which college you attend, or whether you attend any college at all. I want to make a larger point about the kinds of human failings made evident by this recent college admissions scandal. The main criticism I have of those feverishly bribing, cheating parents caught in the current scandal is that they demonstrate a regrettable propensity for a very limiting sort of self-assertion. They say a resounding “NO, not for me or my children!” to all the everyday opportunities that are at hand for them. They show how neglectful they are of the present in favor of some propulsion into the future.

This attitude on their part flies in the face of the philosophies many of them probably espouse. It’s likely that many of these celebrity parents go to yoga classes, spout about the importance of “living in the moment,” and endorse an “Eat, Pray, Love” attitude towards life. But that sort of all-embracing philosophy is apparently not what they live. They are very far from lending themselves to the moment or “going with the flow.” Instead they divert and dam the flow of possibilities at every turn.

There are cases in which parents might recognize their child has a very specific talent or enthusiasm that would require attendance at a specific school in order to be fully developed. Perhaps it’s plain that a child is another little Mozart and it would be a loss to the world if the path wasn’t cleared for that child to get access to the best music schools and the best teachers able to give instruction in the instrument the child wants to play. Or perhaps a child has a sincere and singular enthusiasm for studying supernovae at the edges of the known universe. It’s understandable that such a child would want to be admitted to a school such as Caltech where she could have regular preferred access to the Mt. Palomar telescope. However, such obviously committed and talented young people would probably have no trouble being accepted at Julliard or Caltech simply on their own merits. It would not only be wrong, it would be unnecessary, for the parents of such children to bribe and cheat in order to get their children enrolled at these specific schools.

But little Mozarts are rare. The average youngster, as well as the average adult, has a flexible genius. It could be applied in many different settings to many different ends. The talents of most children don’t require being nurtured in any specific school or, often, in any school at all. Talent, enthusiasm, and interest are free-wheeling, unpredictable qualities that only require self-discipline to bring them to productive focus. Self-discipline isn’t something that can primarily be acquired in a costly, prestigious school. So it’s senseless for parents to try to stoop to all kinds of chicanery to get their pluripotent children into Harvard. Their ambitions in this regard are a sign that, like a Gucci bag, they view education as just a status symbol. It shows they view learning merely as a way of keeping up with, and indeed outdoing, the Joneses.

Worse yet, the actions of these parents show how they are given to flying through life like sharply-pointed arrows. They fly past what is, toward some small circle of a bull’s eye. Far from living in the moment, they harshly judge the present and find it wanting. They see nothing in it for themselves or their children to linger over. They are not the kinds of people for front porch friendships, or sunset reveries, or any kind of abiding. They are people who are always busy, always on their way to somewhere else. In the largest sense, they demonstrate how oblivious they are to the grand, wondrous “all of it,” – and that’s the real shame of their misdeeds.