President Obama called me into the Oval Office a week ago. “Ken, outrages are an outrage that must not stand! Outrageous! We must draw a line in the sand”. So he went to the sandbox and did so. Kind of a Zen thing I guess. First there is a crisis, then there is no crisis, then there is.

Well, the biggest outrage in the world today, Mr. President, is the threat to my access to Bar Girl Nation! Your access to Bar Girl Nation! Cue the Tomahawk missiles!

It’s like this, Mr. President. The Rajah and I pulled into Pattaya, Thailand the other night. The horror! Instead of welcoming bars like “Sexy Girl A Go Go” and “Sugar Honey Sweetie Honey Sugar… Losers Welcome!” there was a wasteland of brand name shopping malls! And where Honey…Sweetie had been….a huge sign openly proclaiming Pattaya a “Family Friendly Destination.”!

Mr. President, if you study these satellite photos you’ll see the bastards are building an “Aquarium World!”

A Thai flunkey approached the two of us. “Welcome! Our city is famous for its fine dining, amusement parks, and world class shopping!”

“Shopping! This town used to be famous for its world class puss…”

“POSibilities!” I shouted. “Rajah, times change. Don’t you check the Asian news? Life in Asia is changing. This is the new Thailand.”

“All right, all right,” he growled. “But nobody had better say “condoms!”.

Pattaya used to be fun. Thailand used to be fun. The “Thai Smile” was real. Everything was cheap, everything was available, and Thais never got worked up about what was happening in any given moment because they knew it was just going to slide into another moment anyhow. Those were the days, Mr. Obama! World class you know what!

America must make things right again!

Well, maybe not just now, Mr. President, as I’m sleeping with two women in my hotel room just now. Call us the Founding Fathers Bar Girl Resistance! I’ll call you back!

Thailand was fun before globalization and the rise of the internet caused eruptions in the Old Rich Boy network of Thai economics. (And, before Russian tourism, of course.) It comes down to one thing – the Thai lower working class (poor working people who keep getting poorer the more they work) began to realize how much they were being exploited. Working seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, serving beer to clueless idiots who spent more in a night than the Thai serving them made in a month or more. Leaving no tip, and proud of it.

The internet of course was how they saw other people were getting a bigger slice of the pie. For that matter, they also had to deal with Thai yuppies spending more on beer in a night, etc. etc.

Anger grew, and power hungry Thai billionaires saw this grass roots dissatisfaction and began to champion the oppressed as a means to political position. This lead to conflict with the other Thai elites, who saw no reason to pretend anything. This lead to rallies’, city wide occupations, sniper attacks, military coups, and harsh language. Of all of those, it was the harsh language that was disturbingly new in normal Thai politics.

To add insult to injury, the quality of tourist has also changed. Hippies (wow man, groovy, got a match?), were good for a laugh; and the later wave of bad boy British tourists were rude but could moon you like a Zen Master. The Thai people appreciate that.

However, today’s young British and European and Australian tourist rarely smiles, seems to take everything seriously, and in general experiences real life as a setback to their hallucinatory superstar media career. They don’t tip either, and post videos about it.

Side note - An alcoholic Tibetan guru I once knew long ago described television as “One of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed” and that would seem to include all the modern variants. How about striking television stations, Mr. President?

Oh, you’re planning to already.

Now, like a Biblical plague against Asian etiquette have come the physically rude Russians, the Chinese who buy nothing and the Indians and Arabs, who do everything as a group, if you know what I mean, Mr. President. The hostility of Thai employees to all this has gotten so obvious that even the mainstream Thai media bemoan it, warning that Cambodia and Malaysia may become the preferred tourist destinations.

All of the above, plus the ceaseless rise in the price of commodities (economic double speak for what humans need to stay alive) have put the final lid on the coffin of the Thai Smile. That’s why I’m in this hotel room, with the Bar Girl Resistance, screwing my brains out, Mr. President, to keep the Thai smile alive!

I might personally add, in case you need dramatic emotional testimony before Congress, sir, that “thanks” to globalization, Western fast foods, and Western culture values promoting selfishness, that we’ll never see this “Greatest Generation” of Thai bar girls again.

Like the two I’m with now. Hold the phone, Mr. President!