Oprah? I remember her," said Uncle Hant reflectively. "Looks like five hundred pounds of bear liver in a plastic bag?"" So go the essays in "A Brass Pole in Bangkok," sometimes wildly funny, sometimes deadly serious, always merciless in their unmasking of the pretenses and charlatans of society. Fred, a former Marine, subscribes to no ideology ("an ideology is just a systematic way of misunderstanding the world") but exuberantly wreaks havoc on practically everything, and delights in everything else: the psychotherapy swindle, squalling feminists, race racketeers, damn fool wars, red-light districts in Asia, and tequila fests in Mexico, where he lives. Why marry, he asks? And answers: "As a young man full of dangerous steroids, your answer will probably be, 'Ah, because her hair is like corn silk under an August moon; her lips are as rubies and her teeth, pearls; and her smile would make a dead man cry.' This amounts to, 'I'm horny, ' with elaborations." Behind the folksy approach lie a great deal of reading and thought by a man who has spent a lifetime in journalism, much of it overseas in places like Cambodia and Taiwan, where you find the snake butchers. but that is inside. | A Brass Pole in Bangkok by Fred Reed, Paperback | Indigo Chapters