Shaolin Monks versus the Amazon Fuzz

So it's the third day of the state of non-emergency.  The demonstrators raided a TV station and got their station turned back on (I think ... my satellite isn't showing it, but the news claims it is back on the air.)  The army demonstrated a profound grasp of Humane Crowd Control 101 by throwing canisters of tear gas into the wind, thus feeling their opponents' pain in a touchingly messiah-like fashion.

The crowd then rushed back to the Corner of the Five Shopping Malls and set up a human shield of monks so as to scare off the policewomen who were in the front line of the army's defense.   Buddhist monks may not, even accidentally, touch a female.  However, it is my understanding that Thai women don't really have to swear an oath not to touch a monk; the rule only applies in one direction.  Who, therefore, will flee whom?  Which impiety will be more gross?

I believe that the Voice of America's headline, "Thai troops use force to quell protests," is a typical example of how the west reinterprets the world according to its own history.  What actually seems to have happened is that the protesters forcefully broke through a police barricade to try to get the TV station to reconnect their channel.  Talk about hogging the remote!  The Thai troops did attempt to use force, but they haven't had quite the experience of beating up the lower classes as, say, the LAPD.  (Yes, in the old days of genuine fascism and real coups, the Thai army knew a thing or two about attacking defenseless peasants, but most of these guys weren't even born then.)  Naturally, they bungled it, throwing the tear gas against the wind and getting it all over themselves.  What a bunch of schlimazels!

I'll let you know as soon as the standoff ends.  It must get worse before it get's better.  To paraphrase John Wayne, "Never send a woman to do a monk's job."

Emergency! Emergency! Zzzzz.....

Yes, we're in the second day of a official State of Emergency, but I don't see any tanks, tear gas, M-16s, or much commotion at all, really.  Indeed I spent the day having a very pleasant visit with the folks at ASEAN TV, a new channel which is going to beamed into homes everywhere and on which we will, it seems, have some kind of weekly presence starting in about two weeks.

Let's talk democracy for a moment.  As I understand it, one of the most important principles of democracy is that when you lose, you wait your turn.  Now, I've been looking at a lot of figures and percentages published by various pollsters and newspapers, and what emerges is a picture very different from that promulgated by the red shirts or, for that matter, by some of the foreign press who are trying to make this look like Bastille Day.

Most polls show that about 20% of people asked want the red shirts' agenda: an immediate dissolution of Parliament.  40%-45%, however, want this government to stay in office till the very end of its term.  The rest are, as they say. "somewhere in between".  Today, the Bangkok Post published a rather more alarming poll: 60% of its respondents think the army should just disperse the demonstrators, and only 39% think they shouldn't.

This 20% is a very interesting figure because in the televised "peace talks", Dr. Weng made the following curious point: "If you have five children, and one of them cries for attention, naturally any parent would cater to the crying child's need above those of the others."  He made these remarks before the 20% figure was published, I think.

This is true, of course.  Anyone who has several kids knows that when one of them is crying, you might well temporarily relegate the others to the background while dealing with that kid's problem.  That is true, of course, but it's not democracy.  In an actual democracy, the kids would vote, and the crying one would be out of luck.

So, late tonight. Abhisit appears on TV to explain the non-state of non-emergency, and was he says is a masterpiece of subtle and complex reasoning, full of the sorts of things that make a politician a politician.  "I'm not planning to disperse the mob," he says, "merely move them somewhere else where they won't disrupt the daily life of the city."  He has learned from Bill Clinton how to say "that depends on what is is."  And he is right, of course.  The state of emergency gives him the legal cover to do whatever the hell he likes, and if he doesn't send in the marines, he will be lauded for his restraint; if he does, the average person in Bangkok will just be pleased that their access to Starbucks has been returned.

Tonight, at the corner 7-11, I saw four women in pink shirts.  "Oh, how nice," I said, "you must be members of the pro-peace party."  Somewhat horrified, the lady at the counter said, "No, we just like pink."

My friends in other countries keep emailing me to ask me whether I've been killed yet, but of course that isn't really how we do things in Thailand.  Nevertheless, there's a rumor out that we should all be careful after midnight.  Jay and I were having some late night Italian food near the main street corner and when we went to the supermarket we did see a lot of red shirts zooming by in their pickups, chanting slogans through megaphones.

Impasse?

Probably not the right moment for our Prime Minister to behave like a gentleman; the red shirts are now using the old "briar patch" trick to get the police to look in the wrong direction, and they even managed to lock some of the police up in the park.  There are grenades and bombs all over the place, though they tend not to work very well or miss their targets.   A mother had to be rescued by cops when the red shirts wouldn't let her take her daughter to the hospital and the people of Bangkok are starting to boo the red shirts as they go by, meaning that altercations and perhaps violence might happen quite soon.

Many of the people I know are starting to wax nostalgic about the days of Field Marshall This and That and fantasize about the good old days when the army could go around shooting people on sight.  (Those, that is, who are old enough to remember what a real dictatorship was like.) But really, turning the clock back is a silly idea; the miserable failure of the 2006 coup to accomplish anything — good or bad — is ample proof of that.

It's almost 2 am and rumors are flying thick and fast.

By tomorrow, farce may well have crossed the line into tragedy.  But at least there'll be another "rap" from the endlessly inventive Purakhanda.

It's a Rap!

I'm afraid that Purakhanda has been at it again ... two raps in two days!  There must be nothing to do out there in the wastelands of Europe except for combing through the internet finding amusing things to edit.

An Easter Message

As an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, I might as well send an easter message to my throngs of disciples, which may one day reach double digits.

Though generally thought of as a Christian celebration, Easter has roots that go all the way back to Neolithic times.  The myth of the God-King who is killed, renews the earth, and comes back to life in three days is part of the very fabric of our culture.  The story is as old as agriculture itself; in its earliest forms it's usually explicitly a corn-god or other vegetation god, ripped in pieces by wild women, perhaps, or sacrificed by being flayed alive ... whether it's Tammuz, Xipe Totec, or Jesus, the basic story doesn't change that much.  A heroic demi-god comes down to earth, allows himself to be brutally slain, and the blood-sacrifice fertilizes and renews the earth.  Easter bunnies (which are actually of course, March hares, symbols of fecundity) and Easter eggs are all part of the pagan ritual that became inextricably intertwined with St. Paul's brilliant and cosmic realignment of events in a remote province of the Roman Empire.  It's a pity that some of the more fun elements, like the traditional spring orgy, have been sanitized away, but perhaps it's just as well, since we're all into safe sex these days.

This is a roundabout way of saying that on Easter, regardless of one's religion, it might be good to think of things like renewal, rebirth, and resurrection.  In Thailand, Songkraan is approaching.  The splashing of water also symbolizes fertility, hope, and fresh beginnings.  We are a day past Easter Sunday and a week from the annual ritual of cleansing and renewal.   Yet Bangkok is paralysed by gridlock and the prime minister is showing remarkable restraint ... a level of restraint which is causing some residents of Bangkok to wax nostalgic about coups and things.  This is therefore dangerous.

My anonymous colleague "Khlui Marana" has recently posted this interesting "rap" on Youtube.  It is of course a highly entertaining reductio ad absurdum of some of the Good Doctor's more ludicrous claims.  But it made me think.

I've always liked Dr. Weng.  Ten years ago, when he and worked together on the World Peace concert after the 9/11 catastrophe, I found him to be idealistic, passionate, and highly sympathetic.  How could he therefore believe that the Code of Hammurabi espouses democratic and peaceful demonstrations against the government, or that the British system of government tolerates massive demonstrations that clog main thoroughfares?  Or that Abhisit intends to slay the red shirts in a fascist bloodbath?  These are all words that came out of his mouth during the peace negotiations.

What the Code of Hammurabi actually says is that if a man makes a false accusation against another man, the man accused shall leap into a river.  If he drowns, the accuser gets to keep the dead man's house.  If, however, the river-god should prove his innocence by not swallowing him up, then the accuser shall be put to death and the accused will inherit his house.  It also says that if a man falsely accuse another of a capital offence and he is proved innocent, the accuser will himself be put to death.

Therefore, according to Hammurabi, Abhisit is home free, unless he somehow missed having swimming lessons at Eton.

As for the British system tolerating massive protests, I can't imagine the police sitting by idle if a seething mass of irate Tories were to try to close down the City of Westminster.  We probably need to set up our own designated Hyde Parks.

This kind of easily disproved and overblown rhetoric is not very helpful when it comes to solving Thailand's very real problems.  In the end, the red shirt movement has lost all the ground it gained when it appeared with the prime minister in a calm discussion of real issues on national television.

When I was about seven years old, there was a vast gap in what was essentially a two-class society.  In our home, and the homes of everyone I knew, servants crawled around on the floor and did not look directly at their masters' faces.   They were paid 100 baht a month and never had holidays.   There have, in fact, been enormous changes since then.  This was, after all about a half century ago.  Thailand's growing pains have been about the growing awareness and empowerment of the middle classes.  When the elites were a remote, alien race, and there was absolutely no concept of social advancement, there was stability.  It is the existence of upward mobility in the new society that incenses the non-upwardly mobile.  And the problem can only be solved by extending the ladder all the way down, and teaching people how to climb aboard on their own steam, not via handouts.

There are still two Thailands, but it's overly simplistic to think of them as rich versus poor, or elite versus proletariat, or even as city versus country.  In the end, the two Thailands are probably really Educated and Uneducated.  That is the heart of the problem, and where all our tax baht can be most wisely spent.

My Growing Shirt Collection

Last night I conducted the Rossini in purple, because I wished to show my affection for HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn whose birthday it was.  The concert went far better than expected: a standing ovation ... one gentleman in the audience said he wept three times ... and a wonderful after-party in the half-circle room.  The orchestra, whom I get prouder of every day, was assured and idiomatic.

Today, I was so tired that I slept all day.  When I woke up, the red shirts were blocking access to the city's finest shopping malls — they really got Bangkokians where it hurts — forcing the middle classes to go without Starbucks.  Their rhetoric has become more strident and they seem to have basically lost most of the ground they gained by appearing so reasonable on TV.  Perhaps it's because Thaksin, from whom they had seemed so ready to be divorced when they met with the prime minister, phoned in from some country or other.  Perhaps it's because shirts of other colors started their own protests.   It must also be rather galling that the TV punditry, in channel after channel that I flicked through, seems overwhelmingly to favor putting a lid on the rallies and placing them within civilized constraints, and that various polls conducted by universities show only 25% of the population of the country to be in sympathy with their demands.

Then there's the daily bombs; none of them ever hurts anyone much, and the red shirts deny all connection and have even ejected some more pro-violence elements from their membership, but they cannot help but cause people to suspect something underhanded ... either sabotage by the reds or propaganda-inducing self-sabotage by the government, or some other even more Machiavellian theory.

It is a good thing that the crowds have not been dispersed by the police — the time doesn't quite seem appropriate — but at some point, the people of the city are just going to become too inconvenienced.  At that point, something drastic may happen.  Today, the driver took the day off because there was no point in driving anywhere anyway.

The Bangkok Opera's concert season is already affected since our April 20th Italian Gala is having to be postponed.  Today, the kids' string quartet couldn't come and rehearse their Schubert because the roads were too clogged.  And of course, I have to avoid wearing half the clothes in my wardrobe in case there's a color that offends someone ... thank god I'm taking more drugs and going back to sleep soon.

As I write these words, a police deadline for the demonstrators to disperse has come and gone without anything happening.  The mysterious "Khlui Marana" is working on a "Weng Rap" from an undisclosed location.  

As I have vowed to take a two-week vacation (a working one) I believe that what I am actually going to do this week is to attempt to finally finish my opera, The Silent Prince....  Today, however, I am preparing myself for this daunting task by watching a lot of TV punditry, alternating with episodes of Star Trek — Enterprise, a show I missed when I de-immigrated, but recently arrived here in a massive box with dozens of DVDs in it.

A Little Poem

NATIONAL HEALTH

by S.P.

I said to Dr. W— last night,

“I’ve got severe thrombosis,

and anti-clotting pills won’t work —

What is your diagnosis?”

“What’s caused the gore to clog your veins

is upper-class derision;

Just shed a pint or two: you’ll end

society’s division.”

“But Dr. W—!” I cried in pain,

My stomach won’t stop aching!

My stools are tough as cinder blocks!

What pills should I be taking?”

“You can’t digest the biased media’s

Brown-nosing the state,

But if your turds have hardened thus,

Throw them at someone’s gate.”

“I thought I saw a million proles

in some hallucination

Being whipped to death by savage troops —

What’s the right medication?”

“Don’t worry.  Trust your inner eye:

Be not by truth enticed:

As I was saying to Napoleon,

‘Hi, I’m Jesus Christ.’”

...and now the Pink Shirts....

Well, Thais do have a love of uniforms.  University students take great pride in all looking alike (can you imagine students at Berkeley agreeing to wear a uniform?) and at my local bank, all the tellers have pretty purple outfits so that sometimes I feel more like I'm on a plane than trying to cash a check.

So it comes as no surprise that the anti-red, anti-yellow, anti-blue, anti-demonstration demonstrators will all turn up in PINK shirts this Saturday, much to the chagrin of the people's liberation front.

The choice of pink is rather special for me, even though I don't like it much.  You see, I was born on a Tuesday.  In Thailand, every day has its own color and there was a time when in the royal court, it was actually compulsory to wear the official color of the day.  So I could pretend they were all wearing it my honour, but in fact the color is a tribute to a far higher entity.

Although the red shirts gained much from appearing on the same stage as the government and being seen to state their case on nationwide television, some of their gains are being wiped away by a sort of demagogic truculence, and by the fact that other factions in other shirts are popping up everywhere, somewhat belying the idea that there is a sort of unified Vox Populi of whom the reds are the anointed spokespersons.  The yellows have been making pronouncements, and then there were the business suits, and now the pinks.  I am holding out for purple because that's the official color of the Bangkok Opera ...

... and, of course, the color of Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, whose birthday is today and in whose honour we're performing the Rossini tonight....

A very happy birthday to her royal highness....

The German Invasion

Well, while the red shirt protests shuddered to a stalemate, some German choristers showed up in Thailand to perform Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle with our choir and orchestra.  Here's a picture of them at a welcome reception at the home of my sister Premika.

After two gruelling rehearsals with the choir, the soloists, and the orchestra, I could clearly see that this is going to be our most exciting choral concert in many years ... an evening of rousing tunes, thrilling climaxes and affecting solos.

If you're in Bangkok on Friday night, therefore, please make a beeline to the Thailand Cultural Center by 8 pm!  Or call my secretary at (02) 231-5273.  Or go to thaiticketmajor.com to book online.

The Sour Grapes of Wrath

I promised to discuss politics a little bit, but today we're in a bit of a holding pattern.  There are supposedly "peace talks" going on right now, which is an odd concept since both sides deny that there's any kind of "war" going on.  So, I'm running to the TV to watch these talks right now.

So ... I watched the entire thing and the punditry is going strong on all channels right now.  A commentator  recently accused me of not being neutral, which is a little unfair as I have been known to be quite impatient with all sides in these wars, but it was clear that, from any non-partisan, logical, Harvard Debate Club point of view, Abhisit outmanoevered the red shirt negotiators at every turn.  Nevertheless, I do believe that in a very real sense, the red shirts won this round.  They did not, and probably will not, win the dissolution of parliament, their ostensible goal, but in a long-term sense they achieved much more.

The red shirt group won the appearance of legitimacy, a serious forum, and a chance to state their case in a very public avenue.  They also won  a divorce from Thaksin, managing to present a credible picture that they are not his tools, and indeed managing to marginalize him from the terms of discourse.

Dr Weng, a deeply committed person whom I respect, was right on target when he explained that Thailand isn't really that democratic at the moment, but his rhetoric started to go way over the top when he accused this government of being a fascist dictatorship and of giving orders to kill people — a problem much more prevalent during the Thaksin administration.  Dr Weng also made sweeping generalizations, such as "In every civilized nation, when people protest, the government always changes."  (He should be old enough to remember Kent State, he's older than me.)

Jatupon struck rather a persistent note by simply saying over and over that the government should resign; by the third hour his demagoguery had become wearying and even the smooth Abhisit was visibly bored.  Of the red shirts, Veera came across as the most reasonable.

Abhisit seemed Mr Voice of Reason himself as he deconstructed their arguments and made a case for caution, thoroughness, and a real respect for all sides of the argument.  He made it clear that he wasn't buying any "people power" arguments when only a small segment of the people were represented.  And he never said he wouldn't dissolve the house.

When reduced to sound bites, however, as it inevitably must be for television, Jatupon's black-and-white reductio may well prove to be more emotionally appealing that Abhisit's reasonableness.  I don't think that most people are going to bother to watch a three-hour debate over and over before making up their mind.  How this plays out, therefore, is really up to the media.  They can probably push this in either direction.

After two weeks of weird rituals and wishy-washy decisionmaking, the red shirts needed something to show they weren't just a bunch of superstitious bumpkins.  This debate has probably done the trick by presenting them on an equal footing in a public arena with the government, an achievement which the yellow shirts never attained.  In letting this happen, this government has shown itself to be more democratic that its detractors would want us to believe.

Finally, at the end of the third hour, reality reared its ugly head.  The red shirts needed to go to the bathroom.  There was a serious discussion of where the best place to pee would be in order to avoid being beset by reporters.  At last, there was something everyone could agree on.

A break from political turmoil

Every writer demands an audience.  I could not fail to be aware that as soon I started discussing political issues in this blog, readership leapt to 600%.  This puts me in a bit of quandary because this isn't a political blog per se; it's me sharing my world and my experiences with my friends around the world — especially those in the western hemisphere, whom I abandoned when I came east in search of (to put it simplistically) adventure.

So, let's compromise.  Today I'll talk about music; tomorrow I'll talk about red shirts, if I have time.

Last weekend we staged a very unusual camp for some of the brightest kids in the country.  It was wild.  We slapped together a symphony orchestra in three days that could play real music, blew the minds of young science students by using that symphony orchestra to demonstrate principles of relativity and quantum theory, used film music to ilustrate the laws of physics, and had Thailand's ten-year-old champion paper plane folder lecture on aerodyamics.  A jazz pianist taught improvisation to kids who had never touched an instrument, and an entire scene from Bruce Gaston's opera "A Boy and a Tiger" was staged.  And amazingly, they had fun doing all this, thanks to their own imaginations and an incredible catering service that produced food every 90 minutes.  At the final concert, Dr Yongyuth, former Minister of Science and Technology, told us that the camp was a fulfillment of one of his fondest dreams.

It was exciting.  The atmosphere all weekend was one of almost uncontrollable glee.  And the final concert, including Mozart, Haydn, and a wild improvisation in which the audience ran onto the stage and screamed and danced about under the direction of Zion from the Patravadi Theatre, was such fun that I didn't want to go home.

Indeed, the minute I got home, I broke out in hives, and haven't been quite myself since....

A Moratorium on Red Shirts

The red shirts plan to go marauding through Bangkok on Saturday, but I will not encounter them.
 

In a few hours I will leave for the Thailand Science Park in Rangsit, where for 3 days I hope to face 80 inquisitive young minds at our "Bach to the Future" camp.  I've always dreamed of creating a situation where the divide between art and science can be bridged.

Around 1980, I was in the lobby of the Sheraton in Boston where I encountered Marvin Minsky for the first time.  I had no clue who he was.  There were two pianos in the lobby.  We both started playing.  After a moment, it became clear that, even though we were both improvising, each was completely aware of what the other was doing, and the music began to gel into a complex and logical construct, far more integrated than one would think possible, and far bigger than either of us could create alone.

Five hours of playing together later .. having astounded all the attendees at the science fiction convention we were at ... I was finally introduced to Marvin.  I had heard of him, of course; he almost singlehandedly created the Artificial Intelligence. 

One of the world's great neurobiologists is V.S. Ramachandran.  When he and I were children, we used to dress up in bedsheets and improvise huge scenes from imaginary operas.  We created an artificial language in which to express the alien emotions of our characters.

What I'm saying is that music, so often, forms an underlying system of paradigms or structures that scientists intuit very well.  There is a reason why Pythagoras numbered music among the scientific/mathematical disciplines.  

I hope to spend the weekend leading a ragtag band of independent thinkers into this virgin territory.