And now, the Conspiracy Theories....

Today, a relative lull.  The red shirts presented a petition to one of the coalition parties to try to pressure him to withdraw from the coalition.  (Did they get the idea from my blog?)  They also tried to bully the press, and seized some TV equipment for a while.  They were filmed covering up the surveillance cameras in the contested areas with trash bags, though if they're doing nothing wrong, one wonders why they'd want to hide it.  (The same with shooing the press.)  Tomorrow, they announced, they will parade two corpses which they stole from the hospital morgue around the streets of Bangkok.  It will be a bizarre sort of "victory parade" since they believe that, once people have been killed, they have proved that Abhisit's government is an evil dictatorship.  Other facts, like the four soldiers dead of bullet wounds, or the colonel blown up by a bomb, can be ignored.  The sin of selectivity besets both sides, but most people in Bangkok seem to feel that the reds' amnesia is more egregious.  I know this from walking around in a middle class (not high society) mall this afternoon and eavesdropping on people's conversations.  If Bangkok alone were to decide the election, it would be a rout.

Television has punditry on every channel, and few facts.  Every bit of the press footage is being looked at by everyone, and interpreted in every possible way.  There is enough footage to fit every theory.

Still, there are a few nuggets emerging that everyone does seem to agree on, and which feed the conspiracy frenzy....

There seem to have been bullets from AK-47s ... not army issue ... I think the Thai army mostly buys American.  Same problem with the grenades.

The colonel directing the army's actions last night was killed early on by a bomb.  In fact, all the army's leaders got "taken out" quite quickly.  How did they know?

A member of the orchestra has a close friend whose house was right next to the fracas in Phan Faa.  He relates that two soldiers fled and hid out in his house.  These soldiers insisted that the reds had hired out-of-town soldiers of their own and embedded them, with weapons, amongst themselves.

A question that perplexes me is this: if the soldiers were in fact ordered to kill red shirts, why didn't they just mow them down?  The haphazardness of the red deaths points to something unplanned and unexpected.  But the precision of the soldiers' casualties (ie their commanders) suggests something less random.

People are calling it a civil war, but I'm not sure it is.  In a war, both sides are trying to kill the other.  The goal of this battle, for the government, was not to hurt anyone yet still get them to stop occupying the business district.  The goal for the reds was to get someone to shoot so as to gain the moral upper hand.

Neither party really got what it wanted.  Somehow, the government did end up killing people.  But the reds also lost the moral high ground by not exhibiting any "non-violence" tactics at all.  Perhaps Dr. Weng should have shown a video of Gandhi; the reds would have seen that one sure-fire tactic for regime change is to just lie down and take it, for nothing moves people so much as bleeding heaps of people willing to be hurt for their beliefs.

It's been a quiet day and there's been a lot of reflecting and perhaps even self-recrimination.  But with tomorrow's corpse parade, the lines may well harden again.

Wrath of the Gods, Part III

Tonight, we do not have so much a state of emergency as an emergency of state.  It is a day that began with an evil omen with three possible interpretations, and ended up with eleven dead people and absolutely no progress. 28 soldiers are being held as hostages.  Which means that we have left the realm of peaceful protest and entered the rocky territory of terrorism.

Many months ago, Thaksin gave an interview to the foreign media in which he self-righteously proclaimed that Thailand was a failed state.  At the time, that statement seemed ridiculous: the present government, which bears no real relationship with the coup that dislodged him, was moving successfully, if tentatively, toward fixing the economy, and was continuing, even improving on, the pro-rural-poor policies which were among the more positive aspects of Thaksin's rule.  (He is demonized by some and deified by others; the reality is far more complex ... if he has to be mythologized, it should not be as a god or demon, but as the tragic hero who begins his journey with every divine blessing and falls victim to his own hubris.)

However, a government that can't control a mob that bombs government buildings, takes over major thoroughfares, and answers rubber bullets with an AK-47 and exploding gas tanks is, by every practical measure, a failure.

We're not talking moral failure, or right and wrong, here.  Abhisit's government is by no means morally bankrupt.  Other governments we have had would not have used rubber bullets.  Thaksin's government had no compunction about the extrajudicial murder of accused drug dealers in order to fulfill a "drug war" quota, or of shooting at crowds of people as long as they were Muslim and in a distant province.  We're talking failure as in dysfunctional.

I thought the pundits would be all over this morning's omen — a Buddha image, a copy of Thailand's most sacred object, the Emerald Buddha, brought to the Rajprasong area demonstration and set up in a place of honour, tumbled to the ground and broke into two pieces just as they came to arrest some red shirt leaders.  However, apart from this news being tucked away in the NATION's iPhone news app, I never saw anyone else mention it publicly.   There has been plenty of private mention, though.

I see 3 interpretations: (a) The Buddha is angry at the red shirts and no longer wishes to protect them (b) the Buddha is angry at the government for trying to arrest the leaders  (c) The Buddha image represents the sacred wholeness of this country which is now irreparably broken.  As a novelist and a poet, I find the third interpretation to be the most powerful.

It's now about eleven thirty pm and the battles have calmed down, but there is no resolution.  The most disturbing event of the day is a non-event.  The Prime Minister did not appear on television to report on the day's events as he has promised to do each day.  Many in this town are complaining bitterly about how this would have been dealt with in the "good old days".

Speculation is therefore rife that, behind the scenes, Something Big may be going on.  The paper, this morning, said that "certain important parties" wanted this conflict to end.

I seriously do not think that dissolving the Parliament will solve things.  The population of Bangkok is now so fed up with the marauding mob that it's conceivable that an election held tomorrow would not go the way the red shirts had in mind.  And if it did, the yellow shirts would be back.

Maybe we need a more radical solution.  For example, instead of dissolving parliament, why not dissolve Thailand?  Not the country ... the word.

Many people of my parents's generation might agree that Thailand was born under an unlucky star, and that if we became Siam again, it would symbolically and astrologically heal the country.

It's not just the name, you see.  Siam was a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society.  The name Thailand was chosen in a jingoistic time, and basically exalts the dominant ethnos of this diverse country and turns everyone else into a second-class citizen.  It's a very nationalistic name if you happen to belong to that ethnos, but if you're a member of a hill tribe, or a Muslim, it makes you wonder if you really belong.  In fact, thinking of this country as the Country of the Ethnically Thai Peoples is the psychological block that prevents hill tribe members who have lived here for generations from being able to get  a passport.

Could not the idea of reaching out, of inclusivity, be re-awakened by the simple act of changing back the name?  And wouldn't this reconnect modern Thais with their history so that the land and its past are all woven from the same cloth?  And wouldn't tourists finally realize that this is not Taiwan?

Okay, it's a stupid idea, what's in a name and all that.  But in this country, when you have a run of bad luck, you cure it by getting an astrologer to change your name.  It might also work with entire nations.

If I think of a more practical solution, I'll be sure to tell you.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine who is a member of parliament sent me a message that in the Suan Benjkiti at 9 am tomorrow there is going to be a gathering of the "silent majority" who have had enough and want to take the country back.  "From whom?" one might ask.  If one only knew....

If you live on Sukhumvit, check that meeting out.  The note says "shirts can be of any color."

Addendum:  No, I'm wrong: Abhisit DID appear on TV after all, much, much later.  He said they would get to the bottom of the deaths.

The Wrath of the Gods - Part II

As we all know, the heavens opened up to wash away the blood hurled at the prime minister's doorstep last week.

Today, as arrest warrants were delivered (or at least attempted to be delivered), a venerated replica of the Emerald Budda statue, brought along to the red shirt demonstration as a iconic focus point, fell to the ground and split in two.

The red shirts were so horrified at this omen that they prevented photos from being taken, but the news just managed to get into The Nation's breaking news.

I don't know whether such an event — involving no armed forces or throngs storming TV stations, will even be a blip on CNN — but I imagine that all the talk amongst the general Thai public is going to be about what this means, and whether it's a bad omen for the government or for the opposition.

Do you remember when the oracle of Delphi prophesied that "a great victory would be won" but didn't say by whom?

I can already see the rival schools of religious punditry sharpening their rhetoric.  On the one hand, this could mean that Heaven is dismayed at the government daring to break up the forces of righteousness.   On the other, it could be a symbol to the reds that they have gone too far.  It is also clear that some will say this portends the splitting apart of the entire nation, if the Buddha symbolizes wholeness, unity, and concord.

This is the morning when the religious celebration of Songkraan has already begun.  In temples and shrines, images of Buddha will being washed.  The thirteenth is the "official" Songkraan, but many ceremonies start this morning.

How the splitting of the image will be spun is going to be a major undercurrent of how this all plays out.  Of course, the key players may never confess to the foreign press that they are influenced by something as superstitious as an omen, so it might never make it to CNN.

And now: Rossini

Well, here's a litle video:

To show you that life in Bangkok goes on despite policewomen and monks slugging it out in front of the mall.

This concert went far better than it had any right to ... considering everything that was stacked up against it, including the fact that it almost got cancelled the day before.

Please enjoy this little excerpt.  A DVD will soon be available.

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....