Koh Chang

Thailand: A (hopefully) temporary madness

Friday April 10th 2009, 2:21 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

Source: Bangkok Post

Madness is contagious, and soon no one will be left uninfected.

Madness like ad hoc ideologies. Madness like empty slogans painted on stages and trucks. Madness like the Red Surge and the Kamikaze Yellow, like Thaksinomics, Thaksin Polity, Bureaucratic Polity, Mandarin Polity, elitism, capitalism, populism, heartbroken communism.

Madness like anti-this and pro-that, like hand-clappers and foot-clappers, like prolonged poverty and ridiculous wealth. Madness like fangs, claws, prejudices, hateful rhetoric, contradictory ambitions, impossible demands.

Madness like vultures over Ratchadamnoen road. Madness (or what looks like madness) like phone-ins, video links, 8pm televised addresses, tearful press conferences.

Madness like military subterfuge and political double-whammy. Madness like self-serving logic. Madness like open-air slaughterhouse and frozen saliva (whose? core leaders’, mostly, whoever they are).

Still, madness like when people say democracy is Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton – something expensive, imported, desired, unattainable, or if we happen to actually attain it we won’t look good in it, given our ragged personality, our decrepit wardrobe. What’s the use of acquiring a Prada bag when you’re a Third World wannabe in flea market clothes?

Then, too, madness like ignorance, like bourgeiose complacency, or cynicism, or naivete. Madness like not believing in change. Madness like not realising the ceiling has been broken, or at least cracked, the glimpse into the unknown now possible, though still not clear, not reassuring. Madness like not believing you can see the rings of Saturn with your bare eyes even when you’re seeing them with your bare eyes.

Then, too, madness like when democracy-believers – let’s assume there are a number of democracy-believers in the throng – march out to overthrow an influential statesman, saying they’re not doing this for anybody but for an ideal, yet have no misgivings when the leaders of the march are clearly working for one man (or for the LCD pigments that make up one man appearing as a satellite image, like in a sci-fi movie). Madness like when that man suddenly becomes a symbol of the ideal, of true democracy. Madness like when you oppose the privileged class, then embrace a privileged man with a private jet. Madness like when that man, obviously a Thai, has a Nicaraguan passport. What? A Chinese-Central American descended from an Aztec chief?

Then, too, madness like when a large crowd fell in a trance of the Pied Pipers’ oratory about New Politics, but had no sense to wake up when they led them through the mountain to hold up an airport. Madness like when nobody mentions New Politics any more, as if the Democrats the oldest, stubbornest party, represented the much-clamoured New Politics of just four months ago.

Then, too, madness like when you let a group of ordinary people threaten the PM in his official motorcade, almost dragging his chauffeur off. Madness like when the alleged attacker claims he was attacked by the car, not vice versa, then the madness like when the police let the accused escape from their custody (he practically walked out of the station). Madness like when the PM still refused to get angry, to speak up, to fire someone, to show a tougher shade than his unruffled front, to acknowledge the true path of his rise to power.

Then, if you’re still safe from all of these, there’s the madness like wet T-shirts during Songkran. Madness like road rage and road kill. Madness like when people, quite a large number of people, confuse dampness with happiness, drunkenness with immortality. Madness like when you use one madness to supplant another, perhaps bigger madness, even temporarily, half-heartedly.

Then, madness like the attempt to still believe in journalistic services, to believe that there’s a chance that madness could be a precursor to wisdom, that geniuses sometimes live in an asylum, that if we brave through all of this with calm and open-mindedness we’ll arrive somewhere, bloody and wounded maybe, but we’ll arrive somewhere.

The ultimate madness is when the opponents – red, yellow or otherwise – still don’t see that they’re actually fighting against the same things: cronyism, inequality, rule-breakers, invisible powers, corrupt practices. Even if the price is our sanity, it is still worth a try because madness is not always a curse; it’s only necessary – and hopefully temporary.

Kong Rithdee writes about movies and popular culture in the Bangkok Post real.time section.

Thailand: A (hopefully) temporary madness

Technorati Tags: Thailand: A (hopefully) temporary madness

Comments Off

RSS feed for comments on this post.