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COMMENTARY
May 22, 2010
Siamese squeeze
There is much to be said for ignorance. My reader is to understand I don't mean a mere inability to answer the sort of quiz questions that can be graded to generate educational statistics. No, I mean a more thorough, peasant ignorance of the way the world works, and in particular, of the way it works today.Or alternatively, let's say: there is much to be said for freedom from a world-weary cynicism; and from all the spite, malice, and violent reprisal that it spawns. I have been thinking this in relation to Thailand: a country that was once my second home. Or let us call it Siam: the name was changed for very political reasons on June 23, 1939, changed back after the world war, then changed to Thailand again in 1949. When people start changing the names of things, you know trouble is brewing. My acquaintance with the country goes back to childhood, when my father was working as an adviser to the Royal Thai Government, under the auspices of the International Labour Organization, doing a job that, in retrospect, should never have been done. That was: identifying craft skills involved in traditional Siamese handicraft manufacture, that could be adapted through machine production to the requirements of modern industrial design. In retrospect, I cannot think of a faster way to make a contented people unhappy, unless it was teaching them to read and write. For, as Stephen Leacock once observed, it is by such means the poor are enabled to hold a mirror up to their condition, and have a good look. As the old Siamese saying went, there was "rice in the fields and fish in the streams." (Except during the monsoon, vice versa.) Hunger was not an issue, and it is not a country that gets very cold. Every glimpse I ever had of this traditional, "backward" Siam, her people, their homes, the temples, and their monks, was of a kind of earthly paradise. Why not leave them alone? This paradise was transformed, through the miracle of Asian Tiger economics, with its infrastructure of high finance and low party politics. Bangkok, in particular, has been transformed through the two generations since I first saw it, from "Venice of the East" with its wats and klongs, to a high-tech rat cage holding 15 million souls; perhaps a third of those sweating out an existence under tropical solar in tin-shack slums. At some point during the Enlightenment in our West -- since exported globally -- we began to take for granted the purpose of life was to achieve material "progress." The older notion, whether Christian or Buddhist (or anything else), that life served some form of spiritual redemption, resurfaces occasionally, though in a way almost facetiously wistful. (There is an ancient proverb, that a man cannot serve two masters.) Since I wrote my column on Wednesday, on the Red Shirt invasion of Bangkok, the troops went in to put an end to it. The Red Shirt leaders were captured, and their rank and file scattered like a grease fire by a sledge of water. It was interesting to see what they set fire to, in the course of being mopped up. Their principal achievement was reducing the country's leading department store complex -- symbol of technology, wealth, and high fashion -- to a smouldering ruin. There were several dozen other major hits, performed by these people from the country's North and Northeast, who began by resenting the way Bangkok governments overlooked their own wants and needs, and became increasingly vexed as the politicians they elected were removed from power, at the request of Bangkok's Yellow Shirt mobs. The idea of forming their own mobs eventually occurred to them. The arsonists also targeted banks, the country's stock exchange, and the leading TV studio. To their great surprise, the staff of the Bangkok Post also found their building surrounded, and the journalists fled for their lives. I was amused by the response of one of them to an e-mail. It was the classic liberal refrain: "But we're just reporting the news! Why do they hate us?" This from a paper that blames Red Shirt leaders for everything, and speaks of their followers as if they are beasts of burden. I could not help thinking of a North American analogy. It would be a Tea Party invasion of lower Manhattan, setting fires at Macy's and up and down Wall Street. And then they surround the New York Times building. And the paper's reporters, milling through the debris, saying, "But we were just reporting the news! Why do these drooling Republican hicks from the Flyover Country hate us so?" Far, far, more could be said, about the fate of peoples who become disenfranchised by the swell of "progress" and its vanguard elites. In the meantime, it is worth holding a mirror up to Siam, renamed Thailand, and having a good look. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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