Coup D'etat in Thailand Today, Again

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Late afternoon news here informs us that the Royal Thai military establishment has declared a coup d'etat, a taking over of all government authority.  A curfew has been decreed:  we cannot venture out of our homes from 10PM to 5AM.  That's really gonna disrupt our infamous nightlife.  All radio and TV stations seem to have been taken over by the military, and they are playing patriotic music perhaps to inspire everyone.  (Eek!)  The local internet news is slow-to-dead, as everyone is trying to get the word.  Apparently, the two major sides on the fundamental political divide cannot compromise after two days of Army-mediated pow-wows, and General Prayuth says, "Okay, we'll do it my way."
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As a radical lover of liberty, I can complain about the injustice of such a seizure of absolute power, and I could cite centuries of philosophical argument to back me up.  But since Thailand is my adopted home and I'm used to it, what in the hell do I expect?  Gotta live with it, albeit with embarrassment.  Sometime, somehow, all this will pass.  This is part of "normal" here.  Yet, as for the immediate future, all bets are off.
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The question on everyone's mind is:  what will the Red Shirts do next?  Earlier, they had vowed to draw the line if their complete elected government was ousted, threatening to take violently to the streets against the Army again if this happened.  Well, it happened.  Or did it?  I'm reading confusing stuff in the news, sometimes reading that the military claims that the government officials are to continue in their everyday functions.  Some news reports say that the Red Shirts at the west Bangkok protest site are returning to their up-country homes.  Will they stage a massive assault on Bangkok later when they can organize? Who knows?
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Apparently, the military agrees with a minority that true constitutional reform must come before new elections are held.  The present constitutional milieu allows anyone with enough votes to assume all the power of a tyrant, and the court system allows the elites to hold power far beyond their numbers.  It's a constitutional nightmare, a loose cannon situation.
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Thomas Jefferson's take on the importance of extra strong constitutional restraints on any political power is relevant here:  "The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
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Our life here is not disrupted too much.  (Except for that dreadful martial music!)
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-Zenwind.
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Martial Law Update

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(See today’s earlier post below.)  I walked the neighborhood loop this noon, and everything looked normal.  The only soldiers I saw were two positioned in front of our corner police station with their M16s.  They looked uncomfortable in the heat. 

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As a voluntaryist libertarian, it is a repugnant experience for me to witness the military seizing absolute police power, even if temporarily.  If we really must kneel down and have any government (with its policing power) to lord over us at all, usually an elected one is better than an unelected one.  Democratically elected governments often -- but do not always -- shuffle the better of the wolves to the top of the pathetic power heap.  That doesn’t seem to work here in Thailand where a weak constitution allows majority-elected wolves to be rampant loose-cannon despots who think they have the mandate to plunder what they can and punish whomever they oppose. 

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As F.A. Hayek pointed out, when immense power is constitutionally available, the worst of the wolves get on top.  If the constitution severely limits power, then the wolves are not interested; they will turn back to their underground Mafioso ways. 

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What is the lesser of the many political evils today in Thailand?  The Thaksinista regime wants a tyranny of the majority with a mandate to do anything they please.  Suthep and his anti-government legions want an ill-defined “reform” under unnamed unelected authorities.  Neither side will budge from their dogmatic (and equally special-interest) positions.  And the country is divided behind them. 

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A lot of folks here are relieved that the Royal Thai Army has stepped in to stop the building cycle of violence (if they indeed can stop it).  This seems to be somewhat true of both sides of the political divide, since things are at an absolute impasse. 

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The Army’s seizure of power through martial law – which they insist is only temporary – has an analogue in the ancient Roman Republic, where a Roman citizen was appointed as temporary military “dictator” in special emergencies and only for the duration of that emergency, after which he would stand down and give political power back to the Roman citizens.  (I am not excusing it.  I’m merely pointing out the Roman Republic, with some of its constitutional restraints, was infinitely better than the following Roman Empire that crushed all liberty.) 

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But who appointed Army Commander-in-chief General Prayuth as dictator here?  (Well, he did, with the might of the military as his strongest backup argument.)  Will he return power to civilians after he has the two sides talk it out?  History says that the Thai military usually does so after things shake out, and few think that Prayuth has the ambition for further power in the future.  But times are a-changing and the “old ways” are not as satisfying to a modern citizenry who has heard of more peaceful means.  The Army is not going to be able to pull this one off many more times. 

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General Prayuth is a royalist conservative, so the Red Shirt Thaksinistas do not trust him.  They demand that he treat all sides in the conflict fairly and equally if there is to be any negotiated reconciliation.  The Reds have complained of being victims of “double standards” and unequal treatment in the past from the courts and the entrenched elite power structure, and they have a very valid point.  The doctrine of the Rule of Law, from Hammurabi to Moses to Cicero, Locke and Jefferson, has evolved to demand equal standards before the law.  For everyone. 

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As General Prayuth and the Army try to bring all sides together to hammer out a fair political solution, it is a historic opportunity for the Thai military to prove its worth as a respectable national institution.  But today, it’s the only game in town. 

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-Zenwind.

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Thailand under Martial Law

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Early this morning the Royal Thai Army declared martial law throughout the kingdom, but it insists that this is not a coup.  The present caretaker government is still in place, but the Army is taking control of all security and will censor whatever media it sees fit for the time being. 

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In 2006 the Army did stage a coup, ousting then Prime Minister Thaksin and his government.  As they did today, the Army moved in the early morning hours, and the nation wakes up to the news. 

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Since the anti-government demonstrations started six months ago, over two dozen people have died and hundreds wounded in violent clashes between them and the pro-government Red Shirts.  Neither group will stand down.  Evidently the Army thinks it can stop the cycle of violence, but that will depend on the Reds next move.  The Reds are hard-core tough, and they have no love for the Army. 

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Here is a good article from The Nation about “What the Martial Law Entails.”  Here is an article from the Bangkok Post. 

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I plan to take a cautious walk about the immediate neighborhood today to check things out. 

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Latest news:  Army prohibits TV broadcasts from radical stations on both sides of the political divide, those of the Red Shirts and of the anti-government camp.  (This is where Twitter is actually useful:  up-to-the-minute news flashes.) 

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-Zenwind.

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Recent Readings

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It has been the hot, hot season here, and it’s been too hot and humid to type.  But I have been reading like a maniac.  I had hoped to review, if only briefly, what I’ve been reading, but I lost track of all of them. 

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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006) by Lawrence Wright is a masterful work of investigative journalism.  Wright goes right to the heart of the matter:  the religious-ideological background of modern Islamic terrorist jihad.  He first covers the life, the “martyrdom,” and the vast influence of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the Egyptian academic who inspired Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist comrades.  He traces the sequence of radicalization and plotting, also showing what agents in American intelligence agencies were thinking at this time.  Highly recommended. 

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No Shortcuts to the Top:  Climbing the world’s 14 highest peaks (2006) by Ed Viesturs.  Viesturs is one of America’s greatest high-altitude mountain climbers, and he is the first American to climb all 14 of the earth’s summits that are over 8,000 meters, all of which are in Asia’s Himalaya and Karakorum ranges.  And he climbed them all without using supplemental bottled oxygen. 

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I already had Viesturs’ book, Himalayan Quest (2009), which covers the same climbing campaign but is a National Geographic edition with large format photography featured.  Reading them both together was a treat.  Viesturs had other writers contribute to the text of both books, but most photos were his.  My favorite quote is from Viesturs’ sometimes climbing partner, the late great Jean-Christophe Lafaille, who once climbed the huge Himalayan mountain Shishapangma by a new route, solo, in winter; Lafaille said, “Never in my life have I been so cold!”  Whew!  That takes me away from the tropics for a bit. 

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Parkland (2013) by Vincent Bugliosi, tells the story of the “four days in November” (1963) in which JFK was killed as was Lee Harvey Oswald.  Bugliosi was a top prosecutor who became quite famous for prosecuting the Charles Manson family murders and writing about the case.  I have read quite a bit about the JFK assassination, but his details about Oswald and his family, about the criminal investigation, and about Jack Ruby are fascinating.  This book is more of a movie tie-in edition since the film of the same name recently appeared, and all of this is based on his huge 2007 work on the subject. 

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) by D.H. Lawrence is perhaps the most infamous dirty book of the early 20^th century, since it was banned in places and there were high-profile court cases surrounding it.  I finally read it and was surprised that it was not all bad as a story.  Rated X for language and sexual scenarios. 

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Under the Skin (2000) by Michel Faber.  I saw that the new film version of this was coming soon, and I wanted to see it because critics said it was unusual in many ways, and also because Scarlett Johansson stars.  So I quickly get a Kindle version of the book and read it before seeing the film.  I liked both, but they are not for everyone.  Kinda weird.  After reading this book, I got another Faber book, The Fire Gospel (2008).  I liked his earlier book better. 

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I have collected a lot of science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein, both in paper and Kindle.  I will review them on Zenwind eventually, as I am finding them to be among my favorites in my long life of reading. 

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-Zenwind.

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Annual Immigration Run

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This morning Tuk and I successfully completed my annual Extension of Stay in the Kingdom based on Retirement (i.e., my annual retirement "visa renewal").  It is the major headache of the year, with Immigration usually throwing unexpected new requirements at us each year.  Our running list of paperwork requirements has grown quite large, so we arrive with reams of paper -- copies of everything we can think of, and more, in duplicate.
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After we presented our paperwork to the official's satisfaction, she told us to wait in the general seating area while she stamped everything properly.  Another American guy was right in line before us, and the official was processing both our passports and papers at the same time, in order to use all the different rubber stamps in order.  As I watched, I thought:  she could easily mix up our paperwork.
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Sure enough, I saw her pick up the other guy's passport while working on my papers.  (My passport is a bit ragged from marching around with it in the humidity and rain, and it stands out.)  She was comparing numbers and then got a very confused look on her face.  It took a few seconds, but then she reached for my passport and got it right.  (I must say in her defense, that's got to be a boring job.)
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I re-checked that all the stamps were correct, and then we were good to go.  This may have been the smoothest annual Extension of Stay trip we've ever done, with only a bare minimal of domestic strife in the long buildup to this, the year's major stressor.
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Years ago we had to go deep into downtown Bangkok to an Immigration Office, and when finished we would hit the Hard Rock Cafe for a cool drink with lunch.  But now we must go out into the wilds of outer Nonthbaburi.  Getting a taxi to take us out and wait is a major task, but a very good tip will have the driver telling us to call him again next year.
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Returning, I went out for groceries and walked my favorite 2.5k loop by the river at a brisk pace.  Of course, it was "...out in the midday sun."  Like a mad dog, it was exactly noon.  It is 100 degrees F.  I think I'm done for the day.
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-Zenwind.
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Fashionista Rebels

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It is interesting how fashion has evolved amongst the current anti-government movement here in Thailand.  The visit of their leader, Suthep, into our neighborhood today was fascinating.  He walked by on the street just below my window while greeting his local fans.  I got to rub shoulders with some of these fans later, and I think I’m belatedly witnessing an intriguing emergence of a new “style,” a kind of polite quasi-guerilla chic that is getting very intense.  It’s a bit like the earlier Red Shirt style, but not as hick or thuggish, kind of an urban pose that really does have some authentic cool. 

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Some background:  The anti-government movement is primarily an anti-Thaksin one, and it only exploded into vast numbers late last year when the present government – a puppet government directed by the exiled convicted fugitive Thaksin and headed by his majority-elected sister – tried to sneak through a complete amnesty bill at 4am, a bill that would have erased Thaksin’s own corruption convictions. 

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This anti-government push is mainly a middle-class movement of outrage at this – with the traditional ossified conservative elite giving it their blessings while themselves lacking the guts to march in the streets.  (Thailand’s politics is much more complicated than can be explained here.) 

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It is sweltering here now during our Hot Season.  It was 100 degrees F today, without even factoring in the unbelievably hellish humidity.  This morning I got the rumor that Suthep would be visiting EGAT, the electric company headquarters next to us.  Out of my window I saw his fans waiting for him and trying to get into whatever shade they could – not that it helps that much.  Suthep finally arrived, greeting people just like he is often shown on TV.  There was happy Thai music and an air of celebration. 

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Important note:  Suthep’s once-huge protest crowds have been decreasing remarkably since last year.  Some of that might be because of the heat and the lack of results, but it is more probably because his rhetoric and policy statements have, in time, been veering toward the weird. 

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Originally, he championed the Rule of Law against unlimited majority caprice (reminding me of James Madison’s warning, in The Federalist Papers, against any unrestrained “tyranny of the majority”).  Suthep’s point that Thailand’s legal system needs radical reform is widely accepted, and the egregious corruption of the “Thaksin regime” has angered so many by its undisguised graft in the name of “populism.” 

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But now Suthep has uttered vague suggestions of “appointed” authorities (appointed by whom?) to reform the constitutional regime.  What in the hell does he mean?  Does he want to have himself appointed the Great Lawgiver?  (Many Red Shirts suspect that.)  What are his proposals?   Rule of whose Law?  (That’s a question.)  His vision is nebulous, and his credibility has plummeted even amongst the native Thai, Western-educated analysts here who had once championed him. 

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Back to fashion.  In the early Suthep-led protests late last year, I saw middle class folks in their normal office work clothes:  women in skirts or suits and men in slacks and sports shirts, if not in more formal suits with ties.  In the early mass marches throughout Bangkok, one could see this same dress code as protesters left their jobs at noon lunch break and/or after hours – after all, these were professional working people. 

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Today I saw a difference.  For one thing, it’s hotter.  For another, as the former vast numbers of protestors has dropped, these remaining are the Hard Core.  They’ve been marching throughout Bangkok for months, never giving up, and now it’s hotter than blazing Hell.  I had to go out in the heat today to buy bags of ice and beverages, so I mixed with the protestors and their “Guards” on my normally un-crowded local sidewalks. 

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The “Guards” in the anti-government movement are self-appointed security people who guard Suthep against being kidnapped by government forces or hurt by Red Shirt thugs.  They all have a distinct aura of “cool,” dressed mostly in black, sometimes with fashionable (and expensive!) bullet-proof vests. 

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(Shit! I’m dragging my sorry ass, sweating buckets in the heat, and these folks are often wearing black long-sleeved jackets in the sun!  I really must be an alien.) 

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The Guards sport a lot of black military-style boonie hats, fighting harnesses, and combat boots, and often they have some kind of walky-talky radios with big antennas clipped at their shoulder.  Awesome!  They swagger around and are, without a doubt, the coolest kids on the block. 

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I must admit that the Guards were also rather polite, which surprised me.  I was an overheated farang, blinded by sweat, stumbling along the sidewalk with bags of ice, and it was hard going for me because it was so densely crowded with Guards.  (I’m usually a solitary walker who walks fast on empty sidewalks and avoids crowds.)  One Guard saw my plight and engineered a path for me, telling his buddies that someone needed to get through.  Quite gentlemanly of him. 

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But the height of contemporary protest-chic fashion was witnessed later when the rally broke up and everyone was heading home in the heat.  The hard core rally folk were more colorful, but were primarily dressed in practical clothing for the long hot day.  Blue jeans or fatigues were the norm, even for all the ladies, and shirts were often of brilliant colors and offbeat cut.  They reminded me of latter day hippies, but not nearly as pathetic as the Greenwich Village pseudo-freaks in the late 60s where all the colorful plastic people posed and pranced all about.  These were serious protestors in for the long haul and dressing for the weather (like authentic children of the Earth). 

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Sun protection was all-important.  Everyone had some kind of head covering, and this really distinguished the veteran protestor from the raw boot of yesterday.  Stylish cowboy hats were common, usually light colored and very wide-brimmed.  Many people had towels over their heads and necks to block sun and to soak up sweat.  (This reminds me of my first day in Vietnam, seeing Marines wearing boonie hats with towels around their necks, struggling on under the tropical sun.)  Many today looked like colorful Arabs.  One guy  had a baseball type hat with a beautifully colored cannabis leaf cluster in front, and it sparkled in the sun.  (Is there a more broadly libertarian element here within this mix that I don't know about?) 

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Boonie hats, sometimes colorful but mostly brown/ olive drab, often had colorful sweatbands tied around them.  I can definitely relate.  I don’t usually wear a hat when out and about, but if it really hits the fan and I must, I often wear a camo sweatband under my broad-brimmed boonie hat.  I guess I’m just not as fashionable as these hipsters.  I must be getting old. 

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Many of these folks looked like gypsies.  The lady protestors each had uniquely colorful combinations making up their sun-hats, and everyone was making an individual fashion statement.  Or perhaps they were also trying to beat the heat as best they could while they trudged on toward their political ideal.  Gotta hand it to them.  It was something to see. 

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-Zenwind.

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Songkran 2014 CE/2557 BE

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Songkran is the traditional Thai/Lao New Year, in the hottest part of the year.  At dawn, I wake up almost naked with nothing but the relief of a strong electric fan, yet sweat pours from my brow.  Sweat City – no respite. 

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Traditionally, water is poured upon the hands of elders and on Buddha images to relieve the heat.  But in recent times Songkran has become an epic water fight amongst youngsters with gallons dumped on anyone within range.  It is too hot to go out, but if I must go out for ice and drinks I dress down for a possible drenching.  Recent years have not been as wet locally as in the past – mainly because of frequent political crises – but one never knows. 

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Our ice supply will last through tomorrow dawn, but I will have to go out for resupply after that.  The unforgiving tropical sun. 

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Blessed coolness.  Zen delight. 

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Happy Birthday to Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), my hero.  “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

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-Zenwind.

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Brief Rain

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Although the Rainy monsoon season does not normally kick in for another few months, we just had a freak thunderstorm move through at midday.  I couldn’t wait to test out my new pair of sports sandals on the wet pavements and rocks.  They worked wonderfully, gripping like crampons!  They should serve me well for the wet half of the year (while my older pair slips on the wet and is only good for the dry half). 

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It was also nice to step out into the fresh air of an ongoing thunderstorm with its coolness.  The air smells so clean.  Unfortunately, when it stops raining, the steam starts to rise (even without the sun shining), and the humidity makes you wringing wet.  It’s tropical! 

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As I was unloading groceries at home, my back suddenly gave me an amazingly sharp and horrendous pain, pain in my T7 sore spot worse than I’ve had for many, many months – that old feeling like I’d just been hit square on the spine at vertebra T7 with a hard-swung ball bat and then had it crushed by tightening vise-grips.  It hurts to breathe. 

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I did nothing to provoke it, so I suspected the weather – the drop in barometric pressure that accompanies a storm, because this storm was another anomaly.  So, I checked the weather history of our area for recent days.  What I saw was quite a high gradual variability in the pressure within each day.  But what were different were the sharp sudden ups and downs today, with a very sharp drop at the time of my local shopping foray.  Ouch!  

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Dukkha, in some variety, is always a fact of life, hovering just over your shoulder, ready to pounce.  It hurts to type, so I shall stop here. 

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-Zenwind.

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The Heat Is On

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The Cool Season is over, and we are headed right into the Hot Season.  At dawn today I knew it would be a bad one, with that feeling of muggy, sticky heat. 

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At 2:00 PM it is 97*F with a Heat Index (“feels like”) at 106*F.  Damn!

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-Zenwind.

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Blues Music in Bangkok: The Jukes

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A young Thai band called the Jukes plays great Blues at Apoteka, on Bangkok’s Sukhumvit soi 11 every Monday night from 21:30 until after midnight.  I’d heard about them, and I finally got to hear them last night.  Fantastic!  The singer also plays a heart-breaking blues harp; makes you want to cry.  The guitarist plays soul-splitting licks, and he broke two strings from his intensity.  The good bassist and drummer round out this very tight group.  They played songs I could not name, which is a change from hearing the same old standards every night.  It’s a younger generation of Bluesmen coming up, and they live it. 

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It is a rare pleasure these days for me to be out to a late live gig, but it did me good.  My back had ached terribly all day long, on the boat coming to Bangkok and during some intensive necessary shopping.  I rested a bit by seeing a movie (“3 Days to Kill” with Kevin Costner; not bad).  But true relief only came after finding a seat with a comfortable back at Apoteka.  Of course, the refreshments they serve kicked in as the definitive anesthetic, and by midnight – after many beers and many good tunes – all my pain was gone.  Blues music is cathartic, it takes you on a tour down deep and you can only go up from there. 

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Apoteka and Soi 11 are interesting places, grittier than my neighborhood.  The pub is partly an open space, even in rainy weather, with the bar and band area inside with many tables under air conditioning, but it is opened wide to a front porch table area so I enjoy watching people walking by on the soi.  Walking down the couple of hundred meters of Soi 11 itself is rather dangerous, because the sidewalks are incredibly narrow and are usually occupied by food vendors, making you walk in the narrow street with its crowded two-way traffic. 

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The beggars here look much worse off than at least the places I’ve been through when walking back from gigs, many of these being mothers with little kids.  The ladies of the night on the late night soi here often look much more forlorn than in other areas, trying hard to sell their bodies and their sorry souls to staggering louts.  One must walk on by many pathetic situations. 

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One young lady had “hooker” written all over her, but she was a class above the others.  She didn’t operate from the street.  Rather she came into the various bars lining the soi and took up a seat on a high stool right near the doorway.  Dressed in a short black skirt, one could not miss her.  Very good looking, neat, and not looking stupid, no doubt she could be pickier about her clientele.  But what of the years ahead?  If she’s lucky, and smart, she may find a tolerable husband soon, but the clock is ticking. 

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On a brighter note, my shopping expedition earlier in the day was very successful.  I desperately needed a new backpack for everyday rough duty, and I always buy a new pair of sports sandals before the rainy season.  My present pack (an excellent North Face “Recon”) is about five years old and has given me wonderful service, but I am afraid the big zippers will blow out soon from overloading it with books or groceries every day.  I couldn’t find another “Recon” in the city, but I found a great replacement daypack from The North Face (a “Hot Shot II”) that should last me five years or so.  Both these packs have a feature I demand: a good system of compression straps to make it slim in profile while traveling until I need to expand it for loads. 

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I had been having problems finding good sandals.  The pair I’m wearing now are great except for a tendency to slip on wet surfaces – not a good thing in humid Thailand – so I will wear them only in the dry season.  I got a fantastic deal on this year's new pair of sandals from a Rockport store.  The tread should grip well in wet conditions, but I won’t really know until the rubber hits the (wet) road.  

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-Zenwind.

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