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Published on January 13, 2008

 It's as though the country has slipped its anchors.

In Thai politics, the credo appears to be: if you haven't been bad, you were good, which is somehow absurd. Surely, if you haven't been good, then you were bad. Not so. Here you get another shot, with the warning: "Do try not to get caught this time with bundles of notes with people's names on them. It's so amateur. Now, off you go. Next!" Instead of issuing red or yellow cards, why don't they just give them the joker and be done with it?

But as they old saying goes, vote-buying isn't wrong because it's illegal, it's illegal because it's wrong, yet we live in a "democracy" qualified by corruption and vote-buying and still grace it with the term. No wonder the election result appears to have been accepted with a fatigued tolerance by the people who voted Democrat. So far.

Those who are involved are only concerned if they get sentenced, and seeing they never get sentenced they remain unconcerned. After all, some of the more notable "banned" politicians are busier now than they were when they were legit. It's a wonderful gig, when you think about it.

Beneath the hospitality and seeming good cheer lies a society deeply at odds with itself, marked by the great tensions of the rich and poor. No matter what the statistics say, my eyes see a Kingdom of farmers still marked by the poverty of generations. Political commentators now say the poor have been awakened and will not be silenced. Agreed, but there are still huge numbers of people who essentially have no idea what politics is about, what can be reached through it and what cannot. They expect immediate results and are filled with bitterness when those results do not come.

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Overheard:

"You could have appointed one of Samak's cats as the leader of People Power, and it would still have got 90 per cent of the vote."

 

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"We are well on the way to being ruled by a strop merchant who could start a fight in an empty room and another character who has two sons that have "Stroke Me I'm A Primate" as bumper stickers on their pickups, and you're wishing me a Happy New Year?

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"You watch: we are a country that has the kind of leaders who never pay for their own mistakes. The vultures are flocking in from all sides, and only those with power, bad friends and loud mouths will be well off.'

 

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Quote of the week: "It is the best time for [Pojaman Shinawatra] to return to fight her cases since the country has returned to normal," the family's lawyer, Noppadon Pattama, told reporters.

If Noppadon thinks this is normal I'd be fascinated to know what he thinks is peculiar.

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I've got a bit of the Berlin Wall in a box in a drawer somewhere. (Don't we all?) Odd lumps of concrete and unreadable graffiti, as though a cat had walked across a typewriter. Two friends were there in November 1989, the night it came tumbling down. There's a photo of them, laughing amid the huge crowds and wild celebrations. Bottle of champagne in one hand, a hammer in the other.

But the memory I really cherish is that while all this was going on, an unknown KGB agent in Dresden, one Vladimir Putin, had tried to pile so many documents into a burning stove that the thing exploded.

 

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Prices are rising fast: noodles, gas and all kinds of oils. Bummer, but let's keep some perspective: in 1918, the rate of the German mark was four to the dollar. In 1922 it was 400; by late November 1923 you could get 4,210,5000,000,000 to the dollar.

The Berlin daily newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine cost 30 pfennigs in May 1921. On July 1, 1923, it was 1,500 marks; on August 1, 5,000 marks, and on September 19, 800,000 marks. The million-mark mark was reached on Thursday September 20. The next day it was 1.5 million. The Sunday edition on October 28 cost 2.5 billion marks. The paper of Friday November 9, bearing the news of Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, cost 60 billion marks. People were paid with suitcases full of banknotes, which by the next day would be worthless. And yet within four months, the 'new' mark was back on a normal footing with the dollar, at 4.2 marks. What a ride.

 

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The Australia/India cricket spat is, well, wonderful sport, and Simon Briggs of The Daily Telegraph got right to the point.

"The dispute has become almost laughably petty. The suggestion that Australia wrist-spinner Brad Hogg could be banned for calling Kumble and batting partner Mahendra Singh Dhoni "bastards" would amaze even players who learned their cricket in gentler times. The same standards would have done for Bill Woodfull, the Australian captain during the Bodyline series of 1932-1933, who famously responded to a complaint from his opposite number Douglas Jardine with the words: "All right, which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?"

But then, you don't need to be a fan of cricket to have heard the one about the Australian fast bowler who asked the Zimbabwean batsman why he was so fat. "Because every time I make love to your wife," came the supposed reply, "she gives me a biscuit."

Compiled by Roger Beaumont

The Nation