Mid-Week Blues

It’s Wednesday night in Bangkok and it’s raining again, although very, very lightly. Just finished listening to a World Party CD and now I have an old James Gang live album playing. “Just turn your pretty head … and walk away.” Coming up next: a compilation by The The. And if you have to ask; “The what? … well, forget it.

And I’m stumped as to what to write about tonight. It’s been a few days since I posted anything and I feel like I should write something or post some photos, but I just don’t feel inspired. Must be the mid-week blues.  

I could write about the latest rash of bombings in South Thailand; the violence that just won’t stop. Or I could write about the historic visit of Myanmar President Thein Sein to the US, where he’s meeting with Barack “O’Burma” Obama. Or to take that story a step further, I could mention the misguided protesters who think Thein Sein is some sort of heinous villain because he hasn’t been able to stop the sectarian violence between Muslim and Buddhists in Myanmar this year. Or the idiots who think that Obama should not have invited Thein Sein at all, reasoning that it’s “too early” to lift sanctions and “encourage” Myanmar without the government releasing all political prisoners, and blah blah blah. I tell you, nothing pleases these so-called “Free Burma” groups, and it would kill them to acknowledge, much less praise, any improvements or changes that the Myanmar government makes. Hell, it would kill them just to say the word “Myanmar.” I’m certainly not in the pro-junta camp, but some of these so-called human rights groups need to put things in perspective. I think some of their “policies” have done more harm than good in the past decade. I think “democratic” changes will take time to fully mature in Myanmar, but things are on the right track and Thein Sein should be encouraged and supported rather than criticized and condemned.

What else? Oh yeah, there was the efficient transvestite nurse that waited on me at Bangkok Hospital last week, or the Thai doctor who they sent me to at that same hospital. He had a very American-sounding accent, so I asked him if he had spent time studying in the states. “Well,” he said, “I grew up near Cincinnati, but I attended university here in Bangkok.” And the good news: they couldn’t find anything wrong with me!

Or I could write about some of the cool customers in my bookshop this week: David the 75-year-old pot-smoking fan of Louis L’Amour novels; the guy from Sweden who admitted to being “old school” and preferring real books over digital ones; the guy from Prachin Buri who bought the entire series of Gabriel Allon novels by Daniel Silva; the sweet expat lady from Poland who is reading anything we get by Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, or Graham Greene; or the female Thai customer who regaled us with tales of spitting on the feet of Red Shirt protesters last week; or the street guy who likes to “drop his drawers” to passing cars in front of our shop. Oh yeah, it’s a colorful neighborhood!

Or could write about the two nice guys from France that treated me to dinner at a Thai restaurant on Monday night. Good food, pleasant company, and they introduced me to a wicked-good drink that they say is popular in Brazil. I just wish I could remember the name of the drink! Yeah, it was that good. They were departing the next day on a trip to Myanmar and will be back in Bangkok in early May.

Then there were the phone calls from friends in Cambodia, e-mails from friends in Myanmar, and requests for money from friends in Thailand. In the case of my Thai friend Tam, his wife just gave birth to their third child and he needed money to buy some essentials … like food, so I was inclined to help him out.

But alas, I don’t have the energy or inclination to write about any of these things with any additional depth. All in all, it was just another weird and wonderful, and perfectly normal, week here in Bangkok. Let it rain!

 

Janet Brown’s Search for Home

Janet Brown’s new book, a travelogue/memoir titled Almost Home, has just been published by Things Asian Press. I was so enchanted and mesmerized by this book that it took me less than two days to gobble up the 210 pages. In all honesty, I think this is one of the finest books ever written by a westerner about what it’s like to be an expat resident in Asia, searching for “home” or just searching period.

 

Almost Home takes the reader on a whirlwind journey through the cities where Janet takes up residence during her multi-year stay in Asia: Bangkok, Hong Kong, Beijing, Penang, and back again to the chaotic comforts of Bangkok. While reading this book, the places where Janet resides come bursting to life: you can smell the spicy food that the outdoor vendors are cooking around her neighborhood in Bangkok; you can imagine the long line of mixed nationalities waiting for the elevators at Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong; you can picture the ballroom dancers strutting their stuff in a Beijing park; you can hear the cacophony of a Chinese opera troupe, and perhaps you can feel those bedbugs biting you at the cheap hotel in Penang. Despite the allure of all things Asian, Janet remains conflicted: just where is “home”? Eventually it’s the unshakeable bond of family that lures her back to the United States where her two sons are living.

 

Janet Brown is able to pique our interest, and sustain it, in this book not only because of her keen eye for detail and observation, but also because she is such a good writer. She’s truly a master of her craft and it shows in her fluid, honest, vivid, and sometimes very funny writing. It also helps that as a middle-aged woman she has a much different perspective of Asia than the typical male westerner. She’s not following the backpacker circuit or attending full moon parties; she’s not bar-hopping with badly-dressed white dudes; and she’s not hanging out with a clique of wealthy expats discussing the stock market or how much they pay their maid. Instead, she’s rambling down backstreets and alleys, taking local transport, living in low-rent neighborhoods with the locals, and sampling the delights of street food. A kindred soul!

 

Many travelers and expat residents are seduced by the exotic nature and charms of various cities in Asia and many of them have written books on the subject. Few writers, however, are able to accurately — or skillfully — describe the dizzying barrage of odd new sights, sounds, smells, experiences, and feelings that overwhelm them. But in Almost Home Janet Brown accomplishes this task most impressively. Whether the experience she writes about is charming, life-affirming, amusing, or threatening to her health and sanity (her stay in Penang was beyond miserable!), Janet Brown turns it into something that is fascinating to read about. And to me that’s the mark of great writing.

 

 

Expat Exodus = Book Avalanche

It’s that time of year in Thailand; the annual exodus of expats leaving the country. Even without a calendar I can always tell it’s the month of May because my bookshop is inundated with foreigners coming in to sell their books. It’s usually the same old refrain (“I’m moving back to my home country”), or a variation (“We’re moving to another house” … “My husband is relocating to Africa”) of such.

 

So why does this book avalanche happen in May, you ask? For many expats living and working in Bangkok, particularly those with school-age children, this month marks the end of the school year, at least for International schools (Thai public schools, however, usually end their school year in early March). And of course summer is almost here so many families or individuals are taking trips back to their home country. Whatever their reasons for leaving town, we are once again being bombarded with people selling books.

Not that I’m complaining. I like to have more books. I need to have more books. Sure it hurts having to shell out so much cash, but my inventory is important to me and I never want to turn down good titles because I’m on a budget. Late last year,  two hotels in the Phuket area made large book purchases for libraries they were stocking at their resorts, thus the stock at my own shop was starting to thin out. But now we’re back over 16,000 books again … and I still want more! As far as I’m concerned you can never have too many books (that holds true for personal collections as well as store stock) and I want my inventory to keep expanding, to become more diversified. I’m just as thrilled to have more Children’s books and Poetry volumes as much as stocking more Crime Fiction, Travel, and History. I want it all!

Some customers, as you might suspect, are sad to part with their books. But when they start to think about how much it’s going to cost in shipping fees or excess baggage charges to send all those heavy titles back home, well, it doesn’t feel quite so bad to sell them after all. It’s also interesting to compare people’s reactions when we total up the books and tell them how much we’ll pay for them. Some people are pleasantly surprised at how much cash we’ll pay; others are just grateful, if not thrilled to get anything for their books; and then there are the ones who act offended, as if they think we’re cheating them and not offering enough money. What can you do? I try to be fair, but you can’t please everyone and I’m not going to stand there and negotiate with some disgruntled cheapskate. Take it or leave it. You’re not happy with how much we’re offering you? Try another dealer in town … and good luck finding one that is willing to give you a fair price, much less pay any cash at all.

 

Meanwhile I sit at the computer and update our database of titles as more books arrive. Today was a fun day with several hundred new arrivals, a real mixed bag of titles that included Evelyn Waugh, Dr. Seuss, Jan Morris, Ross Macdonald, a slew of cool history books, nearly the entire “Magic Tree House” series for kids, some much needed Spanish and Italian novels, a few old Hemingway books, some old espionage paperbacks, the stray Harry Potter and Nancy Drew title … and on and on it went. Damn, I love these books!

 

Gay in the NBA: Play It, Don’t Pray It

The big news in the world of sports today was the coming out announcement by professional basketball player Jason Collins. He is the first “active” male player (as opposed to someone that retired and later announced that they were gay) in US professional sports to proclaim their homosexuality.

 

Collins should be congratulated for taking this bold step. I hope this is only the beginning and it will embolden many other gay athletes to make similar announcements. Actually, real progress will be made when such proclamations aren’t even necessary, and cause nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders. Of course, a lot of the value of having announced that he’s gay will be negated if Collins never plays in an NBA game again. At the age of 34, Collins is a veteran backup, a role player who plays less than 10 minutes per game, nearing the end of his playing career. He’s not a star, he’s not even a starter. With his current contract having expired, he is a free agent (after playing for both Boston and Washington this year) and there are no guarantees that he’ll be signed by a team for next season. But by all accounts he is a valuable “big man”, a Center with defensive prowess, as opposed to one that can score lots of points, and he still has some value as a player, so hopefully we’ll see him on the court later this year.

 

Collins’ surprising statement drew positive reaction and support from current NBA players such as Kobe Bryant, Baron Davis, Bradley Beal, Emeka Okafor, Kenneth Faried (current owner of the NBA’s best hairstyle!), Steve Nash, Tony Parker, Chauncey Billups, and even Metta World Peace (the controversial player formerly known as Ron Artest). There were also supportive statements from non-athletes such as Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama.  But you can bet that there are many people in the NBA and professional sports who are uncomfortable with, if not angered by, Jason Collins’ announcement. Most of the homophobes will be reticent to voice opinions at this time, but I did notice a few negative comments about Collins, not surprisingly made by the masters of intolerance, those of the Christian faith. Mark Jackson, an ex-player and current coach of the Golden State Warriors said: “As a Christian man, I have beliefs of what’s right and what’s wrong. That being said, I know Jason Collins, I know his family and I’m certainly praying for them at this time.”

He’ll pray for them? How loony is that? And he makes the typical and ludicrous Christian judgment of equating homosexuality with sin. Hey Mark Jackson; you are a moron! And yet another idiot, this one an ESPN NBA writer named Chris Broussard, said: “Personally, I don’t believe that you can live an openly homosexual lifestyle or an openly premarital sex between heterosexuals, if you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says you know them by their fruits, it says that’s a sin. If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, adultery, fornication, premarital sex between heterosexuals, whatever it may be, I believe that’s walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ. I would not characterize that person as a Christian because I do not think the Bible would characterize them as a Christian.”

And people like this are given voices in the mass media? Are these people scary or what? Can you say: Cro-mag? Their faith dictates that they must believe this way? Sorry, but that’s just nothing but ignorance in my opinion. Comments like those only reinforce my long-standing belief that most Christians — along with any other religious zealots, whether they are Muslims, Hindus, or Jews — are clueless, dangerous characters that need to carted off and dumped on a remote island somewhere, far away from the rest of intelligent civilization.

Seriously, why is it that so many of us continue to tolerate the religious extremists in our midst, especially their absurd dangerous, fairy tale beliefs?  We can roll our eyes and call these people nutcases, but when they continue to be given a voice in the media and are able influence politicians and lawmakers, and as a result affect our lives, it’s time we woke up and took some action.

 

A group of sports writers on one website were discussing Collins’s coming out and the impact it will have on his career. One writer wondered if Collins would have difficulty with his teammates. Some thought that it won’t be a big issue, but others suspect there will indeed be some players who are either uncomfortable with being in the locker room with a gay player or who will remain outwardly hostile to homosexuals. Part of that hate, hostility and violence is ingrained in American culture and its warped “Christian values”. Here in Southeast Asia, where the tolerant tenets of Buddhism (more of a philosophy than a religion, some would say) affect the behavior of the people, being gay is not much of an issue at all. In public schools, for example, if a student is gay or lesbian, they might — at the very worst — be playfully teased by their classmates, but without any nastiness vindictiveness. Mai Pen Rai, they would say here in Thailand. But at a school in the United States you can bet that there would be a definite element of cruelty at play, if not something much worse. Remind me again of the suicide statistics for gay youth in the USA? And you can thank those “gentle” God-fearing Christians for the continuing existence of such hate and cruelty.

Thinking about the Jason Collins story and the nasty cloud of religion that hovers over so many issues, I thought of the possible repercussions from an even bigger news event. What if a major candidate for political office in the USA declared: “I am not a Christian, nor do I have religious beliefs of any kind. I remain an atheist.” Now THAT would truly rock some boats. But just like Jason Collins’ announcement, it’s time for someone to step forward and shout it out!

Hot Weather & Cool Music

It’s April, one of the hottest months of the year here in Thailand, or anywhere in Southeast Asia for that matter. For the past month, I’m witness to an almost daily occurrence; customers walking into my bookshop, either sweating profusely or complaining about the heat. Yes, it’s very hot out there, but it occurs to me that some of these folks wouldn’t sweat as much if they weren’t wearing all black or heavy fabrics that don’t breathe in this tropical climate. It’s Thailand, not Northern England, so dress appropriately!

 

To comfort all those heat-stricken souls I run the air conditioner continuously at my shop, but when I’m at home alone I opt not to turn on the AC. Hey, I’m from Florida; hot and humid feels natural to me! But it’s not like I prefer to sit and sweat the whole time. At home, I turn on the ceiling fans and open the windows to let a nice breeze flow through my ninth floor corner apartment. And that’s enough to keep me cool. Of course it also helps that I walk around the room wearing nothing but a loincloth. But whether I’m at home or work, music is always playing; yet another way to keep cool, at least emotionally. Here is this month’s list of CDs playing in heavy rotation at my place:

 

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell – Old Yellow Moon

Dawes – Stories Don’t End

James Iha – Look To the Sky

Neil Young – Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968

Eddi Reader – Candyfloss and Medicine

 

Various Artists – Eccentric Soul: Nickel and Penny Labels

Grant Green – Latin Bit

R. Dean Taylor – Essential Collection  

Joe Henderson – Page One

Tift Merritt – Traveling Alone

  

Trombone Shorty – For True

Velvet Crush – Free Expression

The Scene is Now – Total Jive

Bill Fay – Bill Fay

Mary Chapin Carpenter – Ashes and Roses

 

Ray Stinnett – A Fire Somewhere

Kool and The Gang – Live at P.J.’s

Camper Van Beethoven – La Costa Perdida

Graham Gouldman – Love and Work

Bob Mould – Poison Years

 

Paul Kossoff – Backstreet Crawler (Deluxe Edition)

Lou Bond – Lou Bond

TV on the Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain

Various Artists – Miami Sound: Rare Funk & Soul

Larry Young – Unity

 

Leon Thomas – The Creator: 1969-73

Yo La Tengo – Fade

Sugarman Three – Pure Cane Sugar

UB40 – Present Arms

Colin Blunstone – I Don’t Believe I Miracles

 

Clarence Carter – The Fame Singles Volume 1 1966-70

The Lumineers – The Lumineers

Charles & Eddie – Duophonic

Menahan Street Band – Make the Road by Walking

Kenny Burrell – Midnight Blue

 

Greg Kihn Band – Best of Beserkley ’75-‘84

The Waterboys – A Pagan Place

The Sneetches – 1985-1991

The Explorers Club – Freedom Wind

Cass McCombs – Wit’s End

 

Bangkok Street Scenes

I almost never take photos when I’m in Bangkok. If I’m on the road, traveling somewhere, well, that’s a different story, but once I’m back home in Bangkok, the urge to get out the camera rarely strikes.

 

But I wanted to get some shots recently of the campaign signs of the candidates running for Bangkok governor, and while I was out taking those photos, I decided to snap a few more while I was out and about. These photos are nothing earthshaking, nor anything that’s particularly representative of what Bangkok “is like.” These are just some shots that I took on Sukhumvit Road, near where I work, and on New Petchburi Road (and the adjacent klong), where I live.

 

I included several shots of various food vendors, people who play a vital role in making Bangkok such a convenient and livable city. Step outside your door and there is good, inexpensive food available nearly round the clock. But alas, this year has already brought some changes in the food vendor scene, at least from my perspective. My regular fruit vendor on Sukhumvit went back to his home province in late December and still hasn’t returned. He makes frequent trips back to Phitsanulok, so I’m used to not having him around for periods of time (and there is always another fruit vendor to take his place), but he’s never been gone for this long and I’m a bit worried. To compound that concern, one of my favorite noodle vendors, a guy that sells a very tasty concoction across the street from my apartment, hasn’t been around since late November. At this point I’m wondering if he’s going to return or not.

Meanwhile, the vibrant pulse of the city continues. It’s not a cliche to say that this city never sleeps.

 

 

 

Bangkok Governor Election

It’s been a veritable noise fest on the streets of Bangkok in recent weeks. Yes, Chinese New Year reared its noisy head once again, providing all the idiots who love playing with firecrackers an excuse to create more racket. But the added factor in the decibel level was the start of the campaign for Bangkok governor.

 

Naturally, a forest of gaudy campaign signs has sprung up all around the city, a most visible clue that the election is coming. But to supplement the signage, many candidates have embraced the idea of hiring vehicles to drive around town, blaring campaign slogans and playing songs, with the occasional “live announcer” yelling more nonsense through the amplified sound system. How loud is it? You can hear them coming from blocks away.

 

One of the more visible candidates is the incumbent governor, Sukhumbhand. Despite the fact that he’s done a pretty good job during his first term, based on his cringe-worthy collection of wimpy-looking campaign signs, I’m willing to wager that he loses the election big-time. In some of the photos, Sukhumbhand bears an eerie resemblance to Grandpa Munster. But at least old Mister Munster bared his teeth when he smiled. Sukhumbhand has apparently lost his choppers, judging from the fact that he avoids showing them when he tries to smile. Or is that a grimace? In another unfortunate set of photos the guv is shaking his fist at the camera, and again NOT showing any teeth. The fist-in-your-face pose (there are both right-fist and left-fist signs for some reason; maybe targeting the ambidextrous vote?), however, just comes off looking silly. Is he trying to look tough? Menacing? Determined? Once again, the word “wimpy” springs to mind. This guy is going to lose.

 

The other leading candidate, Pongsapat (he, the darling of the ruling Pheua Thai Party, the latest incarnation of the Thaksin regime), has a look of utter surprise in some of his photos. “Can you believe they picked me to run in this thing!” In yet another photo he is making some sort of odd hand gesture, as if he accidentally lost the flute he was playing. Thinking of that missing flute, visions of old Jethro Tull songs from the 1970s spring to mind. “Bungle in the Jungle” baby! No, let’s try “Living in the Past.”

 

The other candidates are the usual mish-mash of ex-police dudes, university graduates (these guys love posing in their cap and gown, or showing off their military medals), and eccentric types who are running for reasons only known to their family and Facebook friends.

 

This campaign has been going on for over three weeks already, and we still have another full two weeks to go before the elections on March 3. As campaigns go, this one may not be ugly, but it sure is loud and annoying. I think most Bangkokians will be breathing a carbon monoxide-laced sigh of relief when this madness finally ceases.

 

Dan Simmons and his ‘Flashback’ predictions

The new Dan Simmons novel Flashback, is a fascinating, wild, and disturbing tale, set in the USA — bouncing between Denver and Los Angeles — in the year 2036. As the back cover blurb states: “Terrorism and ultra-violence plague a once powerful society, whose only escape is to numb itself on flashback; a euphoric yet cripplingly addictive regression drug.”

 

In this novel, set barely two decades in the future, the US is being governed by Japanese, American armed forces are fighting in China —- on the side of Japan, most sports stadiums (such as Coors Field in Denver) have been turned into federal prisons, shopping malls have become glorified housing projects, Texas has declared its independence, most commuters now ride bikes to work, and basically all hell is breaking loose around the country.  And those are only a few of the outlandish scenarios in this novel. But the more the chapters pass, you start to wonder: will any of this stuff really come true?

Toward the end of the book, on page 482, there is an out-of-the-blue reference to Thailand in one chapter. One of the characters has fallen ill and is given medical treatment by a Thai doctor living in Denver. Here’s an excerpt:

Dr. Tak’s real name was Sudaret Jatisripitak but everyone in the mall called him Dr. Tak. He’d fled from Thailand during their last “Thai Rak Thai” (Thais Love Thais) revolution that had killed a fifth of the nation’s population and found that he could make a decent living, without being medically certified in the United States, simply by giving black market medical care to the few thousand residents of the Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums.

The scary thing is that the writer’s prediction of a fifth of Thailand’s population perishing in a Thai Rak Thai battle isn’t so far-fetched. Judging from the last Red Shirt “protest” — which was more akin to a state of siege as Red Shirt hoodlums set up camps and held central Bangkok hostage for nearly three months — an even more bloody confrontation isn’t that remote a possibility. The colored-shirt political divide here in the kingdom is as entrenched as it ever was, with no signs that unity anywhere in sight.

 While Flashback is a very entertaining and thought provoking novel, there is also a disturbing right-wing slant to some parts of the book. Take this passage, where a Japanese mafia character is lecturing an American detective who he has hired to investigate the murder of his son:

“More than twenty years ago,” said Nakamura, “a group of my fellow Nipponese businessmen and myself watched as your new young president gave a speech from Cairo that flattered the Islamic world — a bloc of Islamic nations that had not yet coalesced into today’s Global Caliphate — and praised them with obvious historical distortions of their won imagined grandeur. This president began the process of totally rewriting history and contemporary reality with an eye toward praising radical Islam into loving him and your country. The name for this form of foreign policy, whenever it is used with forces of fascism, is appeasement.

This president and your country soon followed this self-mockery of a foreign policy with ever more blatant and useless appeasement, attempts at becoming a social democracy when European social democracies were beginning to collapse from debt and the burden of their entitlement programs, unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from the world stage, a betrayal of old allies, a rapid and deliberate surrendering of America’s position as a superpower, and a total retreat from international responsibilities that the United States of America had long taken seriously.”

Doesn’t sound like an Obama fan, does he? As with most right-wing arguments, they attempt to grossly simplify a complicated situation, conveniently leaving out certain facts and details. The previous tirade, for example, neglects to mention the global destruction caused by decades of American imperialism and economic blackmail (read any book by John Perkins for details on America’s alarming practices). The USA is definitely not some sort of benign, innocent party in the war on terrorism.

 

On the other hand, I think Western leaders HAVE shamefully tried to appease the radical Islamic element far too much, absurdly referring to Islam as a “great religion,” for example. Does anyone seriously think that most Westerners, Christians in particular, have the slightest understanding of, or respect for Islam? Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Obama, take your pick; they all speak with forked tongues. And conversely, why should any other sane individual on the planet have any respect for the loony right-wing Christians who go around trying to force their warped “morals” and bizarre doctrine on others? It’s all wrong. I remain puzzled when politicians and “concerned citizens” make pleas for religious freedom. Why should there be such “freedom” when it’s so obvious that most devout followers of religions all over the world have an extremely radical agenda with no tolerance for those who don’t believe the same as they do, all of which contributes to further hate and bloodshed. Which leads to the question: whose intolerance is justified?

Thailand’s Darwin Award Candidates

If you haven’t heard of the Darwin Awards, it’s an annual honor given to common-sense-challenged individuals who have “improved our gene pool by killing themselves in really stupid ways.” The Darwin Awards have their website and publish books full of amazing tales of people who have offed themselves in incredibly idiotic ways.

 

Judging from the news I’ve been reading lately, I think it’s about time for a Thai version of the Darwin Awards. But instead of an annual announcement, I think there is such a plethora of insanely stupid deaths here in the kingdom that they could easily have a monthly roundup. Here are two examples from the past week that I read in local newspapers. In last Friday’s paper, the headline screamed:

Festival Firecracker Blast Kill Teen

According to the article, a man and his 16-year-old stepson were riding on a motorcycle with a bag full of look kong (round, lime-sized firecrackers), heading out to celebrate the annual Loy Krathong full moon festival. They lit the firecrackers and threw them on the road (and perhaps at other motorists?) as they were riding. Shortly afterwards, witnesses said they heard a loud bang and saw the motorcycle catch fire. Police theorized that the bag of fireworks had been placed on the lap of the pillion rider of the motorcycle. Seeing as how the teenager’s “thighs were mutilated,” that’s a pretty good guess.

 

Two days ago, I noticed this jewel in the Bangkok Post:

Truck Kills Teen ‘Stunt’ Biker Girl

According to this article, a 17-year-old girl was killed when she fell off a motorbike and was run over during a stunt performed by a motorcycle gang in Taling Chan district. The driver of the 10-wheel truck that ran over the girl told police that he saw about 100 motorcycles racing on Kanchanaphisek Road about 2 am. The driver decided to park his rig on the side of the road, fearing that the throng of unruly motorcyclists was making it too dangerous to drive. However, before he could park his truck, a female member of the biker gang fell off a motorcycle and into the path of his vehicle, uh, flattening her. Anyone for pancakes tonight? The article added that police “would bring in members of the motorcycle gang for questioning.” Yeah, a lot of good that will do: those morons will be back out racing again tomorrow night.

 

From reading these articles, you might assume that Thailand is not a very safety conscious country. And you’d be absolutely correct. These two incidents are only a tiny fraction of the tragic but absurd “accidents” that occur each month here in the kingdom. Yes indeed, I think Thailand is definitely ready for its own chapter in the next Darwin Awards book.

http://www.darwinawards.com/

Teachers Targeted … to Die

Wednesday’s Thai newspapers detailed a vicious crime, one that’s occurring with disturbingly frequency lately: another teacher shot down and killed in Thailand’s notorious “Deep South.” And this wasn’t just any regular teacher, but a school director in Pattani, one of the three provinces in South Thailand where Muslim “insurgents” have been on a rampage for most of the past decade.

 

In an article this week the Bangkok Post gave a sobering tally: since the violence surged in January 2004, there have been 155 teachers killed. Read that again: 155 human beings slaughtered because they were only trying to do their job and provide local children with an education. Teachers! That’s just … intolerable. Fuck those insurgents.

 

Sadly, it’s not just teachers that are being killed, although that group appears to be one of the various insurgent groups’ prime targets. Buddhist monks have been shot and beheaded; police officers murdered; soldiers and “defense volunteers” ambushed and killed; bombs going off in markets and teashops, killing and maiming yet more people. A news article in Bangkok’s The Nation newspaper back in March put the total number of people killed in the region at 5,086, and the number of injured at 8,485. But that was over eight months ago, and those numbers are obviously even higher now. While Muslim groups appear to be the ones who are instigating the violence, it’s not clear how they are determining their targets. The number of Muslims who have died is higher than the number of Buddhists (2,996 to 1,952, according to the article), yet the number of Buddhists injured was nearly twice that of Muslims (5,141 to 2,751).

 

So what is causing this senseless violence? Oddly, it’s hard to get an accurate answer to that question. On Wikipedia, for example, it says:

A striking aspect of the South Thailand insurgency is the anonymity of the people behind it and the absence of concrete demands.

And that’s one of the reasons that efforts to quell the violence have been so ineffective. There’s no obvious, declared enemy, no one group to take aim at, to attempt to negotiate with or eliminate. Some say that the whole thing is a continuation of a long-running separatist movement, the border provinces (next to Malaysia) wanting to create their own independent state. Others think that the root of the violence is because the mostly Muslim locals feel ignored and economically disenfranchised by the central Thai government.

 

No matter what the cause, one would think that eliminating this scourge of violence would be a priority for the Thai government, but various incarnations of the Thaksin Regime, and even the Democratic Party, have all proven to be either inept or not particularly interested in solving the problem. The mindset seems to be along the lines of:

“Hey, it’s just those three border provinces down south, so why worry? Most of those people are Muslim and don’t even speak Thai anyway, so they are not really the same as other Thai people.”

 

Maybe when the insurgency travels north to Bangkok the government will finally start to take this problem more seriously. Thus far, the violence has been confined down south, but how much longer will that remain the case? Meanwhile, 332 schools in Pattani were closed temporarily this week “for a review of security measures.” One idea is to have teachers stay and live at their schools, rather than risking a commute to and from home. But for those with families, that’s not a realistic option. Frankly, it’s a wonder than any teachers still bother going to work in those provinces with the constant turmoil. At some point, you have to look at the madness surrounding you and gauge if it’s worth putting up with or not. If it was me, I’d be on the first bus out of that hellhole.