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Published on March 29, 2008

Depsite facing economic potholes so deep you could fish in them, for this government the goal is now trying to hold it together. Feeling cornered? Change the charter. A perky judiciary? Complain about the judges. And what's the old saying? When the law is against you, argue the facts; when the facts are against you, argue the law - although I've heard that this sounds much better in French.

 As politicians can hardly be held up as role models, perhaps we should hold them up as mirrors: this is how not to be. Our government now has that straight-to-video quality due to artistic differences of epic proportions.

 It is difficult to encompass our prime minister within the definition of "right" about all this. If he's "right", where wrong is doesn't bear thinking about. It doesn't really help matters if you have a short fuse and a temper like a spanked gibbon and then go all soft-focus and gooey about Burmese generals. To claim that meditation makes them delightful humans is like saying the Druids ran a modern, cutting-edge religion.

 If they do fiddle with the charter and get their way, then everything will be thrown out - court cases, corruption charges, any stain on any reputation. No doubt plenty will be thrown back: furniture, ice-cream, and pints of Mother Dunch's Buttocks real ale.

 The situation is, like most Friday nights in Bangkok, scandalous and staggering.

 Never mind, we can't always get it right. One in three primary-school pupils in the UK believe that Sir Winston Churchill was the first man to walk on the moon, while a similar poll of British teenagers revealed a quarter think that Sir Winston never existed at all.

 

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Overheard at Government House

"You are acting like a coward."

"I'm not acting."

 

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As most Zimbabweans will get whacked by the police with a baseball bat costing 80 bazillion Zimbabwean dollars on their way to the polling booths this weekend, its worth recalling the owner of the only airline in Somalia, who told the BBC: "Sometimes it's good having no government. Without a government, there's no corruption." And then laughed.

 

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Apart from dubious family entertainment shows, the Romans were full of good ideas. They had a feast called Saturnalia when lords became servants and vice versa. Unfortunately, this exchange of status was strictly limited. The servants weren't allowed to feed their bosses to the lions while they were in charge. Even so, it was an exercise that reminded the ruling class of what it was like to be ordered around. Why not make this standard practice one day a month in Thailand? Surely it would make businesses more efficient. Imagine what would happen if the entire board of the AOT and the 169 vice-presidents of Thai Airways had to man the check-in desks at Suvarnabhumi Airport over the Songkran holidays.

Actually, I can't. But the ensuing chaos would be great entertainment.

 

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Quote of the week:

"If anyone knows where Teng Biao is, could they give his family a call? He was bundled into the back of a police wagon in Beijing recently and nobody has seen him since. He's a human rights lawyer - which, in China, makes him about as popular with the authorities as an alcoholic Jew in Riyadh." Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times.

 

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Trawling through Chinese newspaper blogs this week has been very instructive. A tsunami of pure hatred spewed out against the Dalai Lama and the "Killer Monks of Tibet", which sounds like a great name for a Himalayan punk band. If any blogger was impudent enough to mention the million odd Tibetans killed and the 6,000 monasteries smashed since the 1950s, they were met with replies like this:  

  "Look what we have done for our Tibetan compatriots! We have given them a railway, hundreds of thousands of new Han neighbours, tourism, shopping malls, and karaoke! These are all part of the glory of our great Chinese civilisation under the generous rule of the wise Party. It is incredible that they are not totally content with life, as we all are."

 It was the karaoke that did it for me. Talk about a splittist headache.

 

Compiled by

Roger Beaumont

The Nation