Here's my belated
Happy New Year to you all, but 2014 is picking up where 2013 left off. Which
means, if you were able to celebrate the countdown at all, welcome straight
back to the eternal political nightmare. And forget the usual "Fasten your
seat-belts" cliche. Assume crash position, people.
So, whose shoes would
you want to be in now? Yingluck Shinawatra's and you could become a lame-duck
prime minister at best and another political exile at worst. Suthep
Thaugsuban's and you would be treading that super-thin line separating hero
from traitor, the latter with a "lunatic" label and a mountain of
legal problems to contend with. Tarit Pengdit's might be a good choice if you
fancy playing a two-headed spy whom nobody trusts.
Thaksin Shinawatra's
could leave you exasperated but philosophical about what money can and cannot
do. Abhisit Vejjajiva's and you would be wondering how you went from a
political whiz kid to a man maligned by the foreign media and someone barely
hanging onto the helm of your political party. Adul Saengsingkaew's would make
you curse your teachers for not being thorough on "serve and
protect".
Sukhumbhand
Paribatra's and the "Bangkok shutdown" would tear your conscience
apart. Prayuth Chan-ocha's and you would want everybody to leave you alone, but
would probably start to believe their assumption that you were up to something.
Jatuporn Prompan's and you would be torn between the raw urge to smack them all
and the fear of that backfiring badly. And despite being considerably wealthy,
he, Nuttawut Saikua, Arisman Pongruangrong and the likes have all but kissed
"middle-class" shopping malls goodbye. So if you love Starbucks,
don't choose their shoes.
How about the local
media's? You would be taking sides, or accused of taking sides. The foreign
media are no better off. In their shoes you would be chided for having blind
faith in Athens-era democracy. You would be asked why you overlook certain
things while similar things committed by the other side made you scream from
the top of your lungs in protest.
You might like to be
in whistle-makers' shoes, or election campaign poster-makers'. They are
smiling, obviously, although their products are serving absolutely contrasting
purposes. If you were Thaksin's strategists or lobbyists, you would probably be
laughing, too. Crises are making them indispensable. Not only is he unlikely to
change horses in midstream, he will also make sure the horses are well-fed.
Who else is
chuckling? If you want to be happy, the shoes of Singapore's or Vietnam's leaders
are the place. With the launch of the Asean Economic Community just around the
corner, surely they cannot believe their luck. A joke is already doing the
rounds about Thailand's hoped-for role in the economic bloc: "How will the
Thais lead regional integration when they don't even know who should lead
them?"
Some Thais say they
can't wait to vote. Be in their shoes and you would find out that you would not
actually be voting for your own benefit, but for something that makes you think
you are voting for your benefit. The same goes for those boycotting the
election. Be in their shoes and you would be full of the kind of ambivalence
that haunts that woman in the "Phantom of the Opera".
The election
commissioners are being threatened with imprisonment, and so are many other
people. Therefore, you wouldn't want to be in their shoes, apparently.
Political Facebookers look cool, but if you hate "unfriending" or
being "unfriended", you don't want to be them. Remember this:
"Likes" never mean you are "right"; they only mean you are
lucky that Facebook doesn't have a "dislike" button.
The same goes for
bloggers. In fact, the same goes for every "We know better"
individual, whose shoes you might not want to be in. Compliments come cheap in
the Thai political divide, so for every "thumbs up", who knows how
many "thumbs down" are out there?
It can be fun to be
in trolls' shoes. But then again, if you weren't paid you could get bored
quickly. This is not taking anything away from resolute lone warriors out
there, though. You would have a sense of purpose being them. That's one of the
few good things about the Thai crisis. It has preoccupied many souls.
With January 13, the
Bangkok shutdown day, approaching, you might want to own a 7-Eleven store.
Stuff should fly off the shelves this weekend. You would get a good business
head-start for 2014. It's funny, isn't it? 7-Eleven, emptied during the 2011
flood disaster and the political violence a year earlier, is set to be raided
again. And all because humans, no matter how ideologically different they think
they are, have to eat.