Monday, May 24, 2010

DSIL's Meditation Retreat: Or, How I Learned to Quit Thinking and Accept the Pain

One thing I decidedly am not is: flexible.

My body is stiffer than a two-by-four in a blizzard. Despite a brief dalliance with yoga, I have hips as creaky as the rusted hinges of a neglected gate, ankles that pop when I flex them, and a thrice-operated-upon knee that’s about as stable as a house of cards hastily erected in the drafty attic of a dilapidated San Francisco guesthouse perched precisely on the San Andreas Fault. Like Dennis Kucinich’s stature or Sarah Palin’s command of the English language, the rigidity of my lower body is a glaring, crippling liability.

And no position (outside the baroque postures of Rodney Yee’s Advanced Yoga instructional video series) poses my balky legs more problems than sitting cross-legged. Good ol’ Indian Style, preferred position of kindergarten story-times and campfire sing-alongs the world over. Second nature for most sitters, and a torturous contortion for Yours Truly.

Scrunching my legs beneath me is like trying to refold a gigantic AAA roadmap: the kind where, baffled, you spread it across the steering wheel and scrutinize the recondite chessboard of creases until the air conditioner blows the thing up into your face and you flap it around your head like a fucking accordion and you’re traveling 97 mph on the wrong side of the highway while being assaulted by a paper pterodactyl, and finally you just wad the map into a ball and shove it in the glove compartment and fishtail back onto your side of the road seconds before you would’ve been pancaked by an 18-wheeler. That’s what trying to sit cross-legged is like for me.

So, one thing I’m decidedly not cut out for is: meditation.

I could’ve predicted this, but confirmation came courtesy of a recent DSIL staff meditation retreat, a three-day process involving lectures from a monk, numerous breaches of Thai etiquette, and so much sitting cross-legged that I feared that my coworkers would have to bear me back to Bangkok on a divan, my legs frozen in permanent pretzel.

***

Most people pursue meditation to heighten spirituality, achieve mental clarity, or score hippie chicks; but the fruit that the Darunsikkhalai School of Innovative Learning apparently expected the retreat to bear were more pragmatic. Our school, you see, is run by ex-businessmen with little background in education. Therefore, when the school’s owner announced the retreat, he did so through a plenitude of charts and graphs dubiously demonstrating that companies used regular meditation to increase worker productivity – and profits. Far from pursuing nirvana, we would be meditating to boost revenue! (Or the educational equivalent: improved standardized test scores, I guess.)

This, to me, seemed somehow inimical to the spirit of meditation… but who was I, an unenlightened Westerner who can’t even sit on the floor for five minutes without setting off fireworks in his patellar meniscus, to pass judgment on what was or was not in keeping with said spirit? So I went.

***

The retreat took place at a hotel. The hotel, inexplicably, was situated at the heart of a gigantic tapioca plantation.

I didn’t know much about tapioca before the retreat (besides that it was the key and titular ingredient in a barely-palatable pudding), and I still don’t. At least I realize now that it comes from umbrella-shaped plants with shiny, yellow-splotched leaves – I’d always imagined tapioca pudding sludge being siphoned out of, like, a peat bog or a tar pit or something.


Who knew?

The plantation was stark: endless rows of churned clay either bristled with scraggly tapioca plants or stood barren, raw and red like the earth’s exposed flesh. Stagnant, murky puddles that you could just tell served as mosquito larvae nurseries dotted the tilled land. The farm was immense, miles in diameter. I abandoned the secret aspirations of escape that I’d been harboring. I had a hard time imagining who the hotel’s clientele was: maybe it typically served as a conference center for meetings of the agrarian minds. The complex itself was nice enough, but if you’ve seen a gated Floridian golf course community, you can imagine: palm trees, spiky grass crawling with red ants, a cloudy little water hazard, cottages with red sloping roofs. The biggest novelty was that the cottages were dubbed “Tapiocasas.”

Forty-two teachers showed up to the first meditation class wearing white shirts and dark slacks, customary meditation attire.* (The white represents purity and cleanliness; needless to say, I spent three days splashing luminous curry broths on myself.) We filed into a frigidly air-conditioned conference room and sat down on blue velvety cushions – forty-one of us immediately and effortlessly assuming proper cross-legged positions, and one lonely dissenter with legs stretched and crossed before him in heedless defiance.

*Besides reasons of symbolism, you also wear white to avoid distracting your fellow meditators. This precept seems reasonable, but uniform whiteness isn’t always a guarantor of non-distraction: one of the instructors, a woman named Ploy, wore a sparkling white shirt with the word Freak printed in huge green letters. This shirt proved an immense diversion, as my flighty mind wasted untold minutes pondering what the illegible fine print below Freak could possibly read. I’m guessing …in the bed. (Incidentally, Ploy’s shirt was the latest example of my favorite phenomenon in this country: Thai people wearing shirts that bear bizarre, perverted, or nonsensical English slogans. I can only wonder if they know what the slogans mean; I usually suspect not. I once traveled with a tour guide whose t-shirt declared, “I’d rather be smorting cocaine off a hooker’s ass.” Yep, smorting. With an M.

***

The monk who led the retreat turned out to be quite the character. Far from the taciturn figures of stolid piety I’d encountered in the past, this man was animated, wise-cracking, and, thanks to years of education in Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, surprisingly Western in speech and attitude. He spoke excellent English, and he delighted in telling stories about his secular past – about his years as a university student hell-bent on pleasing his father, about his time as an economist and banker, and, with the most relish, about some “nighttime outings” that sounded distinctly unmonastic in nature.

But although learning of the monk’s tribulations provided some human-interest value, I was expecting him to deliver the philosophical and spiritual goods. In that regard, I was disappointed. His monologues were familiar and blandly aphoristic: topics included disavowing materialism, self-identification and labeling, and self-acceptance. As Elise cynically but succinctly put it, “If he’d been wearing a suit instead of orange robes, we could’ve been at a self-help seminar.” (Cinematic analogs include Obi Wan-Kenobi and Greg Kinnear's character in Little Miss Sunshine.)


A heretical comparison? Maybe not. (Also, this is actually not the monk who led the retreat... but, you know, all those guys in orange robes...)


Although he framed his talks as ‘inquiries,’ they were almost totally one-sided; instead of sparking dialogue, his questions were leading and mostly rhetorical. (“Should you identify with your Mercedes Benz and your Rolex or with the person inside?”) He had a rubbery, emotive face, and every time he posed a Life Coach-ish query or recited a maxim, his mug stretched into this pop-eyed expression of joyous disbelief, as though he’d inadvertently stumbled upon the secret to lasting happiness and wanted to be sure that we were sharing the revelation. He was congenial enough, and I liked him, but nothing he said came close to rocking my mental boat.

When we weren’t absorbing treacly wisdom, we were meditating. Sitting cross-legged proved as untenable as I expected. Thanks to my intractable hips, I couldn’t sit in true knee-touching-the-floor butterfly posture; my legs kept popping back up like squeezed-and-released bedsprings. And thanks to my balky knees, I couldn’t even maintain that half-assed facsimile of Indian style for more than a few minutes before my tendons began to twang like plucked banjo strings. I was constantly fidgeting, readjusting, complaining. The first time we attempted meditation, I almost instantly attracted a small crowd of instructors and well-wishers offering me advice* about how to sustain a proper meditative posture, their frustration deepening as I failed to heed their suggestions: “Relax your hips… Breathe deeply…. Not that deeply… Okay, now a little more deeply… Straighten your back… Don’t be rigid… Why don’t you just breathe normally?” Through it all, I was in orthopedic agony, pain that proved incompatible with maintaining proper breathing rates.

*I knew I could count on the monk for a meaningless shibboleth or two, and he didn’t disappoint. His words of wisdom: “Instead of thinking about what the pain should be, or what you want the pain to be, or what you hope the pain to be, accept the pain for what it is.” Cue eyes widening, brows rising, toothy grin broadening as though he’d just given me the formula for turning lima beans into M&Ms.

Now, among the first culture mores you learn upon arriving in Thailand is that one should never, ever, under any circumstances, point one’s foot at another human being. I don’t know why, exactly, but doing so is gravely disrespectful, an act of appalling insolence and insult that only a truly uncouth, ill-mannered lout would ever be thoughtless and/or malicious enough to perpetrate.

Of course, every time I crossed and uncrossed and recrossed my legs in desperate search of a comfortable position, I was inadvertently pointing my bare, calloused, broken-toenailed, size-15 dogs directly at the monk.

This faux pas was brought to my attention by the audible gasp that escaped from my Thai co-teachers whenever I twitched, the kind of not-quite-stifled exhalation of shocked embarrassment that was probably breathed by millions of puritans during Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. I was, it seemed, bringing deep dishonor to DSIL whenever I moved a muscle. Eventually I was pointedly asked to sit elsewhere, so that my enormous feet would direct their toxic insults away from the holy guy.* The ignominy!

*While the Thai teachers were stunned, appalled, etc., I’d like to point out that the monk didn’t seem to notice that I was dissing him; or if he noticed, didn’t give a shit. Or at least his saccharine patter wasn’t affected. Which, I mean, good for him.

***

Even in the best of times, I might not have been able to sustain three days of meditation. But Bangkok, as any person who’s lately picked up a newspaper knows, is not enduring the best of times.

Wednesday, May 19 was the first day of the meditation retreat, and the climactic day of Thailand’s ongoing political conflict. The Thai military finally followed through on its threats of a crackdown, invading Ratchaprasong Square, where the Red Shirt protestors had amassed. Although the Red leaders surrendered, the radical Red fringe went nuts, burning thirty-six buildings in downtown Bangkok, including the nation’s largest shopping mall, before finally being quelled. (Weirdly, a lot of the most violent rebels weren’t Red Shirts at all, but Black Shirts – the term for politically unaffiliated rabble-rousers who seemed to exploit the breakdown of law in Bangkok as an opportunity to act out anarchical fantasies.)


A Thai soldier subdues a Red Shirt.

Although the government suppressed the protesters within 24 hours, we had little way of knowing what was happening in Bangkok during the isolation of the retreat. We clustered around the TVs in our hotel rooms, trying to parse scraps of news from the disquieting cycle of images, most of them involving some edifice being swallowed by flames – or if not that, then Red Shirts operating grenade launchers; or casualties, perhaps corpses, being toted away on stretchers; etc…

Then, sometime Wednesday afternoon, most of the TV stations mysteriously malfunctioned: live feeds were replaced by test patterns and the national anthem on repeat. Classic disaster movie cliché. We imagined the worst: Bangkok razed, thousands dead, enraged and machine-gun-toting rebels tearing through the streets. Many of my co-teachers were unable to contact their friends and family. I began to plot my escape from Thailand. Only later did we learn that, though the TV stations’ power sources had been destroyed, most of Bangkok was still intact, and that the uprising had effectively been put down – for now, at least*.

*I’m still trying to decide how to feel about the Red Shirts being so thoroughly vanquished. Their cause isn’t unjust, and the government committed some real atrocities during the standoff, often using excessive force. But the Red Shirts’ methods were equally barbaric, if not more so, and I never quite cottoned to rooting for terrorists. And then there’s the fact that the end of the protests means a dramatically increased quality of life for moi, in that I can now go almost fearlessly into downtown Bangkok again. I’m glad, selfishly, to see it end, but I also hope that the Reds someday accomplish their aims – next time, non-violently.

Anyway, in the middle of this chaos and uncertainty, we were whisked away from our TVs by the unyielding demands of the retreat’s schedule. If you can clear your mind when your own city is in flames, you’re made of sterner mental mettle than I am. I struggled to forget the conflict raging just a few hours from our bucolic tapioca paradise, and just a few miles from my apartment. Focusing on the synchronized movements of my breath and navel proved beyond the powers of my distractible mind. To my surprise, though, most of my Thai co-teachers seemed remarkably sanguine (at least compared to us distressed English teachers). Either they knew something we didn’t, or they felt the numb faith in Bangkok’s ultimate invincibility that comes with having lived safely in a place for a long time. (Think: the people who stayed in their homes on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens.)

Regardless, the next couple of days vindicated the Thai teachers’ nonchalance, as the fighting died down and the TV networks were resuscitated. Even so, my concentration never recovered.

***

What with the formulaic talks and the pain of meditation, I don’t think I got a whole lot out of the retreat (aside, that is, from a renewed appreciation for tapioca). There were times when I thought I was maybe on the verge of a breakthrough, when I nearly managed to tune out all external stimuli and extraneous thoughts, when I was conscious of the pain in my legs without allowing my mind to be its captive. I think I came to understand why meditation is valuable for other people*.

*I suspect that sitting meditation may never be for me, but I also maintain that physical activities can be equally meditative: I’ve always found that a special focus comes over me while running or biking; I grow attentive to the movements of my body to the exclusion of all other thoughts, and often – especially while biking – find myself miles from my place of origin without realizing that any time had elapsed. That, to me, seems like the kind of utter mindfulness (manifesting itself as absent-mindedness) that seated meditation is aiming for.


I probably 'meditated' more successfully in Glacier National Park last summer than I did at any point during the retreat.

Mostly, though, I felt restless, and my leg muscles tighter than tennis racquet catgut, and by the third day the weather was too nice and my mind too errant to stay seated in a small, crowded, air-conditioned room, and Elise and I wound up wandering the grounds amongst the Tapiocasas. And that, I think the monk would’ve said (if he hadn’t been sleeping serenely in his armchair), was okay too.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

A Layman's Explanation of Thailand's Political Situation

Bangkok, of late, has been jarred by political turmoil, and I’ve received a handful of emails inquiring after my safety. In response to these missives, I’m dusting off the keyboard to offer an appraisal of the situation. (Since conditions here are evolving rapidly, this post may well be obsolete by the time you read it; I've already had to revise it extensively in response to sudden developments.) Hopefully those friends worried about my well-being will be mollified, those who’ve been incommunicado will remain silently sanguine, and both groups will have a better idea of what's happening in my adoptive nation.

***

Thailand is dominated by two political parties: the Red Shirts and the Yellow Shirts. The Reds are, almost universally, poor, rural, agrarian – a sort of pastoral proletariat. The Yellows are urban (read: Bangkokian) and wealthy and white-collar*. The conflict, then, isn’t just Red v. Yellow, but Rich v. Poor, and Bangkok v. The Rest of Thailand.

* Thai political parties’ compositions seem to me much less diverse than American parties’. Within America’s Democratic Party, for example, limousine liberals from New England rub ideological elbows with poor blacks in Oakland; the Republican Party unites even stranger bedfellows (which births logical fallacies like uninsured Texans universally despising health care reform). Thailand’s parties, perhaps due to the country’s comparative ethnic homogeneity, aren’t nearly so jumbled in constitution; so, while the above descriptions might be overly simplified, I think they’re apt enough.

Until recently, Thailand’s Prime Minister was a man named Taksin (like Cher, he needs no second name), a businessman and politician as Red as they come. During his stint in office, Taksin passed a litany of policies that benefitted his poor, rural constituency: for example, he dramatically improved access to affordable health care (the baseline cost for a visit to a Thai hospital is something like $1.50), and granted farmers generous subsidies. As PM he was, by all accounts, a champion of the lower classes.

But the primary beneficiary of Taksin’s term was – surprise, surprise – Taksin. Prior to becoming PM he owned Shin Satellite Corporation, a company that builds (you were expecting?) satellites. Instead of dropping this conflict-of-interest business holding upon taking office, Taksin (perhaps taking his cue from Dick Cheney) remained head of Shin, and proceeded to shamelessly line his own pockets. To name one infraction among many, he granted a sizable loan to Myanmar on Thailand’s behalf, expressly so that Myanmar could purchase goods from Shin. The upshot was that Taksin, who’d entered office a billionaire, was soon able to stick the prefix multi- at the front of that sobriquet*.

*One of the stranger things about the Color War for me personally is that it’s very hard to know whom to support – a weird feeling, after years of loathing an irrefutably despicable Republican nemesis. My instinct is to side with the poor farmers and cheap health insurance, and thus the Red Shirts; but my other equally reflexive instinct is to side against corrupt politicians, and thus against Taksin, whom I find slimy and exploitative. This fight isn’t being waged under familiar terms, and so I’ve stayed more or less unaffiliated, in the vain hope that one party or another will seize the moral high ground. At first it was thrilling, being here during an epoch of percolating political change, and I was pulling hard for the Reds; but since those heady early days my esteem for them has dissipated, and as the death toll has mounted I just find myself wishing that the struggle would end. I’m basically a glorified tourist here anyway, and my interest in Thai politics is dilettantish, and to choose and staunchly support a side when I’m so poorly informed and have so little at stake feels frivolous.


Taksin, looking as ruthlessly savvy and politically calculating as ever.

Taksin didn’t see his term through, however, because, like many a corrupt and autocratic ruler before him, he was victimized by a coup. I’m a little hazy on the details of how/why this happened, but basically the Thai army swept in and bloodlessly removed Taksin from power*, installing as PM the mellifluously named Abhisit Vejjajiva, who continues to rule, albeit shakily, to this day.

*The deposed Taksin escaped Thailand, and, after an ill-fated stop in Cambodia, is floating around in exile. I’m not too certain of where he’s squirreled away – Dubai, I think.

But though Taksin is out of sight, he is by no means out of mind. Far from it: the Yellow Shirt govt has prosecuted the banished ex-PM vigorously, first indicting him on charges of corruption and then, in mid-March, confiscating his ill-gotten gains. Forty-six billion Bath (Thai currency unit) worth of gains, to be precise, or $1.5 billion. Before you bend bow across a tiny violin in lamentation of Taksin’s loss, bear in mind that he still has over a billion dollars in the bank, and is probably sunning himself on a palm tree-shaped island or coasting down an indoor ski hill or freebasing caviar or whatever extravagant things people do with themselves in Dubai.

And this is why Taksin gives me the creeps: while he’s enjoying steaks and blowjobs paid for by his Saudi sheikh friends, his constituents, the people whom he’s riled up and summoned from Chiang-Mai to wage his battle, are camped out on the streets and fighting and dying on his behalf. Because for some reason, the Red Shirts – many of whom can’t rub two nickels together – took the seizure of Taksin’s assets as like a huge personal affront. Shortly after the government announced the ruling, now over two months ago, Red Shirts began pouring en masse into the city, preparing to wreak havoc. But why should the Taksin ruling incense the Reds so badly? Why do these impoverished farmers give a shit about whether a billionaire loses an extra billion? Truthfully, I don’t know. To me, though, it smacks of rhetoric and manipulation and obfuscation: Taksin has so inflated his own legend as Champion of the People and Defender of the Little Guy that his backers are willing to die for him, even though he’s (pretty transparently) interested only in himself*.

*When pressed, the Red Shirt attitude about their hero’s malfeasances is, Yeah, he’s corrupt, but so is every other politician in this country, and if we made a big deal about this kind of thing we’d never have anybody in office.

Of course, the Reds aren’t up in arms solely over Taksin’s financial loss; the confiscation of assets was merely the proverbial camel-straw. Their real objective is to get Taksin back in office. The Red Shirts’ argument – and it’s a fair one – is that Vajjejjiva wasn’t democratically elected, but militarily and unconstitutionally installed, and that the government needs to permit elections ASAP. Taksin would certainly win such an election in a landslide.

To that end (i.e., getting Taksin back in power), Red Shirt protestors have continuously occupied strategic sectors of Bangkok for the last two months*. They poured in from the Northern provinces by various forms of ad hoc transportation – pick-up trucks, tractors, bicycles, feet – in significant numbers (though just how significant is hard to say, since the Reds claim they’re 500,000 strong, and the Yellow government puts the figure closer to 5,000). They came with pickets, with banners, with bullhorns, and – a recent and alarming revelation – grenades.

*None of which sectors are near my quiet and isolated suburb, I should add, which has remained unaffected and will continue to remain unaffected, and as long as I’m not a total idiot and go out and screw around near known Red territory, I’m totally safe. Sure, my movements have been slightly restricted, but never once have I felt endangered.

Their aims, as I understand them, are twofold: they seek, first, a democratically elected Prime Minister; and second, they wish to dissolve parliament. The Reds initially pursued these goals through nonviolent means – speechifying, clogging traffic and public transit, generally inconveniencing and irritating people by making it hard to get between points A and B. But when these docile measures got them nowhere, their actions turned more pernicious.

The Red Shirt action that seemed to escalate tensions from ‘simmering’ to ‘boiling over,’ that lent these previously benign demonstrations a deeply disturbing cast, occurred in late March. To wit: the Reds collected blood from their supporters and used it as artillery, hurling it on government buildings and officials*. (A large quantity of the blood later proved HIV-positive, making the whole thing much creepier and more malicious.)

*Somehow it wasn’t the action itself that was so sinister, but the threat of the action: the drenching was well-publicized beforehand, and the red-puddled, rust-smelling, spattered downtown crafted by my imagination (blood churning in the gutters like slow lava, viscous red drops coming off the eaves, the whole city echoing with falling liquid as in a cave) was far more powerful to me than the actual consummation of the act, which proved actually not very graphic. It was the mental image of Bangkok as gory war zone that did more than anything to convince me of the Red Shirts’ seriousness, and of the situation’s gravity.


Red Shirts spill blood as riot police look on.

Since that incident, the protests have intensified and contorted and blackened; they have turned horrifying and terrifying and everybody in this city wishes desperately that they would end. The army has been called upon to contain the protests, yet they’ve done far more exacerbating than ameliorating. Deaths are sporadic but not uncommon: three killed when a grenade struck a subway stop; a soldier slain by a bullet through the eye (for some reason the ‘through the eye’ bit was never once tastefully omitted when this story broke, and for some reason that detail makes the soldier’s slaying even more appalling – I picture, always, the kid that Tim O’Brien kills in The Things They Carried, the star-shaped bullet wound obliterating, too, that VC’s eye). The worst carnage, by far, occurred in early April, when twenty-one Red Shirts and soldiers were killed.

It’s never clear, when the Red Shirts and the army come to blows, who exactly the initiator is. Whenever troops and demonstrators have historically clashed, the military seems the aggressor – eg., the Boston Massacre and the Vietnam protests in DC and Tienenman (sp?) Square. And it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of nervous trigger-happy soldiers, youthful and combat-untested, bearing assault-rifles and an inflated, govt-promoted sense of the Reds’ combustibility/weaponry, firing the first shots.

At the same time, there’s some sinister and sober quality to the Red Shirts – it’s maybe the grim strength of their convictions, the life-or-death import of the protests for them (that they’ve persisted despite heavy casualties is both admirable and awful), their willingness to do evil and batshit-crazy things like dumping blood on people and firing grenades onto crowded train platforms – that makes me think that maybe they’re actually the instigators, the first-stone-throwers. After all, they have an incentive to make this conflict a violent one. Every day of the Red Shirt occupation is a financial catastrophe for Thailand. The nation’s economy relies heavily on tourism, and not surprisingly tourism has etiolated during the protests; Thailand’s GDP takes a measurable hit with each Red sunrise. So the more dangerous the country appears, the more imperative it is that the conflict resolves itself, and the more likely (the thinking perhaps goes) that Vajjejjiva will cave and give the Reds what they want.

***

The Red Shirts’ political passion, the immutable willpower that keeps them in Bangkok despite heavy losses, is awe-inspiring and kind of shaming for me. Shaming in that they care about their cause more than I can imagine myself caring about any cause, ever. It’s clear to them now that their lives are at constant risk, yet their numbers have not appreciably decreased; they are not cowed by the possibility of death.

I don’t mean this reverentially: their methods are strange and cruel and their desperation scares me. They’re probably in the right, but they’re impossible to root for. I mean, rather, that their passion is awesome (in the real sense of that word), and that my own convictions feel milquetoast by comparison.

A not-so-far-fetched scenario: if George Bush had fabricated a war right before the end of his second term and exploited a constitutional loophole and, for the ostensible good of the nation, remained in executive power for a third term: would I have risked my life protesting that? Would I have occupied Washington DC for months, under fire from the National Guard, even as my fellow protestors were cut down around me? Would you have? I suspect I wouldn’t have. I would’ve held a picket sign; I would’ve marched circles around the Lincoln Memorial, I would’ve written strongly-worded letters to congressmen and editors and all the other traditional recipients of strongly-worded letters. I would’ve gotten arrested, I think. I would’ve chained myself to the front bumper of the presidential motorcade. But I wouldn’t have let myself be killed, or even put myself in a situation where death was at all a possibility. No way.

And that, I suppose, is the difference between the privileged and the un-. When I get sick, the private health insurance that my family and I can afford foots the bill, no matter how extravagant the treatment. When a Red Shirt got sick before Taksin, he couldn’t afford even the hospital stay, and he died. No wonder, then, that the Reds view a lower-class-friendly government as a matter of life or death. Wealth is insulation against political change. My yuppie brethren and I aren’t going to be drafted to fight in Iraq, or have to fall back on welfare, or rely the asphalt-laying jobs provided by a stimulus plan. My quality of life won’t be much different under Barack Obama than it was under GWB. I am, therefore, anesthetized. That’s why I – and most people, I bet, in my comparatively filthy-rich homeland – don’t possess the Red Shirts’ fuck-everything courage. We don’t have as much at stake.


Red Shirt protesters on the march.

***

So the whole sad frightening mess has dragged on, as implacable and slow-moving as WWI-style trench warfare, each side making microscopic tactical gains and sustaining equally minute damage, not much, really, happening besides the senseless loss of life. A massive military crushing of the Red Shirts was rumored for weeks, and the prospect of such a savage denouement was alarming – the Reds’ reaction to an incursion could well have been not dispersal, but civil war. A violent climax to the conflict seemed inevitable.

And then, only yesterday (after I’d written the above post and come to a gloomy conclusion about the said inevitability of violence), the Red Shirts appeared to turn the attritional tide decisively in their favor: PM Vajjejjiva agreed to disband parliament and hold elections in November. That’s a remarkable turnaround, considering that elections are a radical step, and obviously inimical to Vajjejjiva’s interests. There are still details to be hashed out – the Red Shirts want elections much sooner than Vajjejjiva’s willing to hold them – but it appears that a truce may be coalescing.

It’s too early, I think, to declare the conflict ended; although both sides appear to have finally tired of brutality, I don’t trust either’s sudden magnanimity. But if, in fact, Thailand is out of the woods, I wonder how that rewrites the last two months. Is violence that a week ago seemed senseless abruptly justified? Now that the Red Shirts have emerged as putative victors, and the bloody rigmarole has yielded a righteous and noble solution, should I look more kindly upon the protestors? Democracy has won (or at least is winning) out; why, then, does this conclusion not feel triumphant? Perhaps because the methods through which this triumph was achieved are reprehensible: the product is admirable but the process deplorable. Posterity will tell us whether the ends justified the means.