Conquered, as if of no use, hands flying everywhere as he sank back into his own flesh, the subsequent days, the corporal punishment, the little boy with his hand out stretched in the freezing cold, waiting to be caned, the injustice perpetrated against unwilling spirits, what did it mean? That in the dank Asian heat the flesh was master? My wife, the coffee man points out as he gestures proudly at a good looking woman working at the front of the restaurant and making a two fingered explanation, we sleep side by side. He had watched him earlier, his not quite cocky but happy walk, and had thought: that man is happily married, happy with his life. How many children he asked in a mixture of hand gestures and English and broken Thai. Five, came the reply. Five! He expressed astonishment, she did not look like a woman with five children, and they laughed in a mixture of pride and amusement. While skinny, perhaps Aids ridden rent boys lie sprawled on hotel beds; and the tragedy that had stalked so many of his friends, so many waking hours, dissipated in a city enfolding in and over itself, new buildings, new lives, new streets, construction everyhwere.
He walked late at night through what used to be the commercial heart of Bangkok, the glistening high end malls that ran for what seemed like miles, Centralworld, Siam Paragon, these places where you could walk in and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and no one would think it was terribly unusual. He was crippled and in disguise. Headaches, sometimes feeling exactly like hangovers, dissipated; but his body ached and he knew, in some strange way, these were the days to enjoy himself, Rip van Winkle at the end of time, for life is fragile and the sweeping city scapes, so astonishingly beautiful, so futuristic, the finely designed architecture of the high rise buildings; these euphoric moments, of appreciation, delight, congress, all of it could so easily disappear. A lonely death. A silent dream. A place in the heart where there was no one left. So he picked his way through the sleeping red shirts, occupying the terrace walkways which connected the malls to the public transport system, and knew, knew as if by magic with a feeling of joy prickling through the substance of everything, that this was history in the making. He had never seen anything like it.
The embassies had all issued travel warnings. More than 20 people had been killed so far. And yet this was the place he wanted to be, under the concrete buttresses of the sky train, the declamatory tones of a typically long winded speech from a red shirt leader being played on screens set up in the street. As he made a populist point cheers would break out; and even down the terrace walk ways amongst the hundreds of sleeping bodies little groups would cheer and clack their clackers when a point particularly pleased them. Protestors cheered outside the Louis Vutton shop. Avatar at IMAX, advertised the sign at Siam Paragon. But no one was going to see anything. How could they move against so many people? The government was in serious trouble, had a serious problem on its hands, and he was picking through someone else's fight. They were friendly. He wanted to march with them. And even in the massage parlour earlier red was everywhere. Thehy were so good at the come on. It was a different story when they got home.
Western men told stories of their exploits. I'm just going to get a blow job from one of my favourites on the way home, Bangkok's version of Jack Nicholson declared cheerfully, waving goodbye with a grin from ear to ear. What had once seemed so astonishingly strange, balancing on the back of a moto as he was whisked from the station at Om Nut to his cheap hotel on Soi 97 had become the norm. Breakfast in the markets, which used to take him back to Asia 40 years ago, was now just the norm. Familiar scapes, familiar lies, a dance of wanton death and sad destruction, lives cut short, as if God himself was stalking the deviates, as if the Christians had been right all along. It wasn't going to be this way. They turned their head at any genuine affection. Old now, old, European, these marked days had become familiar. He watched the so so fat middle aged queen with his astonishingly handsome boyfriend sitting at the Balcony. They were still there at 1am, when he cycled back through the web of sois that was Patpong, Bangkok's original red light district.
There wasn't much point, of course, having such a handsome handbag if you couldn't show it off; and he knew in a single glance exactly the dynamic; and could even guess the price, the relationship, the long time pleasures and the short term pain, and could guess the compromises that boy had made to be there, keeping this man company, his dreams fulfilled, his wallet slowly draining. He caught the boy's eye in a micro-second of misjudgement, hedidn't mean to stare, and they both knew instantly what the other knew; crompromises indeed. Money talks. Yes, there's a different attitude to prostitution here. Yes, in those kind days and kind nights, comfortabe hotels andshowers of gifts, there was some satisfaction, if not desire. But they were far away from anywhere, far away from family, far away from the village; and here in a place where every interaction was fast and spoilt, swishy boys trolled for rich clients, those astonishing looks had bought him a space that few would actually want, company that few could stand, sex that few could muster. We were a dying fall. We were grace executed. We were a swan song of a life badly lived. And then the sewerage overflowed in the crowded street; and the rank sweet dank smell permeated through the crowds of the watchers and the watched; The Telephone, The Balcony; and later, later, the sweetest dreams would be exposed as nothing but illusions with their own rank smells destroying all pretence.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/world/europe/20ash.html?src=me
PARIS — European transport ministers announced a plan to begin easing the ban on aviation traffic around the Continent by Tuesday, but only after a barrage of criticism that the European Union had failed a fresh test of leadership.
The easing could begin to unravel the gridlock that many rate as the worst peacetime air travel disruption, a nearly weeklong halt in flights that stranded tens of thousands and cost airlines hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yet even if the ash spewed across European skies by a volcano in Iceland begins to dissipate soon, the region is grappling with a new blow to its ability to act decisively during an emergency. That is a problem that has plagued it repeatedly as it has struggled to manage swine flu, the financial crisis and the problem of Greek debt.
Most noisily, the head of the International Air Transport Association said before the announcement of a partial lifting of the aviation ban on Monday that “the decision Europe has made is with no risk assessment, no consultation, no coordination, no leadership.” The industry group’s director general and chief executive, Giovanni Bisignani, went further, saying that the crisis is a “European embarrassment” and “a European mess.”
It took five days to organize a first conference call of the European transport ministers, Mr. Bisignani said, and with 750,000 passengers stranded, “Does it make sense?”
His words struck home with many. But given that the European Union does not control European airspace, a responsibility that rests with each individual country, some suggested that Mr. Bisignani was being a little too harsh — but only a little.
Jean Quatremer, the European Union correspondent for the French newspaper Libération, said the situation seemed “inexplicable to outsiders, that the Europe Union should regulate the size of peas but not the E.U. airspace.”
Under Monday’s agreement, the aviation authorities would carve airspace above the Continent into three zones: one closest to the volcano that would completely restrict air traffic; another zone that would set up partial restrictions on flights; and a third zone, free of ash, where flights could resume completely.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2877093.htm
The weeks of popular protests by thousands of red-shirted demonstrators in the centre of Bangkok reached a critical stage on the late Saturday evening of 10 April 2010. At that point, Thailand's state-security forces began a crackdown against those who had gathered under the banner of the United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD). A longstanding political crisis that has divided Thais into bitterly opposed camps has now become a national tragedy.
The immediate crisis had been escalating since mid-March 2010, when tens of thousands of members of the increasingly heterogeneous UDD began their takeover of the streets of Bangkok. The red-bedecked activists from all over Thailand carried their tents, sleeping-mats and food supplies into the area around the high-rent shopping-district of the Rajprasong intersection. The red-shirts' political representatives held intermittent talks with the government of Thailand's prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva; but these broke down in the first days of April, and the protestors then vowed to stay in place until the parliament was dissolved and new elections announced.
The crackdown was launched three days after Abhisit declared a state of emergency, which provided the government with broad powers of arrest, censorship, and suspension of civil liberties. Among the first measures taken was the blocking or closure of independent media, including thirty-six websites; the popular bilingual news-site Prachatai was one of those affected.
This prepared the ground for the more stringent actions on Bangkok's bloody Saturday night: the use of water-cannons, tear-gas, and ultimately live ammunition to force the red-shirts off the streets. At the time of writing, twenty-one people are reported to have been killed (sixteen protestors, four soldiers, and a Japanese journalist), and over 800 injured. Abhisit Vejjajiva insists that soldiers were permitted to use live bullets only to shoot into the air or in self-defence, though the nature of the deaths and wounds inflicted on many protestors casts some doubt on this statement.
Thus the uneasy peace that had prevailed amid the popular tumult on Bangkok's streets has been broken. Thailand now peers into the abyss. But whatever the outcome of the clash between people and state, a profound and little-remarked political transformation continues to unfold.
