The Way Of All Contempt

*

In this way, in the way of all contempt, in the way in which fathers and mothers cared for their children, in the way of poor households on the edge of Thai rivers, ways of life reaching back thousands of years. I am old now, 24, ugly, not many customer take me, the boy complained. I still have to go to work or pay the bar 400 baht. I see you that first day, when you take my friend. For the family, he said, handing over more baht. The stories were legion. He had heard them all but nothing stopped him falling into the same old traps. He didn't realise until he was in the gold shop that the boy was expecting him to spend a thousand dollars on gold jewellery for him; and that that had been the point of the entire exercise. Not to get matching rings. Not to get some token of their relationship. Just pure, simple, grasping greed. I am sorry, he said, later, I apologise, pointing out the words in the dictionary, but it was all too late. He had woken up. He would never look at him the same again. That was the cruel disposition. You think someone would love you just for you? Don't be ridiculous. Someone would take care, "take cae" as had entered the Thai language, just for love. Some old queens expected it. He expected nothing. The sex is definitely part of the allure here, Alex said, and in these fragile reminiscences, in the friend, pue-en, sitting on his couch, in the subtitles on Up In The Air, he could be framed, he could make a million mistakes, but nothing fragile would ever answer back, only hard truths and decaying lives.

Don't believe half of what you hear, half of what people say, that, at least, was something Baw had taught him. Never trust a sex worker. What were you doing in that soi in the first place? Why did he fall so hard heartedly in such a random way? There for you, there for you. So these shocks, amplified and muffled through the storm drains, also drained and hardened his heart and filled it with doubt; but that didn't matter. They were very status conscious, strange in a Buddhist country. A way of preparing, initialising, categorising, suddenly it seemed he could leave this place and not bother to return; or learn the language and surrender, or harden his heart and let everything fall into place. These were the options. But then he walked down the darkened streets before dawn, having fallen into his old pattern of being up by 4am, past the people who had slept or passed out on the pavement on Silom, past the young men hanging outside the massage parlour, God they are young he said to Peter, no wonder the 24-year-old thought he was old, and was in Limpini Park, su-en, when the night turned to day and the nung, song, sam, si, song, sam si, nung, nung, one, two, three, four, two, three, four, one, one, of the Tai Chi and the old women exercising in the early dawn mixed with the distorted music from their sound speakers and the early morning light shimmering across the lake, the giant lizard like some ancient dinosaur barely rippling the surface; and all was right with the world and there was nowhere else he wanted to be.

I feel sorry for her, he had said to Baw, that morning with the sun coming up when some girl they had picked up off the street and with whom they had been drinking too much whisky and smoking too many cigarettes and generally having a laugh about everything, because Baw could be hysterically funny even when he didn't understand half the jokes and the days slid by and the laughter gripped every alley and turned, there in the brittle air, into ice-like gargoyles with a slender, frightening embrace, even then he could be so funny about the antics of everyone and everything, they would all be laughing because people were so absurd, the fragilities, the honest last, the desperate panting and their strange lusts, all of it, they could just be so effing ridiculous that the fact the sun was breaking over the backyards and the buildings, the tenements and clapped out office blocks, these things didn't matter. She says she's got a baby six weeks old, she says that's why she's tired. And later, on the way, yet again, to the ATM after fishing his wallet out of the hotel security box, this was one week, or more like one fortnight, when he wasn't leaving his wallet anywhere near the hotel room, and he said: remember what I told you, don't believe half of what you hear. You are a baby. You don't understand. You don't know what they're like. Why do you think they're there, in the hotel room?

She tells you she has a baby because some men pay more for the breast milk. He looked surprised; that was one variation on a theme he had never heard of. She has no baby. She not care for any baby. She wants to take the plague away; she wants to walk out with more money than she walked in; she wants to be free of all variation and all want; to take status; to have wealth; to climb ladders, to be good, to be free. He encountered nothing but resistance; and then, surprisingly, entered the sunshine; every day precious; every day glorious, full of opportunity, full of broken days and broken wreckage of the past, sure, like shipwrecks floating through some grey ether, but equally the sun shone outside the apartment and Peter said as they headed away from the practice site in Limpini to the food court where they would have Chinese porridge and coffee and soy milk, if I lived here, in the heart of Bangkok, I would make sure I appreciated every day, every minute, enjoyed every day, every minute. He smiled that ancient smile across cracked teeth and said, gesturing at one of the men jogging past; they all know the minute you look at them, they all smile back. Peter looked vaguely disinterested; I wouldn't know about that, but the park's beautiful, thank you for taking me. This is the best time, he replied, the only time, magic, nothing like it. You are the only foreigner to have ever seen this corner of my life. Honoured, he replied. Already the heat of the day was driving them back into the air conditioning, dissipating the magic of the early morning park. While the cat's away the mice will play; that was the order of the day, in a Bangkok way.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/asiapac/stories/201007/s2949789.htm

Two weeks in the job and Australia's Prime Minister Julia Gillard has found herself mired in controversy surrounding her government's policy on border protection asylum-seekers.

Aside from accusations the ruling Labor party has shifted to a less tolerant and, some say less humane approach towards asylum-seekers, Prime Minister Gillard has also been criticised for acting in haste, out of political considerations.

Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Professor Greg Barton, Indonesia and security specialist at Monash University
Listen: Windows Media
BARTON: Well I'm afraid it has. She's made two mistakes; one is she's made policy on the run and it's caught her out. She was clearly desperately trying to tick off the boxes in the run-up to the election and hope this one would slip through. But it was a risky move. And the second thing is she risked giving the impression that Labor has indeed moved to the right on this policy, and although she backs away from the language of the previous government's Pacific Solution, what she's proposing really at the end of the day if she could find a host country would end up being an offshore detention centre. So it would be a Pacific Solution. So I think this is a blunder and she'll be best advised to back out of this as gracefully as she could and move on to something else.

LAM: Do you think she might have been better off just reopening debate but not issuing any kind of proposal, unveiling any kind of policy?

BARTON: Yes, it was a strange week for her, she emerged triumphant from the leadership change and I think she wanted to be seen as a person of action moving forward doing things decisively. And that's a reasonable political aspiration, but she blundered on this one, and you're right, she would have been better off just opening up the debate and then watching how it unfolded. But even that has the risk of course of suggesting that so-called dog whistle politics, of appealing to reactionary elements of society would come to the fore and that Labor would be accused of backing down on its values. So it was always going to be a hot potato to handle, a difficult issue, and I think rushing in like she did was not a smart thing to do.

LAM: And Greg Barton you've been following Australian-Indonesian relationship for a long time, do you think it's extraordinary that neighbouring Indonesia was not consulted before the PM unveiled her proposal?

BARTON: Well it is extraordinary and the comments over the last 24 hours by Marty Natalegawa, the Foreign Minister in Indonesia, who politely spelled out very clearly that he was not consulted, his government was not consulted, I think suggests a certain degree of concern and irritation. Australia and Indonesia are the two giants in the region, Indonesia is already involved in a kind of informal detention centre program in as much as through no choice of its own people seeking to come to Australia by boat end up being detained in Indonesia for sometimes for years. They have a degree of freedom but of course it's not a great existence. It's not something that Indonesia chooses, but that's the reality that circumstances have forced upon them. So although Indonesia has not signed the international convention on refugees, and therefore it was excluded from our Prime Minister's list of possible nations to be part of this new solution, the reality is Indonesia's already part of what's happening and pays a heavy price for it. So at the very least we should be doing is talking with Indonesia about how we can make things better, and how we can recognise the heavy burden they're currently carrying, and try and find a way to make things better both for them and for the people who are caught in this terrible limbo.

LAM: And many people have condemned the policy as patently unworkable. Is that your reading too?

BARTON: Yes you can see there's a sort of seductive logic to it that if you took everyone who arrived by boat and safely transferred them to an offshore processing centre then this would undermine the appeal of people smugglers. But of course the problem is that people who are transferred to a detention centre would end up being kept there for a very long period of time, so they couldn't immediately be placed forward. If they were placed forward to a receiving country like Australia, then the scheme wouldn't work. If they were detained, then it would be offshore detention and it would be contrary to what the government says its position is. So although at first this seemed like it might be a clever solution, when you think it through it's actually quite disastrous, it's not going to work in practice, even if you had in this case East Timor's complete agreement to back it, it still wouldn't work.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/90873458-8b26-11df-a4b4-00144feab49a.html

The Thai government on Friday defended its move to extend a state of emergency covering about a quarter of the country, despite criticism of its restrictions on civil rights and the potential impact on reconciliation efforts.

Thailand has been peaceful since the army forcibly ended anti-government protests in Bangkok on May 19. By the end, the weeks of street violence had left almost 90 people dead and over 1,000 injured, mostly civilians.

Suthep Thaugsuban, deputy prime minister, on Friday warned of “preparations for anti-government activities” that justified the government’s move this week to retain emergency rule in the capital and 18 other provinces for another 90 days. The Department of Special Investigation, the Thai equivalent to MI5, said it was investigating “an anti-monarchy network” encompassing some opposition parliamentarians and protest leaders.

Some leaders of the protest movement, which was known for its customary “red shirt” attire, were paraded on Thursday clad in prison jump-suits before reporters.

Extended emergency rule has been criticised by civil rights campaigners and legal analysts. “Vague and general future threats and individual criminal acts cannot justify the continued imposition of a state of emergency and the derogation from protected rights,” the International Commission of Jurists, the Geneva-based advocacy group, said on Friday.

Representatives of Thailand’s important tourism industry have queried the extension of the emergency decree, warning it could deter foreign visitors, in part by invalidating some forms of travel insurance.

Despite the decree, Abhisit Vejjajiva, prime minister, is moving ahead with plans to set up two reform panels to advise the government on resolving political and social divisions that have worsened through four years of protests.

The panels are part of a government reconciliation agenda which takes in media oversight, increased social spending and measures to prevent politicisation of the monarchy.

The government has yet to detail its plans, but the reform panels have been given three years to complete their work. Officials have said that reconciliation is necessary before elections, due before the end of 2011, can be held.

Picture taken by Peter Newman on a recent bicycle trip through Laos.