Take My Word for It

By David Simmons

When I originally started this blog, the theme was meant to be language and linguistics, harking back to my undergraduate studies and eventual degree, and reflecting my career as a moulder and manipulator of words.

It is said that language is the main, perhaps the only, thing that distinguishes Homo sapiens from the “lower” animals. Of all the tools we have developed or exploited, from pointed sticks to fire to supercomputers, it is the most versatile, and the only essential medium of all else we have accomplished over the millennia, good and evil.

Yet so often, it is so pointless, so empty, significant of nothing.

I’m no intellectual, so I make no apologies for stating here that I am a fan of the original Terminator trilogy. In the second film, Judgement Day (1991), Sarah Connor has a recurring dream in which she tries to warn families in a playground of the coming holocaust, but her cries are muted, and the families are deaf and blind to their approaching doom. The missiles land, the nuclear blasts obliterate all vision, and Sarah is consumed by flames as hot as the sun before she awakens.

That scene keeps popping up in my memory as I watch from my comfortable bubble in northeastern Thailand the disaster being perpetrated on this pleasant little country by villains, vying for power that they say they will use to “reform” the nation but which of course they will use as they always have, to enrich themselves at the expense of their yellow- and red-shirted sycophants. Plenty of people see the truth, and cry a warning, but are neither heard nor seen.

Voranai Vanijaka wrote in the Bangkok Post last week:

When [the Shinawatra siblings] Yingluck and Thaksin say reform, rest assured they mean to do nothing short of changing the system to afford their family and cronies more power. When Suthep [Thaugsuban] speaks of reform, rest assured he means to rid Thailand of the Shinawatra family’s political power and put said power in the hands of his own clique and cronies. That is the meaning of reform, and both sides know it. That’s why they are not sitting down together at a table to discuss reform. Nobody would be able to keep a straight face.

The only people who are fooled are the people still believing either side has the best interests of Thailand as a priority. Fortunately for Thaksin and Suthep, there are millions of such people. These are otherwise good and intelligent people, but goodness and intelligence too often don’t stand a chance against a tide of anger and hatred, plus tribal loyalty. Humans are emotional creatures. Add effective propaganda to righteous fervour, and suffer the fool.

My wife is one of those fooled, lapping up the lies and propaganda of the doublespeak-moniker Democrat Party’s Bluesky Channel, as the pro-dictatorship People’s Democratic Reform Committee (amazing how these outfits don’t see how abusing the word “democratic” places them in the same ilk as the DPRK and GDR) “shuts down” Bangkok and drives the already struggling economy toward oblivion (the Thai Chamber of Commerce, no fan of the Shinawatras’ “populist” policies, warns that the PDRC’s actions are costing the economy up to a billion baht – more than C$300 million – a day). Meanwhile the activities of the corrupt palm-oil oligarch Suthep are emboldening the red-shirted fans of the corrupt telecoms oligarch Thaksin, now gathering like storm clouds on the outskirts of the besieged capital, awaiting the next chapter in this tragic saga.

Western commentators smirk at all this. So silly, these Thais, caught up in their superstitious worship of their monarch, utterly unaware that the underlying purpose of the dispute they are fuelling and funding with their eagerly proffered 500-baht notes is to determine who is in the seat of power during the fast-approaching royal succession, greedy hands outstretched to welcome the new ruler’s largesse. So silly, as they revel in their tribal self-delusions that those outside their own circles are “stupid buffaloes” not worthy of suffrage, or that they are Western-corrupted urbanites who have abandoned His Majesty’s “sufficiency” philosophy and honour of the hard workers of the rice paddies.

Meanwhile in the West, sophisticated folk flock to the polls to elect “fiscal conservatives” who, as these voters would know if they bothered to do even a few minutes’ research, have neither the competence nor the desire to improve the lot of anyone but themselves. These sophisticated folk embrace the “consumer economy”, wilfully ignorant of the destruction they are wreaking on the very ecosystem that supports them, and of the injustice and inequality that history (if they bothered to recall it) teaches can only lead to violence and destruction.

Words. So many words, in this “information age”, flying around and then disappearing into the void, forgotten and pointless.