The King and Thai: Global Recession, Political Warfare and Discount Handjobs

eXiled
September 27, 2009

In front of Bangkok’s countless sex fronts—massage parlors, hotels and go-go bars—brown-skinned northern women clad in logo-stamped fast-food styled polo shirts still let out their trademark drawn out hiss. “Maaaaaahhhh-ssaaaaaggggee.” But the deepest global recession since the onset of cheap jet travel has rendered the sight of hordes of horny foreigners itching for $10 hand-jobs scarce. With no takers, the cries get a little more desperate and insistent every day.

As I saw for myself in late July, the worst global downturn has hit Thailand’s club-med economy hard. The English language dailies were filled with bad news: stalled construction projects, massive household debt and continued rising economic inequality. A piece in the July 9th issue of Time cited an official statistic, which indicated tourism would be down 35% in Thailand this year. It will probably be much worse.

Beneath the vacant hotels and quiet go-go bars, there is an even darker Thai crisis however. Their vampiric 80-year old king, Bhumibol—stopping at nothing so his unpopular family can hold power after he dies—is ratcheting up long-standing economic and political warfare against the population. He is determined not to allow his reverential subjects escape from Third World serfdom—and his family’s clutches.

Thailand is historically the US’s favorite Southeast Asian stooge, so there has been little motivation for executive criticism of the Thai government. Occasionally, as in late August, when a Thai woman was hit with an 18-year prison term for insulting Bhumibol, American newspaper readers are reminded of the bizarre crime of lese majeste. But the media has been overwhelmingly silent about the king’s personal powerlust: deflecting sporadic criticism of his policies—corporate exploitation for the enrichment of the country’s light-skinned elites—onto a chimerical political structure.

Thai is an obscure language and the country’s schools are notoriously bad, insuring that few people—even in Bangkok and beach resorts—can speak more than a few words of English. Add to this, warnings can come at freelance writers from unlikely places. In a thick accent, Joann Davidsonn, a Swedish hotel manager told me to be careful about writing about the monarchy. He said: “I am serious, you will get fucked up.” Most of all however, the people have been obedient.

bhum

***

It’s nearly 10pm, but Sukhamvit Road, like much of Bangkok, is still jammed bumper-to-bumper with traffic in both directions. In the headlight-streamed darkness, a few rusting open-air busses and blacked out Mercedes are visible jutting out from a 4-lane gridlock of taxis. Painted yellow-green, orange or pink, the cabs are a make of Toyota dubbed Limo. The pink ones have brightly colored English slogans stenciled on their rear windows that scream out: “We Love our King!”

The stretch runs beneath the wide Skytrain tracks connecting Soi-Cowboy to Nana—the city’s two most famous red-light landmarks. Only a couple of the cabbies have fares however. Despite this, there is no road rage—no yelling, honking or even loud radios—just a gentle whirring of A/C. The gaunt profile of our driver is completely still. He patiently fingers a string of carved-wooden beads looped on the steering wheel.

Al, a hyper South American, is sitting next to me in the backseat. Despite having lived here for a year, he’s starting to get antsy. “In LA at least there’s noise in traffic, here it’s just some crazy silence,” he says, jerking upwards. “They fucking like it. It’s some Buddhist trip.” Only then do I realize our driver is literally meditating.

The Buddha has taught him well, even through modern medium. Variety shows feature attractive hosts subjecting each other to mild forms of torture like burning, or constriction by large snakes. Other images: an old woman dying, a young one in painful labor, are presented without sound. Everywhere he looks the message is clear: take your lot in life and smile. Our cabbie, like every other one in the country proclaims his obedience to two unwavering symbols on his dash: the Buddha and King Bhumibol Adulyadej, his earthly incarnation.

From beggar’s carts, to neon-bright 7-11’s, to gold and black shining cathedrals of high finance that rise from shanties; posters of Bhumibol are everywhere in Bangkok. Cruel-lips, slightly effeminate bone structure, combine with a beatific affect to convey a mixture of Dracula and a Buddhist saint. Bhumibol is 82, but he always looks much younger in the posters. He allegedly lives in a palace outside Bangkok, but he is rarely, if ever seen in public. In the pictures of him holding court, which are published in the tabloids, subjects must lay flat on their face in his presence. Since it’s impossible to know the man behind the curtain, you’re free to invent your own Bhumibol. I picture him lying in a hyperberic chamber on the Riviera—hooked up to plasma IV’s.

As seen from the highway, 20-story high portraits drape down the side of skyscrapers display him dressed up for safari pointing a telephoto lens. It’s not uncommon to see a sort of Karmic joke playing out on the streets: a beggar—or a handful of swaddled peasants crouched down chipping away at the sidewalk—in front of portraits of Bhumibol. In the 100-degree heat, I can almost envision their religious daydreams: reincarnation as the monarch might be the reward if they behave.

Still stuck in traffic, Al impatiently hands a Bhumibol stamped 50 Baht note (1.20 US) to the emotionless driver and we get out. A wall of humidity and lung burning smog—the product of cab exhaust mixing with smoke from charcoal fires and diesel generators’ fumes—hits us. The elevated Skytrain track keeps the noxious stuff from escaping street level, creating a blast-furnace. The South American points out a large number of aging hookers lined up in large numbers along the curb. This inferno is the end of the line for Bangkok’s prostitutes—too old or diseased to work in the city’s thousands of go-go bars and massage parlors. Al had told me at Soi Cowboy: “The first rule is the girls don’t have any feelings.” Now he’s breaking it. “I hate walking by here, you can see hunger in their faces.”

Nana, biggest of the three red-light districts, is laid out across from an Arab bazaar on Sukhamvit. Around the corner, East Africans call out from the shadow of an alley: “Blow? You know you want it.” Al whispers with a chuckle, “Don’t fuck with those guys, they don’t have anything.” As anyone who’s read a Lonely Planet knows, the drug of choice in Bangkok is a cheap form of Methamphetamine called Ya-ba.

The drugs’ effects are everywhere. On the street: in their purple smocks, motorcycle taxi drivers endlessly fidgeting with the engines of their rice rockets. Inside a restaurant: a tattooed waiter so solicitous he runs after a customer—who has forgotten her credit card—and smacks into a closed glass door.

Weaved throughout the kiosks are scenes of an almost surreal desperation—more so because this is a touristy part of town. Shirtless children begging for alms on the steps of a colorfully lit 7-11… Scabby teens scurrying along trying to sell DVD’s… Where the sidewalk breaks down into a carpet of sand, a legless drunk is laying prostate with an empty bowl at his head. My guide, who’s lived in just about every backwater South American capital says: “This is the first city I’ve seen starving people being stepped on.”

Looking like a traveling carnival from the mid 70s—with garish facades featuring cultural exports like the band Kiss—Soi Cowboy has a kitschy charm. Nana Plaza, however, is all about numbers of girls. They literally hang off the terraces, fondling each other and calling out to what’s left of their customer base, mostly Japanese and Korean salary-men. Now that western men are by and large gone, the Japanese hold a most coveted status. In keeping with the country’s ethnic hierarchy the management—mostly visible when they take money—are light-skinned, while the working girls are darker and from the north.

Reverence to the Buddha and the monarchy can be seen in the go-go bars, many of which have a shrine devoted to King Rama V, who ruled in the early 20th Century. In Rainbow 4, the liveliest of the bars, girls make a bowing gesture of devotion to the shrine before they climb the stage. Like all of the other go-go bars we have hit, dancers exceed the customers by 4 to 1. With numbers pinned on their bikini tops so you can take them to your hotel for 2,000 Baht ($60) for a few hours, the girls uninterestedly shuffle to the music—their eyes firmly fixed on reflected images of themselves in mirrors around the room.

A few are old enough to have C-Section scars and sagging breasts visible—even under the colored klieg lights—but the majority are in their late teens. If you don’t like one crop, not to worry, another shift comes out after a few minutes. A chubby waitress keeps glancing at me. As it turns out, she thinks she has seen you in another life.

Poy, a curvy 20 year old with cosmetically enhanced breasts and a broad face, gives me her story in tortured English for the price of a watered down drink. She is finding it increasingly hard to support her large family, who live near the Laos border. As the oldest girl, subsidizing the family is seen as her job. She has only worked there for a few months she adds. Moving his hand up her thigh, the South American laughs dismissively and says, “They all say they’re 20 and have only worked here for a few months.”

Just beyond the main business district of Sathorn, where the main Japanese banks have 50 story-gilded towers, there are acres of terraced housing projects and thatched roof shanties. The apartments lack telephones and even bathrooms. A ten-foot portrait of the king in full 19th century dress marks the neighborhood’s entrance. Walking past it at 1pm a poor imitation of a lady boy—a mustached victim of hormone shots—grabs my arm. As I Shake off his clutch, he lets out a pseudo-effeminate growl: “You know you want it.”

Rows of heavy steel pay-phones, operated by a company owned by the king, surround low slung, drab concrete blocks of flats. The only place to buy food besides street vendors is a 7-11, which offers family-sized 3 foot long hot-dogs to a population seemingly hooked on junk food. (There are seemingly thousands of 7-11s in Bangkok.)

The squalor couldn’t help but bring Davidsonn, the threatening Swede—who works as the manager of a 4-star hotel’s rooftop bar, Le Fenix—to mind. Looking out at the Chao Praya River, he smugly told me how nice it was to be in a city where one didn’t have to pay high taxes. “I can build what I want,” he gushed. Without taxes, it has been left to the king to personally assist his people. Davidsonn’s blonde pony-tail and silk scarf being thrown around by an industrial sized whirring fan, he explained: “[Bhumibol] done a lot for the poor people, he doesn’t give them money, but the tools to become, how do you say, do for themselves.” Like what? “He’s given them the coffee bean,” the Swede adds seriously.

snakemans

Toothless bald beggers jump out from in between parked cars where they are sleeping. Shirtless children play in the streets. There is no hope here, only motorcycles, Yaba and the Buddha–who’s smiling gold covered statue, is the only thing that shines in his neighborhood. Thai Buddhism is the ultimate control for a kleptocratic ruler—teaching a dogma of absolute serenity in the face of crushing inequality from within. As you move further away from Wireless Road, where the banks are located, the flats get more and more drab until they collapse into thatched shanties, and you’re hit by a shocking realization. The people in the projects are lucky by Thai standards.

Thailand’s mystical regent is the son of a commoner mother who rarely set foot in Asia before he was 21. But in 1946, his brother, the king, was murdered at point-blank range and Bhumibol was shipped in from a Switzerland. He has been America’s biggest stooge in SE Asia ever since, turning Krup Thep (Bangkok)—the city of Angels—into a sprawling concrete playground of slapdash slums, hotel districts and red-light districts. His function of main-procurer for the Armed forces has earned him the title of world’s longest running monarch; and according to Forbe’s magazine, the richest—this, despite Thailand still part of the Third World. Officially, the US and Thailand have several bi-lateral treaties. More importantly, Thailand was an important buffer in US anti-communism strategies as far back as 1954, when it joined SEATO.

When he is mentioned at all in the Western press, Bhumibol is usually portrayed as a benevolent, but detached, patriarch—a stern judge of how much westernization his maturing population can cope with. A much more cynical figure isn’t far behind the soothing image, however. The Crown Purse Bureau, his economic arm, is the majority shareholder in Thailand’s heavy industry across the board—the corporations include the most powerful in construction, banking and telecommunications. (Bhumibol also owns personal stakes in them—like Thai Insurance Company independent of the CPB.) The CPB hold leases for the properties of many large western hotels, including the Four Seasons.

In 2007 the CPB served evictions to entire districts of food stall vendors—many of them very long-term tenants—in the service of a scheme to create the “Champs-Élysées of Asia.” This was only one maneuver on a much larger strategy, in which, according to a muckraking article in the Asia Sentinel, “most of Bangkok’s best real estate is owned by Thailand’s royal family through the [CPB.]” Sadder still perhaps is that most Thais live under the fiction that this Frankenstein of Darwinian capitalism is, in fact, a charity.

With such a clear-cut economic incentive, is it any wonder that there is no urban planning in Bangkok? The city is broken up into districts that were thrown up fast and all look the same—low-slung concrete terraces dotted with plazas and high rises. Because of the pollution, it’s impossible to keep anything clean. When a section gets too old and its soot covered buildings start to crumble, the government clears out a slum for a shiny new development. Beneath ancient decrepit signage, touting the wonders of another era, businesses in the older districts are left to battle it out for warm-bodies. A Playboy Bunny shaped sign still trumpets to 70s soul brother GI’s. “Jim Man Tailors and Silk.”

Now, the process has been brought to a virtual standstill by the slowdown of tourism. Construction sites either lie dormant, guarded by rent-a-cops and Buddhist shrines or just save face with skeleton crews. The English language business daily, The Nation, recently reported that, on the beach tourist haven of Phuket: “48% of all new hotel developments…are experiencing major construction delays triggered by the global economic downturn and concerns over Thailand’s political stability.” (Almost certainly a conservative figure.) When a few English-speaking Bangkok residents admitted the local economy’s woes, they were always quick to add that things were much worse in the South.

Thailand is officially a constitutional monarchy but Bhumibol—and the oligarchy he represents—frequently exercise naked political power to shut down democracy. Most famously, in September of 2006, after Thaksin Shinawatra, a rich populist backed by the country’s poor, was forced out after launching the country’s first social welfare policies. The army— hurling charges of lese majeste against Thaksin and his cronies—staged a successful coup d’état. The king’s silence was deafening.

More recently, the monarchy has utilized a vast-array of social, military and economic tactics to shut down reform including corruption hearings, the banning of opposition political parties and destabilizing the country’s finances to retain control of the country. The popular political wing of the monarchists is a yellow (the royal color) shirted mob that frequently appears in force to bully the peasants back in line.

In late November, during a period when the reformers had been swept into power, Sondhi Limthongkul, head of the PAD— People’s Alliance for Democracy—threatened a bank-run by his supporters if the government did not step down. “The whole financial system of Thailand will go down the drain,” he told the media, much of which he owns. Sondhi was rewarded for his fidelity to the system with an assassination attempt. In April, members of the Army sprayed his chauffeured car with 100 rounds of M-16 fire, one of which grazed his skull.

Two months after the shooting, a recuperated Sondhi started talking. Comparing the army to the “Cosa Nostra,” Sondhi said he had been shot because he had “revealed the secrets of a lady who appears close to King Bhumibol.” Later, he gently raised the possibility—to a round-table of reporters—that the Reds (democrats) and Yellows could work together reforming the kingdom. “The only difference between red and yellow,” he said “is that when there’s a change we believe that change will have to incorporate the monarchy institution.” In other words, the throne might survive Bhomibol, but the monarchy’s power would be reduced. Sort of like in Nepal.

Perhaps the royalists had gone too far for Big Business’s tastes as well. In late November the PAD had been dispatched to storm the airport, which they did, shutting it down for a week. The elites were biting into the country’s jugular vein, tourism, and not letting go until the pro-democracy reformist opposition relented. Reformers again lost the government, through a combination of economic pressure and a rigged judiciary, but for the pro-business oligarchy it was a pyrrhic victory. Standard & Poor’s immediately downgraded Thailand’s rating and images of tourists being stranded by mobs holding up pictures of the king were beamed around the globe. All this political upheaval was not good for business.

The octogenarian king might be nearing his end, but he is determined to shore up his legacy any way he can. As an incident highlighted in late August—when a former journalist was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment for violating his majesty ‘s dignity by criticizing him—Bhomibol looked ready to impose another round of clampdowns. The old geezer has been having some health problems recently, and was admitted to a hospital for “fatigue.” Yet even while he’s preparing himself for reincarnation, the “great ruler” is fighting to ensure that his family’s plundering of Thailand outlasts him. No wonder he’s so sensitive to criticism.