by Steven Sills
Chapter 19
Interregnum of Democracy and Chapter
Military helicopters pass overhead, but then of course they would; of course there would be a coup d’état that if not able to rectify the situation, then by absolute fiat, at least for a while, proscribes these two sides from confrontation--sides that have been increasingly dehumanizing each other in that abstraction of the “enemy” that allows them to conscientiously eradicate others the way one would in enjoining a surgeon for an abscission of tissue deemed as “cancer.” It is, after all, the essence of conflict that the strongest side ultimately vanquishes that deemed deleterious to society or to the state so that this “cancer” will not be allowed to proliferate. For an animal attacks one of a different species for the procurement of food and rarely, members of its own kind when physical survival is at stake in the competition for scarce resources, but man, this species purported to be a “higher animal,” actually more bacteria than animal as all animals are, assails others for mere expression of an attitude, the conveyance of a contrary idea, especially when money and the comforts it provides are in any way threatened.“Runt, suck-calf staying inside with his mommy!” that father, the kidnapper or kid-abrogator, would mock as though the allergic reaction that sometimes occurred when picking the chilies--the rashes, the swelling, the fever, and the itchiness that caused insatiable scratching-- had been of my own volition.
Here, democracy is gone, as inevitably it would be with the two polarized and intransigent sides this large and in continual gridlock, and corruption as rampant as it is (one side democratically elected with the guise, the guile, of false populist promises but legitimately garnering the will of the people, and the other the artifice of a more professional elite, chugging and shunting the train into the 21st century with a new engine, but corrupt and incapable of winning enough parliamentary seats for anything but a court mandated premiership, and this imbroglio, until now, ever tilting the country closer into that oblivion of becoming a failed state). The fact that these generals have now imposed martial law and curtailed freedom of assembly and expression is undeniable; but then so is the fact that only in this suspension of democracy can extremists be demilitarized and the constitution amended, if there still is a constitution, so that there is no longer unqualified suffrage in a system without a mechanism for winnowing probity and merit of political candidates long before any voting takes place---only the allure of the rich, powerful and comely, or easily bought impressions by those endowed with greater money than good looks managing to procure seats of power in Siam. And if he caught me idle, staring dreamily into the ether or looking at the life forms that abounded beneath me--every ant walking around a leaf as though it were a boulder, making one question what he himself calls a boulder and all his other nomenclature for every natural thing, and each creature fixated on itself and unaware that it in response to its environment is merely a speck in the perspective of something much greater-- he would slap the suck-calf numerous times with only the threat of “Stop crying or I will give you something to cry about” a restraint on the vile and the lugubrious.
And yet this military coup, or stratocracy long active behind the scenes, has been summarily condemned by America and the world community as though any sick democracy that is active, when common sense would suggest it should be forced to lie down in quarantine, is better than none at all; that there are no countries with radicalized religious elements predominate in the entire populace--countries to which it would not be in the world’s best interest to allow them to become democracies; that there has never been cogent and emotive declamation in Ancient Athens in their pure democracy and for us in our own impure ones that has altered this experiment into dangerous demagoguery of the worst and most beguiling kind by stroking sentiments of patriotism and prejudices as attested most horrendously early on in the Athenians’ reaction to the alleged disloyalty of Mytilene of Lesbos during the Peloponnesian War;97that a tyrannical force would not be necessary to abrogate the right to bear arms in countries to which guns are legal and the countries spiraling into ever worsening violence with every year that passes; that no decisions were ever made for the popularity and the good of political careers, and that all laws and their execution are done for that which is right for the long-term good of a given country; or that there are never scenarios in which a military should protect its citizens from a democracy. If the Thai constitution is not significantly altered to restrict the qualifications of politicians and reduce the importance of elections in the procurement of national leaders, little outside of confiscating caches of weapons will be achieved in this suspension of democracy. It will be merely the resetting the button of elections so that another batch of the glorified rich and venal, the powerful and the comely, will go forward, and history, which repeats itself, will be more repetitious here than anywhere else on the planet. And when I had to study for my correspondence classes, as Siam, even then, compelled, every father to provide some form of rudimentary education for his sons, he would tell me to “blow out that goddamn candle,” or “turn out that goddamn light,” when we finally had lights, and if I demurred, he would tell me to stop sassing or he would “mop up the floor with me.” If I demurred further, he would slap me in the mouth so hard it would bleed. Loss of my pen, compelled him one time to buy a new one, and to say, “You would lose your ass if it wasn’t tied to you.” And often for more extensive punishment he would force me to spend an afternoon behind plow and water buffalo; and I would have to hit the creature with a stick to keep it moving, something I was so averse to doing, so that I would not be bludgeoned by a belt myself.
Outside, as inside the mind, there is a degree of civil war. Now, another helicopter is hovering above most godlessly. And of the gods or God, just because the majority believe in deities and afterlife does not legitimize them in my mind. Religion, just like being desensitized to homeless people on the overpasses or in traveling, romanticizing the world to be a glorious place, is a delusional means of giving a man a respite from the harsher realities of life. And here, also, Buddha has been anthropomorphized to a Heavenly Father, that protector from ill fate and harm, no different than our Moslem brethren, especially in the South, to which the growing extremist fringe will assist the ruination of world civilization just as once they advanced astronomy98 and preserved Greek thought in the era of Christian lunacy.99From animism to polytheism and then briefly morphing to monotheism, and then monotheism once again emerging permanently from polytheism100, man picked up cultural influences along the way: Anubis, the Egyptian deity, assisting souls of the dead for bodies that had not become putrefied in their journey to the afterlife101—Egypt giving us the heavens and Greece giving us Hades or Hell.102 But a god, and a loving God at that, would not allow injustices to proliferate on the planet throughout the millennia; and if he is an Aristotelian God who sets all in motion and does not alter it even though he can, he has made himself irrelevant to man. Even if he cannot, he has made himself even more irrelevant to man. These are the words of Lek, Pharaoh Snefru’s Chief lector of atheism.103