• OPINION

  Learning to speak govt's language

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/08/2017

  » The Newspeak is the Oldspeak. The New Testament is the Old Commandments. When they say the clock strikes 13, it means the clock strikes 13. The writing isn't in the law but on the wall.

• OPINION

  First they came for those who 'twerk'

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/06/2017

  » The police this week visited several cultural spaces, to appreciate the art and to mete out censorship. Next they'll give out art prizes -- to those who toe the line and serve the official ideology -- like the propagandistic communist states did in the last century.

• OPINION

  The politics and poetry of private jokes

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/05/2016

  » Let's compare scores. In Thailand, a python had a wrestling match with a penis. In Myanmar, a dissenting poet was punished for a poem allegedly written on his penis. In the Philippines, the newly-elected president, aged 71, announced last month that he didn't want to "hang" his penis, and that "when I take Viagra, it stands up".

• OPINION

  In our special situation, hail the metaphors

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/07/2017

  » We can still speak, preferably in English, or even better in metaphors. The dilemma is painful: We speak in coded words and we risk being irrelevant, obscure, snobbish; but if we say it too directly, we risk something else, such as a summons, a slap on the wrist, or a mark on the forehead as the Biblical executioners arrive at the gates of Jerusalem. For those to whom Thailand remains home, both paths are strewn with barbed wire.

• OPINION

  King still with us, in photos and memories

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/10/2016

  » On the screen we see the King in his Land Rover sluicing through mud in rough terrain. Again on the screen, he is a wiry young man in dark sunglasses and saffron robe, walking barefoot in a royal temple. Next, His Majesty King Bhumibol in dinner jacket -- the footage slightly scratchy -- is deep in a jam session with Western musicians sometime in the last century. Then we see the monarch in full regalia, captured on a Kodak motion picture film, as he proceeds down the street in the opulent pomp of Coronation Day in 1950.

• OPINION

  Huffing and puffing puts us in a spin

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/01/2016

  » For your weekend reading, you have two gripping options: The draft of the new constitution, or the government’s proudly presented “Photobook Infographics: Government for the People”, a 104-page hodgepodge of self-congratulatory news clippings. Either way, we brace ourselves for whatever comes, for our fate is not really ours to contend.

• OPINION

  Of military, monks and an unholy mess

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/02/2016

  » It was a match made in heaven, if heaven had a wrestling match. A few hundred monks from the Sangha Buddhist Alliance faced off with 150 soldiers on Monday at Phutthamonthon park, saffron vs green, tonsured vs crew-cut, as a mini brawl broke out between the two sides over the contested supreme patriarch nomination. Choice photos show a monk head-lock a soldier, jujitsu-style, while soldiers were blocking the angry brethren from entering the park. It was an unholy mess. I thought we were watching news from Myanmar, only that Myanmar seems peaceful these days.

• OPINION

  Tabloid saga and our gang mentality

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/01/2016

  » The tabloid saga of the week is a slap-fest involving 30 people, mostly women, its flurry of glorious hair-pulling captured in a video clip. The cause is a triangulated romance between a young man and his two women, one of them a TV celebrity. Love hurts, as we teach our children, or it’s not love. But let’s pause and consider: what can a catfight, the first sensational, useless headline of 2016, tell us about the state of our national politics of the past decade? That we’re in a gang war, apparently.

• OPINION

  Swatting away visions of refugee hell

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/09/2015

  » This week the drowned Syrian boy rattles the conscience of Europe — and hopefully the oil-rich Arab nations — while in Bangkok, the Uighur fiasco keeps sending repercussions. In Europe, fierce debates ring across parliaments from the UK to Hungary as to whether countries should take in more refugees to cushion this humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, true to form, the Thai police awarded themselves with cash even though the suspects haven’t been tried and while every suggestion that the Erawan blast was connected with our foul deportation of 109 Uighurs in July is adamantly deflected, as if with fly swatters.

• OPINION

  Hear youthful outrage amid a silent sit-in

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/05/2015

  » They were not martyrs, heroes, or Jesuses nailed at the crosses as the crows picked out their eyes. They were just students who wanted to express their disagreement, which was the least anybody could do in a world where disagreement has not yet been outlawed (really?) and at a time when everybody else has been lulled into fake silence. The scene outside Bangkok Art and Culture Centre on May 22 was ugly, not as ugly as Tiananmen Square in 1989, or Gwangju in 1980, or Thammasat in 1976, but ugly enough to let us glimpse the flames beneath the volcano.

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