COMMENTARY
KONG RITHDEE
Sometimes you're hard-pressed to decide what's more entertaining: the semi-finals of the European Championship, or the gabby bitchfest of the recent censure debate, a mini-marathon of slightly overweight men spitting into the microphone and throwing verbal sludge at one another. For the sake of this country's progress, no less.
As the Spanish midfielders composed the poetry of passing and convinced us that watching a football match can resemble watching an art film, our parliamentary characters, over the course of three days and nights, veered from informative to rhetorical, from dramatic to theatrical, from comical to nonsensical. Poetry? No way. This is Symphonie Pathetique at the highest decibel.
Mud-slinging went both ways. Both sides accused each other of B.S-ing, stealing, cheating, corrupting, bastardising, politicising, conniving, fouling, diving, shirt-pulling. On this side of the screen, we viewers accused them speakers, especially the ministers defending their cases, of polluting the airwaves. Why didn't they put the parental guidance sticker on the screen, like they do with soap operas? Watching the histrionics of PM Samak Sundaravej and Interior Minister Chalerm Yubamrung is much more damaging to the brain than any prime-time slap-galore.
As I watched the drama unfold into an anti-climax - the actual voting was like a penalty shoot-out, only that the government got 306 shooters and the opposition 164 - I was convinced that our MPs were really performing for the national audience. They knew we were watching, and they gave it their best performance. We were undecided whether to applaud or be appalled.
Kicking the debate into its most amusing sequence - or most hideous - was the shouting match between Democrat Suthep Thaugsuban and Mr Chalerm at 10pm on Thursday. Hulk vs King Kong? Alien vs Predator? Even better: it was mud wrestling. And it only took the valedictorian poise of Abhisit Vejjajiva, who wrapped up the debate at midnight, to remind us that this debate actually had some purpose.
Sorry if you missed the Suthep-Chalerm match-up. It was like a sex scene in an action movie - pointless, but you wouldn't want to miss it for the world - and the two actors performed it with such live passion that you might've thought they're actually real-life lovers, married for so long that instead of cavorting, they let off steam by screaming at each other, like in a Woody Allen film.
Unsurprisingly, the minister resorted to the old trick of challenging his opponent to swear in front of the Emerald Buddha - "the one who lies will be damned, down to the last one in his clan." Given the fact that Mr Chalerm alarmingly looks more and more like a chubby Bollywood actor, I thought he'd have dared Mr Suthep to swear at the Hindu temple of Preah Vihear. Only if Cambodia would let them in.
Cut to Mr Samak, PM and expert in paper origami. If he were a footballer, he'd be Cristiano Ronaldo during his first year at Manchester United: he dribbled, meandered, threatened, distracted opponents, but never scored. In short, Mr Samak didn't actually answer the questions, but skirted around the subject with such rhetorical fury that you could hardly catch him doing so.
Keep listening, however, and you felt that same demoralising feeling you feel every time our PM opens his 73-year-old mouth. The man flaunts his contempt, disdain and insensitivity as if they're his most precious assets. When he repeated, again, that a 70-something PM shouldn't be subject to the scrutiny of the 40-something opposition leader because children can never be smarter than adults, he insulted the entire young generation of this country. In fact, he's worse than the ungroomed Ronaldo, because Mr Samak scored an own goal.
Surely I, and everybody on this newspaper and in the Thai Parliament, do not have the seniority to make our old leader listen. But we should just keep trying. It is said that in Cuba in the 1950s, subversive commentators encrypted their messages in newspaper columns. Say, if you combine the first letter of each paragraph in a particular column.... I'm not suggesting anything. No. Maybe it's all just an accident.
Kong Rithdee writes about movies and popular culture in the Bangkok Post real.time section.
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