In the land where time stands still

In the land where time stands still

The past, as they say, is not even past. Just look around, scan the headlines, or smell the Cretaceous swamps that haven’t been pumped for ages. It feels strange watching the view outside the train window become a blur of movement, only to realise, with horror or apathy, that it’s not us who’re moving and leaving a trail of hazy landscape behind. It’s the outside world that’s speeding ahead while we’re stuck on the interminable platform.

Marty McFly (Back to the Future) turns 30 and the Terminator (rebooted this year) — both experts in time-travel — could attest to the danger and allure of yesteryear’s newspapers. Just like 20 years ago, we’re still reading news about someone wanting to legalise casinos, with supporters and critics spitting out exactly the same arguments that we’ve heard through the decades. Just like 20, 30 years ago, we still feel guilty reading about the drought in rural areas while the city enjoys free-flowing taps, with exactly the same pleas for Bangkokians to conserve water.

Just like 20, 30, 40 years ago, we’re still reading about the trouble in the deep South, about Bangkok floods, and most painfully about activist students being abused by authorities (I hope the crackdown part doesn’t follow). Just like 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, we’re still reading the headlines that use the term “military government”, with the name of the generals changed. Just like 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, we’re still reading about a new constitution, next to a report about a coup and rumours of a counter-coup.

And just like 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 83 years ago, we’re still reading about the miscarriage of democracy. Actually, it goes back further, because we’re now debating whether democracy, shakily installed on June 24, 1932, is even compatible to the unique species of this Golden Axe boondocks. Or just like 100 years ago, dear God, we’re still reading about slavery, this time on fishing boats. That we’re reading all of this on our smart phones instead of real papers isn’t a sign of post-modern paradoxes. It’s a sign of pre-modern unconsciousness that many of us mistake for comfort and calm.

How nice to have sleepwalked across the decades, or centuries, in fact millennia. Time has collapsed, and the present doesn’t just feel like the past. The present is the past. The clock didn’t go back, it hasn’t even moved. Jurassic World, salute to Steven Spielberg, is real! Of course, you can blame it all on corrupt politicians, bureaucratic regression, weak education, weaker media, tropical lethargy, horoscopic misfortunes, or our own collective inability to get our act together and push on. But it would be hypocritical to overlook the role of the men (always men) in camouflage uniforms, too. George Orwell said that who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. Who — in 1932, 1947, 1957, 1973, 1976, 2006, 2014, maybe 2017, 2024 or 2035 — is it?

Reform, too, is a well-meaning term that has been circulating in the news and in parliament, elected or selected, for several decades. They say self-serving politicians aren’t sincere about it, and they’re too busy hoarding wealth to move our slow train forward. Maybe.

But it’s hard to stomach the idea that the combined force of bureaucracy-military, whose structures and mentality have hardly changed in a century or so, can pull off the job more convincingly.

As many have pointed out on this very same page, after a year or so, it’s not even clear if “reform” has actually begun. Not to mention the recent comedy of the reform mavericks proudly pushing the casino agenda as if it was a matter of life and death.

In an age where speed defines the future, only ghosts are stuck in the past. Everyone wants to time-travel — to 2020 and beyond, not the other way round. I’d like to think that time is on our side, that the process of reform, like a nation or fashion, is like a blackjack table at a Poi Pet casino: It goes on forever until the apocalypse.

We’re told to be patient as the reformists dismantle the rotten planks and rebuild a new one, piece by piece, meeting by meeting, month by month, and if they’re not done soon as previously planned, another reform assembly will come in to keep working on it. Fair enough, but the problem is that we’re not given enough glimpses of the future to feel that hopeful. In fact, it looks like they’re afraid of the future — the unknown future where people have a voice and where coercion is primeval — that they decide to seek refuge in the comfortable past.

The view outside is moving, and it’s strange to look back inside to find that we’re all reading yesterday’s newspaper.


Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.

Kong Rithdee

Bangkok Post columnist

Kong Rithdee is a Bangkok Post columnist. He has written about films for 18 years with the Bangkok Post and other publications, and is one of the most prominent writers on cinema in the region.

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