The website PainScience.com explained last week that a "perfect pain spot" is the Shins. They are “plenty sensitive if you press on them” but “Shins probably will suffer in silence”.
Who knew that the military government was turning quickly into a medical research unit, focusing on that perfect pain that can be produced by merely applying pressure to the Shins, and the greater the pressure the worse. Or better of course, depending on whether you are the pressure giver or receiver.
On the outside, the medical text says, the Shins have a thick pad of protective muscle. Put some pressure on it, however, and see that there’s much less protection than it seems. Shins can take a lot of pressure but that hard bone underneath is vulnerable.
Gen Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, head of the National Council for Peace and Order and Keeper of the Power of Section 44, knows about pressure, pain and breaking the Shins. Last week he probed deeply and strongly under that outer muscle pad and got right into the bone of the matter and just as PainScience.com predicted, the pain was just a bit short of excruciating.
It is not clear whether the prime minister and the green shirts picked last week to put on the pressure, or if it simply just growed, like Topsy. It started off with the general prime minister in Chiang Mai, which he defined to a somewhat sullen crowd as “one of Thailand’s 77 provinces [that] can’t be separated”. He went on, saying that he knew full well who the crowd loved and, following the example of this column, uttered no actual names.
“You can hate me but please love the country,” he explained to citizens, who obeyed military suggestions to attend. And then he got serious and started kicking Shins with military boots.
One remembers Lord Voldemort na Dubai for various reasons but the most potty-mouthed supporter of shutting down that corrupt airport remembers him occasionally for two achievements. One is Otop.
The One Tambon One Project policy has been derided for the very idea of throwing investment funds at a village, when everyone knows the entire world’s supply of knowledge and ideas rests in Bangkok. It has spurred some corruption, but then as the remarkable MR Kukrit Pramoj pointed out 40 years ago, shouldn’t graft be as national as taxes?
Otop also resulted in some fantastic local successes of useful and top-selling products, from food to apparel. Most of all, in many eyes, Otop transformed the Northeast by providing jobs and hope in the tambon, and ended, virtually at one swell foop, the “tradition” of sending rice farmers to Bangkok for half a year to drive samlors or act as market coolies.
The leader seemed only interested in the political part. The private sector’s Otop isn’t a lick on the government’s Office of Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion (Osmep). A lot of Otep owners and cooperatives are struggling to stay in business, he said, and they should stop struggling and get out. Meanwhile, the fabulous Osmep already has 31 partners, compared with the Otop’s measly 70,000 merchants.
If promoting the wonderful services and advice of Osmep by running down Otop seemed strange, it was actually the least passionate Shin-kicking of a three part drama.
The day after the premier dissed Otop, the “rice expert” of the Thailand Development Research Institute, Nipon Poapongsakorn revealed to the nation the person behind the current water crisis aka drought. Also taking up the lead of this column, Mr Nipon did not utter the actual name of the world’s only female ex-premier currently facing malfeasance charges in court. But it was her. Her and that rice-buying project that actually — can you believe this? — budgeted water for rice farmers?
The green shirts, in power for a mere 13 months, were apparently powerless to change the water use and management. The Shins, remember, are the perfect pain point but “suffer in silence”.
Shin-kicking will continue, apparently, until morale improves. Part of returning happiness is taking what some people regard as the only significant achievement of the Evil One’s time in office — the 30-baht medical scheme. They laughed at Lord Voldemort for promoting it; they hated him for for its success.
According to the leader, it’s populist, it’s too expensive and it would be better if the country also returned to the past where poor, sick people occasionally got some medical attention at district clinics.
He won’t do that, of course, but it was an extremely violent round of Shin-kicking. There is so little dissent against universal health care that it is remarkable that the premier attacked it on any grounds, let alone the strange claims that it is both populist and too expensive, when neither is actually true.
The week’s triple Shin-kicking may be part of an overall programme to dismantle everything that happened in politics since 2001 except the military budget increases. That would indicate the road to the next democratic election is longer than officially stated.