We thought it would be Batman v Superman: Yawn of Justice. But it turned out to be a cut-rate spectacle performed on a sidewalk by inept actors. We thought it would be a bout between the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) and the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC), a contest of will and superpower. But then it revealed itself to be a badly scripted soap opera executed by elderly actors who read their lines without a wink.
This script seems to be made up as they go along, hoping for deus ex machina in the final act. For all we know, the NCPO last week submitted a list of “suggestions” — the term has never sounded more ominous — to the CDC, asking them to “consider” a fully appointed Senate with six fixed slots for military commanders. This, the coup-makers say without irony, will be a safety lock against any future coup. Two other “suggestions” involved the CDC blazing the path for parties to nominate a non-MP as premier, which is hardly surprising coming from NCPO, and the one-ballot-or-two-ballot system of voting.
At first we glimpsed the fine line between “a suggestion” and “an order”, and probably entertained the idea of seeing a contest between the law scribes, their dignity at stake, and the ruling military. This would be, we secretly hoped, a celebrity death match between two self-righteous superheroes, the all-powerful Superman and the half-demented Batman, battling for our souls. Each of them truly believes that they’re doing this for all of us; they only want to test out who’s more righteous than the other. In short, we hoped that the CDC members would stand up to the men who appointed them, to nibble if not bite the hand that feeds them.
Then we get to the Yawn of Justice part. When the CDC announced its stance, it initially sounded like a give-and-take pact between the two entities that was still a no-win for voters. The CDC agreed to the fully appointed 250-seat Senate, with six slots reserved for “civil servants” — then on Thursday, it totally yielded to the military’s “suggestions” by confirming the six seats to chief of armed forces and top security offers. Spreadeagled, they give what’s asked of them, nicely.
To observers, this number game looks complicated at first: 200 (or just 194, after subtracting the six) of the 250 Chosen Ones will be chosen by a nine-member selection committee, and the remaining 50 of them will come from representative of 20 professional groups (which professionals? which groups?). Anyway, you don’t have to waste your brain because the golden key is that all 250 senators will have to get the final consent of the NCPO. The ghost, as they say, is in the machine.
So why all the confusing arithmetic when the god-like junta decides who deserves the Senate seat or not? This is why the whole saga — the “suggestion”, the CDC’s pretence to stand firm, the bargaining and the push-pull, faux-ideological contest — reveals itself to be just a soap opera. We all know who runs the ship, so it might just as well that the captain orders his first mate — and his the other four “rivers” of handpicked assemblies — how he wants the ship, the country, or even the world, to be run. Spare us the theatrics and the false niceties, for we’re not that dim, and because we’ll have to get stuck on this strange ship together for a long time.
That leads us to another magic number: five. All the suggestions and requests from the NCPO are couched in the “five-year transitional period”. A natural question is, why five? Why not two, three, six, 10? Asked if the five years can be shortened if the situation improves, Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwon says no. During these five years — which haven’t even started and no one knows for certain when they will — the military commanders in the Senate will make sure that reform is on course and no politicians can derail it. But reforming what? The educational system, which has recently been turned backward to the old centralised system by Section 44? Or the transport system, with China ejected from the high-speed rail gig and Thailand plunging onward in the dark? Or the anti-corruption front, which involves a linguistic duplicity of renaming “kickbacks” to a less evil term.
All the theatrics are required only to give a veneer of legitimacy in a world that has no place for authoritarian rule. We’re not demo-crazy; we’re just hoping that all the talk about reform and reconciliation should start from openness, honesty and respect to people’s rights. In the end, neither Batman nor Superman should have a place in our human struggles, because both super-beings are die-hard fascists who believe that they should write the future for us. Such a future, I believe, is nothing but grim.
Kong Rithdee is Life Editor, Bangkok Post.