Last week filled out the cast of the least-awaited drama in Thai TV news history, <i>The Untouchables: Bred Men Walking</i>, starring the Watchman, the FAT man and the Catman.
When a person takes an oath to put his life on the line if necessary to defend his country, that should not be a licence to use the oath to accumulate wealth that puts him in the 1%. But it is.
When a man voluntarily joins the force pledged to honour, serve and protect, this should not come with a real or implied warrant to consort with human traffickers and brothel owners and hit them up for millions of dollars in "loans". But it does.
And when a man inherits from his dad a thriving and carefully built business designed to serve country and people and shareholders by securing infrastructure and maintaining key transport, that should not come with overt permission to use any land, fauna or flora to provide his personal pleasure and leopard's tail soup. Yet it does.
Certainly the public has spoken about this. That is especially true of the public opining on the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, Gen Prawit Wongsuwon. He is friend and career colleague of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha. Not only have the Watchman and the general prime minister been ring-knocking military mates for close to 40 years. The former army commander Gen Prawit was there when Gen Prayut became eligible to become army commander. What, you think merit alone provides promotion to the top? Ha-ha.
Their camaraderie has led quite logically -- if you're them -- to the decision by Gen Prayut to throw away a major part of his personal face, professional dignity and public support in defending the indefensible.
Officially, of course, it's not the prime minister who is doing this. It's the National Anti-Corruption Commission, appointed by Gen Prayut's National Council for Peace and Order that is providing a shambolic "investigation" of a million dollars worth of show-off timepieces.
Officially, there's no phuyai protecting current FAT man Pol Gen Somyot Poompunmuang. What could big shots even do about a DSI team massively bumbling a pretty straightforward investigation into a case of a slave-trader controlling the national police chief for 300 million?
Then there's the case of the privileged son of hard-working Chinese ancestry, handed control of a multi-billion construction firm by his daddy. Sure, some people are currently speaking truth to power and building a very public and humiliating case against the man accused of eating leopard's tail soup in his quest for a nice black throw rug for his Bangkok mansion. Consider just for a moment, however, two unrelated facts about how this works.
The independent director on the board of of Italian-Thai Development Plc is Tirapongse Pangsrivongse, who for one thing is the controller of Kasemkij Company Thailand and therefore many splendid properties such as Phuket's Cape Panwa Hotel (30,195 baht-plus-plus for an excellent three nights next weekend; big bed but breakfast extra).
Also, and we cannot stress enough how completely irrelevant this is to the preceding paragraph, the Thai Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Thai SPCA) has been completely (and uncharacteristically) silent about pheasant shooting and leopard eating in national animal sanctuaries. According to its websites and Facebook pages, the president of the Thai SPCA either is or very recently was Tirapongse Pangsrivongse.
So, like a connected family marrying the No 1 daughter to the son of another connected family. Mr Premchai has taken a huge hit in society's eyes. His legal fight to stay out of prison (unlike the villager who shot and ate a civet cat last week and was locked up) will depend entirely on a coin flip. Heads, he will not go to prison. Tails, he will stay free.
All of this was the point made to the BBC by the now too-timorous Minister of Education, Teerakiat Jareonsettasin. Sure, he was speaking of corruption. He didn't mention money or white envelopes or Swiss bank accounts. He spoke only of the connections that the Watchman and his general prime minister keep, and why the actions of the 1% matter more than justice or national surveys including elections.
In truth, it's not even "connections". Those are present worldwide. In Thai-ness it is called patronage and it's deeply embedded. It's going to take more than a lifetime beneficiary of patronage, like the general prime minister, to succeed at his lip-service promises to reform and bring about reconciliation.
For now, their patronage system assures the elite that none of them need fear reform or real rule of law.
