The police this week visited several cultural spaces, to appreciate the art and to mete out censorship. Next they'll give out art prizes -- to those who toe the line and serve the official ideology -- like the propagandistic communist states did in the last century.
In the province, the police got front-row seats at a gig by the singer Lamyai Haithongkham, the "Golden Jar" teen idol who has become nothing short of a national agenda due to her amazing suppleness.
An avid culture-vulture, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha commented that Lamyai, 18, was being too generous in her hip-grinding moves, and law enforcers, picking up the signal from the top, dropped everything, rushed to her concert and (metaphorically) measured the length of the singer's hot pants.
In the lexicon of World War II dictators, they would call Lamyai's choreography "degenerate art" -- Entartete Kunst, or non-nationalist art that corrupts the minds of good citizens. Not content with just the political war with his opponents and the imaginary war that necessitates new armoured vehicles and submarines, the PM has opened a new front in the culture war.
Me: "It's hard to believe that our esteemed prime minister would pick a fight with a teen singer and that the police would take it so seriously."
My friend: "I don't find anything hard to believe anymore."
OK, it's a push to call Ms Lamyai's moves art. But given the 230-million-plus YouTube views and the infectious melody of her hit Pu Sao Kha Loh, I'd prefer this degenerate whatever from the Northeast to the prime-time Friday telecast, which is anti-art, anticlimax, anti-everything.
Lamyai is postmodern; the telecast is premodern. In the not-so-subtle drive to impose an old-school nationalist narrative (something like "Thai women won't do this dirty dancing!"), the culture war is an inevitable outgrowth of the regime's grand scheme to suppress diversity. The expressive dance move is a no-no because any expression, bodily and intellectually, through hip or mind, that threatens to cross the official conservative line is definitely a no-no.
Other expressions of unpatriotic art were in trouble too this week. Right on Sathon, the police and the military inspected two photographic exhibitions by two young lensmen Tada Hengsupkul and Harit Srikhoa, and the axe came down. Mr Tada's work features pictures of political prisoners and rights activists printed on a special thermochromic paint that only reveals what it contains through heat from human's touch. So you have to "hug" a blank picture before it becomes the face of someone who was threatened or jailed in the past three years.
Mr Harit's work is a series of retouched photographs based on the 2010 crackdown on the red shirts in downtown Bangkok. They're trippy, feverish, and the only thing that bleeds is the colour. The politics is poetic enough to make us believe it could have eluded the censorious eyes of the good soldiers.
But apparently, "Art Appreciation 101" is part of the police and the military coursework. "How to spot Degenerate Art" is also a major. Or, seriously, they might have read the Bangkok Post's reviews of the two shows. On Thursday the officers went to the galleries, looked around, admired the work, nodded, shook their heads, and sounded off a warning.
Mr Tada and the gallery decided to cancel the shows five days before they were scheduled to end. Mr Harit was also told to remove some of his photos.
When a regime detains an artist -- like in Stalin's Soviet Union -- they take away his body. When they censor his art -- like we've seen repeatedly here -- they take away his body and his soul. It's a classic move from a playbook (except Stalin actually understood art): Artistic and cultural expression must be the servant of the monolithic ideology, or the artist goes to the pen and the art to the pyre. Or both.
In the beginning, they go after the political enemy -- and that's understandable. But in the dark spiral of dictatorial rule, the regime has found out that they can never stop at that: They have to come after the poet, then the scholar, then the photographer, the filmmaker, and now the hot-pants singer barely out of adolescence. It's an unstoppable motor of absolute control that will eventually consume everyone.
It's hard to believe half the news we're reading every day (Section 44 to speed up a rail construction, seriously!). But as my good friend philosophises, after the tit-for-tat between the head of government and the Golden Jar nightingale, one can't find anything hard to believe anymore in Juntaland.
Kong Rithdee is Life Editor, Bangkok Post.