The recent unpleasantness in Bangkok has left many outsiders puzzled. Isn’t Thailand the Land of Ten Thousand Smiles? A haven for those weary with the crass materialism and shoving effrontery of the shallow West? A kingdom dedicated to peace and light, where the teachings of Buddha reign supreme? How came this Donnybrook, this tumult, this imbroglio?
I will explain the situation so even a Republican can understand it.
You see, many years ago in Thailand the people did not wear shirts. Not the children. Not the men. And not the women. If you wanted to impress someone with your beauty or handsomeness, or wanted to get dressed up for a village shindig or religious ceremony, you simply got a tattoo. That was considered a classy thing to do. Since no one could hide anything from the waist up, a kind of rough democracy prevailed – if you had a gut the size of a small boulder everyone could see it; if you had warts covering you like pebbles on the beach everyone knew that; if your husband beat you, the welts and bruises were right there for all the world to see and disapprove of. It was hard to hide anything, either good or bad, when everyone could see your chest and backside. And so the Thai people developed a tranquil attitude towards life and towards one another.
Then came the day when a Portuguese man-o-war sailed up the river to Bangkok. The sailors poured out of the ship, curious to see this land of myth and shadow. Of course they were all wearing coarse linen shirts. These shirts set the populace of Bangkok agog. They had never seen such a thing before, and couldn’t imagine how those poor Portuguese managed to wear such wicked-looking things without perspiring to death. But human nature being what it is, a few of the more adventurous Thais traded ivory and rubies for a filthy, foul-smelling sailor shirt – which they immediately donned to great consternation. Consternation at first, and then growing admiration and envy. Before the unfortunate Portuguese knew what was happening they were slaughtered to a man and their ship was sunk in the harbor, but not before every single shirt on board had been confiscated.
Now the first class system was born in Thailand. Those who had shirts lorded it over those who did not. The Shirts were given the best seats in the temple and were served first at every holiday feast. Their children were excused from climbing palm trees to fight the monkeys for precious coconuts. The Shirtless had to kowtow to their shirted masters.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, as soon as the Thais learned to make their own shirts everyone decided that they would be a Shirt – and soon there were no more Shirtless people in Thailand. But that meant that there was no one to climb the palm trees to fight the monkeys for the precious coconuts and no one to take out the trash each evening and no one to row the barges up and down the river. Commerce and civilization came to a stand-still.
Until someone thought up the idea of dying the shirts. The first dye they used was green. The Green Shirts proclaimed their superiority to every other color on earth, and demanded that whenever a Green Shirt passed by everyone else must snuffle in the dirt and wiggle their keysters high in the air.
Then someone else got the smart idea of dying their shirt blue – so now there were the Green Shirts and the Blue Shirts. And the Blue Shirts claimed that the Green Shirts were terrible people because they liked to eat sticky rice instead of plain white rice. To which the Green Shirts replied that only an uneducated baboon would even consider soiling their fingers eating plain white rice.
Then things got complicated. Some radical dyed his shirt both blue and green, in stripes. No one knew what to make of this, so they took the blue and green stripped shirt and hung him up by the toes until he begged for mercy. Then they fed him to the crocodiles. Everyone felt this was an excellent solution, and there was peace in the land for many years.
But it goes against the grain to leave well enough alone. So along came a trouble-maker who began wearing a polka-dot shirt. Then came someone in a plaid shirt. There were riots everywhere and the country would have plunged into civil war had not a wise old monk invented the checkered shirt, with French cuffs, which soon swept the country like fried Twinkies. Everyone wore a checkered shirt, and the land settled down into a drowsy tropical languor that lasted up until just a few months ago – when some wisenheimers decided to go back to solid colored shirts again. And some people wore their shirts inside out, to indicate . . . well, I dunno just exactly what they wanted to indicate. But it incensed part of the Thai population, and that part marched and quarreled with shirts of all sizes and shapes until the only color a shirt could safely be was white, or black.
And then another wise old monk came along and told everyone to take off their shirts and go bare-chested again like in the Good Old Days. This monk was sent to Disneyland in California, and has never been heard from since.
And that is how this whole quandary came to pass.
I’m happy to report that things are now settling down in Bangkok and the surrounding countryside. That is, until some trouble-maker over in Khorat or up in Chiang Mai decides to take his pants off . . .
