Even in politics, there can be tough love

He’s got me taped – I really am that confused. As I was for 12 years as a single parent alone with three daughters while trying my damnedest to be both the mother and the father they needed. For both parents are crucial in any balanced upbringing of a child, obviously, the unconditional love on the one hand and the attempt to impose reason on the genius-

disorder of adolescence on the other. And I’m not suggesting at all that mothers have a monopoly on love either, or fathers on reason. Indeed, as often as not it’s just the reverse!

And I take the risk of saying all that, even when I know I’ll be accused of being patronising toward what we used to call the “working classes” but now, out of respect for our peculiar, free-market prejudices, we call “the poor”, or “the undeveloped”, or sometimes even “the disadvantaged”.

In my experience, parenting is a sort of magic trick, because as hard as one tries to use the wands and spells of parental advantage, the power, the experience, the sacrifice every parent hopes to make, it just doesn’t work so much of the time. The transformation so often goes so horribly wrong – or appears to go wrong, in any case. My wonderful eldest daughter, now a human-rights activist and one of the best people I’ve ever met in my life, ran away at 16 for a whole year, all my efforts went as wrong as that. And my youngest daughter has just left her wonderful husband in an exact repeat of what happened in her own childhood 40 years before. Yes, on and on it goes, even the most benighted parent ending up producing some astonishing good out of the bad and, even more perplexing, the so-called “good” parent producing heart-wrenching bad out of what was the noblest attempt to do right.

What I’m suggesting is that there are no easy goods and bads in human development on the political any more than on the personal front. Nelson Mandela found his way from condoning terrorism against white interests in South Africa to supporting a virtually all white South African rugby side in the 1995 World Cup, the subject of Clint Eastwood’s extraordinary film “Invictus”, a huge force for the good. And then, of course, Clint Eastwood goes on to play the red-neck GI himself in “Gran Torino”, only to find himself using his crude racist violence to nurture and protect his vulnerable Hmong neighbours!

Surprising things do happen in real life, which is what made me so angry at the BBC during the Ratchaprasong demonstrations in 2010, its coverage being so compromised by the willingness on the part of its reporters to see good, hear good, and speak good. Ill-informed and prejudiced, the BBC swallowed the well-planned message of the lobbyists hook line and sinker, and saw the whole weird event through the rose-tinted glasses of the with-it, well-schooled intellectual: workers = good, elites = bad. As simplistic and out of date as that. 

This is what I want to say in reply to Khun Kemadist, then. Just as there are confused sons and daughters who will do anything in their power to force their parents to use violence against them, and when at last they do succeed in getting slapped, or are forced to change their clothes or go to their rooms, the little revolutionaries call their teachers or even the police for protection, or even attempt suicide, and boy, that really gets the white coats a-running. 

So too the Red Shirt demonstrators went further and further in their provocation until they got the response they knew was indispensable to achieve their special interests – bloodshed. Yes, that’s what they wanted all along, well-documented bloodshed – because they knew that without blood they would never get their parents arrested! 

Think about that. Think about Ratchaprasong and what children sometimes do to make their parents look bad. Even in the very best of families.

Finally, I have never “justified” the coup, Khun Kemadist, nor have I ever even commented on “what the police did to the yellow-shirt demonstrators”. Indeed, I have no idea who lobbed those grenades into the Government House encampment at night anymore than I know who shot Seh Daeng, or who planted the six bombs in Bangkok or the cash in Suphoth’s house. I did mention junior police officers who beat up demonstrators right in front of their superiors, but I used that as an example of the sort of vigilante justice that was being meted out before the coup, and, in my mind, those events were proof that the playground was no longer safe for democracy. As it so often isn’t.

Lung Kip

Chiang Mai