The Funeral Casino by Klima Alan

Author:Klima, Alan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

THE VALUE OF THE DEAD

The integration of the Thai economy with the new vision of the world market was fairly well completed by the time I returned to Thailand in 1995. Only three years after Black May, the alignment of neoliberal financial policy with the privatization of industries and relaxation of state interventions into the economy had picked up great momentum. The “bourgeois revolution,” as the ultimate victors had performed it, was successful, and without a subsequent reign of terror. And yet curiously, three years after Black May, the military’s constitution was still in place. The Democrat Party, which eventually won the premiership, was unwilling to take steps toward a new constitution after it began enjoying the powers that the military’s version afforded. A demonstration for a People’s Constitution had been staged in Bangkok the previous year, two years after Black May, and was led by another Chalad Worachat hunger strike, but it failed due to the public’s lack of interest.75 Chalad called off his hunger strike, seeing no point in dying if no one was going to pay attention. The next year, for the third anniversary of Black May in 1995, he just sat outside parliament alone. There, he complained to me:

I have been sad and disturbed all this time, all three years. If not, I wouldn’t have come here today. I am sad thinking about those who died that May, and how we did not get anything from it all. I don’t use people’s lives to campaign for fame. I don’t use people’s lives to seek my self-interest. I honor them. I will finish their task, so long as I have a life to do it with. I want democracy to be real. One day, if there is real democracy, the heroes will get what they deserve. I think of them always with a pure heart, and not to make an image for myself. At the very least, I will do something to exchange with the martyrs. . . . If I see the flowof the people is right, I might put my life on the line one more time. But this time is not right for that.

Surely politics is all about timing. But if so, then timing, and so politics, is also all about the nature of time itself. Student activists and relatives of the dead, whether from October 14, Bloody October, or Black May, believe that there is great political potential to the time of recurrent return, of commemoration and anniversary. This is a counter time that cuts against the grain of a system that would have itself move rapidly from era to era, that would stress this aspect of time against others that might drag on its heels. True, things seem better in 1995 than in 1992. Democracy and a free press, though not fully realized, seem to be more robust than they were when the military seized power at the turn of the decade. There is certainly no way to fight tyranny without these things, above all the free press.

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