My new goal is to learn a little about the Thai political climate, that which is all around me, yet about which, until recently, I have remained entirely ignorant. In a recent interview, a prominent Thai political pundit reduced the whole thing down to three words: monarchy, military, and bureaucracy. Beyond yellow-shirt-Mondays, posters of the King and Queen flanked by waterfalls and pagodas in every house, and the song between the previews and the feature, the monarchy doesnt really affect my everyday life. And, knock on wood, I have had little to no interaction with the military, beyond the just-finished-high-school city boys serving their mandatory 6 month service at rural road blocks (read: perennially adjusting their uniforms, ogling the odd attractive female passenger and taking photos with their camera phones of said female passenger). Bureaucracy, however, has been a different story.
Thus, the triumvirate may well better be described as leung(yellow in Thai), leering and lackadaisical, or else saffron shirts, shoddy soldiering, and sheets upon sheets of paper (hows that for a scatagories score?).
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