In a rough week for the military government, the best response they could come up with was unveiling a nightmarish mascot right out of a horror movie. In a week that called for deft public relations manoeuvring, the government spokesman riled the Muslim South with disgraceful doublespeak. In a week that required a calm port in a storm, the prime minister's infamous blustering blew the top off every lid of decency.
Among the junta's shortcomings, their PR policy is the most wretched. They anger people when they should placate them. They boil blood when they should tranquilise it. This week only confirmed how disconnected this government is when it comes to public communication -- as if we still need any confirmation of that after nearly four years.
Hire an expensive PR film, I would advise, one that, first of all, would tell them to at least change the background of the PM's weekly address, or come up with a peace mascot that looks less like a psycho-killer. But hiring a top firm would mean a bigger budget for the junta, and that is strictly against my religion.
The excessive response to the anti-coal protesters in Songkhla was disagreeable in itself. Sixteen protesters were arrested, then granted bail, and yet more are set to be rounded up and detained -- all of this for voicing their opposition to a coal-fired power plant in Thepha district. What was more offensive was the handling of the crisis. There was no conciliatory attitude from any of the top officials, not one kind word, as if the protesters -- including women and children -- are homicidal criminals unworthy of any sympathy. They were called "assailants" and "hard core", when it's clear from various footage in circulation which party carried weapons and used physical force. Please, don't treat us as if we don't have an internet access -- doing that only shows how disconnected you are with the rest of the world.
The most shocking of all was government spokesman Lt Gen Sansern Kaewkamnerd's baffling innuendo: He alluded, on national TV, that one of the protesters who had gone missing, Mustasidin "Bae Mus" Waba, might have disappeared with a woman "who's not his family". The spokesman danced with his tongue and came out later to insist that he never meant to accuse Bae Mus of committing any unseemly act with another woman "who's not from his family".
But my heart sank on hearing a top government official saying something like that in broadcast to the nation. The trick is cheap. Shaming a small protester is totally unnecessary, disgraceful, and flat-out cruel, and the family of Bae Mus came out to say how disappointed they were with the remark. If this is a PR response from a government that claims to be a reconciliatory force, one that also claims to champion human rights as a national agenda -- who are they kidding? -- the term "PR" may no longer stand for what it does but something more petulant, regressive, and prone to disaster.
Let's not repeat the incident, related to the first, when Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha yelled at a southern fisherman who raised his grievances before him. The PM's reaction was scary, and yet later he said he was sorry for flipping out. Now remember, when Thaksin Shinawatra was in power, he, too, freely exploited verbal arrogance and insensitive accusations -- he, too, said that lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit went missing after arguing with his wife, a total fib and a disgrace to the speaker. But Thaksin was a little luckier because back in the mid-2000s, there was no "social media". The karmic retribution came at him still, though more slowly and in a more physical form.
Near the end of this tempestuous week came the most bizarre thing from the army: the abominable mascot Nong Kiao Koy ("holding little pinkies sister"), a symbol of reconciliation that looks like a mad girl, or a monstrous clown from a Stephen King novel, not to mention the worse-than-high-school-play quality of the costume that makes her -- it -- all the more unpleasant. One wonders what this little freak will be able to reconcile when kids will run away at the first sight of it, and one wonders if with the two-billion-baht army budget, this is the best they could come up with.
We're talking about all of the above as PR mishaps. But is it really that simple? Good products can be ruined by bad PR, but bad products can't be saved even by the best advertising. Nong Kiao Koy may be a disaster in mascot-making, showing tastelessness so hilarious and humiliating that it spawned thousands of memes and photo-shopped mockeries in mere hours. But it also belies a deeper, more essential problem: The disconnectedness from the way the world is operating. That will take much more than a mascot to solve.
Kong Rithdee is Life Editor, Bangkok Post.
