The other day I saw some graffiti in a public toilet. It read, ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short, as the popular translation goes. Like a street artist, I decided to vandalise it, scratching out and changing the first bit with my poor Latin: dictatura longa, vita brevis. Dictatorship is long, life is short.
How long? At the moment, nearly four years and counting. It could be five, six, 20, 100, a millennium. In the past 85 years of constitutional monarchy, the years we have spent under military dictatorship are longer than that which we have had under elected civilians. History doesn’t just repeat itself. History has never gone away anywhere.
The reactionaries, the former “whistle blowers”, the online cheerleaders and the Ravana-like arms of the National Council of Peace and Order (NCPO) are popping champagne and doing the Panama Dance. There’s a cause for celebration: On Thursday the National Legislative Assembly (NLA) voted 196 to 12 (a slight improvement from 250 to 0) to pass the draft organic bill that extends the deadline for holding the election by another 90 days.
In the debate, if we can call a gathering of like-minded men appointed by the same coup-makers a debate, one NLA member argued that the election should be postponed for five years. Give Pol Lt Col Phongchai Warachit a medal please, for he has spoken the mind of many: The country is at peace, corruption purged, politicians stifled, so why do we have to rush the election?
If we really have to answer that, it’s because the past four years have seen the anaesthesia of democracy and the amputation of people’s involvement in public matters.
We’re not fond of politicians — let alone tycoon politicians — but we can’t ignore the fact that the current regime has trivialised its near-absolute power and treated its rule as a chance to mete out personal vendettas. Its inefficiency has a crippling effect, and its repeated, blithe about-faces on the roadmap and election date are simply an affront to the people and an embarrassment to the world.
The roadmap, yes, to where exactly? To the corruption-free utopia where politicians won’t cheat and a career soldier won’t buy 25 luxury watches and won’t claim, without his heart skipping a beat, that he has borrowed the timepieces from his dead school friend? The roadmap to a military wonderland where we have more tanks and submarines than our neighbours? To some imaginary, foolproof platform where people have no representation and public officials are handpicked by the military? Even China has a civilian at the top from where he commands the army, not vice versa.
Of course if they want to postpone the election date for three months or three years, what can we do? After the coup in 2014, the junta said the election would happen around late 2015 to early 2016. That came and went with nobody noticing. Then they said it would be August 2016, but the complication over the new constitution meant the deadline went up in smoke.
Then it was supposed to be July 2017, the tentative date Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha informed the then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Then it was supposed to be November this year, as the premier boasted to President Donald Trump in that funny meeting at the White House.
And so, dictatura longa, vita brevis. The election is likely to be moved back again, and all we can do is blink the disbelief away. Life is short, art is long, but the junta is longer. No, the longest, an anomalous force that breaks all the rules.
This newspaper has a countdown clock on the front page, winding down to the tentative election date in November as announced earlier by the regime (303 days to go from today). It is futile, a countdown to an anticlimax. Though the junta has denied having ordered the NLA to pass the bill that in effect can postpone the election, it is hard not to question their sincerity. Just in case they forgot, we can read and think here. How can the government, the legislative and the NCPO be distinguished from one another when they’ve come from the same seeds of May 22, 2014?
