RUNNING ON EMPTY, RUNNING FINE
Atlantic Waves - from the net
They were confused, these random desires which peaked and slid as he looked at the local gang of rough heads. There were carparks and hours idled away; they weren't spending money because they had no money to spend. Everything was wrong, had gone wrong. "I'm not my own person, the situation I'm in," he said; and that was true. He wasn't going to stay in the same place for long. Everything moved and everything settled, all at once. As if he knew the despair that would always be there, the self-destruction that would always come back, had grown in force since its last outing. "Told you," came the voices; and he let their random desires infiltrate every last situation. "Liars and thieves," he would sometimes angrily announce to no one in particular, or to the people who used to watch on his computer. As if their tentacles still crept through every section of his life. "Thailand," he would spit. "They're a preposterous pack of liars and thieves."
Yes, well he had been robbed repeatedly. And yes, they had taken singular joy in robbing him, an old man who had made the mistake of looking for friends in all the wrong places. Of assuming they meant what they said. Of falling for all the old lies at an ill-prepared time in life; when all he had been seeking had been a little comfort and companionship. And instead, it had all turned into a nightmare. "Nasty thing for one gay man to do to another," one of the intelligence officers had commented. And yes, that was true enough. He had thrown himself off a cliff; and was lucky to have survived. Why these things happened he would never know. "Amazing how unhappy you can get trying to have a little fun," he said. Amidst the howls of ridicule. "Falang have no power," rising in the morning air. Why weren't they ashamed of having cameras in his bedroom? But they weren't. They hated foreigners, and they hated him in particular, and they just wanted the foreign particle off their sacred soil.
The foreigners that did best in Thailand, he observed, often made no effort at all to befriend the locals. Treated them as servants for their homes and waiters in their restaurants, barely made any effort to learn the language, and treated them as they treated themselves, in a feudalistic way. He came from an egalitarian culture. Thailand was anything but egalitarian. And so what was meant to be a healing period after years of stress and penetrating, eroding pain from a repetitive strain injury became, instead, a nightmare beyond description. And yes, he was robbed, and robbed, and robbed, before the ridicule began. Months, years later, the echoes still ran through his life. A nation of prostitutes, the country's critics would say, often enough men such as himself who had been ripped off with delusions of love, or at least affection. Of a web of lies, beginning with the advertising logo, The Land of Smiles.
So when he called them liars and thieves, that was certainly his experience. But just as you cannot be bullied if you do not allow yourself to be bullied, so you cannot be robbed if you do not allow yourself to be robbed; and in some grand dysfunction, in a cripplingly inappropriate piece of self-destruction, he had let the thieves they subsequently celebrated in their popular culture run riot through his finances, destroy his self-esteem and his sanity, dance on his grave. They had little or no empathy for foreigners, and would have been happy to dance on his grave. Crowds and Power. The manipulation of public opinion. A Chain of Fools. "I like him now." It wasn't your job to like or dislike, or even to make judgement. Why were the mafia and their police cohorts in the seedy sois of Bangkok still allowed to operate, to go about their routine robbing of tourists with impunity? Why were corrupt Thai government officers allowed to breach sovereignty, to hold dance competitions to see which teenager could dance in the most suggestive way. Was this the culture you were so proud of? Go rot.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Nicola Roxon has supplied a 6000-word answer to a question Kevin Rudd sometimes asked his colleagues – why does she hate me so much?
Labor has been as fervent in denouncing Rudd for the past three years as it was silent in acquiescing him in the preceding three years.Â
The former health minister in Rudd's government, now out of politics, said that while ''Kevin always treated me appropriately and respectfully'', she was ''frustrated beyond belief by his disorganisation and lack of strategy''.
Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd embrace Nicola Roxon after her valedictory speech. Photo: Andrew Meares
She cited examples. Many details are new, including her explanation of why Rudd's drive to reform hospitals bogged down.
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''The real tragedy,'' she says, ''was that despite over 100 visits to hospitals . . . we had not been able to pin down Kevin to use [his] focus and phenomenal interest to move the debate, to test out our ideas, or even to resolve some key areas of contention (like the takeover of hospitals question, that Kevin favoured and I did not).''
Roxon presented her John Button Memorial Lecture to set out 10 tips on how to run a government. The lesson from her hospitals example: ''Good governments run best with good diaries.''
The tips are a constructive attempt at a ''lessons learnt'' exercise for future governments.
Perhaps her best summary of Rudd's governance problem was this: ''In 2007, Kevin was great at cut-through, then struggled at follow through.''
But while some detail is new, the information that Kevin was a ''bastard'' and chronically disorganised is not.
Labor has been as fervent in denouncing Rudd for the past three years as it was silent in acquiescing to him in the preceding three years.