THE NIGHTMARES FLED
Courtesy The Cursed Heart Collectors Edition
I love you I miss you I stay with you forever. These were the lies that foreigners paid for. These were the false assurances that quickly turned not just into falsehoods, but into elaborate or not so elaborate robberies. Poverty did many things. It meant you could sleep with someone purely for money. It meant you were prepared to demean yourself with lies and treachery, because your own family was a higher cause. And because foreigners were actively disliked, and foreigners who dared to protest disliked even more, it was all not just forgiveable, but perfectly reasonable. To turn a liar and a thief into a cause for national celebration was a neat feat. To rob a foreigner was easy. To pursue them from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, from one part of the Kingdom to another, simple vindictiveness. To pursue them across borders, a criminal act.
These were some of the things he had fled. Because, as he had said before, only Thais rob tourists with such malicious glee and then ridicule them for being "lek, lek", small, if they run low on the readies.
Money was everything to them. Truth nothing. Or so it came to seem to some of the many jaundiced victims of their sex industry, the AIDS ridden criminally run element of their society protected by police and by governments. His head still swirled with these sometimes stupid thoughts for one reason, he was here because he had been there. One door shuts and another opens. When in crisis deal with what is in front of your face. All these old cliches had come in handy during the process of what had happened. And now, the crysalis in the making. Everything happens for a reason. All of that. Dreams kept coming back. Of crowds celebrating Song Kran, chanting against the foreigner, swirling with hatred. Laughing, laughing, at him. He wished the dreams, the nightmares, would go away. He didn't want to think about them anymore. He didn't like them anymore, if he ever had.
They had been so hateful, in a level beyond absurd hatred, the thousands, tens of thousands, dancing in the street, celebrating the rent boy who had robbed and ridiculed him; celebrating theft and deception. He wouldn't have believed it if it hadn't happened. The mafia tentacles not just reaching through and with the police; but with the government; with the populace. "It's the worst case I've ever seen ," one of the officers commented. And another, shaking his head at the stupidity witnessed: "They don't seem to have bothered to even do a background check."
As if they had created their own nightmare. As if life and ruin would stretch out forever. As if here, in the sun flecked valleys, there were moments of peace, when he slept and adopted routines, and days followed days and all was well. "We take care of our citizens,
not try to destroy them." Well as may be, some things changed and others did not. It had been a long road but short as well. "Where are all your friends?" someone asked and he shrugged: "Many of them died a long time ago."
THE BIGGER STORY
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/us/politics/obama-administration-presses-case-on-syria.html?_r=0
WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner said on Tuesday that he would “support the president’s call to action” in Syria after meeting with President Obama, giving the president a crucial ally in the quest for votes in the House.
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Obama Seeks Support on Syria
A Broader Look at the War Across Syria
Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, quickly joined Mr. Boehner to say he also backed Mr. Obama.
“Understanding that there are differing opinions on both sides of the aisle, it is up to President Obama to make the case to Congress and to the American people that this is the right course of action, and I hope he is successful in that endeavor,” Mr. Cantor said in a statement.
Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. summoned Mr. Boehner and other Republican and Democratic leaders to the White House as they intensified their push for Congressional approval of an attack on Syria. Conservative House Republicans have expressed deep reluctance about the president’s strategy, and winning Mr. Boehner’s approval could help the president make inroads with a group that has not supported him on most issues in the past.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, said, “I believe the American people need to hear more about the intelligence.”
The difficulty with Kevin Rudd promising on Sunday that we haven't seen anything yet is that a lot of Australians figure they've seen just about everything.
Labor's official campaign launch, thus, was a determined exercise in attempted amnesia.
It could be nothing else. Mr Rudd couldn't talk much about Kevin Mk I, because everyone remembers how that finished. He couldn't remind the folks about the last three years because, well, we know about that, too.