In which I'm beginning to get annoyed...

As Corinne noted in her comment on the last post, other bits of gross nationalism are popping up all over Thailand at the moment. An exceedingly stupid 57-year-old Swiss man has been sentenced to ten years in prison for insulting the king. Outraged over restricted alcohol sales on the King's birthday last December, the drunken fool spray-painted over four posters of the monarch in full view of security cameras, and was promptly arrested. Thailand's draconian lese-majeste laws, enshrined in the bleeping Constitution, forbid any criticism, however benign, of the King. The King himself doesn't seem to want such insulation, but they're part and parcel of Thai nationalism - which, by the way, is really starting to get on my nerves.

Bottom line: if you're not Thai, you'll just never get it - or so we're told. Hence, foreigners are socially proscribed from criticizing the government for handing down a 10-year sentence for petty vandalism, or when all of Youtube is blocked because someone showed a video of feet touching a picture of the King. I grasp that these acts are monumentally disrespectful and show a disgraceful contempt for the standards of a society that has kindly welcomed we foreigners. But there's something far more vile about a decade's incarceration for a crime that robbed and injured no one. The government should have deported that asinine fool and been done with it.

As usual, I reserved my real frustration for the foreigners who defend the government's actions on the grounds of cultural sensitivity and the like. I've talked to more than a few of these folks, and they're driving me batty. There's cultural tolerance, which I'm all for, but defending such a foul move goes far beyond that. These people have let cultural relativity erode their core personal principles, and that's pretty reprehensible.

Myself, I'm disgusted. I really enjoy life in Thailand - it's not a difficult place to carve out a pleasant existence. But it's not a free country here, in some very important ways. I'll surely be glad to see the last of ugly Thai nationalism when my term here is up.