The most famous ghost story in Thailand is the tale of Mae Naak Pra Khanong แม่นากพระโขนง.  This horror story is said to refer to an incident in the time of King Rama IV who reigned in Siam from 1851 to 1868.  The story is that Mrs. Naak died in childbirth while her husband Mak was away at war.  But when he returned he found her there with her child.  Neighbors were killed who tried to warn Mak that his wife and child were ghosts.  Mak accidentally learned the truth and managed to flee.  Mae Naak chased him until she was subdued by a priest who was an exorcist who encased her in a bone fragment of her forehead which he kept in his sash.  It is said that this is now property of the Thai royal family.  In 1899 Anek Nawikamul, a Thai historian, investigated and wrote an account to set the record straight.  Nevertheless, for decades one of the most popular personages in Thai culture was Nang Naak whose selfless devotion surpasses even her death.  To this day women seeking easy childbirth make offerings at a shrine in the Suan Luang District of Bangkok [see (above) the picture of her shrine in Wat Mahabut near the Pra Khanong Canal].  More than 20 films and TV versions, as well as one opera, have been made of this romantic ghost story.
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The story of Mae Naak Pra Khanong has everything that Thai people love.  It is a lurid ghost story; Nae Naak murders her neighbors in a vain effort to prevent them from exposing her real nature as a ghost.  It is a tender love story about the supernatural lengths romantic love might go.  It is about people who really lived – and, importantly, died.  On top of that, the story has royal connections having been retold by no less than Prince Damrong, a son of King Mongkut (Rama IV), whereby the relic possibly came into the possession of the Palace.  Just as significantly, the story’s satisfactory ending involves Mak taking refuge in a Buddhist temple, and a Buddhist priest capturing the ghost and (in one version) pacifying her by promising her reunion with her husband.  Aside from the story, traditions have developed that encourage continued veneration of Mae Naak Pra Khanong as a granter of petitions.

There are countless ghosts on the loose and in literature, but Mae Naak beats them all.

NOTE OF THANKS  This blog essay is our 427th as we conclude our 8th year online with weekly essays from northern Thailand.  November 1 begins our 9th year.           

 “Woke is a political term originating in the United States referring to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice,” our amazing online reference resource, Wikipedia, informs us.  “It derives from the African-American Vernacular English expression ‘stay woke’, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.”
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I’m guessing a few million of us became aware of the word “woke” during the events following the murder of George Floyd when protests arose and expanded from anger about that single injustice, to that sort of injustice, to what police do, to the danger of white supremacy, to the racism of some national heroes (Columbus, Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, Gen. Paton, Robert E. Lee … and Edward Colston – you’d know who he was if you were a woke Londoner).  The protests were a “Woke Movement”. 

The question that quickly follows when one is woke is what to do about it.  And that sometimes leads to our second jargon of the year Cancel Culture.

“Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.”  Thanks for that definition, Pop Culture Dictionary.

Before this year I would have associated the term with, say, a TV show being cancelled when the ratings dropped.  Then came the ruckus about J.K Rowling, the author whose books I have read and written about more than any other in the last 20 years. Timorously, a group of alarmed celebrities (including Piers Morgan of the BBC’s “Good Morning Britain”) have tried to help us understand that cancel culture attacks can become exaggerated, as when a group of Vegans intruded into a British steak restaurant and interrupted everybody.  They were out-shouted by a spontaneous group of diners chanting “Red Meat, Red Meat!” 

As I understand it, social media (and by that many observers mean TWITTER) have raised the stakes.  For some targets, such as Rowling with her millions of pounds in the bank, being smeared and vilified online and having her popularity dimmed is more of an inconvenience than a danger.  But for people of lesser means, just being accused of not being a strong enough supporter of a cause can result in the end of a job or being physically attacked.

Stay woke, cancel culture, and virtue signaling, which are moral issues, have a sinister potential to turn into a purity spiral, which is a competition.

Nathan Taylor, a gay guy who loves knitting started a hashtag aimed at promoting diversity in knitting.  What happened was what Gavin Haynes in a BBC documentary called a “purity spiral” in which the online “discussion” intensified into moral outrage.  Haynes insists that “the spiral often concerns morality, it is not about morality. It’s about purity — a very different concept. Morality doesn’t need to exist with reference to anything other than itself. Purity, on the other hand, is an inherently relative value — the game is always one of purer-than-thou.”  What happens is that people who are involved feel the need to defend their purity as more pure than other’s.  They list examples.  The knitting group began talking about the books they were reading to prove they were pure of the racism the knitters were being accused of.  The books were found to be racist by other knitters.  Knitting businesses began to become targets.  But those accused could also benefit by agreeing with the thought leaders.  Saying, “We just sell yarn!” could lead to death-threats.  But agreeing that “We knitters have been deeply remiss in our failure to acknowledge the pain we have inflicted on struggling Black and indigenous people of colour,” [a paraphrase of a comment by a Scottish knitter quoted by Haynes] might get one by until rants began that “just feeling sorry is the very essence of white privilege.”  When Nathan Taylor tried to calm things down the attacks intensified so much that he had a nervous breakdown.

Purity spirals can have those outcomes.  They happen when a purity spiral turns mindless and destructive.  But purity spirals contain their own demise in the way they form.  Pressure to be purer and purer leads to posturing and defensiveness that are unsustainable.  Timur Kuran, Professor of Economics and Political Science at Duke University, calls this ‘preference falsification’. His theory relates to things like the fall of the Soviet Union, where almost no one saw the end coming, because they hadn’t realized that an entire population was falsifying their experience to each other.  That’s what happens when one tries to win in a purity spiral.  Eventually the effort simply becomes too much.

Before that happens it can get very ugly.     

Persistence is the word that most characterizes the protest movement in Thailand.  Events of the last couple of days have made the front pages of newspapers worldwide.  Those who read carefully may know more than I do, here where my access to news is limited by the self-censorship of the media and my distrust of them.  However, for friends and family who have been wondering, here is my brief interpretation of what is going on.

Beginning with the military-controlled government’s liquidation of the main political party opposing them, students began protests to call for constitutional reform to restore democracy and to call for the Prime Minister to step down.  That call expanded to include reform of the provisions in the constitution relating to the monarchy and release of people charged with undermining the monarchy or the government.  But movements evolve.
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In the past, criticism of the monarchy as an institution and any members of the royal family was against the law, the rationale being that Thai culture rests on three pillars: the state, religion, and the monarch.  The previous King was held in high esteem.  Criticism of him was quite unpopular.  But as of 4 years ago his son has become King.  He has not cared for popularity.  The protest movement about 6 months ago began the previously unheard of practice of calling for the King to return funds to public control which he had taken over.  The movement took the form of large gatherings of students and young adults on a frequent basis, often in symbolic locations.  Thai ex-pats began to draw attention to an additional list of grievances including the fact that the King and Queen spent most of their time in Germany without appointing a regent to act when the King is not in the country. 

Until this weekend the government has permitted the students to gather and say pretty much whatever they wanted.  But the King and Queen have now returned, not just for a brief holiday, but for 7 weeks or longer.  They have resumed public activities such as audiences and presiding at university commencement services.  The government (meaning the central part that includes the Prime Minister as well as senior military leaders) would like very much for the young people to “go back home and attend to your business.”  To underline this demand, twenty or so “leaders” of the student movement were arrested.  But the demonstrations have continued. 

Crisis times came and passed without violence.  Police have kept royalist counter-demonstrators separated.

But it appears that now the government has decided to “up the ante” to use a gamblers’ term.  Following an incident yesterday where the Queen’s motorcade was obstructed when it drove unexpectedly onto a street blocked by a group of demonstrators, last night police in riot gear put up road blocks and sprayed the crowd with a high pressure water cannon using water mixed with blue dye and a caustic substance (called tear gas by one source).  A “Severe State of Emergency” was declared restricting public gatherings to no more than 5 persons.  In defiance, thousands of students gathered Saturday at five locations in Bangkok, and other locations around the country including a packed crowd at Chiang Mai University.

October is a deeply symbolic month.  It is the month two previous student movements for democratic reform were put down by the military, killing hundreds (perhaps thousands).  Once again it is the young adult generation that is persisting in challenging the powerful elite to include the people.  “It’s our money!” the protesters shouted at the royal motorcade. The young people have changed the words of the national pledge, too.  It used to be a pledge to uphold “the nation, religion, and King.”  Yesterday they were shouting, “Nation, religion, people!”

Here’s a little exercise to see if your vision is 2020.

Insert first pic
1.      Make 4 dots at random.
2.      Connect the dots with 4 uninterrupted lines.

Insert second pic
3.      Find the middle point on each line.
4.      Connect the points.

Insert third pic
5.      This will always provide a parallelogram.

Does this theorem have any application?  I do not know of any, but I do not work with geometry or physics any more than I have to.  Nevertheless, I do not think this odd fact should be discounted quickly.  I would not be surprised if Pythagoras or Paracelsus has considered this phenomenon.  It’s the sort of thing that might have popped into Einstein’s head to open an avenue of thought about space, time, and gravity.  Somebody COULD decide that this example of random irregularity resolving into regularity has profound significance.

So far I have only gotten far enough to feel that thinking about this is a relief from almost everything else that 2020 has brought so far.

​As the USA gets close to the national election on November 3 the rhetoric has tended to get hot.  One Trump supporter appealed for reducing the name calling.  He objected to being called a “nationalist” which was equivalent to “supremacist” or “racist”. 
 
He said, “Perhaps people vote for Trump, blacks and hispanics included, that believe: late term abortion is wrong, a strong economy is good, critical race theory is racist and teaches children to hate America, BLM is a radical, Marxist terrorist organization, antifa is more than an idea - they murder burn and loot.”
 
I’d like to reply to him.  I think we can be reasonable.
 
Let’s agree that some voters are issue oriented.  Let’s identify their issues as (1) late-term abortion, (2) economic growth, (3) racism that teaches children to hate America, (4) Black Lives Matter is a radical Marxist terrorist organization, (5) Antifa advocates murder, burning and looting.  Let’s even lay aside the notion that those who most fervently hold these concerns are nationalists.  These concerns are exaggerated out of proportion to reality.  But we can even postpone that debate although that is at the heart of this.
 
What cannot be so easily ignored is the result of these concerns.  The issues lead to actions.  The action being supported to address some or all of these is the matter being contended in this US election.  What those voters advocate amounts to this: In order to prevent late-term abortions all abortions are to be prevented.  In order to permit economic growth almost no limits should be imposed on industries.  In order to promote patriotism narratives concerning past humanitarian errors and slavery must be toned down.  In order to keep America secure radical black as well as anti-Fascist movements must be seen as organizations and suppressed.  As the danger of these things is exaggerated so are the actions in response to them.
 
Since America is not a pure democracy in which every issue is decided by a referendum, but is a republic where representatives meet to do that, the election is our main recourse.  We can ask the candidates what they believe about these issues, and consider how their answers line up with our understanding of justice and sustainable progress.  But then we need to ponder how trustworthy the candidates are and whether we believe they will take action when elected that stays consistent with what they say they will do.  Our power as citizens is limited.  We can do almost nothing but consider the character of the people standing for election and then vote.