Life Imitations Leaves Scar Tissue

"Things are pretty much the same everywhere."-- Timothy Hallinan's Thai cop sidekick

This trial in Thailand seems to echo Western perceptions of vacuous Asian ethics, in a border country seemingly caught in an intersection. I have the actual AP feed bookmarked on my phone, and may refer back to it, but this seems a bit spooky, superimposed from our narrative entertainments in exotic locales. A Nail Through The Heart makes the Scandinavian television series, The Legacy, look like a picnic, and The Beach, as a film, dilutes itself with a poorly referenced plot, but why Thailand? A constitutional monarchy surrounded by a history of leftist extremes, with a big lying socialist bully up north, suffering and pleasuring civilization and savagery collide in an interesting dynamic. Hallinan's novel was so powerful it made me lie for hours in the dark, superimposing many things of my own. Timothy's American optimism perseveres through his travel detective, despite a tidal wave of genocidal deception, and mine cannot, even though he thanked me for my review when I was still with Examiner.

I have been thinking about proportionality for some time, and this case raises it in spades, whether the migrants are guilty or being set up, what possible justice is there for such a brutal attack? The British families will be haunted the rest of their lives, and what motives Zaw and Win may have had seems puzzling, as the evidence indicates there was a degree of rage to these killings. The case also is an exception to sociological studies about class and crime. The indignant do not kill the privileged, except when they do, apparently to sate some driving impulse.

I part company with conservatives like George Will about the death penalty in the US. Will acknowledges the reality of its erosion, and it is a state sanctioned cessation of life in which a percentage of innocent individuals were unjustly electrocuted, hanged, or injected, but I do not think it should be abolished. Some humans are heinous beyond incarceration, but anyway you choose to parse it, justice for these two Britons doesn't seem attainable through standard judicial procedure.

Bigfoot's Sensory Perception

For example, if the animal does not have enough food, is it a kind of cruelty or not?"--Adisorn Noochdumrong, not quite the autocrat

Thailand seems to be a hot property, in this century, for an uneasy cultural fusion between permissiveness, hegemony, and corruption, almost as a guild-province rather than a country. It is where the youngest brother of The Legacy, Emil, gets imprisoned for a sour deal. It is the locale of choice for the clever travel detective author Timothy Hallinan, who skillfully juxtaposes innocence with a stark nihilism which makes Roman tempers picturesque, and it is almost part of the cast in Danny Boyle's flailing film with DiCaprio, The Beach.

DiCaprio also seems to be the gilded boy always under threat when he takes the side of the vulnerable. It is a motif he seems to consistently deploy in films like The Titanic, The Quick and the Dead, or playing Howard Hughes.

The narrative exasperation DiCaprio adopts strikes the right tone of skeptical disillusion with material accouterments and ennui, but Alex Garland should have sued Hodge over that screen play. Every major scene backfires like a faulty transmission in a Ford station wagon: the talking shark, the dead Daffy, the killing of the American jackasses toward the conclusion, in which Tilda Swinton engages in nearly the exact maneuver as she does in Michael Clayton: the dramatic collapse of the true believer exposed for crossing too many lines.

Though the adaptation here is less ridiculous than The Blue Lagoon of Brooke Shields' sexual peak, the killing of the last three Americans by the Thai pot farmer seems arbitrary. However, there is a touch of survival of the most ruthless going on here. Subsistence manufactures brutality out of its own necessity, and athleticism isn't always an advantage in subtropical climates. 

I came up with a fairly good idea for a pitch last week, (of 6/15/15) and fed it to OZY anyway (why I do these things I am not quite sure, I have been angry with the lies of the American left for a long time, which isn't to convey that conservatives don't deny reality when it suits them) and then dared to pitch it to Wapo, but it made me reflect upon the difficulty of gaining access, especially when it is all about pedigree, and I am trying to figure out how to cajole my quarry without being overly forceful. (Sigh) Freelancing without a contract is a bitch.