So some unnamed evil-doers hatched a dastardly plot to spiritually drive spiritual tacks or nails into the 6 points of the spiritual hexagon that surrounds the equestrian statue of King Rama V, thus preventing the spiritual power emanating out of the statue from saving the nation.  But the leader of the People’s Alliance for Demagoguery, Sondhi Limthongkul, was alert enough to counter this threat.

With the kind assistance of female followers of the PAD, used sanitary napkins were used to replace the spiritual tacks or nails, after these had been spiritually extracted by Sonthi’s spiritual experts wielding spiritual pliers.  The menstrual blood prevented the spiritual baddies from sending their spirits back, which, we are told, made them furious.  In a spiritual sort of way.

Apparently the Fine Arts Department, the BMA and the police have been to look around the equestrian statue.  It is not reported if they found any evidence of holes in the tarmac or unsightly litter.  Or if they were infuriated by what they did find, spiritually or otherwise.

And the equestrian statue is not the only sacred spiritual site under threat.  Sondhi also tells us that more evil-minded persons allowed a Khmer, of all people, to get behind the Emerald Buddha statue and remove a stone which emits spiritual power.

General Pinlop Pinmanee, with whom I have never agreed in the past, has decided that Sondhi has gone wild.  And with these references to Khmers, it must be a madness with a nasty racist edge to it.

So how do devout followers of the PAD, who are also devout followers of Santi Asoke (which takes a very dim view of this kind of mumbo-jumbo), react to all this?  Succumb to schizophrenia?

But let’s try to put this gullible gibberish into some kind of context.  The PAD are forever banging on about the ignorance of upcountry voters.  Venal and uneducated, they cannot be trusted to understand what’s good for the country and, in exchange for a sum that most PAD supporters wouldn’t miss for minute, will sell it down the river by ensuring that Thailand keeps getting the wrong government.

PAD followers, on the other hand, are supremely confident in the correctness of their own view (even though this means having to ignore what the academic literature tells us about voting in the provinces or even what upcountry voters say themselves, often with admirable lucidity). 

Preeda Tai-suwan is a PAD supporter and a business owner with so much of a social conscience that he’s regularly invited to conflabs on issues like corporate social responsibility and the sufficiency economy.  And he pointed out at a recent public symposium that PAD devotees cannot possibly be brainwashed by the kind of opinionated rhetoric that pours endlessly from ASTV and the Manager, ‘because they are middle-class people’.

Now there has been some post-election analysis in the US about how unusual it is for the White House to have a brain in it at last.  It is not just the almost wilful ignorance of ‘don’t read newspapers’ Palin and ‘don’t read books’ Bush that is frightening.  It is also the way the American electorate responds to intelligence (highly distrustful) as opposed to an amiable, affable mediocrity of the intellect (they’d enjoy sharing a beer).

It has been suggested that the country with the best universities, some of the planet’s finest brains, and the world’s longest list of Nobel Laureates has a worryingly uninformed underclass that in a surprisingly large number of cases can’t read, in even more cases doesn’t read, and is for the most part reliant on easily manipulated images requiring little by way of an attention span.  The ability to tolerate ambiguity, to weigh evidence, to extrapolate to likely consequences and to see hidden connections just isn’t there.

But in the US, the debate has assumed that the celebrity-sozzled, the easily distracted and the uncritical are the people who use more muscle than brain, and who fill the lower-paid ranks of the workforce.  The meritocracy that rises to positions of responsibility or expertise need a bit more by way of brain power. 

In short, it is the middle-classes that are supposed to be able to think, to reason, and to see the insanity of religiously placing used sanitary towels round the base of a statue.

But not the Thai middle class.