Royal Envy?

I know that I have written about this before, but the reverence for the King in Thailand is something that I have never seen before and had no idea existed before we arrived.

My first reaction to this omnipresence and love of the king was to have more of an understanding of how personality cults work. You are here for a little while and all of a sudden you start liking the king, and thinking that he must be a pretty great guy. This is not to say that he is not a great guy, but I really have not investigated enough to know. You just see everyone wearing their yellow shirts and putting their picture of the king in the nicest spot in their business and think, "How could all these people be wrong? If everyone loves the king so much, then I should probably like the king too".

The thing that is even more convincing is that the reverence of the king is not forced, like North Korea, et al., but rather people seem to really like him. It is not like you have to wear the yellow shirt, or put up his picture, but people genuinely seem to like to do so. Some things are certainly done by the government, like the billboards, or the parade in Ching Mae of school kids wishing him well in his current illness. But even the school kids seemed to really take the parade seriously and liked being there.

The other thing Nisha and I have talked about is a kind of jealously that we have no figure to look up to as much as Thais look up to their king. The thing about the king is that he is not a pure figurehead, like most modern monarchs. My understanding is that he does still have a role in politics, but it is more of a guiding force, then day to day politics and administration. Thus he has this role of watching over the country, without having to delve into the mud pit where the politicians must reside.

One might say that we in the US had this type of reverence of the president, but I do not think it was ever as intense as Thais have for the king. Even before the down and dirty politics of the Clinton and Bush eras diminished the reverence for the president, the president was still a politician. As such he must be in involved in the nasty business of politics and sling mud like everyone else. To some degree it must be nice to have a person who embodies the guiding force of the nation, while being able to stay above the fray.