Long live the King
Nowadays, most of us in the western countries, especially in the U.S., don’t really considered monarchs as powerful head of states. Kings and queens, princes and princesses are those in the bed time story or history books. They hardly make any political headlines, and most of the time people would rather hear about monarch scandals than some kind of royal reverence.
The attitude may seem a bit stuck-in-the-past, but in Thailand, the King is deeply revered by everyone in the country. His god-like status has never been questioned. You will never find any living soul in Thailand disrespect the King, or say his name in vain, ever. The people have geniune affections for him. Any disrespectful remarks is taken seriously, and you should never make jokes about him. I think it’s one of the country’s amusing charm.
This weekend Thailand celebrates the King’s 60th anniversary on the throne. He is the world’s longest-serving monarch, reigning through 17 military coups, 20 prime ministers, and 15 constitutions. (BBC) He doesn’t intefere much with the democratic process, but intervenes during crises and able to stop blood-shed revolutions from getting out of control. Having been the king for 60 years now, he’s the only king for most of Thai population’s living memory.
Something Mark and I learned from our travel guide when we last went to Thailand:
1. He is the world’s first and only monarch to ever hold a patent. Since 1955, he’s held several patents on rainmaking techniques.
2. He is an accomplished jazz musician and composer, also a published photographer, painter, and translator. He’s jammed with Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Earlier in his reign, he ran a pirate radio station from the royal palace and people could call in to make requests. (for a geek, that’s cool.)
3. He dedicates a large part of the royal palace for research and development projects, involving mainly in agricultural research. The results of the research are then spread to help development in rural areas of the country.
4. He has one eye. The other eye was lost in a car accident.
Something I just recently learned: he has been awarded the United Nation Development Program’s first Human Development Lifetime Achievement Award.
And so Thailand celebrates this weekend, putting everything on hold, including the current political dilemma, until Wednesday (because a special weekend deserves to be 5 days long). Doesn’t it just sound like a fairy tale?