The Hole Truth

December 7th, 2007

Warning: If you should find yourself walking around in the Royal Plaza area, watch your step. There are holes all over the place. These freshly dug hazards are the work of candidates and party hacks (but of course not including those banned from using shovels for five years—they’re only allowed to watch). What “on earth” (sorry) are they doing? To the casual observer they might simply appear to be friends dressed in matching polo shirts and jackets with bad haircuts doing a little group gardening, but their purpose is not to celebrate Mother Nature’s magnificence; it is, rather, to ensure that the Goddess of Democracy isn’t sullied by that age-old, albeit reprehensible, practice known as vote-buying.

Foreigners have a hard time understanding this, just as they are perplexed by our ability to “sit” for hours in a squatting position, but the buying and selling of votes is in our blood, encoded in our DNA. It’s as natural as nose-picking or smiling when you know you've pissed someone off—more than just a habit, in other words. Fortunately, it can be overcome. And that’s where the digging comes in. For legal reasons, we’re not allowed to describe the entire ceremony for you here, but what we can say is that the hole is a necessary part of an elaborate ritual that involves putting something into that hole, a bit of chanting, Viagra, mugging for the cameras and then covering up that hole. Next thing you know, the urge to sell votes is but a memory.

(While we’re on the subject of Viagra, that rumor about a candidate giving the sexual dysfunction drug to elderly voters is the result of, as Prachai would say, a “misunderstanding”—“election” was misheard as “erection” and can't you see how these things happen?)

But back to those perilous pits. The problem is that very few of the approximately 4,000 candidates from 40-some parties running for office in this month’s election have worked on a farm or even tended a garden, and often they don’t do a very good job of filling them in. Which is odd considering how similar the principle is to repairing divots on the golf course and how many of them play golf. Dirt to most of them is, well, “dirty”—and the sooner they can wash their hands of the stuff, the better. So please be very careful.