Democracy for $11.75, or, Serendipity

One day not long ago I drove home wondering how we were going to eat till Friday, payday. It was Tuesday. We had 300 baht, which, technically speaking, was not no money. It was $8.81. I was not certain of this amount. I had recently turned all money matters over to my wife, in hopes some local alchemy would keep us in enough cash to stagger through the month. Keep food in the baby’s mouth, the electricity flowing. Living out here I was trying to write and raise a daughter on as little work work as possible. And now the rubber was meeting the road, flapping brokenly over the potholes, the engine squealing and the rearview mirror loose.

The wife did not disappoint. I walked in the door, she informed me she’d made 400 baht. Thereby more than doubling our current fortune.

Let me put our situation in context: when I say we had 300 baht, that’s all we had. Credit here in the Thai village amounts to telling the shopkeeper you’ll pay her tomorrow. You can’t borrow against the future with a piece of plastic. You pay or get someone else to pay for you. To us 400 baht ain’t chickenfeed. I raised my arms in triumph. Yes! We were going to make it to Friday!

The wife got the money from a man she didn’t know. Local elections were coming up and someone dropped by the compound for a little electioneering. 400 baht in the pocket of anyone who’d pledge a vote for the incumbent. Overlook five years of corruption with a little thrown your way.

Our one-year old sat playing with a mallet. She liked to whack it on the floor and grin. Whack whack whack. Tomorrow she’d be eating vegetables bought with that dirty money. Consuming corruption. Ingested with the fertilizers and dirt and pesticides and genetic modifications. Inhaling it with her mother’s milk. Someday I’m going to tell her this story. Explain what it means. But what does it mean?

Here I could say: When The Local Official Lies, No One Dies. I mean, no countries were being invaded. No women and children on the way to a wedding party were being shelled. No polar bears were being driven to extinction and no Saudi royals were kitting out new 747s with oil revenues. You want to make things better, start with the real culprits. Hint: petty officials in a tottering banana-y republic are not them.

Equally, I could sermonize on how $11.75-a-vote corruption is as heinous a violation of the principles of democracy as the existence of Dick Cheney. How the fact that the only political system in history that gives the people a shot at a say in their own destiny can so easily, frequently, and universally be corrupted is probably one of the main reasons why the planet is in a pot of boiling hot shit. You can take sides. Debate it out. May the best argument win. All that.

Me, I don’t know yet. I needed money. Money arrived. Hardly a cent more than enough. But enough. I tell you this, though: if I’ve got to accept the proceeds of political corruption to keep on keeping on, then what and where I’m doing ain’t getting it. Now the trick is to find what and where does. First stop: your nearest purple state.

**Postscript: When the wife went to vote, she was disallowed because her house registration wasn’t current enough.

**Postscript II: We didn’t return the money.

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Endless Emendation