1. The Mall-ization of Bangkok
If a visitor from another planet were to set down in Bangkok, he might assume that progress is measured by the amount of land occupied by shopping malls, freedom by how much time it takes you to reach the mall nearest to your home or office.
If he flew over the Siam Square area, with CentralWorld, Siam Paragon, Siam Center and MBK all in a 3km radius, it might look to him like one huge mall with a few boutique shops between them. Even our pride and joy, Suvarnabhumi, is basically a sprawling shopping mall that also has planes (filled with potential shoppers) flying in and out of it.
Like zombies we’re sucked into these monuments of consumerism, where we are taught to associate spending with happiness and to confuse “need” with “want.” We develop a taste for the homogenized, the uniform and the non-challenging. We learn to find beauty in polished concrete, glass and steel, piped in pop music and fast food.
There’s an argument that shopping malls exist because the public likes them. But what gives us the willies is the feeling that we only like them because we’re running out of alternatives. A stroll through a long public park along the banks of the Chao Phraya River sounds great, but that doesn’t exist so we head to Paragon instead. Hey, what ever happened to that Arts Center?
So say goodbye to Suan Lum Night Bazaar—no points for guessing what will likely rise up in its place.
2. Technology
We love our iPods and our PDAs, but it’s terrifying how much of what is important to us is now contained in little chips, SIM cards and servers, sometimes by people who don’t have a clue how to keep that information secure (us included). Identity theft scares the crap out of us. Phishing, email viruses and the sheer amount of junk email in our mailboxes every Monday morning is pretty damn frightening, too. And don’t even get us started on what holding mobile phones to our heads 24/7 is doing to us.
3. Looking For Love
Trying to get some is not just hard: It’s scary. Because the thought of eating alone, sleeping along, having sex alone (webcams don’t count), growing old and dying alone drives us to do some seriously scary things:
Blind dates: Too busy to find a mate on your own? Better be brave.
Posting our measurements, photos and innermost thoughts on the Internet for all the world to see.
One-night stands: Through your beer goggles she looked pretty sexy. And her voice seemed a lot higher. Damn you, hormones!
And then there are scary people:
Men who have read The Game: Who knows how many guys have taken this supposedly true story about life as a pick-up artist as a bible instead of the anthropological study/voyeuristic pop pulp non-fiction that it is. Seduction as a foolproof science with which they’re able to lead someone to bed with just a few well-rehearsed lines? That’s a bit disturbing.
Women who have read The Game: Equally scary—they already know where all your lame mind games are headed.
4. Medical Science
Natural beauty? Love it. Inner beauty? Fantastic. Synthetic beauty? In the wrong hands, scary. Some of the badly nipped and tucked and botoxed faces you see on the social pages of Tatler give us nightmares. As do those of Michael Jackson-inspired luk thung singers. And sometimes we’re afraid for them, like Tata and her breasts. See #5, below.
5. Unrealistic Ideals of Beauty
Our obsession with beauty scares us, as do some of the popular conceptions of beauty. Just look at all the waiflike young people chillin’ around Siam Square. Diet pills—scary. Stuff that makes you shit all the nutrients out of your body—yuck. And what’s with this obsession with white skin? Whitening products are terrifying.
6. Urban Dangers
Cops: Even when we haven’t done anything wrong, when we drive past a cop on the street we get goosebumps every time. With roadblocks, it’s goosebumps on goosebumps.
Oops: You’re hungover, your hairdresser is hungover, neither of you has had coffee. S/he’s chopping away and suddenly you hear, “Ooops!”
Holes: Holes in sidewalks are dangerous, for sure, but what scares us more is what crawls out of them. Same thing for those holes in the stalls in public restrooms.
Really expensive cars or really cheap cars: You’re at a crosswalk. You’re safe with that Honda. That Toyota, too. But that black widebody BMW barreling towards you? Don’t even test him with one toe on the crosswalk, because he … will … not … stop. In fact, he’ll speed up. The same goes for that punk driving the beat-up old pickup delivery truck. Get the hell out of his way.
Clueless taxi drivers: There seems to be more and more of them every day.
7. Teachers
Don’t get us wrong here: Teaching is a noble profession, perhaps the noblest, next to being a lifestyle journalist. As a whole, educators are underpaid, overworked and underappreciated. But that doesn’t mean they can’t scare us. Even competent teachers can be scary—and do you know what it is about them that scares us most? Their damn enthusiasm. Think about it: Would you want to meet Ajarn Yingsak, Khru Lily or Andrew Biggs in a dark alley when your homework wasn’t finished?
And then there are those in a completely different category who seriously scare us, freaks like John Mark Karr, obviously, but in a more general way foreigners who come here and get teaching jobs even though they couldn’t write an essay to save their lives. They’re not all incompetent misfits without teaching skills let alone social skills who put their own interests above those of our children, but what scares us is that there are a disproportionate number of them out there.
Still, you know what scares us most of all? Not them as much as us for being so shallow and so easily impressed by foreign skin.
8. Pop Culture
Actor/politician/boxer-turned-singers: Many celebrities don’t know when to stop. Tao Somchai, Sorn Ram, Mam Kat, Paris Hilton—this means you!
Lookalikes: Striped Ts, tight jeans and dirty Converse—show how “indie” you are by looking like everyone else!
Tiny sex symbols: Moms, dads, quit scaring us by dressing up your little kids to look like their slutty pop idols.
9. Moral Minority Authorities
It’s certainly easier to distract everyone with talk of our society’s moral decay and supposed remedies—early closing times, advertising restrictions, censorship—instead of going after, say, corruption. What scares us is that a few zealots are having success imposing their morality on the rest of us.
10. Scary People Doing Scary Things
The least traveled president of the United States in recent history is now in office with a foreign policy that many consider more than a little scary. Having somebody like George W. Bush in command of one of the world’s most powerful military machines, and at the same time, having Kim Jong Il testing nuclear arms in North Korea in direct defiance of U.N. sanctions and U.S. threats is a recipe fraught with danger for every living thing on the planet.
A bit closer to home is the violence in the South that has been flaring unabated for years now. As more and more people are killed, regardless of their age, sex, or religion, one has to wonder how a resolution can be found. Thai people have a reputation the world over as being some of the most peace-loving on the planet—if we can’t stop killing each other, is there hope for anyone else?
And tell us you aren’t scared that a bunch of these dinosaur politicians will somehow manage to slip into the power vacuum and take over like the old days. We’re not saying that Banharn and Chavalit are evil—but they still scare us. So do Sanoh and Sanan. And Vatana and Chalerm.
11. Nature
Nothing makes us realize how small and powerless we really are on this planet more than Mother Nature. Tsunamis, floods, draughts, typhoons—one little twitch on her part and hundreds or thousands of lives are lost. And recent reports are indicating things are getting worse. The number of category four and five hurricanes has doubled in the last 30 years. Typhoons are for the first time being seen in the Southern Hemisphere since the planet was formed. It’s all in An Inconvenient Truth. And in the newspapers.
12. Ourselves
Nothing is scarier than not knowing what we are really capable of…until we do it and surprise even ourselves. How many times have you gotten home from impulse shopping and thought, “Wait a second, how much money did I just pay for this completely useless thing?”
Everyone knows what it’s like to spend a day in the office completely useless because you had a long night. And yet why do we continue to go out and drink with our friends on weeknights? Because it’s fun … right?
And then going home and drunk dialing.
13. Florescent Lights
Especially when they come on at closing time and you see what people really look like.
