In troubled times, any kind of royalism will do

 

 With all of the red shirt protests and the responses to them, PPT has also been keeping an eye out for news of the various royals. We would observe that the televised royal news over the past couple of days has been rather short. Even so, as long-time observers of Thailand know, when there are troubles in the nation, exaggerated royalism can always be a conservative ploy for stabilization, order and calm.

 

We have been bombarded with stories and pictures of the odd dog fetish art of a strange royal who lives in France, so we know there is some scraping going on. So PPT wasn’t at all surprised to see an old story suddenly turn up as one of The Nation’s two headline stories at it’s website on Tuesday (The Nation, 23 March 2010).

 

This story is of Princess Ubolratana’s appearance two weeks ago, at a tourism fair in Berlin. Now Ubolratana is not your average princess. In fact there is often doubt expressed at to whether this is even the right moniker for her given that the king stripped her of titles when she married a foreigner. Of course, some of the luster came back when she divorced and returned to the good life in Thailand. She’s a “movie star” as well! This vainglorious woman has now appeared in several awful parts on the big and small screens.

 

In Berlin, she did interviews with the German and Thai news media and attended a Tourism Authority of Thailand Happy Hour, where her newest self-promoting project, a film called “My Best Bodyguard” was shown. In addition, another booth promoted her mum’s Arts of the Kingdom project that claims “to promote our arts and crafts and give needy families some extra income.”

 

PPT saw one of the interviews, in Thai, and was amazed at how inarticulate and downright dumb she sounded. This is doubly dumbfounding when she is said to have “been involved in promoting Thai tourism for nearly a decade…”. Her best quip is rendered in this story as: “I always tell them, too, that the charm of Thai people is the smile, not taking advantage of tourists by lying or cheating.” She actually said that tourists should not be raped as they didn’t like it.

 

The Princess is then alleged to have “acknowledged that her own films are part of the media that can help Thai tourism.” Well, that might be true, but we doubt anyone outside of Thailand takes much notice of these films.

 

She’s now off to Hong Kong on a similar tourism junket.

 

 

 

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