TELL IT AS IT IS

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, how life goes on, brah (or, take a break)

Pornpimol Kanchanalak

BANGKOK: -- This song by the Beatles was a whimsically optimistic and yet strange, or rather abstruse, track. On the surface, it talks about two characters, Desmond and Molly. They meet, fall in love, live together, build a home, have children and life goes on happily ever after. Their life is as sunny as a day in Shangri-La.

But, wait, maybe things are not that simple. "Molly" is an old slang term for a gay man. Could Desmond and Molly then be a gay couple? Or even drag queens, as both Desmond and Molly at times "do their pretty faces"? Some think ob-la-di, ob-la-da is a kind of drug, as the last line of the song says, "Take ob-la-di, ob-la-da," and ends with giggles. Some would say ob-la-di, ob-la-da is a saying of the Yoruba tribe and that it means "life goes on". An alternative version of this song appears on a later anthology album named "Take 5", i.e. take a break.

In Thailand, with the sword of Damocles poised to fall tomorrow, Friday the 13th, when the Constitution Court hands down its ruling on the legality of the government's proposed constitutional amendments - written by the third-party and supposedly independent Constitution Drafting Assembly - we may need to put ourselves in an ob-la-Di-la-do frame of mind. Life goes on, regardless.

To ease our minds, we are not the only country in a constitutional pickle. Germany and Egypt are facing their own dilemmas.

Our 2007 Constitution was written using that of Germany as the model. Impartial legal professionals concur that it contains several mechanisms aimed at preventing the whitewash of wrongdoings by politicians for politicians. While the 1997 Constitution was written to prevent, in colloquial terms, the thieves from committing their innovative acts, the 2007 Constitution was written to catch and penalise them. In other words, it was meant to prevent or trim down the culture of impunity and the abuse of authority by the powers that be.

In Germany, the Constitutional Court there was set up in 1951 after the Second World War as part of an intricate system of checks and balances. But in recent years it has been seen as a hindrance to the government's efforts to conduct what it perceives as its business.

Currently, the normally dispassionate German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been loudly voicing her displeasure at the Federal Constitution Court, which ruled that her efforts to rescue the euro, while disregarding the rights of the German parliament to have its say on these issues, was unconstitutional.

Since the eruption of the euro crisis over the last few years, the same court has already crossed Markel three times. In happier times, this court was viewed by politicians as a "gadfly". But in the current do-or-die euro crisis - and the unequivocally critical role of Germany in the revival of the European Union - the legendary words of the late Herbert Wehner of the Social Democratic Party have been resuscitated: "We won't allow the a***holes in Karlsruhe [the location of Germany's Constitution Court) to destroy our policies". The divide in public opinion regarding the court and its role is deep and wide in Germany. It ranges from "keeper of the will of the people" to "safeguarding the court's own importance or vanity".

In Egypt, the newly elected president from the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi, is engaged in a stare-down with the country's High Constitution Court. He has just defied the court's decision in favour of the dissolution of the People's Assembly (the lower house) by issuing a decree ordering parliamentarians back to work. It is the same assembly in which Morsi's party won nearly half of the seats. The issue of the constitutionality of Morsi's decree, and the decision of the military-controlled Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to dissolve the assembly that preceded the high court's decision, will remain a hotly contested issue in the foreseeable future. So will the role and viability of the court itself.

Back home, constitutional law experts opine that without unknown elements that could permeate the courtroom, it is inarguable under Section 291 that the effort to rewrite the entire Constitution in one go is unconstitutional. It does not mean that the 2007 charter cannot be amended; it only means that it cannot be done in the manner that the government wants to do.

The House speaker does not have the constitutional right to decide the constitutionality of the amendment proposal. There are several provisions in the Constitution that form a complex web of measures meant to deter conflict-of-interest manoeuvring. However, the court should not find that the government's effort is designed to abolish the constitutional monarchy. There are a few more treacherous issues involved that might lead to the eventual dissolution of any political party whose members had voted for this amendment. But we'd better not deal with them right now for the sake of our cynical desire to remain sane, at least for as long as we can. We will cross that bridge when we come to it. After all, it was Damocles himself who showed us how to escape the tragic fate of his own execution.

So take five, ob-la-di, ob-la-da, how life goes on, Brah.

-- The Nation 2012-07-12

Boy oh boy. This is some jumbled and meandering around nonsense editorial.

Should have used "Nothing ever happens" Del Amtri.

Desmond and Molly... So... Abhisit's gay and Yingluck's a katoey, right? And the Constitution Court judges are, what, Nigerian? German? A-holes?

Next time, if you have to extend a Beatles metaphor, maybe pick one of the songs they recorded *before* they started doing acid.

Desmond and Molly... So... Abhisit's gay and Yingluck's a katoey, right? And the Constitution Court judges are, what, Nigerian? German? A-holes?

Next time, if you have to extend a Beatles metaphor, maybe pick one of the songs they recorded *before* they started doing acid.

Fixing a hole.

Happiness is a warm gun.

I don't want to spoil the party.

She came in through the bathroom window.

We can work it out.

Why don't we do it in the road.

Yellow submarine.

een stelletje lucht sprongen!!

Dear Khun Ponphimol

As a journalist no doubt you want your output to be read by your readers so if I were you I'd refrain from making your first two paragraphs a load of meandering <deleted>.