Today in many places there’ll be people recalling D-Day on the 65th anniversary, and on the other side of the hemisphere from where I am now, in the Canadian town where I spent my youth — Georgetown, Ontario — local dignitaries, some of my old neighbours and perhaps a few World War II veterans are unveiling a plaque.

They’ve selected a spot along the street on which I grew up, Normandy Boulevard, so called because the government built houses there for returning veterans as part of its nationwide Victory Home Project. Normandy was, of course, the region of France where the D-Day landings took place.

My father, Wilfred Anthony Dorsey, returned home from military service well after D-Day, though not to Canada. He was in the British Army and had a go at civilian life in England before deciding the job situation had to be better in Canada. He emigrated in 1953, the year I was born, and bought the house on Normandy Boulevard from its original war-veteran owner. My mother and sister and I followed a few months later.

Dad proceeded, 90% with his own hands, and really only one good arm, to transform the house at #37 into the best on the street — a beautful yard out front and a veranda that later became a roomy enclosed porch, a vast garden out back, a basement excavated beneath, a paved driveway, wood panelling on all the interior walls and carpeting throughout, plumbing, and all the modern appliances as they came on the market.

And he did all this while working for a quarter century, five or six days a week, often 10 hours a day, at a Ford assembly plant that I would discover, in my own brief stint there, was a bit of a hellhole.

But back to the war, the real hellhole.

I’ve always liked to say, based on the few tales Dad shared about his time in the army, that he was chased off the European continent by the Germans in 1940, from the coast at Dunkirk, and came wading back ashore, 270 kilometres to the west, four years later, insisting on staying longer this time.

The hasty exit of the 340,000-strong British Expeditionary Force in late May and early June 1940, gunfire at its heels, was facilitated by Operation Dynamo, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay’s “miracle of deliverance”, as Churchill dubbed it, aboard a makeshift rescue armada of 850 boats, the “little ships of Dunkirk”.

The return trip was Operation Overlord. They came back swatting. There’s more!

Today is the 40th anniversary of the day a famous Christian monk told a Thai audience that Eastern religion might be better. He was dead within hours.

Forty years ago today, a visiting monk from America who has since been described as the most famous Christian monastic since St Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century, died by a quirk of fate in Samut Prakhan.

Thomas Merton, who had formulated theology and theories of peace and justice in discussion and correspondence with the Dalai Lama, DT Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez and many others, had just given a morning talk about melding Eastern and Western religions.

The setting was Sawankaniwas in Tambon Tai Baan, a shady retreat with flower gardens and an aquarium, five kilometres south of downtown Samut Prakhan. It’s owned by the Thai Red Cross Society.

Merton, known as Father Louis, had emerged from 27 years of solitude at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky for two reasons. The first was to meet the Dalai Lama, which he did over the course of three days in Dharamsala, before flying on to Thailand. In earlier correspondence, the Tibetan leader had advised Merton to read about the Vajrayana school of metaphysics, which the American embraced enthusiastically.

In turn, His Holiness would later credit Merton with showing him that Tibetan Buddhism did not have a monopoly on spiritual truth. “As a result of meeting with him,” the Dalai Lama wrote, “my attitude toward Christianity was much changed.” He described Merton as a highly advanced lama.

Merton spent two months in India, also visiting New Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai, in the last city seeing Little Mount and St Thomas Mount, where Indian Christians believe the apostle Thomas brought the gospel in 52 AD, and where he was martyred 20 years later.

Then he had a stopover in Sri Lanka, where he viewed the three reclining Buddhas in Polonnaruwa. “This was,” he wrote in his journal, “the greatest aesthetic experience I’ve ever had in my life. All things become clear.”

Preparing for his journey to the Orient, Merton “was like a kid getting ready to go to the circus”, his secretary at the monastery, Brother Patrick Hart, told Knight Ridder Newspapers in 1998.

“It was a dream come true. He never thought he would get to Asia. He was going with the idea of learning from the wisdom of the East.”

Sawankaniwas, I’m reasonably sure, as seen on Google Earth.

In response to Vatican II, the Catholic Church’s sweeping policy realignment initiated by Pope Paul VI, the Confederation of Benedictine Abbots organised an inaugural Asian East-West Intermonastic Conference in Samut Prakhan. Merton’s second mission was to attend this gathering and, in his talk, compare Marxism to monasticism.

Simply put, the linkage is that Marxists believe change is impossible, and dangerous to attempt, without a thorough understanding of economic sub-structures, while monastics, both Buddhist and Christian, require the same level of understanding of the consciousness. Our inbred prejudices skew our comprehension, always placing our own ego at the centre of things.

It was a year of revolution, 1968, and Merton held forth on Marcuse (”a kind of monastic thinker”), the Sorbonne students (who told him, “We are monks also,” challenging the world’s claims) and Marx’s desire for a progression from individual greed to the good of the community.

Buddhist and Christian monasticism alike, he said, teach that social, political and economic structures cannot be counted on for support because of their inherent vulnerability. Only in detachment and purity of heart can be found freedom and transcendence.

Merton concluded his talk by saying that Buddhism and Hinduism could show Westerners how to achieve that freedom in spite of perceived external limitations.

Any questions for him would await the evening session, so he said simply, “I will disappear from view, and maybe we can all have a coke or something.” It was December 10, 1968, the the 27th anniversary of his entry into the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

Merton returned to the bungalow assigned to him and, around 3pm, had a shower in preparation for a nap. He crossed the floor, still wet, and reached up to switch on a tall floor fan. He was flattened by the current, and the fan fell on top of him, with the power still live. When his body was found soon after, there was a severe electrical burn across his chest. Merton was not quite 54.

It was an accident bizarre enough to generate multiple mystical notions, beginning with the fact that his 1948 autobiography had concluded with the words “to know the Christ of the burnt men”. There’s more!

Once I move to northern Thailand to escape the rising sea that everyone thinks will turn Bangkok into a fantastic scuba-diving site when the ice caps melt, one of the places I definitely want to see is Wiang Kum Kam.

Dovetailing nicely with my interest in Siamese dinosaurs and other prehistoric signs of movement, Wiang Kum Kam was a good-sized town on the edge of what is now the city of Chiang Mai. It was only rediscovered in 1984, and they’ve scraped away enough dirt and come up with enough theories that it’s now a bona fide tourist attraction.

Not that the Night Safari has to worry about the competition. So far there’s nothing at Wiang Kum Kam to make the rubes go golly, and that appraisal isn’t about to change anytime soon.

But for many generations, Wiang Kum Kam was thought to be a mere legend belonging to the dusky past.

And if you bring your imagination along to the scene today, you find yourself in the middle of a fortified, temple-intensive, millennium-old “city” embraced by the two arms of a river that has since taken its affections elsewhere. In fact, the Ping River flooded the inhabitants out 700 years ago, so you have to wonder what freakish karma they’d accumulated.

And the river, having shifted direction well to the west, isn’t done with Wiang Kum Kam yet: it flooded the site three times in 2005.

Situated in a plain ringed by mountains, the settlement was established in the eighth century by Mon migrants from Nakhon Pathom, U-Thong and Lopburi, likely as a trading outpost for the Haripunchai culture they’d sown in nearby Lamphun. The river ensured that it thrived as a key economic centre for centuries, and then it abruptly took everything away.
There’s more!

Thaksin Shinawatra is going to need a new lawyer now that his whole legal team has been thrown in jail for trying to bribe the Supreme Court, but he should have his old lawyer back soon, once Noppadon Pattama loses his job as Foreign Minister over the Preah Vihear fiasco.

Meanwhile, naturally, nothing’s actually changed, so back to more speculation about the supernatural.

The picture above shows an equilateral triangle superimposed on a Google Earth image of Central Thailand and western Cambodia. Preah Vihear is at one corner, and Koh Kong — the Cambodian island in which Thaksin is allegedly investing — at another. I added a triangle thinking the other point would rest on Bangkok, but it doesn’t. It sits almost exactly on Nakhon Nayok.

Five years ago, when Thaksin was at the height of his power as prime minister, he designated Ban Na, a largely agricultural district in Nakhon Nayok, about 100 kilometres northeast of Bangkok, as the future site of Thailand’s new administrative capital, along with adjacent areas of Saraburi province’s Wihan Daeng and Kaeng Khoi districts.

He called it Muang Mai, meaning “New City”, although the name Muang Sawan — Celestial City — was also kicked around.

The idea was to ease Bangkok’s population burden and, starting in 2005, to move the halls of government to 250,000 rai in the adjoining provinces to the northeast, to be shared with residential and commercial development, a new royal palace, schools, hospitals, first-class hotels, its own mass-transit system linked to Bangkok and Suvarnabhumi Airport, facilities devoted to “environmental tourism” and hi-tech industry — but no polluters.

More than a third of the area was to remain green, with parks or retained farmland. Ban Na means “home of the paddy fields”.

Civic planning began in earnest, and public forums got the citizens of Nakhon Nayok excited about the prosperity that development would bring. Land prices immediately jumped tenfold as speculators swarmed in, and at least one newspaper openly accused two of the country’s biggest corporations of hoarding thousands of rai while owners of small parcels were being duped.

Then, in August 2006, there was a larger-than-usual gathering of military officers for the annual anniversary celebrations of the Royal Military Academy in Nakhon Nayok. Privy Council president Prem Tinsulanonda attended for the first time in years, the Bangkok Post reported, quoting sources close to him as saying his presence “was aimed at fostering unity, amid reports of attempted political interference”. There’s more!

Apologies to George Bellows as well as Dempsey and Firpo.

Other nations can find their own ways to cope with earthquakes, floods, cyclones and the plague of Big Oil. Thailand deals directly with God.

“God”, that is, in the sense of the spirits of the land, the Hindu pantheon and whoever’s in charge of the stars and planets.

Thaksin “Ousted” Shinawatra, who should be done with his pilgrimage around 99 temples and become fairly enlightened by now, said on June 16 that Thailand’s once-again-lethal political mess will be well and truly sorted out by July 2, and here we’ll extrapolate to include all the world’s current problems.

You see, he said, Mars — the planet but also the god of war and all things military (like coups d’etat) — would be “moving away” on June 21, and then there’d be no more danger. “After July 2, confusion in the country will ease. Let’s be patient. We will have headaches until July 2,” he said.

Apparently, by “moving away”, he meant that Mars will have caught up to and passed beyond Saturn as they run the million-kilometre dash across the constellation of Leo. Saturn, far bigger, a whole lot farther away and thus a much slower orbiter, is the tortoise in this celestial footrace. There could be trouble when the two planets meet en route.

The local star-gazers were quick to point out, though, that it’s not as simple as that, Mr Know-It-All-Who-Can’t-Even-Hold-a-Job. International Astrology Association president Pinyo Pongcharoen said the anti-corruption People’s Alliance for Democracy now massed around Government House is likely to clash violently with the defenders of Thaksin and current Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej between June 21 and August 29, with the Interior Ministry “targeted” in particular.

Another astrologer, Lak Rekhanithet, was much more dire: July 2, he said, will be “a day of hell”, Thailand’s worst day in 30 years, with death, explosions, fires and combat. He couldn’t have been more specific: “The situation will reach a climax at 11.07pm.”

Earlier Siamese spook stories

Another shrine destroyed
Thaksin consults the spirits
Post-coup shivers
Tsunami magic
My superstitious medium

Actually, Dorseyland has received a press release announcing that the world will end on July 5.

Apparently the Church of the SubGenius issues the same press release every year, which may be why Wikipedia seems to think it’s a “parody”. But, as with everything in Wikipedia, I’m not so sure.

The church predicted in 1980 that the world’s end would come on “X-Day” — July 5, 1998 — in the form of an alien invasion and global destruction, from which only church members would be rescued (by alien “Sex Goddesses”). When nothing happened in 1998, church theorists suggested they’d got the year upside down (it should be 8661), or that the calendar was wrong and July 5, 1998 hasn’t yet arrived, or that Earth and Mars were switched in 1998, and we missed “the Rupture” because we’re now actually living on Mars.

At any rate, the “SubGenials” will again be gathering this July 5 at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman, New York, to await the outcome amid rock concerts, bonfires and random mayhem. Their sins will be ritually washed away in a baptism and they’ll “receive new ones in return”.

“Random mayhem” might be a good description for what’s been happening in Thailand lately, but what follows is a synopsis of certain events, all of which lead me to one inescapable conclusion: Thaksin Shinawatra is attempting to regain power through magic. And there’s very little about it that’s random. There’s more!