Clean-Up, Paint-Up

"This is the most wonderful time we've had since the last royal cremation." exclaimed a happy Siamese building contractor as he gazed about him in Bangkok last week. Thailand's carefree, colorful capital was in an unaccustomed fever of activity. On every side, under a blazing tropical sun, builders, bricklayers, tile setters, linemen, street sweepers and landscape gardeners were laboring, at a cost of perhaps $2,000,000, to ready their city for the arrival of the great men of SEATO (see above). The government of soft-spoken Strongman Marshal Phi-bun Songram, warm advocate of the West, hoped that the new treaty organization might even choose Bangkok as its permanent home.

A few jaundiced observers wondered whether Bangkok would not do better to spend its energy to clean up its politics rather than its streets. Contented and traditionally independent (more than 700 years), Thailand is the only frankly pro-Western ally along the southeast border of Red China. But its government is also autocratic and corrupt. Communist propa ganda makes heavy capital of these facts, but for the most part the amiable Siamese themselves, generally smiling and invariably well-fed, seem not to give a hoot.

Uplifted Face. The U.S., which channels millions in aid to the Phibun government, and U.S. businessmen who sell their shiny products and soft drinks in Thailand's hospitable atmosphere, also seem content to let things ramble along in their amiable Siamese way. (Since Bangkok has become a kind of focal point for U.S. activity in Southeast Asia, no American has any standing whatever in Bangkok society if he is not rumored to work for the CIA.)

Last week, as Siamese energy and money combined to lift the face of Bangkok, telephone poles were uprooted along all of the city's main roads and moved back to make the cluttered highways passable to the expected influx of conference limousines. Eighty thousand flowering shrubs were brought in from the countryside and planted along roads and canals with, as one Siamese paper put it, "express orders to bloom when the visitors arrived." Early in the week Bangkok's fast-cracking Public Works Chief Luang Burakam decided that the main street before the great former royal palace where the conference is to be held needed some fountains. He got off a cable to Germany, and before one could say Prajadhipok. workmen were installing gleaming, white, multi-tiered jobs which had arrived by air freight.

Dying Flies. Twenty miles out of town, workmen were frantically erecting a village of prefab houses for the conference hangers-on. In the lobby of Bangkok's Trocadero Hotel, where the bigwigs are to stay, painters laid new colors on walls, ceiling and passing guests. In the upper stories, a grim-faced "sanitation engineer," armed with a huge, mechanical Flit-gun, mowed down his enemies by the thousands. "The flies are dying," cracked one preconference resident, "like hotel guests."

In a matter of days, a score of bridges were resurfaced and the muddy pathways along Bangkok's Suriwong Road were transmuted into well-paved sidewalks. To "avoid embarrassing incidents," the city's numberless perverts had been rounded up. And as a further concession to the dignity of the visitors. Bangkok's mothers were ordered not to let their children run naked through the streets while the conference lasted.

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