The logic doesn’t work in quite the same way here.

Certain verbs operate as logical sequences. So if I show you something, you can see it. If I lend you something (or you borrow from me) then you owe me.

It can get a bit trickier when we move into more cerebral activities. If I say something to you, the result is that you hear it (unless, of course, it is one’s spouse, when the principle of selectiveness deafness comes into play). And if I teach you something, then what?

The Thai education system here assumes a strong logical connection between teaching and learning. If the teacher teaches something, then the logical consequence is that the student learns it. Now of course every examination in the land proves that the one, in many cases, fails to result in the other. But this failure is invariably the fault of the student (whereas success at exam time is obviously the result of superior teaching).

The logical relationship is still valid and is also thought to work in reverse. Learning, if it happens, can only be the result of teaching. Autodidacts don’t have much standing in this society, and a candidate with formal academic qualifications, however spurious, outdated or irrelevant, will normally win out against someone who can show nothing more than competence gained without the benefit of formal instruction.

But when we move into politics and study the logical expectations raised by the word ‘explain’, we begin to see how diplomatic relationships can easily become strained.

Cynics like myself would be inclined to see ‘explanations’ as one end of a spectrum that moves through excuses and into outright porkies. I could say that the result of your explanation is nothing more than that I hear it.

But a more general interpretation is that explanation leads to understanding, along the same lines that teaching leads to learning. But for many in government, explanations are much more powerful. They result not in just understanding, but in acceptance.

So when the red shirts complain of double standards, the government ‘explains’ that there is no such thing. When journalists claim that soldiers opened fire on anyone who moved, the government ‘explains’ that they misunderstood the military’s graduated response according to international principles of crowd control that no one has ever heard of.

And when the Saudi Chargé d’affaires wants to know how a Police Lt-Gen can be charged with the crime of participating in a murder in November and, while the case is still proceeding, be promoted to Assistant Police Commissioner-General the next September, the government’s response is to ‘explain’ the situation.

It doesn’t matter that the explanation contains some jaw-dropping assertions, like the one that promotion from Provincial Police Commissioner to Assistant Police Commissioner-General actually reduces the officer’s opportunity to interfere with his own case on the grounds that Assistant Commissioners-General can only do what the Commissioner-General tells them to do (and Provincial Commissioners can do whatever they feel like?).

It doesn’t matter that the explanation appears to argue that being charged with a serious crime will not interfere with a police officer’s career unless it also involves a ‘gross breach of discipline’ and it was decided, before criminal charges were filed, that there was no such breach in this case, and that decision, however whacky, is irrevocable unless and until the courts find him guilty.

It doesn’t matter that the explanation equates the role of a foreign embassy in asking questions to protect the interests of its citizens with ‘outside interference’ in the ‘integrity of the Thai judicial process’.

It’s an explanation. And if the government gives you an explanation, the logical expectation is that you accept it.

Now, as for the Saudi government’s explanation that the hajj visa applications from Thailand got held up by bureaucratic understaffing, …

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).