Bad day, good day

Thailand must be schizoid. In a way it's a gift, in a way it is just nuts.

Just after noon today I watched a couple of hundred soldiers in riot gear fire in the direction of a couple of hundred red shirts, who hurled rocks and debris and Molotov cocktails at the troops. The red shirts also burned a bus and sent another bus they had commandeered hurtling toward the soldiers. Depending on who you choose to believe, the troops then (a) fired live ammunition at the legs of the rioters (a military officer quoted by the BBC), or (b) fired live ammunition randomly into the mob (reporters from both the BBC and CNN), or (c) fired live ammunition into the air (also BBC), or (d) set off frighteningly loud explosives but only fired rubber bullets at anybody (yet another BBC reporter). I pick (c)---fired live ammunition into the air---because I did not see a single red shirt fall to the street dead or injured. And I was only about a hundred yards away, watching with a several dozen Thais from the walkway under the elevated skytrain structure that arcs around Victory Monument. That's a big traffic circle with a memorial obelisk in the middle. The area had been the site of a major clash between rioters and police Thursday night, and had been held by UDD supporters (United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship)as a "red zone" since then.

Back at the Pinnacle Hotel a bit later, I watched a CNN reporter gasp out that mayhem had been loosed in Bangkok, and he had been there when the "bullets were whizzing" at Victory monument, and he didn't know if violence was sweeping across the entire city or not. The guy should have made some calls. In much of Bangkok, people were merrily celebrating the first day of Songkran, the water festival that marks the beginning of the Buddhist new year. On Silom Road, a main commercial street, food stalls had been set up, and when I got off the sky train around 1:30 I was talc-ed---smeared with wet talcum powder---by three European ruffians. (The Thais tend to just hurl water light-heartedly; it's the tourists who can be really, really annoying.)

The day's cognitive dissonence continued back in my hotel room. I looked out the window and saw black smoke rising in three places up near Victory Monument, about two miles away. I guessed that more buses had been torched or more piles of tires set aflame. I turned on Thai TV, and the five Bangkok channels were showing the usual game shows and Thai sitcoms, shows that make Urkle look like Restoration comedy.

A Thai-American acquaintance said to me Thursday night, when things began to heat up, "Thais love entertainment. This is entertainment." These words came back to me up on the skytrain walkway, where only about a third of those present were cheering wildly every time the red shirts came up with some new provocation. The rest were just there for the show. As the confrontation was shaping up---soldiers massing, the red shirts positioning their barriers and buses---a young man said to me, "Isn't this exciting?" I said maybe a little too exciting. A young woman watching with her boyfriend said, "Are you scare?" [sic] I glibly said no, and when she said, "I am a little," I had to admit I was too. But this was too good a piece of theater for any of us to pass up.

I asked a couple of people down at the riot if they were red or yellow shirts. (Red being more rural and populist, and yellow being more urban and king-and-country, but both led by limited people whose sole interest is in the spoils of office.) Both of those I asked about their political sympathies just smiled at me in that sweet Thai way.