So they flew the Super-Constellation all the way from Rimini / And feasted them on fish and chips from a newspaper facsimile

What a very odd few months it has been.

What a surreal few weeks.

Both gross understatement I think, but better that than gross overstatement. I think odd and surreal describe the extended period better than any adjectives that imply bloodshed, disaster, civil mayhem or urban warfare.

There have been those much reported moments of awfulness too but mostly those were limited to four bloody bursts with extended periods of stalemate, which when they came were truly horrific, even sitting on the outside looking in as a (close) observer who could, this last week, see the smoke rising a few kilometres away, whilst, however, pretty much everything in our almost completely Thai suburb, seemed day to day to be as it always was, which of course gave it another level of surealness.

And indeed that was the way for 90% of this city, where life was largely unaffected until the very last few days when a curfew and the curtailing of train services finally intruded into the rest of the town.

However if you read the voluminous posts from much of the international media you could be forgiven for thinking that Bangkok, and indeed Thailand, had turned into some huge war-zone, with The Times in one report calling Bangkok a 21st Century Sarajevo for god's sake, which was not only inane but plain irresponsible. CNN said Bangkok was almost unrecognisable after four days of clashes. Really? I guess the ten million or so here missed that bit as they mostly went about their daily lives, although for others, inside the more troubled zones, life changed a lot, and, even more so for the thousands who were trapped without power and water for 48 hours or more as chaos ranged outside their doors.

For a better commentary on this, I point you towards this pretty convincing and well argued blog post from Somtow's World:

There is one final element that must be mentioned. Most are not even aware of it. But there is, in the western mindset, a deeply ingrained sense of the moral superiority of western culture which carries with it the idea that a third world country must by its very nature be ruled by despots, oppress peasants, and kill and torture people. Most westerners become very insulted when this is pointed out to them because our deepest prejudices are always those of which we are least aware. I believe that there is a streak of this crypto-racism in some of the reportage we are seeing in the west. It is because of this that Baghdad, Yangon, and Bangkok are being treated as the same thing.

I found the repeated claims of a descent into civil war made by offshore media and, much worse, the more idiotic non-professional commentators had the same taint, especially when you, with even a little bit of research would likely come to the same conclusion that this poll (conducted by a reputable University, not any governmental organisation) arrived at: 74.5% of Thais support the current government's road map. This may well develop into an uglier situation and standoff, but it is not there yet.

I was amused by this, from a Thai English language news parody site:

Finally reaching the nearest fire, a smoldering noodle shop on Rama IV, they piggy-backed on the hard work of locally based correspondents who had been covering the story for months and years, been shot at and risked their lives.

Funny but oh so true, more than a few journalists arrived at the airport, donned a flak jacket and were instant experts.

As this story approached the end of this particular stage (you would be nuts to think that this anything close to over) there seems to be some sort of consensus that only one network or major news-outlet that came out of this with reputation more or less intact, Al-Jazeerra, who not only seemed to actually capture the story correctly as it happened but didn't fall into the cliches about despotic third world governments and selfless unarmed freedom fighters for democracy. CNN, BBC, The Guardian, The Times, Reuters, AP and others all got a huge fail in their attempts to add perspective. The NYT seems to have been unable to work out exactly what was going on so gave up. Foxnews were unable to work out if Thai people came from Taiwan and couldn't find that on the map either so decided to concentrate on the bigger story: an Arab-American Miss USA. CBS went even further with that and decided to work out if this had an impact on national security, good grief......

Fortunately you could, and indeed were wise to, largely ignore the traditional media as this (Bangkok, not Miss USA) was a incident, or more correctly, series of increasingly violent incidents that were utterly dominated by the newer media. The reporting from Bangkok in the past weeks was completely owned by Twitter, supported strongly by Facebook and YouTube, perhaps more so than even Iran a year earlier, given the deep penetration of smart phones in this society. The traditional news services and wires were largely irrelevant to the ceaseless and immediate flow of news, information, data and propaganda. Indeed, if you relied on those services you were way behind the day's flow. Brigid, three days back, commented to me that the story being run by the New Zealand Herald was such old news, and I had to point out that it was Reuters sourced and correct about twelve hours earlier, but the torrent of instant twitters, with images and video, made it seem like such ancient history.

The visuals on various blogs and twitter services like TweetPhoto and Yfrog were both incredible and instantly broadcast globally, and, yes, made mostly from phones, although the odd more traditional site provided some incredible imagery, with Boston.com deserving some special mention.

I've had an endless stream of emails from from all over the world asking if we were ok. I think it's fair to say that not for a moment did we feel threatened and there was never an inclination to leave, with pretty much the whole expat community, outside the immediate central zone where this mostly took place, sitting tight and sharing that sentiment. The streets around our part of upper Sukhumvit were never less than bustling with people of all races throughout this.

And the questions as to whether we regretted leaving Bali seven months ago have the same answer: no, not at all, not for a second, quite the opposite. For all the awfulness of the past two months, this is still a wonderful country and city; and unlike Bali where we were very much targets, you simply don't have to live with the oft stated 'it's not a matter of if but when' that you hear everywhere there, from Indonesians and foreigners alike.

Now, I guess we wait.

So let me sing a song for you / Just to help your day along

How many of the world's armies travel with mobile Karaoke trucks?

h/t to ThaiVisa

The preacher talked to me and he smiled / Said, come and walk with me, come and walk one more mile

This is an interesting, and I think fairly perceptive overview of China's possible media future, from journalist and media observer Charles Mabbett:

When China’s most popular blogger Han Han had his recent post about a spate of violent attacks in Chinese schools taken down, it wasn’t the first time that he had courted controversy and it is unlikely to be the last.

The post entitled “Children, you’re depressing grandpa” was critical of a media ban on reporting the latest attack in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, at a time when the Shanghai World Expo was due to get underway. Evidently, Sina.com, the website that hosts many of China’s most popular blogs determined it was too sensitive to keep online.

Han Han represents a relatively recent phenomenon in China, one that commands millions of readers and is highly influential as both social commentary and barometer of public sentiment. As of April 2010, his blog had attracted 350 million hits, making him by far and away, the king of China’s blogosphere.

[From Bloggers and Chinese Twitter, China’s new media wave | Asia New Zealand Foundation]

The underlying fact that should never be ignored is that China is only 30 years into the post Mao era, and the massive social momentum that Charles saw in-country is hard to describe unless you see it first hand. And never underestimate the Chinese pragmatism.

This fairly radical revision of the boundaries of twitter, which I didn't know, fascinates:

While Chinese Twitter can accommodate up to 400 characters, it is more common for users to post messages up to about 120 characters. Compared with English, Chinese characters allows between two to eight times more information to be packed into the same number of characters.

Which makes it vastly more powerful as a social networking and news dispersal medium. Twitter has played a huge part in the bloody political head-butting that hopefully reached some resolution yesterday here, and I'm keen to find out the Thai script limitations.

Update: Shorty after I posted this, I found this post on the Bangkok protests and the rise of Moblogging:

About the same time as my first tweet, I also posted my first "moblog". This is an abbreviation of "mobile blogging", which, as the name suggests, is blogging from your mobile phone. This was the most exciting development for me. For the first time I was able to post blogs while I was still on location and my thoughts were still fresh. If you visit www.mythailandblog.com you will be able to see some examples of my moblogs. The main difference between the blogs here at www.thai-blogs.com and those moblogs are obviously the number of words. However, if you compare my earlier moblogs to the ones I do these days, you can see that I am now typing longer moblogs on my iPhone. Sometimes, I post about the same event on both blogs, but the moblog is definitely more laid back and relaxed and has more of my daily life that I don't write about at www.thai-blogs.com. Even if the events are the same, the pictures are always different. This is because I use my big DSLR for this blog and my iPhone camera for the moblog. As I carry my iPhone around with me all the time, unlike the heavy DSLR, you will find the I write moblogs more frequently. And I also now find it easier to process pictures and video in my iPhone and then use a Word Press application to write my moblog. These are then uploaded up onto the Internet. Whenever possible, I try to post while I am still at the event.

[From Paknam Web: An iPhone, Twitter and the Red Shirt Rally - (Thailand Travel, Culture, Food and Life)]

Although I didn't for a moment feel threatened going about my daily business in the city, and I think the same goes for just about every expat here, there being absolutely no outflow of resident non-Thai and an ongoing daily arrival of 20,000 tourists (down from the normal 30,000 a day) which is still an incredible number, the live twitter stream on google, which in my office I kept open on my second monitor, was pretty much the live news stream I needed to carry on in a fairly normal way.

The world, how we approach it and how we draw information from it has changed just that little bit more in the past few weeks.

Play the string gently now / Pull the bow

There is so much stuff online documenting and commenting on the riots and the before and aftermath, it's hard to know where to start. I've spent large parts of the day sifting through all sorts of pages and links, but still in a state of shock. This is in the city I live in, in streets I walk down, if not every day, at least once every two or three weeks. I know by sight some of the vendors around there, who's world as surely as anything can be sure, has come crashing down in what they say is over a billion US dollar loss to the Thai economy so far, and the tourists stay away.

The irony in that is that tourists and foreigners, even with the accidental death of the Japanese newsman, are not targets and are not at risk, unlike something like the Bali bombings where tourists were the primary target.

I went down to the Ratchaprasong intersection near Chit Lom BTS station this afternoon and I'm going to post a photo or two but before, I thought I'd post three videos from Thai-faq's Tony Joh, which are simply incredible and, as Thai Twittersphere has been saying, should really be award winning stuff:

I knew i could't get there on the Skytrain, which we were told terminated at Asoke, about 2km before Ratchaprasong, so I guessed I'd have to walk and thought I could go the last part of the way on the Skywalk which hangs under the trains' tracks and branches out to malls (all closed I guessed but I actually found a couple partially open, including the five story DIY store at Ploen Chit..odd) and usually provides an easy way to get around avoiding the traffic and the grime. Why did I go? I guess I like to observe and I want to try and get a grasp on what is happening to this rather wonderful but perplexing country.

Sukhumvit Rd, where this shot was taken, near Soi 12, is usually 24/7 at a traffic standstill or at least groaning under the weight. Today, though:

Further on, at Wireless Rd, the first of two roadblocks, manned by red marshalls:

Chit Lom Rd., normally gridlocked on a Sunday with shoppers and taxis:

The second roadblock, at Chit Lom into Thanon Rama 1:

From another angle under the Chit Lom BTS Station:

The McDonalds beside Erawan, doing huge redshirted business:

The main rally stage, with a massive PA that was staggered all the way down the street for a km or so:

Not sure what the middle upper one is supposed to represent:

She asked me if I liked the Redshirts, I said I did and she gave me a B5 discount on my fresh juice:

Parts of the area were quite sparse, there had clearly been quite a drop off in numbers since Saturday's mayhem:

And lots and lots of people asleep everywhere you looked:

If I was asked, I'd say the mood was somber, very tired and yet still staunch. It's very much not over yet.

And yet it was still welcoming to me, and to answer the questions after the last lot of photos, not once did I feel threatened in any way, quite the opposite in fact, people smiled continuously at me, asked me where I was from, what I thought about all this and shook my hand. And, aside from a couple of cops I saw sharing a coffee with two redshirts at one end, there was no military or police presence.

But I have to ask the same question that Tony does in the videos: this is costing a fortune. Who's paying for it all?

Cos the moral doesn't matter / broken rules are all the same / to the broken and the breaker / who's to bless and who's to blame

The last twenty four hours in Bangkok have been horrific, with two opposing political factions refusing to back down from confrontation, one egged on by a leader sitting in a plush suite in Dubai. I'm not going to go into the political back and forth here, partially (and it's a huge part) because I don't understand Thai politics which are enormously complex, and I don't want to mis-state things I don't quite get. I always think that westerners who try and pretend they fully understand and who tout themselves as immersed and more Asian than the Asians are amongst the saddest people you find in this part of the world.

As I said when I posted a couple of weeks back, I spent some hours wandering and photographing the red crowds and it was a staunch but uplifting occasion, almost fair-like in its atmosphere. Indeed I was about to head down to the Chit Lom intersection yesterday when the government shut the BTS (Skytrain) and I doubted I'd find a cab to take me there so I canned the idea, much to Brigid's relief.

Clearly, in the past few days that changed and it got ugly. That some of the protestors were using live bullets and grenades was awful and clearly speaks to a, I think, small, but heavily militant element which ramped things until it got out of control. And it was inevitable the government would have to say enough, that much was always clear.

I was especially upset for the kids. There were thousands of young people and children amongst the crowds I witnessed first hand, and I thought of families like this, who were so kind to me, and I hoped they were ok:

Late last night I began to to scurry through the international media to see what the coverage was like. This page, of incredible shots, stood out, as did this footage on Swedish TV, and this slideshow from Reuters, the last two both showing Khao San Rd, backpacker central, and the generator of vast amounts of revenue for the city, which last night became a war zone.

Google News indicated that the most recent story was being covered by over 6,000 outlets around the world, as one of the biggest stories on the planet:

So I thought, at about 6am New Zealand time, about 12 hours after the shit had hit the fan, if you will, and bodies had begun to fall in Bangkok, I'd see how the biggest news outlets in NZ were covering this. After all, it's on our doorstep, we are in the same region, members of APEC, associate members of ASEAN, thousands of New Zealanders (far, far more than visit Poland yearly, or ever) have been here, many Thai live in New Zealand and we have a free trade agreement.

This is what I found:

NZ Herald

Stuff.co.nz

TVNZ News

I was reliably informed that this was the news item that had gone through to the editors at TVNZ. They'd chosen not to run it but gone with the death of a politician that almost no New Zealanders could name from a country that few New Zealanders could pin-point on a map instead as lead item. I wonder how many New Zealanders are in Thailand right now?

Surprised? No, not really. Shocked? Yes still, but appalled is probably the better word, and ashamed. Is It any wonder that New Zealanders seem, if my personal experience is any guide, to be giving Americans a run in the global ignorance stakes these days.

I'm Standing At The Gates of The East / I Take My Pulse and the Pulse of My Friend

A few days ago we Bangkok residents (and others in Thailand) received the most recent of the regular travel warnings we get via email. Despite the fact it was rather mild this time, it kinda irked me. They always do.

Whilst I understand that governments have a responsibility to keep their citizens safe, and given the current uneasy situation in BKK it's likely wise this time around but the frequency and ease that a few Western nations issue these things for places like Thailand and Indonesia, when they seem reluctant to do so for nations such as the US despite the fact that, people like, you know, Bin Laden issue threats all the time, gets to me.

I can't help feeling that doing so reflects two attitudes. Firstly, there is the failure to recognise that these funny Asian countries have mostly caught up, and indeed passed much of the the old world (meaning the old Western, white dominated world) in many ways. It's a kind of odd paternalism, like the mental divide Churchill was famous for, when he talked of self-determination (he said it only applied to people in Europe), stuck in the middle to late 20th Century, and I think it's mostly bred by simple ignorance from a world where for many people still civilization is narrowly defined by a fear of the unknown and reference points long gone, in the same way that India and Japan still don't sit on the UNSC.

The other attitude it reflects, sadly, is a kind of muted official racism. Although I guess that's gonna be a harder sell, but it's much commented on by we guests in this part of the world, and is very much seen that way by the peoples and governments of the region.

Hell, NZ even has a travel advisory out for Singapore! Have those that issue these things ever been to that most safe of all sedate little lands? This just makes NZ look very backward and parochial.

As I said on Twitter, NZ issuing a Travel Advisory for Thailand is like Gore issuing one for Auckland.

Seeing as how they're almost exclusively western phenomena, how about NZ issuing a Travel Advisory for NZ warning of random alcohol fuelled violence and road rage?

With all that in mind, I decided to toss Wellington's caution to the wind and visit the big demos down there by Democracy monument.

The fastest way in yesterday was via Klong Boat (the canal boat that takes me, with one change at Pratnum, from the top of my street to Wat Saket which just happens to be next to Red Shirt Central).

After the boat change I realised that I was one of only two people in the vessel without a red shirt on.

So it began.

After alighting I wandered in. There was chanting, dancing, cheering, and some obviously important guy making loud speeches which, every now and then, enticed a huge roar and shake of the thousands of rattles in the massive crowd (around 80-100,00 they said), so much so that the ground seemed to shake when in front of the stage.

I wandered for two or three hours and was hugged, smiled hugely at, given a Mao cap by a concerned vendor who was worried about my head, and a bag of my very favourite deepfried bananas.

It was very much a carnival atmosphere and I know how these things can turn, but the common wisdom is that it takes an awful lot to turn a Thai to anger, and there was little sign of that (or much in the way of security forces..the only cops I saw were stationed next to the mass of portaloos..which seemed to be overflowing while the guys in charge of them panicked and the cops wandered if this was a bad joke).

Best I let the images talk:

And finally, the barbed wire in front of the Interior Ministry: