"Red in the land"

When the red shirts took over Bangkok's main hotel and shopping area on Saturday, the government said, Now they have gone too far! It's now Tuesday evening and they are still camped out there, all 50,000-plus of them. The upmarket malls are shut down, the streets are ankle-deep in foam plates slick with fish sauce, the few remaining guests at the Grand Hiatt and the Four Seasons are tippy-toe-ing through the debris, and both the porta-potties and porta-monks---elderly monks spraying holy water from the backs of wagons---are getting a workout. Today, according to the Bangkok Post website, the reds seized three fire trucks they said the police were preparing to use to chase them out. As if there weren't more fire trucks where those came from.

I'm writing this at 6:35 pm Tuesday, not having seen Joe since noon. I assume he got good pictures today. We went in different directions, and I THINK I saw him in a photo on the Post website photographing the reds smashing through a riot police barricade under the Ratchadamrie sky train station. And I hope he was somewhere in the vicinity of Silom Road, another major commercial area the reds had been specifically forbidden from entering, when they showed up there at one this afternoon and sent a feeble squad of 40 or 50 cops scurrying. Too late, a thousand or so cops in riot gear arrived and lined Silom Road and watched as the hooting, honking, music-blaring, yelling---"Abbisit, get out!"---tens of thousands of red shirts motor-biked and pranced by.

I happened to be there for the Silom confrontation. Some pro-red spectators encouraged me to buy a red-shirt bandana when a vendor came by. My sometime-journalist instincts said don't do this, but by good-natured popular demand I gave in and bought one, and a man tied it around my neck. I kept it on even after these folks moved on, and a well-groomed farang of a certain age (mine) came over and glared at me.
"Why do you have that thing on you?"
"Some reds put it on me, but I am sympathetic."
"See what happens when YOU want to call a policeman!" he snapped, waving his smoldering Dunhill at me.
The police, of course, were ten feet away, and would have responded, I'm sure, if I had needed their help. But I did not.
I wonder if this guy was Bill F., who wrote a letter to the Post averring that back in Chicago, were he was from, the police would know how to handle the red shirts: "You would have your skull cracked before being taken to the nearest precinct to get a beating you would never forget."

The government here is showing un-Dick Daley-like restraint, and it is admirable. But both nerves and the economy are starting to fray, so maybe this can't go on. Or...maybe it can. Where it all will end knows Buddha.

Joe and I are set to fly south to Khao Sok National Park tomorrow. It will be very hard to leave, but we will do it. The jungle wants us. We return to Bangkok April 16, then fly toward home on the 19th, arriving the 21st. Joe will get some pictures up on the blog of rampaging red shirts in the next day or two---this jungle has internet service---and later of some rampaging---what? Insects? If they come after us, practically natives by now, we will EAT THEM.