Oedipus' Message To Thailand: "Freedom Is Not Easy, Democracy Is Not Easy"

When I started one of the first punk rock record labels in America back in the late '70s, most rock radio stations laughed at our records and refused to play them. The first big station outside of the San Francisco Bay Area to play the 415 Records artists was WBCN in Boston. We went from being a label that measured sales in various Bay Area neighborhood stores to suddenly shipping boxes of albums to stores in Boston, Worcester and New Hampshire. And, because WBCN was such a huge and successful station, other stations around the country started playing the records as well. The program director there, the man who made the decision to play releases from a small indie label clear across the country, was music fanatic Oedipus. He helped us break RomeoVoid, Translator, Wire Train, Pearl Harbor & the Explosions. And he helped us get our first #1 hit, China by the Red Rockers.

Years later, Oedipus and I each discovered the beautiful Buddhist culture of Thailand. I've visited the country more than a dozen times. He married a Thai woman and lives between Thailand and the U.S. Above you can see him addressing a rally for Thai democracy advocates. Here's a letter he sent me yesterday:

Bangkok is quite exciting these days. Protesters have blockaded major intersections in the city for over 4 weeks now. They are trying to dismantle the corrupt democratic dictatorship that so blatantly overstepped its authority that many Thais finally awakened and said enough. There is no end in sight as both sides are firmly entrenched but someday Thailand may throw off the feudal yolk.

Yet this is not your traditional protest. It is not unlike a rock festival complete with staging, lights, 3-camera shoot, sound towers, video screens, elaborate shutdown merch, entertainment between speeches, huge semi-permanent tent structures for protection from the midday sun, security for ingress/egress, backstage catering, toilets, camping (a sea of tents), and even private Muslin prayer rooms for the minority from the south of the country. The protestors also have their own TV channel. Imagine 59th and 5th in New York with the concert fare all the way down 5th. Now add 5 more major intersections. Could not happen anywhere else in the world that I can think of. Really quite unique. Only in Thailand could demonstrators shut down major portions of the city and not face immediate retaliation from the police.

I was invited to speak and was told that I was the first farang to appear onstage at the Thai protest… I opened for a former deputy Prime Minister. So well received that they want me back for an encore, but I have to lay low for a while as they have begun deporting non-Thai protesters.

Still causing trouble after all these years.  Once a punk…

Causing trouble for fascism, an ideal Oedipus and I always had in common, Last week, the New York Times covered a group of Thai-Americans who are doing something along those lines with their low-budget political satire TV show in Bangkok.

Founded by two Thai-Americans, Shallow News in Depth is a low-budget weekly program posted to YouTube that employs a type of Western humor not common in Thailand-- acid-laced sarcasm-- and draws on the deep well of paradoxes, absurdities and mangled logic of Thailand’s otherwise deadly serious political crisis.

The show has been running for five years but has seen its viewership soar into the hundreds of thousands in recent months as the crisis has escalated.

“If you take seriously everything happening in Thai society, you will go mad,” said Winyu Wongsurawat, the co-host of the show.

…The show has drawn inevitable comparisons to The Daily Show, the satirical American news show anchored by Jon Stewart.

Shallow News in Depth follows a similar format of celebrity interviews, commentary on news and humorous dispatches by reporters on the streets of Bangkok.

But with its ultrafast, chaotic pacing and its silly antics, Shallow News in Depth is “Jon Stewart on crack,” in the words of the Bangkok Post, an English-language newspaper.

Thai politics have become such a circus that reality can be hard to trump.

Protesters in Bangkok are vowing to overthrow the government and banish from Thai politics the prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, and her billionaire brother, the still-influential former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose populist policies have made him a hero to many of Thailand’s poor. They are indeed opposing the current election and doing all they can to thwart it.

They have taken over major intersections in Bangkok and blocked people from voting in a number of districts in the city and southern Thailand, enough disruption to delay the election process for weeks, if not months.

In the meantime, Thailand is deadlocked and lacks a fully functioning government.

…“We are not to be taken seriously,” he said. “We are just clowns.”

But this is a very serious political juncture for the Thai people and, as Oedipus explained in his rant against reactionary Congressman Mike Turner (R-OH), westerners are tending to not understand what's going on at all. Shallow News In Depth may be entertaining but it isn't bringing much clarity. Reporting last month for The Guardian, Dave Sherman was far clearer about what's at stake and why it should matter to westerners who love Thailand and who-- unlike Turner-- love democracy.

As Thailand's protests intensify and a state of emergency is imposed in and around Bangkok, some have begun referring to the demonstrations as "antidemocratic," zeroing in on the opposition's boycott of a forthcoming election and the protest leaders' calls for an unelected "people's council" to replace existing democratic structures. But the truth is more complex, with the protesters being arguably-- and paradoxically-- more democratically minded than the elected government they oppose. To understand how this is possible, one has to scratch beneath the surface of Thai politics and dispel some myths.

Myth 1: The protesters are mainly 'Bangkok elites'

The government is led by Yingluck Shinawatra, who is widely acknowledged to be the proxy of her self-exiled brother and former PM Thaksin Shinawatra. The protests began last November after the parliament passed an amnesty bill that wiped Thaskin's slate clean, allowing him to return to Thailand without serving his two-year jail sentence.

Spearheaded by the opposition Democrat party and Bangkok's middle classes, the protests grew even after the bill was withdrawn, morphing into a wider movement to reform Thailand's politics, cleansing them of Thaksin's influence once and for all. These protesters are often called an "elite" by pro-Thaksin groups – it's a term used to discredit their opponents, and it has caught on among many in the international media. In reality, while the protests indeed have their centre in Bangkok, most protesters are fairly diverse, and include the city's middle and working classes, as well as students and people of all walks of life from Thailand's south. Crucially, the majority of the Bangkok-born working class do not support the government.

It is true that the protest does not enjoy much support in the country's northern and northeastern regions, where the majority of Thailand's population resides. This geographic divide highlights the protest's limits as a national movement, but it in no way supports the notion that protesters are an unrepresentative elite.

Myth 2: Urban protesters oppose rural Thais' desire for equality

The protests were never driven by a need of urban Thais to deprive their rural compatriots of their rights, but were triggered by specific and highly provocative actions by the pro-Thaksin government and parliament. The controversial amnesty bill carried one clear message: we are here to serve, first and foremost, the needs of Thaksin Shinawatra, not the country-- and it was, in effect, the last straw.

But while the protesters want to remove Thaksin from Thailand's body politic, they do not specifically seek to punish his rural supporters. When Yingluck Shinawatra first assumed power after winning the 2011 election, all Thais accepted the result peacefully. Had "Bangkok elites" wanted to bring down the government simply because it represented the power of their opponents, they would've come out against it much sooner.

Some protesters have, unfortunately, said disparaging things about rural Thais, questioning their ability to make the "right" electoral choices due to a lack of education and other perceived faults. What this shows is that Thailand has a long way to go in conquering the many stereotypes that exist among its people-- but it does not point to a protest born of a desire of one part of the population to disenfranchise another.

Myth 3: The protesters want 'less democracy'

Thai protesters will invariably tell you that democracy does not end with elections-- that it is not simply a piece of paper placed into a ballot box. This shows parallels to Egypt last year, as masses piled into the streets, challenging the elected government of Mohamed Morsi in its drive to consolidate power and impose a theocratic state on an unwilling populace. It's not that Egyptians did not want democracy-- a year earlier they had died in the streets fighting for it-- but they felt democracy was usurped by the very government elected under its rules.

Thai protesters' anger and disillusionment comes from a similar place. They are reacting to the government's abuses of power, its vast corruption and a majoritarian style of rule that excluded opponents from any decision-making on key issues of governance. As the government became more and more dedicated to fulfilling Thaksin's need to regain power, it became not just distasteful to the protesters, but politically illegitimate.

To the protesters, Thaksin has always been seen as an autocrat for whom democracy is simply a means to holding on to power, not a guiding political philosophy. Therefore opposing Thaksin and his proxy government is not seen as antidemocratic-- as Thaksin himself is antidemocratic in substance, if democratic in form.

Meanwhile, Yingluck's dissolution of parliament and call for new elections as the protests intensified was viewed as nothing but a raised middle finger to the protesters: "We don't care what you're protesting or demanding; we will have an election, and we will win on the strength of our supporters alone. You don't matter!" The protesters heard this message loud and clear, and it only deepened their resolve to resist an illegitimate government, hiding behind the facade of an election.

Hence, the demand for "reform before election"-- with most protesters accepting democracy with free elections as a basic form of government, but only after reforming the system to eliminate Thaksin's influence from Thai politics.