Discerning precisely what’s been going on and what went down with the red shirts I feel about as lost as when I’m in a mall parking lot with my grandma trying to find where we parked the car. The red shirts are either a group of naïve folksy folks duped into a campaign pushing the agenda of Thaksin Shinawarta and his elite homies being masked as a genuine grassroots movement, or they’re a collection of seriously and legitimately pissed off collections of disenfranchised populations with shared enemies and some overlapping goals and agendas. At least, I’d say these tend to be the two major narratives that everyone buys into and then etches their perspective of the situation on top of. So if you’re looking for a comparison, the red shirts could be like those tea-bagging ignorant nut jobs in the U.S., or, um, maybe, the “Battle in Seattle” folks? But I’d hesitate in jumping towards neat equivalents or wholly buying either tale. While narratives are constructed in opposition to one another as mutually exclusive and a clean either/or choice, the truth isn’t. Given the way this narrative business works, the truth is likely somewhere quite messy and complicated and in the middle. You’ve probably got decent folks (duped and not duped) and enormous assholes along with a variety of opinions within each rather homogeneously portrayed (demonized or romanticized) camp. Out of everything I’ve come across, this little piece deconstructing narrative(s), the same guy’s blog, and this site he’s spearheaded, seem to be the most insightful agenda-less reads on things. As he puts it quite simply, “Simplistic portrayals do not help anyone to understand anything.” (Is that quote ironic? I’m insecure with the term ever since everyone gave Alanis Morissette such a hard time.)
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