The Drone Overhead, the Gas Below

Bangkok in late 2013 was fighting itself. What had started as opposition to Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s government—her critics called it a proxy administration for her exiled brother Thaksin—had escalated into something uglier: demonstrators storming military compounds in the government district, rocks and Molotov cocktails going one direction, tear gas and water cannons going the other.

Someone sent up a drone. The footage that came back was eerie in the way aerial protest footage always is: you lose the noise, the acrid smell, the specific fear of a crowd that’s decided it has nothing left to lose, and what remains looks almost abstract. Smoke columns. Police cordons. The city’s grid holding its shape while something inside it breaks.

There’s a particular dissonance in watching that kind of footage from a desk in December, with half the people you know having just booked Christmas flights to Thailand. The clashes were concentrated around the government quarter—not the tourist strip—but close enough that "just avoid the area" starts to sound like advice given by someone who’s never been caught in a crowd moving against its will. Bangkok absorbs a lot. It had absorbed a lot before this and would absorb more after. The coup came the following May. The drone moved on.