report from NYC protests - 19 anecdotes

Before Reading: please note, some of my radical friends might worry that in the following I'll give away the anarchists' tactics and surprises. However, I am certain that there is NOTHING in the following text that is not already on tons of blogs or for Christ's sake reported in this week's Village Voice (and thus would have been easily learnable by any "intelligence" cop or Homeland Security worker who might have be assigned today to sit in the office and surf IndyMedia for updates on demonstrators' plans, or signed on to the protestors' completely un-secure web-enrolled lists of cell-phone-text message "newsgroups," which I treat only as a reporter would, in the following. I am CERTAIN about this. I've checked and proofread carefully to make sure these are all compeletely journalistic anecdotes that some kid sent by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch could have written.

1. Text messaging has in some ways changed the face of activism - or, at least, of multi-event urban protest activism. I signed up for software called TextMob, at www.txtmob.com, which permitted the automated distribution of messages from a single desktop computer to the cell phones of dozens of demonstrators, who may be widely dispered physically at the time that each of them is alerted, by cell phone, to some consideration that might affect the plans of the other group. I signed on to a couple of these lists so I'd get updates about things like where there were huge numbers of cops, where there were cops with riot gear and what direction they were moving, arrested, etc. I got a couple ones that were funny in their incoherence ("cops look panicky" at such-and-such an intersection). Maybe this is how Homeland Security workers feel when they cock their ears and strain to hear the "chatter" of the terrorists and somehow decide what color of alert to tell the country we are on?

2. For instance, apparently (I wasn't there), early this afternoon, a group of "gay" "anarchists" (to use FOX NEWS ANCHORspeak) convened suddenly at the cafe where the Log Cabin Republicans were holding their major pre-convention special event. Fliers advertising this event had been distributed at several smaller rallies and actions the previous day, and were available for pickup at bars and coffee shops on the lower east side. (At the Phoenix, I picked up a bumper sticker saying ATTENTION REPUBLICANS: GO FUCK YOURSELVES, sponsored by an indie rock band whose website was advertised in small print at the top and bottom of the bumper sticker. but a reminder just a few minutes beforehand made sure everyone would arrive at the restaurant on time - much as their Republican counterparts. They staged zany mock "weddings," like between animals and people and so forth.

3. This last phenomenon reflects the tactic that especially serious demonstrators said ahead of time in interviews that they would adopt for the convention week: learning about where Republicans would be dining, celebrating, or relaxing in the city, and then assembling at, outside, and between those functions and trying to make the delegates' stay in New York as unpleasant as possible. Early Sunday evening, I was in Times Square just before the day's big wave of arrests began. I was with a group of queers who had gathered for a "kiss-in," and who were spread across several of the square's intersections and islands just at the time when delegates began to arrive with their state contingents to attend Broadway shows. (Counterconvention.org posted a list on their website a few days ago of which states' delegates would be going to which shows, at which times).

4. I introduced myself to a Republican delegate from Oregon. He was a middle-aged white guy in a nice dress shirt and trousers. I asked him what he thought about the Federal Marriage Amendment and he said he had "mixed emotions" about it because he did have a gay nephew, and he was after all a part of the family. I told him I was gay too (in case he couldn't tell), and that I was really disturbed that his party had been taken over by extremists who put in their platform that they want to amend the Constitution to discriminate against me. He said, well, a lot of US think the Democratic party has been taken over by extremists. A woman next to us piped up, "Boy, if only that were the case!"

5. According to a story I read in the gay press, the Republicans appear to have hand-selected a group of eight Broadway shows for delegates to attend during specially scheduled performances this afternoon. What did this group of eight shows have in common?..hmm, it turns out that each show had not a single gay or lesbian character. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also tended to be the blandest, dullest shows that locals eschew (such as PHANTOM OF THE OPERA).

6. According to a text message I received, the police strung orange "arrest webbing" around a large group of perhaps one hundred fifty protestors, immobilizing them in a single place and then herding those caught in its sweep into paddy wagons to spend a hideously unpleasant eight to twelve hours or longer (how much longer we don't yet know) in the city's downtown jail.

7. On Thursday, a group of two men and two women from California and New York rapelled off the side of the Plaza Hotel, unfurling a huge banner that covered up many of the windows on the hotel's historic and architecturally important facade. The banner had two arrows, one labeled TRUTH and pointing to the right, and the other reading BUSH and pointing to the left. It was quite some time before police managed to get the banner removed. Many RNC delegates are staying at the Plaza Hotel. The photos of this action are really cool and you should check them out at http://www.indymedia.org. The four activists were arrested and charged with numerous offenses, but despite Manhattan prosecutors' efforts a judge released them on their own recognizance.

8. FOX NEWS is using photos of an immense, burning dragon-puppet that filled the stretch of Seventh Avenue in front of Madison Square Garden this afternoon, as its lead visual image displayed in tonight's website coverage of today's massive "umbrella" march (organized by United for Peace and Justice, whose appeal for permission to rally in Central Park was denied at the last minute by the state Supreme Court). However, as someone who participated in the march and even, in fact, saw the burning of the dragon from the next block, I would have chosen a different image to capture best the extraordinary intensity of the march. The image I would have chosen is of the section of Seventh Avenue directly in front of a hotel where many delegates were staying. As demonstrators literally filled the streets - moving very slowly because streets were so much more clogged than march organizers had expected - those within an easy sightline of the hotel chanted and screamed directly at the few RNC-related staff members who decided to appear, under heavy guard, on the hotel's balcony. Their chants included GO HOME BUSH, THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, HEY HEY HO HO GEORGE BUSH HAS GOT TO GO, YOU'RE NOT WELCOME - and, simply and angrily and with fingers pointed, the single word SHAME! The corporate media has set up an opposition between "good" protestors (peaceful, Quaker, middle-aged, Democratic Party, hardworking Americans) and "bad" protestors (young, disaffected, violent, dangerous), yet the overwhelming tone of the march, in my perception, was one of intergenerational cooperation, enthusiasm, and mutual education. At times, many young highly energized protestors took the lead in enacting, with their arms and bodies, the group's profound anger; other protestors with decades of social movement experience looked on smilingly, as if they appreciated that SOMEONE had finally taken up their mantle and was pissed off enough about their government's actions to flood midtown Manhattan with demonstrators. Some doubtless recalled their own youthful activism in the Vietnam era, and a number of handmade signs bore slogans referring to President Bush's avoidance of the Vietnam-era draft. (The NYT is reporting that today's protestors were part of the largest crowd ever assembled in conjunction with a political party's event, i.e., more people than Chicago '68.) One man was selling t-shirts with "Bush in '72" written in lines of cocaine (the shirts have printed on them "bushin72.com," though the guy said the website wasn't quite ready for primetime). One very elderly woman sitting at the edge of 7th Avenue in a lawn chair, watching the crowds, wore a sign saying TEXAN AGAINST BUSH, and was interviewed by a steady stream of reporters.

9. It's New York. Union Square has been mobbed for days by vendors and random folks of all stripes hawking t-shirts with all kinds of anti-Bush slogans. There were also lots of opportunities to buy these along the march route.

10. I marched with the queer "contingent," which was large enough to constitute a march in itself. By the time we left our starting point, I had received a text message saying that the front of the march had reached its endpoint but the end of it (that would be us) had not yet begun to move. Believe me, we were hot and cranky and sweaty after standing around in the middle of the street and ducking into Duane Reade or Dunkin Donuts hoping that sometime soon we might get to actually march. As my friend Sarah observed, protesting is often, it turns out, really really boring. Designated to gather in Sheridan Square at 10am, we homos and perverts and trannies and dykes formed a large "feeder march" that gathered in Sherdian Square (i.e., near the site of the Stonewall riots).

11. My favorite subgroup within the queer contingent was the GLAM BRIGADE. This consisted of extremely glamorously dressed activists - each dressed in a different elaborate outfit of totally garish makeup and prom dress, tuxedo, or undergarment, and each carrying an enormous sign whose glitter and matching plastic feather boas made it hard to miss. Each sign had a harsh, cutting message for Republicans such as

5 DEFERMENTS? TACKY, TACKY, TACKY.
G.O.P., YOU'RE NOT ON THE LIST [as in, you're denied entry at an exclusive club]
FASHION MEMO: FLIP-FLOPS ARE IN
PEACE IS BOOTYLICIOUS
ELECTION-STEALING IS SOOOOOOO 2000

and a bunch more along those lines.

12. About 250 bicyclists were arrested Friday evening at a Critical Mass event in which 5,000 people on bikes brought traffic across midtown Manhattan to a virtual standstill for several hours. (The circumstances of the arrests were described very differently in, say, the text messages I received about them and on FOX NEWS.) Few or no arrests Saturday. Then in the late afternoon today several hundred protestors were arrested (word is 150-200) in and around Times Square, which was basically shut down for a couple of hours as both delegates and protestors flooded the area. Some of these direct-action protests seemed to very effectively disrupt some delegates' arrival in the city, that is, they forced them to brave very angry, intense crowds of demonstrators who blocked their path through the streets and sidewalks.

13. I left the scene of the Times Square thing before huge numbers of people were arrested. But I was there for the beginning of the confrontation before the cops brought in horses and I walked far, far away. It started with this huge queer-kiss-in that according to fliers was supposed to fill the square just as delegates were on their way to attend eight specially scheduled performances of Broadway shows. The whole square (yes, the whole square) was pretty physically tense as protestors screamed carefully at passing delegates from behind police barricades. When the crowd in the square got really big, cops on horses suddenly came out of nowhere and galloping through the street, frightening a lot of people. Then riot squads came in, carefully arranged, and forced everyone up onto the sidewalk. The whole thing was videotaped by NLG legal observers in green hats (there were supposed to be 500+ lawyers and law students out volunteering today, the ACLU said ahead of time), and cops apparently designated by the NYPD for the purpose of videotaping us individually darted around and zoomed in at everyone carrying a sign and made sure each of us saw that our face was being captured on camera.

14. According to protestor-operated websites like IndyMedia, at least a dozen protestors were beaten by cops and and bleeding profusely in the street from their wounds.

15. I didn't see any riot gear. And, although many protestors had feared/discouraged or expected/hoped (depending on their level of willingness or unwillingness of members of a given contingent to risk arrest) that there would be physical confrontations with the police over whether the entire march could "break off" in the direction of the notoriously un-"permitted" Central Park Great Lawn, this did not happen.

16. Next to Madison Square Garden is a huge billboard for FOX NEWS. Whole sections of the march shouted FOX NEWS SUCKS as they walked past. I also took some time screaming BUSH MUST GO or YOU'RE NOT WELCOME at a couple of delegates appeared in the entranceway of Madison Square Garden. The delegates themselves were easily distinguishable from the Port Authority Police (since the NJ/NY P.A. operates Madison Sq Garden), and from the nattily-dressed-in-chinos, uniformed, walkie-talking-wearing Republican white-collar security-related personnel by their highly gender-color-coded outfits of three-piece suits and ties or tasteful, brightly colored skirts and tops.

17. I've been hanging out with my friend Kat who came from Chicago with me on an ATA frequent-flyer "companion ticket" + my Swarthmore friends and former housemates. Kat likes them and they like Kat :) We're all staying in Sarah Allegra and Judy's 3-bedroom apartment near Columbia, even though their really isn't enough bed space for all of us.

18. Protestors are having their own party all over the city. In my social set, the really cool kids had tickets to Margaret Cho, who was performing at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street (Harlem). In case you don't know, Margaret Cho is a Korean American comedian [thanks those of you who corrected me on that] who grew up in SF's gay Polk Street area, is a big fag hag, and icon for gay men who care about politics (think Judy Garland circa 2004). These shows at the Apollo were part of her STATE OF EMERGENCY tour. (Cho was, as you may know, nixed from a scheduled performance at a DNC-related function in Boston when the Democrats discovered she had intended to speak up about her opposition to their party platform's lack of support for gay marriage.) I tried to get a ticket on Saturday morning for one of her last two shows that evening, but they were completely sold out.

19. A final story - from yesterday, when I marched with 20,000 people across the Brooklyn Bridge in a pro-choice march. (In this case too we had to wait for hours before marching because only the pedestrian lane over the bridge was permitted....urrrgggh). Let me tell you, cheap-Chinese-restaurant operators were not equipped for the influx of folks they had after we made it across the Brooklyn Bridge. We were tired and our feet hurt and we had to wait like an hour for really really terrible food. During the wait I struck up some conversations with cops munching at nearby tables. One of them, a Bronx cop, told me they needed the Bronx and Brooklyn cops when something really bad was gonna happen, cause the Manhattan cops wouldn't be able to handle that (we shared an anxious, very very conscientious on both sides laugh over this joke). Another cop shushed him for saying this out loud 'cause he thought it would offend Manhattan cops within earshot (I am not making this up), but a third cop glanced at the nearby tables and assured the others that there definitely weren't any Manhattan cops who could have heard the insult.

20. Photos coming soon!