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The cops
have boarded up the demonstration’s central planning space & roped
off entire downtown Sunday DC yet,
after Seattle, they and we believe there is magic enough to shut today’s
IMF meeting like
when three decades ago protesters announced they
would levitate the Pentagon to end America’s
Vietnamese slaughter and whether
such heavy concrete block lifting was possible all sides
knew odds were high it would happen the U.S.
would soon pull out & seeds of grassroots
democratic experiment would implant forever in American soil I’m standing
7am mid-intersection I
Street and 19th next to huge pink paper mache World
Piggy Bank gripping rubber globe
in slender jaws &
shitting long silver pipe turds staring me between the
eyes while blocking
DC’s Sunday morning paper route a dozen
video cameras focus on line of young people linked arm-in-arm
some with hi-tech yellow metal sleeves their pictures being
sent in present time by independent
internet sources through as-yet-unbought
air waves around a pulsing planet of overflowing
river wires Tactics
built for the forests of the Western Redwood are being
tested in the capital’s tarred & feathery
streets face-to-face afront
a line of Helmeted Police the young
are rapping a slow hiphop cadence: “No one in no one out that’s what the line
is all about” 200 more
milling about, drumming, dancing chanting Seattle’s now infamous 21st century
rally mantra “This is what democracy looks like” The clouds
that earlier looked ready to keep this event enveloped are moving to make way for a sun that’s decided
to reveal this day to all The police
on other side of ropes & chains
wear million-dollar Star Wars gas masks
& knee pads so are clearly no match
for the morning’s idealistic
wizardry of youth Do these
three thousand people working in small
groups mostly still in their twenties know what actions this
weekend will cost? How it
will endanger/enrich their lives? tattoo their bodies electrify
their brains for
what part the century remains? Do they
comprehend this weekend’s heavy vows? Know the DC jails have a long scratchy memory? That the
World Piggy Bank never forgets? There
is a sense of boldness & empowerment in the air that tastes as potent as ginger
breakfast tea inhaled even through
hayfevered nostrils The sidewalk
knows it will soon be doused w/ pepper
spray the store window knows tear gas is
on its way the fire hydrant leaves
space between
parked cars for police nightsticks
to crash upon innocent heads the prison
door hinges are oiled and ready With
no apparent help from pedestrians the street writes its own
graffiti to honor the courage
on display In Saturday’s Washington Post, Police Chief Ramsey
remarked: “I think we’re going to make a lot of arrests and ...
have a lot of problems” Last
night 670 were surprise-arrested marching peacefully against
the prison-industrial complex as if the DC police
wanted to do folks the favor of an
up-close-and-personal look at the 2-million strong
phenomena they’d been criticizing only abstractly
before Police
said those arrested ignored an order
to disperse but the Post reported: “even tourists
who witnessed the event
said
not only did police fail to order people to disperse but they
also prevented those who wanted to leave
from doing so” A Post photographer & other journalists
were arrested about which
police told press: “To the extent we arrested a person that shouldn’t have been,
I apologize.” Near
George Washington University campus, 21st and H, a guy in blue suit tries to
push through the line. The line
closes, a mixed group of young people long hair,
short hair, shaved heads lots of ear, nose, and
lip rings yell
“delegate” & create a dense wall of arms & torsos “No one in, no one out, that’s what
the line is all about” The perhaps-delegate
tries pushing with palms to no success then shoulder first a human battering
ram at vulnerable
knees, yet line holds He starts
yelling phrases I can’t quite hear & more young people move in behind
him some wearing shark caps
or turtle jackets they
start calm-chanting “OM OM OM,” I think Allen would
be touched to know his Grant Park mantra has filtered
thru generational divides With
the help of cops pulling from the other side this perhaps-delegate finally smashes
his way thru most perhaps-delegates
don’t The NY Times Monday headline would read:
“I.M.F. Points to a Big Accomplishment: It Met on Schedule.” Turns
out cops have chauffeured most delegates through DC’s deserted
streets into the
meeting at 5am an hour
before activists due on streets but these young protestors
were blockading
DC intersections by 6am a sure
sign this new movement can succeed when new millennium coffee can brew itself before
the sun rises! A group
of cops head-to-toe’d in riot gear march single-file up a street
center too goose-steppy for
my tastes About
3 dozen young anarchists march unblinking
toward the approaching
police they are clad in black pants, shirts,
boots, black
bandanas covering faces so cameras
won’t recognize they spread across road in few columns putting bodies in way
of police advance The cops
stop & form a single file crossways 20 feet away from these courageous
crazily provocative
kids The 1/2
hour stand-off is unnerving violence seems inevitable yet moving
in concert bandana’d anarchists take 10 steps
even closer a dozen
video cameras from news groups large and small stand between cops and kids awaiting direct footage
of bloody
confrontation as another
line of riot-geared cops drive up on motorcycles to add one more layer of intimidation
& rogue support Young
drummers have come around to beat
beat beat, the big bass drum beat beat beat, the chant: “This is
what democracy looks like” “This
is what democracy feels like” then
a protection-mantra from the protesters to media: “Film them,
not us,” “Film them, not us” with
whole world watching via World Wide Web the mantra works & after 40 or 50 minutes the cops
on motorcycles turn
their bikes & lead a procession of retreat amid a several column
thick communal
deep sigh A utopian
garden party is spreading downtown groups of young women
& men block car
& foot traffic with huge puppets & silver metal
sleeves street
theater & dance mocks the IMF, WTO, and World Bank there goes
a big tooth’d munching Structural Adjustment
Pulverizer There
a guy in a Clinton costume, there someone
walking on stilts passing
out fake dollar bills. Signs read “Spank the Bank,” “Get
Corporations Off Welfare,” “The Debt Kills” “Yacyreta Dam Argentina/Paraguay 75,000 people displaced.”
The teach-ins,
alternative papers, new internet sites Noam Chomsky
lectures & books have taught protesters
well enough to know that
IMF & World Bank structural adjustment agreements demand poverty-inducing ecologically
destructive capitalist economic
policies in exchange for emergency
room million dollar loans to Developing Countries in need of both band-aids and long
term medical plans The Washington Post patronizingly describes protesters eating from a “chow line for the revolution” with trays “piled with
cruelty-free rice.” What’s
wrong with cruelty-free rice? The IMF ministers are
forced to publicly acknowledge “a widespread fear” that
benefits of world economy “are not reaching everyone,” and Monday’s NY Times front page sums up our concerns pretty well: demonstrators
accuse “financial institutions of burdening poor Third World countries with crushing
debts, impoverishing
peasants, destroying rain forests, supporting sweatshops &other policies
that, as
one sign put it, ‘saps the poor to fatten the rich’” Munch
Munch Munch Skin Neck Back Munch Munch Munch Brain
Fingers Genitals this is what democracy’s devouring
teeth look like. At about
noon, a legal rally begins in the Ellipse buses from around the
nation roll in to a field overseen by nation’s
largest phallus 10,000
on lawn hear Roger & Me’s Michael Moore, reps from Students Against
Sweatshops, the
Steelworker Union’s George Becker–– to demand
more humane international economic & environmental policies, to shut
the Great Muncher’s
Bullying Jaw to march
through streets of world’s lone remaining
superpower with signs that read
“more world, less bank” “make global economy work for working
families” By afternoon,
a rainy morning has turned 84 sunny degrees shut that jaw–– through DC side streets
the roving
blockades continue and there
are enough www.indymedia.org cameras to record police responding
with tear gas & pepper spray arbitrary
batons and purposeful bootkicks. Near
the end of the legal rally, one end of the Park, I saunter to watch 500
protesters sit peacefully while U.S. Park Police sit in steel
gear atop scared horses lined
up in a row across one end of the protesters A few empty plastic bottles fly from
unseen hands toward the police until
peace-promoting voices from the crowd go up “we’re against the World
Bank not against the cops” & things
calm for 15 minutes Then
police start looking restless & horses begin to
shuffle the Washington Monument in the background
swallows
its Viagra and SWAT
troops begin running thru crowd pushing nonviolent protesters aside
viciously one guy
swiped by forearm off bicycle face first onto the
pavement a few
yards before my eyewitnessing eyes a SWAT cop with name
Zarger on his uniform
badge smashes a woman’s head with nightstick There
is no need for that! She was
trying to move! Still cameras start clicking, but there
are no news video or film teams
around so young
and old alike here for the legal rally are pushed
and punched & a single file
aisle is cleared so the
park police on horseback can walk
that aisle to get to the other side as purposeless as the
old chicken joke only
an instinctual urge to smash a few protesters’
heads in one of today’s rare
in-the-shade moments away from CNN MSNBC WEB the Sun’s gaze In next day’s NY Times, a front page photo will show a similar scene elsewhere:
a young
man fallen immobile under a horse, beaten
by a police baton The caption
reads: “Police officers scuffled with a protester who fell under horse on Constitution Avenue yesterday.” Munch
Munch Brains Belly this is what the teeth of corporate-waxed & glazed globalization
looks like 5:32
pm, Sunday, April 16th, I walk back to metro as helicopters
roar lionlike overhead, while protesters in small park 20th
& I soak tired feet in a
small yellow-green fountain Monday
is the World Bank meeting Eric, Ben, & I drive to protest
late morning directed
by local pirate radio station amid heavy rains which
today don’t cease 1,000
people are sitting intersection while police
wearing padded boots helmets, gas masks, plastic shields stand semi-circle from
one end of block to other,
where snapshot will show them guarding a Gap dungaree’d manikin store window
display cops are holding tear
gas rifles &
pepper spray containers while activist drums
are banging the tension
is high there are nonstop negotiations at the
line’s front after
an hour the cops remove gas masks & a huge applause
leaps out activists stand up slowly & begin
to cross police lines in an
arranged arrest, about 10 at a time looks like about 600
placed into waiting
blue vans the deal enabling civil disobedience
move
forward without smashed heads or bashed elbows &
knees he rain is crashing in dense sheets protesters are chanting” We’re
here! We’re wet! Cancel the
debt” They are steadfast & brave while the Gap mannikins tremble In Wednesday’s
NY Times, John Kifner
would write: “In the end, Washington was not Seattle.” David Frum
op-eds: “So Round Two of the great mobilization against
globalization ended in a squelch rather than the photogenic
violence of Seattle.” The paper of record tries so hard to
be negative that
any reader with between-the-lines
reading glasses knows something historic has taken
place that
although the World Bank met, the lobbyist corridor was closed, banks shut, world attention focused
on issues of international
trade and finance previously hidden behind back
stage corporate curtains just one week earlier-- even the Times front page April 18th
admits “The
world’s top financial officials, trying to show sensitivity to poverty
as protesters braved
a chilling rain ... pledged to pay more attention to globalization’s victims and to commit ‘unlimited money’ to fight AIDS in poor
countries.” In an unusual moment, The Times put our general analysis succinctly
on its front page: “The protesters accuse the World Bank
and the I.M.F. of spreading
the gospel of free-market capitalism
to benefit
corporations while ignoring the environmental impact
of their policies and worsening poverty
in many countries.” This
was not Seattle, but the continuation of Seattle’s
legacy fulfilled, successful, theatrical, inventive, fun, empowering
for a new generation of activists growing smarter, all the while with video cameras & poetic
notebooks rolling out on
the streets no longer letting the mainstream
media monopolize the whole story the historic lessons
are being learned–– one sidewalk
curb at a time— a
new magic spell has been cast–– A person walks down 21st Street wearing a red box
over her or his head–– in magic
marker is writ “Light of Possibilities” a yellow bumper sticker across the
box says “accountable governance” a nearby
sign reads: “We’re not going away” another: “Dissent cannot
be shot down or arrested” I was there
to witness the ground beneath the bank begin to
shiver 5/2000 |