Hello. Thank you for tuning into “The 1st Anniversary of the 2004 Republican National Convention.” Happy Birthday, Mr. President, indeed. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is proud to present twelve stories recounting the way that the Republican National Convention reshaped New York City, articulated from a wide variety of perspectives and in a wide variety of voices. Click here to enter the Convention.

A lot has happened here in the United States since the Convention wrapped up, one almost wants to say too much to warrant any further discussion. Yet the fact of the matter is that certain crimes were perpetrated in that week which have never been suitably addressed either in the media or in the political sphere. Among other things, almost 2,000 people were arrested arbitrarily and kept in jail under unsanitary conditions for days. Under any other circumstances, such a thing would be called kidnapping and to punish it under the law would be an extremely straightforward matter. Under these circumstances, it was the government itself that broke the law and as a result the matter is not straightforward at all.

If there is another RNC-related crime that has since gone unpunished, it is cultural and not as easy to define as the mass kidnapping that took place. It has to do with this: There is no more precise, compact, almost adorably metaphorical illustration of the fact that the current American project of spreading democracy is an insane fantasy than what happened in New York last August. While talk of freedom reverberated under the dome of Madison Square Garden, thousands were in jail for no justifiable reason while untold others sat at home afraid to go outside. I have always thought Madison Square Garden looked like one of the alien spaceships from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"—and in August 2004, the ship launched out into space and took all of the space cadets in the GOP with it.

Generally speaking this website gives people a chance to say something about their lives, their neighborhoods, and their city, the way it looks from their own individual point of view. The basic project of the 2004 Republican National Convention was to replace the real New York City in the public mind with a bizarre, caricaturish simulacrum of New York City which flatters the current interests of a handful of people. For whatever else it’s worth, these stories mean to help prevent that project from ever succeeding.

That the stories are also compelling, funny, scary, and even sexy is also worth bringing up. They are the revenge of reality against fantasy, demonstrating once and for all that it is possible to tell a good story and tell the truth at the same time.

Jason was a 23 year old beat cop from Staten Island. 6,000 NYPD officers had received special training in crowd control and civil liberties. I doubted that Jason had ever worn riot gear prior to when he received the training, but the high of the costume seemed to have changed the way he thought about his body. Now that it was off it gave him an almost unnatural level of comfort and ease in the way that he carried himself. His bulgy stomach pumped up and down as he twirled amblingly between us, grinning. More than anything else, he acted like a rock star interacting with fans after a sweaty show.

He smiled and looked off into the distance. “We only want to get you outta here as soon as we can,” he said.

A charter bus loaded with more prisoners rolled into the cavernous box while applause thundered from far away. I wondered whether the sounds were coming from protestors gathered outside or holding cells inside, in which case I wondered just how huge this place was. When the bus stopped the prisoners inside stood up and walked to the front of the bus with their heads down and their hands behind their backs.

My then-girlfriend stood in the other parallel row, directly across from me. Jason turned his back to her and she stuck her tongue out at him while he listened with an inscrutable, sage-like expression into the rumbling noise of the space. She dropped back into an iridescent smile when he turned around. We wore cheap disposable handcuffs made out of white plastic strips which the police could be seen sporting on their belts in thick stacks throughout the Republican National Convention. This was an entirely different type of tourism than she and I had expected that evening, when we had idiotically decided to go tooling around Midtown together so that we could “see what happens.”

After they swept us up in a mass arrest, Jason and his crew brought us to PASS (Post-Arrest Screening Site), new to the City since Spring 2004. Pier 57 on the Hudson River, the site had originally found use launching cruise ships and, until 2003, for maintenance on City buses. Massive random arrests had been planned for the RNC, and New York’s already crowded corrections system begged the question of where they were all supposed to go. The NYPD assumed control of Pier 57 after the Department of Transportation had rejected an earlier proposal, in which the NYPD was to transform the Staten Island Ferry into a giant floating prison barge for RNC-related offenders.

I spent that night pacing around in a narrow chainlink fence enclosure full of my fellow men. There were white dress shirts, colorful T shirts, businessy polo shirts, and revealing wife beaters all covered with the same mysterious black stains. My shirt happened to be black itself, as a result of which my appearance was unusually dapper in a chainlink fence cage full of so many unsightly customers. Appearances can be deceiving, however, so I made sure to keep my hands away from my eyes at all times. I didn’t know what kinds of chemicals went into performing City bus maintenance, and it was clear that neither the NYPD, the City, the GOP, nor the Chelsea Piers Commission had given a lot of thought to tidying up before our arrival.

There was a large group of women in a chainlink fence enclosure immediately adjacent to ours, with a space between them just wide enough that we couldn’t reach across and link warm fingers for moral support. As the night went on and the mind’s ability to form complete sentences diminished, sleep became the only real pastime in our cell, and I craved it badly. On the concrete floor or sitting on the benches leaning deep into the sagging chainlink backboard that we all shared, the men’s sleeping faces were open-mouthed dead from sheer exhaustion. I watched my girlfriend sleeping in the other cell while I made my rounds. She sat on a bench right up against the fence, her back leaned against it, so that I could see the back of her head slumping peacefully to one side. Since the moment Jason had gathered us up and stashed us both in the paddy wagon, there had been a quality about her that I lacked the courage to imitate. Completely at peace with the entire misadventure, she showed no expectations of what would happen at any given time, how or when it would end.

By contrast, the thought that kept me awake was that the moment in time when I would be released would or at least could always be just one moment away. I believed Jason when he told us, staring off into the distance, that we would be out as fast as possible. They had been doing it ever since we showed up—coming out every once in a while with a list of names and then spiriting the group of chosen men around some murky corner. The men often seemed legitimately happy when the police did this; I remember there had been one man, who looked like he was in his fifties, who prior to coming to Pier 57 had been very well dressed in a mysterious black stain-free white dress shirt and elegant white slacks. Yet even with the stains he looked important, with a vaguely European air about him and gray hair swept back over his head like Donald Rumsfeld’s. When the police called his name he pumped his fists just a little bit and grinned like a boy who had been exempted from taking out the garbage. I wondered how important he really was, whether there was a towncar pulled up to the shoulder of the West Side Highway waiting for him.

When morning came all of the men were moved out of our cramped chainlink shoebox into a chainlink space about the size of a basketball court at the rear of the great bus-cleaning facility. Through the links you could see some kind of opening in the wall to the right, and the Hudson River looked so vivid. A big line of guys went through an open door in the fence and lined up in front of a port-a-potty, but a cop came by and told us to go back inside because we weren’t supposed to use that port-a-potty. Behind us he closed the door and the turning lock rang superlatively. I went over and filled up my cup with water, drank it, and then lay down in the sooty concrete and tried to sleep. But the big cell door up front was open and the police were calling names regularly so thoughts of being out by lunchtime preoccupied me.

More hours passed as the names rolled on and I had still not slept at all. I listened obsessively through each individual syllable of every name, unable to even try and make conversation with the others, until at last I became delirious. Two parallel lines of frowning cops wearing helmets and vests stretched like an equal sign from the opening of the cell to where the buses were parked and I approached them with all the speed in my step of any New Yorker on the street, walking to or from the subway and back to his job, his home, his life.

The armed parallaxis waited behind a cop holding the usual clipboard. He asked, “Where you goin’?”

I said, “Patrick Gallagher.”

He looked at me as though he were still waiting for my answer.

“I-I thought I heard my name called. My name is–”

The cop shook his head. “Your name wasn’t called.” He didn’t even have to look at the clipboard. He knew what he was doing.

Finally they did call my name and I thought, Fuck lunch, but at least I’ll be out in time for happy hour. Before going through the riot gear gauntlet a cop approached me removing another strip of ribbon-cuff from the big stack tied to his belt. With the movements of the cop’s hip the stack of ribbons bobbed up and down and every one of them, with their two huge loops sized for the widest common denominator, became blurry in my exhausted eyes and looked like fat white bats flying out of a primitive drawing. Then I was put on a bus to Central Booking.

I was in a holding cell facing some kind of reception desk. The cell had yellow cinderblocks like my dorm room freshman year of college. The people milling around outside the bars almost danced through the station house, whether in uniform or in plainclothes. They had more swagger in their hips, emotion in their smiles, or boom in their voices than any group of people I had ever seen outside of some raucous club. The NYPD were ecstatically theatrical. I imagined that their constant proximity to incarceration had changed the way that they think about freedom itself, rather than an abstract natural right it became a rare and precious condition of the body that one relished and did not take for granted. I watched an overweight officer sit down at a table, somewhere behind the main reception desk, and lower a piece of cheese pizza vertically into his mouth. That he could be mocking us, when Jason had gone to such trouble to show that we all would have been friends had circumstances been only a tiny bit different, was inconceivable to me.

Hours again passed, name after name was called and taken from the cell and, when I couldn’t convince myself that I would be “back on the street” momentarily, I thought about the police. A girthy young man in tie dye leaned back against the cinderblocks, hands clasping his knees, guffawing, his big chest pumping up and down. It was clear that everyone was beginning to get used to it and with that change came the physical signs. These were faces, haircuts, fancy-rimmed glasses that looked foreign to the stubble gathering around them. The grease accumulating in everyone’s hair reflected broad swaths of the harsh overhead light. I stewed in myself while a crew of such young and middle-aged men with electric eyes gathered around the fat young man as he guffawed. The men looked like they had just woken up from an indeterminate amount of sleep, only to discover that the new show on TV was in fact the Super Bowl.

In my crippled mind I nicknamed him Siddhartha, the corpulent guru. He was what you would call a natural leader. He made the time pass. I couldn’t so much as hear any of the other men’s names besides mine, but whatever Siddhartha’s name really was they called both of our names at the same time. They fastened me into a daisy chain behind him and three others, single metal cuffs all linked into a line as though they wanted us to help take care of some roadwork. Someone said, “I bet you could cut through this shit with a toenail clipper.” Arching his back, a tall police officer with a laminated-looking bronzed face upturned and gleaming of tobacco boomed, “This way, gentlemen.” We trudged at a uniform pace into a narrow cinderblocked hallway. The cop continued, “One day, when you’re older, you’ll all be in the system just like us and you’ll look back and say, ‘In 2004, when the shit went down, I was there.’ ”

The problem was that many of us already were older, besides which the system in all its neediness may have wanted us back even more badly than we wanted to be released. Our jobs had to be done by someone. Rather than a routine case of youthful rebellion, this was a case of the system itself rebelling against . . . Itself. The law had pre-empted the law, and the police, with all their hours of training and glorified babysitting, had essentially arrested themselves.

Four small holding cells, each with an aluminum-topped bench wrapped around its three walls, connected to a bright white room where a cop with bright red hair and a bright red moustache sat at a desk reading the New York Post. The cop looked like a cross between Thomas Friedman and Strawberry Shortcake, everyone in our cell made fun of him. A ring of men accrued around Siddhartha while he laughed and exclaimed that there was no possibility, no possibility that we would be released before the end of the Convention. The men had that same shocked but grateful look, like they were only one step away from learning to master their own anger. A thin bearded man in a purple T-shirt who called himself John Doe talked to me about the discipline of Comparative Literature, very problematic. Doe was a professor of Philosophy somewhere in Georgia.

The cop turned the page of his Post loudly. People mocked the blazing streak of red across his upper lip until an old man yelled at them. “He is our only link to the outside world!” exclaimed the old man, who had also identified himself as John Doe. “It’s not helping anything and it’s just plain stupid.”

Philosophy John Doe suggested that we have a meeting and Siddhartha intoned, “Yep, I think that’s a really good idea.” We all sat around, some of us on the aluminum bench and, since we had exceeded the bench’s capacity, some of us on the floor. We worked out a plan to sleep in shifts, since there wasn’t enough room for all of us to lie down.

It had been 36 hours since I had last slept but the formalized procedure made me feel more comfortable than I had in the previous cells, where conversing had been a simple matter of holding other people’s attention for the longest possible lengths of time. It re-energized me so I volunteered to sleep in the second shift.

The six of us gathered around in the front of the cell, while the others slept in the back, went silent for a second until I went up to the bars. I approached the bars and asked the mustachioed police officer if he could give us any of his New York Post to read, and he offered us the crossword puzzle. He tore it out of the paper and handed it to me through the bars and we huddled around it doing pretty well for twenty minutes or so, considering we didn’t have anything to write with and needed to memorize our answers if we were going to play. With each clue we had more and more to memorize, and I was sure that we could have pulled it off had half of my cellmates not been lying asleep on the floor. We all laughed, me as much as I had since it had started.

At some point someone asked the red cop when we were going to be released and he said, “Well, I don’t know. But if you want to know my opinion, they’re gonna keep you until it’s over. It makes sense, right?”

When I woke up the next morning on the floor of the cell I felt crisp and polished. There were only two other prisoners, Siddhartha, the Does, even Friedman was gone, replaced by a black woman cop, and the whole Post was now scattered around the cell in sections, not just the crossword puzzle. When new prisoners came in I learned that a group of lawyers that had formed solely to address the massive-scale civil liberties violations planned for the RNC had succeeded in getting a Federal court injunction on a writ of habeas corpus, which meant that we were getting out that day after all.

When they came for me I stood with a single raised finger, having embarked upon a tirade, while two very young men sat on the bench on opposite sides of the cell nodding slowly. This has been a lesson in corruption, I said. The degradation of our police force and the privatization of our streets have proven only one thing once and for all, which is the dedication of the Republican Party to creating an America in which the principle of class survives but without the principle of liberty. And we could never imagine a more thorough demonstration of what that kind of America would be like than the microcosm which we are experiencing now, I said. This version of jail, without violent criminals and without the poor, business class jail, hippie class jail. If we lose this election, the same description will apply to our own homes. Scared to go outside, scared to walk the streets because of who you might piss off, all the creature comforts in the world won’t be enough to disguise the fact that our whole lives are jail!

“Patrick Gallagher.”

“OK.” I gave the two boys a quick salute and hurried to the bars, lest the cops change their minds.

I will not go on about the curious timing of your death. People are very impatient with conspiracy theories these days, even when past theories have revealed conspiracies. Still, I read with weary cynicism that you spoke to a meeting of war veterans in Willmar, Minnesota in October 2002 and told them that Dick Cheney said to you, “If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush Administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.” Days later, you were dead.

You voted against Bush’s unilateral attack on Iraq, against Bush’s Homeland Security Department and in favor of an independent 9-11 investigation over Bush’s and Cheney’s objections. Your wife, who shared your courage and persuasiveness and would have continued your legacy, was dead also, preventing a repeat of John Ashcroft’s defeat by the wife of deceased air-crash victim Mel Carnahan. I am still working through my anger at you and your wife. (It’s always easier to be angry at the dead ones.) Why didn’t you understand the danger you were in? After a threat like that, couldn’t you two have flown economy class on the biggest commercial airline you could find?

Senator, you were not a whore and you did not have a price. Feeling disillusioned after the election of 2000, I desperately needed a politician to have faith in; and as a powerful voice of dissent against the war, you were asking serious questions about America, obviously deadly ones. After you died, I waited for you to become a martyr. Instead, the media said, “Oh well, shit happens,” and I never heard your name mentioned on television again.

I am writing this to you because I am hoping it will help me to understand what is happening to us. I feel the country is falling apart. Our democracy and constitution are threatened, our civil liberties may soon disappear, and I don’t know what the hell to do about it.

___ I isolate in my apartment and watch the news compulsively, calling it “staying informed.” An ex-mayor and our current governor pimp our national tragedy, and a senator who is also an ex-presidential candidate joins the two of them and turns the Republican convention into a televised job interview. I question the Republican presence in New York. For the first time in one hundred and fifty years, they choose our city, a Gomorrah to many of them. I couldn’t feel more violated if they were holding the convention in my living room. You don’t belong here, I shout at their cheers and chants, their exuberant flag-waving and “patriotism.” You think we are liberal and sinful, and you hate us (except for a few who work on Wall Street). Republicans, what are you doing here?

I watch the black faces in the crowd with bewilderment and fascination, trying to comprehend what attracts them to what is so obviously a platform of white supremacy (I am still nursing an acorn of heartbreak that they used Colin Powell, whom many trusted and believed in, to further their corrupt agenda; more painfully, that he allowed himself to be used). As the black Republicans genuflect before the altar of patriarchy, I find myself feeling outrage, contempt, and a little jealousy. Occasionally, but only in private, I have indulged a fantasy of myself as a black Republican-strident, mercenary, up at 5 a.m, and arriving everywhere on time for once in my life. I feel instantaneous relief as I am finally released from the psychological burden of believing the world should be fair for everyone, that I have to devote my life to making that happen. With the amount of time it takes to say, “I got mine, get yours,” I can, at last, be selfish without guilt, instead of what I am now, occasionally selfish, constantly guilty. Finally reconciled are the irreconcilable polarities of my life-a radical vision of world equality matched by a desire to be absolutely filthy rich. It occurs to me, with more than a little irony, that I’m not the only American to feel this way and that perhaps my great political ideas and judgmental postures can all be summed up in two words: sour grapes. I’m pissed off at the Republican party because I am failing at capitalism.

___ On the A train, I try to make a decision whether to protest or not. Regardless of the skeletons of greed that rattle in my peace-activist closet, one thing is absolutely clear about the convention and the Republicans: I want their asses out of here.

I weigh the options. I have a dog, I don’t have a lawyer. There is less than fifty dollars in my checking account at the moment. I have no savings. I work as a temporary secretary, and I didn’t get any calls this week for work—several companies closed their offices because of security concerns—so I’m broke. I am one of those people who came to New York to become an artist, but I don’t know what to call myself anymore. I refuse to admit that I am a secretary because that would betray my dream, but I haven’t made any real money from my art yet. So, in the city’s more cruel estimation I am, for lack of a better word, a loser. I can’t even afford to protest. I certainly can’t afford to get clubbed over the head by a police officer or inhale asbestos at pier 57 where they are detaining the ones they arrest. I don’t have any health insurance.

I should have taken “that job”—the one my mother always begged me to take, the one I thought would dry up my creativity and push me to the brink of suicide, but came with great benefits and a dental plan. I wouldn’t know how to tell her, if she were alive, that the last temp job I was assigned, the woman I worked for injured her foot badly in an accident and was told by her doctor that she needed surgery immediately. She spent an hour on the phone with the door closed (I could hear everything) screaming at her HMO because they would only pay for her surgery if she had a month of physical therapy first. As she hobbled home at the end of the day, barely able to walk and in tears, I thought, even the safe lives aren’t safe anymore.

___ A young woman gets on the train at Times Square and I decide that she is a Republican. I hate to admit it, but whether I like it or not they have arrived and some of them, the brave ones, are even riding the trains. She has that certain kind of sweater “they” wear, that looks like it’s made from ice cream, and she wears a small locket around her neck. She is white and pretty and looks rich.

Not that there aren’t plenty of pretty, rich, white people in this city, but there is something angry about them—New Yorkers wear an aura of anger. Our madness is like our dirt; no matter how much money we have, we are all just a little filthy, a bit smudged. It comes from living on top of one another, from competing for everything and from having our asses and armpits in each other’s faces all the time. Even the rich people who never ride the train want more air, more space, bigger apartments. It’s part of the fun of the city—the constant battle for distinction.

She’s not from here. Something about her suggests a life with plenty of room. I decide she’s from Michigan. Having grown up there, I know those sweaters and lockets, that comfort. Of tall glasses of fresh, cold milk after tennis practice, summer cottages on the lake, and guaranteed college tuition. Someone has paid a lot of money and chosen to live in a very particular place so she will never have to experience the type of black person she will meet on this train: funky, homeless, mentally ill, addicted. The undomesticated kind, not like the one who cleans her house.

At least she doesn’t have that look of entitlement on her face that some Republicans have as they edge you off the sidewalk, the one that says, “As long as I am walking, there will be a road.” But this is my city, godammit, and I’m mad because she will enjoy a safety this week that just isn’t possible here, one I’ll certainly never know. In an act of glorious chivalry to the GOP, the mayor has ensured she’ll have the illusion of absolute protection; in fact, he’s made it clear that he will arrest anybody who even looks at her cross-eyed. With sleight of hand, he’s turned the city into a magical kingdom where all the homeless people in Port Authority and Penn Station simply disappear. He hasn’t had to change much: Times Square long ago traded one kind of pornography for another, looking more and more like a Disney theme park. As the GOP snuggles under the covers for the mayor to read them a bedtime story, he tucks them in gently, then orders a police state for the rest of us.

The woman sitting across from me hasn’t traveled anywhere, but simply packed the Midwest in her suitcase. She’s in a New York, but not the one she thinks she’s in. It’s a New York devoid of pain, which is not New York at all.

___ Close to two thousand people are arrested for protesting the convention, some held for three days of processing that should have taken three hours. The mayor has betrayed us. In an effort to gain stature within the party, he has demonized protesters, denied them the use of Central Park, and made the experience of exercising the right to free speech a terrifying one. The wonderful “freedom” that is referenced over and over again inside the convention hall to roaring applause, that has placed us in the hearts and minds of cheering crowds of Iraqi and Afghan people on television, somehow doesn’t extend to the American protesters outside Madison Square Garden.

What the mayor would like to try and stop, and cannot, is the great creativity on the streets. All those qualities that make New Yorkers obnoxious fifty-one weeks out of the year are suddenly exhilarating when alchemized with moral outrage and talent. In Harlem, a white man dressed in a business suit walks against the oncoming crowd with fake blood covering his mouth and hands, and dollar bills spilling out of his pockets. He is a truly terrifying spectacle. “No need to protest,” he says, smiling. “Everything is taken care of. We’re keeping you safe. Just trust us.”

When asked about Pier 57 and the oil on the ground that burns protesters when they sit or lie down, the potential asbestos poisoning, and the inability to contact family or friends for sometimes a day or more after arrest, the mayor replies, “Well, it’s not supposed to be Club Med.” For the people who are guilty not of the “crime” of protesting, but window-shopping, finding themselves gathered in the police’s orange nets and also detained for days, he says, “You can’t arrest 1,800 people without having somebody in the middle who shouldn’t have been arrested. That’s what the courts are there for . . . to find out afterwards.”

I am shocked and appalled by the mayor’s indifference, but then again, I’m shocked and appalled by something every day now. I feel impatient with myself for having any expectations of justice at all anymore. When are you going to get it? I ask myself. The constitution is out, passé, so “last century.” Not that we don’t all love it, we just love it as an abstraction; stapled to the wall in 3rd grade classrooms, lit behind glass counters at museums or referenced from politicians’ campaign podiums. The meaning of the arrests is profoundly clear: Shut up and do exactly as we tell you, and if you disagree, we will lock you up until we are ready to release you.

I watch the news of the protesters’ being detained with the condescension and disdain I was taught in school to reserve for Third World countries in turmoil. Here they go again. Another military coup and illegal election, another despotic ruler and police state. Citizens disappeared and held without due process for protesting. Who will ever save them? Usually the U.S., or so I was told in history class, only this time the Third World country that needs saving is Manhattan.

___ I’m too young for this much cynicism. I know I want peace, but am I really a pacifist? I believe in democracy, but I don’t always trust the democrats, either. I want people to be free, yes, but I want the old-fashioned kind of freedom, not this new kind, where in order to free someone, you have to blow his head off first. Somehow liberal is now a dirtier word than warmonger. I’m in a constant state of anxiety while reading the paper, watching the news. “Then don’t watch,” a friend of mine says. “I refuse to watch anymore. It only depresses me.” I feel that what he is really telling me is “don’t look.” But I have to look, I have to watch, if only for the desperate consolation of saying “I told you so” to friends who keep telling me not to worry, that the end of the separation of church and state will never happen, the Constitution cannot be amended by the religious belief of one citizen just because he also happens to be the president of the United States.

When I walk into the apartment, Zell Miller is speaking to the convention. It’s all closing in—somehow, he is the soundtrack for the police tactics that I just witnessed on the street, the gross intolerance and ridicule. On his face I see the perverse delight of someone who enjoys watching something squirm that is trapped and defenseless. Of little boys who like to tear the wings off things.

Four hours of protesting and I feel absolutely powerless against the rabid hatred of this man. He is speaking in a voice that I thought America was ashamed to present on the world stage anymore, a voice suppressed in our collective unconscious along with separate drinking fountains and white-only lunch counters. It’s the Southern segregationist voice from the crypt, and the living room goes cold. I’m not used to hearing that voice except embalmed on the history channel where I am reassured with black and white images that racist boogiemen don’t exist anymore. Now he is proffered by the GOP front and center with rolled back eyes, a savage grin and no apology. Frothing at the mouth and aching to be provoked into climbing over the chain-link fence, Zell Miller is his own beware-of-the-dog sign.

He’s working the convention in that particularly frenzied way that is meant to whip a crowd into hysteria and get them out on the streets, the way that only good Southern preachers know how to do, and Grand Dragons of the Ku Klux Klan. If John Kerry were speaking a mile away from here, he’d be facing a lynch mob. I turn down the sound and undress for bed, but on the screen it’s still there: the toxicity and viciousness, that menacing smile. If I were a small child, I might think those grabby hands could reach right through the screen and get me.

___ I am a girlie-man, i.e. a homosexual. Despite gay people existing on prime time, dressing straight men on reality television, and getting married on the evening news, for the governor of California a homosexual is still a shameful thing to be. I have my moments. As the camera pans the conventioneers the final night, I see who America is: straight, white, male, rich. As they chant, “Four More Years”, I am in awe; one has to be impressed by the sheer will that must be applied to stay in their constant impenetrable trance. They are high on war, shooting up on it, in fact, and orgasming on my TV screen. I feel the familiar envy. How can they all be so sure? None of that democratic ambivalence and self-hate here; Republicans clearly love themselves and each other. I watch with wonder the absolute delight with which this group absorbs its jingoistic, empty rhetoric and its deep self-righteous incuriosity about everything except America. Read a book or not, travel the world or not, but remember what matters most: love your country, love your God, and most important above all, agree with your president, whatever he says or does. Their devotion would be truly inspiring if they weren’t dead wrong.

In the interviews, the delegates have an analysis of the war that could fit inside a fortune cookie, but their enthusiasm for their Commander-in-Chief knows no bounds. They repeat their hackneyed catch-phrases ad infinitum, but with a fresh look of revelation every time. Saddam. They hate us because we are free. He wanted to build weapons. Four More Years. Winning the War on Terror. Freeing the Iraqi people. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.

If I hear that fucking word one more time! Freedom is starting to sound like something you can buy on sale at Wal-mart, like extra-strength toilet-paper, dishtowels, or king-size Milky Way bars. As they excoriate Kerry and shout flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop, I finally get it. I am watching the national convention of the Ugly American. I’d thought he existed only in exaggerated international folklore, but here he is—empowered, inspired, and unashamed. It’s his coming-out party! As he is freed from the national closet where he stands next to his buddy, the Southern Segregationist, the Ugly American no longer just demands better air-conditioning in Lisbon, the right to take flash photographs at the Uffizi, or to drop his Big Mac trash into the river Seine: he has graduated from being a pushy, entitled tourist to being the leader of the free world. It is his phantasmagoric reasoning behind calling french toast and french fries Freedom Toast and Freedom Fries (a decision that a friend of mine met with raucous laughter until she realized I wasn’t kidding, and immediately became glum and depressed). We are screwed for the simple fact that there will never be enough money, enough power, enough war or enough death for him because at his core, the Ugly American is an addict (it takes one to know one), and an addict is leading us. Which means that unless he gets help or someone stops him, none of this will end until something truly devastating and irrevocable happens. It also means that no matter how hopeless I feel, I can’t go to a bar and get drunk over this shit.

___ Studying the Holocaust in high school, I remember the reverence we had for the survivors and murdered, and the girl that elicited empathy because she was our age: Anne Frank. After our reports were returned and we got good grades for telling the teachers what they wanted to hear, we met in the hall for a different conversation. I would have fought Hitler, a friend of mine announces on his way to his next class. He wouldn’t have gotten me, that’s for sure. Another friend asks, annoyed, Why did those Jews just stand there? Why didn’t they fight back? Couldn’t they see what was coming?

Sometimes gay men have intuition like women: I guess that is why we are girlie-men, and why, like women, we can also be dismissed as hysterical. Maybe I am a girlie-man because I still have a tiny corner in my heart that believes that everyone can be fed on this planet, that no child need live below the poverty level with all the money in the world and the billions we spend on war, that nations really can live peacefully and that there will be a world community one day. It’s the part of my heart that was lifted by the international support following 9/11, and was smashed again soon after when we went to war. The part of my soul that knows it is wrong to attack people who are defenseless, as it is wrong that a child is considered precious when its name is John or Susan and not as precious when it’s Abdullah or Onike; wrong to assume that a mother in the Third World who cries over her son, dead from hunger, grieves less, because she is used to watching her children drop like flies, than the woman on the East Side of Manhattan whose daughter suddenly dies of crib-death. Maybe these women will never know one another, maybe one picks coffee or oranges or makes baby-clothes with bleeding hands for the other, but I have to believe there is a place in the sky where the cries for their babies meet.

___ It’s like the man at the march with blood on his hands, Senator. They are telling us to go shopping, that with more than a thousand soldiers dead at the time of this writing, and between ten and thirty thousand Iraqis murdered, we are winning the War on Terror, that they’ll protect us from terrorists and that everything is fine.

Still, I can’t help but wonder. Will there be a classroom of kids studying us forty years from now, telling their teachers what they want to hear and privately asking themselves: Why didn’t they fight back? Couldn’t they see what was coming?

What is coming?

September 10, 2004

New York City

“Hello to all the undercover cops in the room,” beamed Sarita, the plump Southeast Asian woman and leader of the workshop, her hot pink ponytail swinging as she spoke. The remark didn’t seem directed at any one of us thirty or so activists seated on the honey-hued hardwood floor in a circle around her, but rather to an anonymous interloper lurking among us. “The NYPD is sending its officers into protester trainings all over the city to spy on us, to try to anticipate what our tactics will be. No doubt one or two are here tonight.”

Sarita scanned the group. Everyone in the group eyed each other—from the lanky, pale, androgynous twenty-something with dainty sideburns and nametag that read “Logan” to the bearded sexagenarian in the woven Guatemalan sweater whose eyeglasses hung around his neck and thwapped against his chest every time he moved.

Oh God, I thought, they probably think I’m the narc.

“So we’re going to start by going around the circle and introducing ourselves,” Sarita continued as she paced in front of an easel at the head of the makeshift classroom. “Please say your name, what your preferred gender pronoun is (if you have one), what brought you here today, and whether you are a police officer or government official.”

“What our preferred gender pronoun is?” echoed an older woman with a Greenpeace tote bag, a perplexed expression on her face. Thank God she asked; I’d been reluctant to betray my ignorance.

“Yes,” Sarita answered matter-of-factly. “Whether you prefer to be referred to as ‘he’ or ‘she.’” Her response left about half the group unfazed. As for me, I feigned nonchalance, I was beginning to wonder whether I could endure two consecutive nights of Sarita’s hyper gender consciousness. The first intrepid soul to introduce himself was a young white man—probably about twenty—with a nose ring, a decorative plug in one earlobe, and olive canvas army boots. His black denim cutoffs revealed a tattoo on one calf that read “Never trust a Yuppie.” I instinctively found myself wondering if I, in my comparatively tame anti-Bush shirt and Gap jeans, might be considered a Yuppie.

“My name’s Dan. I sure as hell am not a cop or government official. I go by ‘he’ but you can call me anything you want. I’m here because I’ve had to deal with so much shit from cops at protests—being beaten, being locked up—and I want to learn how to better protect myself.”

The gray-haired woman with the Greenpeace tote bag sitting beside him went next. “My name is Roberta and I’m with the Older Women’s League. I go by ‘she,’” Roberta added slowly and deliberately—no doubt the first time she’d ever uttered that particular sentence. “I saw an ad in the Village Voice that said, ‘Be heard without being hurt.’ That’s why I’m here. Oh and I’m certainty not a cop or government official.” “My name is Erika and I’m with Queer Fist, a group of radically queer cheerleaders,” the fiery teenager with naturally blonde dreds declared. “I go by ‘she’… usually. I’m not a government official or a cop.”

When my turn came, I said that I went by Jessica, that “she” was my pronoun of choice, that I was neither a government official nor a cop, but that I was there as both a protester and a writer, transparency being at the forefront of my mind. No one seemed to object.

An hour later, after much debate about the media presence at protests and the meanings of civil disobedience, we entered the physically active segment of the workshop, in which we learned how to protect ourselves from a line of baton-wielding police. The police, we were told, were apt to hold their batons diagonally across their bodies, thrusting them outwards to push back an encroaching crowd. Lined up in rows of six, we learned how to retreat slowly en masse, with those in the front line shielding their heads with their forearms in such a way as to avoid head injury. At a certain point, the front line would fall to the back so that the next row could practice facing the cops.

It occurred to me as I shrank back alongside the other workshop participants, the trainers role-playing the police, that we were essentially a retreating army, reluctantly but not without dignity acknowledging our fate and giving way, ever so slowly, to the stronger side. For the sake of our country, for the sake of what we held dear about it, for what it had once been and for what we hoped it would one day be, we were eager to defend it. It was for our country that we would be putting our bodies—our male and female and androgynous bodies—on the streets, on the line. Our individual motives for protesting were not uniform, what we held dear and what we sought to defend differed from one individual to the next; it was simply our will to resist that bound us one to the other. I was also struck by the thought that many of the soldiers in Iraq were putting their bodies on the line for love of country, for the sake of what they held dear about the nation. There was something about the earnestness with which most in this workshop, and those that I’d met at protests and political gatherings throughout the last year, that matched the earnestness of the few military recruits I’d interviewed and the many I’d seen interviewed as they went off to Iraq. Men and women my age and younger, who, in the aftermath of 9/11, felt compelled to go fight to protect, so they thought, the people and the country that they loved.

Admittedly the risks to which the soldiers’ bodies were being subjected were far graver than those our bodies would face in four days of protest, but for some reason I took comfort in the fact that for the first time I could isolate a point of convergence, however tenuous, between them and us, between soldier and outraged civilian.

“When I lost my corporate driver’s job last year, I traded in a black car for a yellow one but didn’t see any reason to stop providing professional, courteous, positive service to my clients. Think of me as an icon on your computer desktop. A ‘POSITIVITY’ icon. If you’re feeling down, just double-click on me.”

Then he passed a homemade computer-generated greeting card trough the bulletproof divider. It said, “Thank You…” in fancy script on the front above a bucolic scene of swans on a lake. The message continued inside: “… for being a valued client! I have appreciated serving you. Paul J.– Your POSITIVE Cabby.” And despite my usual cynicism, the guy actually brightened my morning.

I thanked him and he gave me a little tip of the hat in the mirror. Then he became quiet for a few blocks, apparently out of script. At the next red light he said, “Once the convention gets here next week, this traffic’s going to be a fucking nightmare.”

As part of the security plan, a Frozen Zone– no unauthorized vehicles or pedestrians– has been created around Madison Square Garden. The Zone itself is actually quite small, but the street closings and security checks create a major headache.

Monday, August 30

RNC Day One. The sun beats down and the air’s not moving. A demonstration travels up 7th to the Garden. On 9th from the Village to Midtown, cops stand posted at every corner, scanning the pedestrians, chatting, fanning themselves with their hats.

The closer you get to MSG, the more crowded, tense, confusing and scary the whole things gets. More cops mill around 31st and 9th; metal barriers line the curb. Pedestrians are stopped from crossing either north of 31st or east of 9th. One after another, they ask cops questions; the cops point around the barrier and north. Inside the Zone itself, concrete barriers, TV satellite trucks, red, white and blue charter buses, orange plastic traffic cones, camera crews, the Garden itself, cops, cops and cops combine to form a picture of loosely controlled panic.

The overstressed and overheated seek refuge in the Cheyenne Diner (featuring “Buffalo Burgers” and frescos of Indians astride steers), just outside the Zone at 33rd and 9th. Manager Spiro Kasimas looks around at his two dozen or so customers–cops, fire fighters, tourists, demonstrators, journalists and locals. “Right now there are four people here I know. I asked around beforehand. Eight out of ten of my regulars said ‘We’re takin’ our vacation this week.’”

Across the street, authoritative Officer Nesmith stands at the pedestrian bottleneck, answering question after question after question. He gives directions north, south, west and all the way around.

With truck deliveries into the Frozen Zone prohibited, men pushing hand carts loaded with ice, soft drinks and big square cartons of catered food line up in the baking heat, eventually get to display their various forms of identification, then get passed through. A low-flying helicopter noisily buzzes the Garden. Again and again and again. A wilted-looking protester carries a sign: “Hermaphrodites are people too.” He passes a woman with a sign of her own: “NYC Women to RNC: Get the Fuck Out.”

Tuesday, August 31

It’s A31, the day designated for demonstrations involving, depending on which radio station you listen to, “non-violent protest and direct action” (NPR) or “Anarchists!” (1010 WINS).

But the weather has broken, the demonstrations are happening somewhere downtown, and life around the Frozen Zone has settled into its temporary routine. Seventh Avenue is now open, the sidewalks less congested.

The McDonald’s is once again accessible. However, only a handful of customers sit inside.

Yesterday, Spiro had nailed the truth about business in and around the Frozen Zone. “I’m doing good, but there on the other side (east)– nothin.’”

Most notably, no Republicans. Mayor Bloomberg chirps about the $265 million benefit the Convention will lavish on the city. Nobody’s seen it around here. The locals most imperiled and inconvenienced are taking a hard financial hit as well.

In the 33rd Street Galleria, past the Impressionist reproductions, New York posters, A-Rod and Mike Piazza bobble-head dolls, manager Nasir Sharif sits all the way in back, all alone. “Last week was really busy,” he says. “We hope we get a check in the mail next week from Mr. Bush. He wants to fix the economy, he can start here.”

The bad times continue at the A & H Plaza deli. Cashier Cindy Bat sums up business in one word: “Terrible! Look at me! I’m doing side work, there’s no customers to serve!” Any problems getting deliveries? “Only two deliveries!! Nobody’s here!” A pair of actual Republicans, small people in conservative suits carrying slick Bush-Cheney folders, quietly purchase some lunch and slink away.

H & M security guard Shirley Grant would rather talk about the Sunday demonstration than the flagging business. “Did you see the coffins? That was great; that’s something people need to see.” Despite the massive police presence, she worries about Thursday. “He’s coming, and you never know, it just takes one crazy person…”

Somewhere back there in the Frozen Zone, beyond the cops and the metal barriers and the satellite trucks and the concrete blocks, past the i.d. checks and metal detectors, Mayor Bloomberg quietly fantasizes about bringing the Olympics to NYC. And President George Bush, the man who promised to unite, not divide, America, will be staking his political future on the claim that he has made America safe.

My wife and I participated daily in protests against the RNC and our organizing efforts were filmed by a documentary film crew from Spain’s CANAL+ network. When we first heard the Republicans were holding their convention in NYC, we were outraged. It was yet another example of their exploiting our city’s tragedy for their own political gain. In essence their exploitation of 9/11 desecrates the memory of those who died on that day. But as the day approached, I realized that this was our chance to show the nation that NYC does not like the Republicans.

I started organizing months in advance. I managed to contact local and national activists through the internet. Canal+ noticed my recruiting efforts and their crew contacted me and filmed some of our organizational meetings. At one time I had more than 50 people interested in coming to NYC and protesting, though, in the end, I never led more than 16 people at a time.

From the pro-choice march across the Brooklyn bridge to the last night, my wife and I protested. At the time she was 8 month’s pregnant and quite large. The heat would get to her and we had to cut some days short so she could rest, but she was determined to show the Republicans that she had no liking for them. I had activists from as far away as Arkansas join some of our protests. And for much of it, Canal+ filmed us. It was my job to pick the activities we would participate in, and to make sure that none of the people I was leading were arrested. To this latter end I spent some time at each location making friends with the police and making sure that we were not antagonizing them. This paid off as the police saw that we were sympathetic to them and their efforts and my group had no troubles.

If I had to pick one memory from those days of protesting to relate, it would have to be the night that the Republicans all were treated to Broadway shows. We protested outside the Lion King. As the delegates emerged, they saw us with our signs and heard us yell at them and their faces turned sour. One group of prune-faced delegates emerged to see my very pregnant wife yelling at them, “Shame on you for turning our tragedy into your photo-op!” One Republican woman yelled back, “Shame on you for getting yourself knocked up!” Well, that just angered my wife.

I turned to see her chasing a group of about 6 delegates down the street, shouting at them as they cowered. She was already half a block away from me, berating the delegates soundly when I noticed a cop taking interest. I saw him coming up from behind her and imagined my wife giving birth in a jail cell! I ran up from the other side, trying to get to her before the cop did but without seeming threatening to the police. I got there one second after the cop got to her.

He simply tapped her on the shoulder and asked with some concern, “Ma’am? Are you okay?”

My wife turned to him and said sweetly, “Yes. Everything is fine.”

By then the delegates had made their escape, tails between their legs.

I have stayed in touch with most of the people who looked to me for leadership during the convention. When the 2004 election gave us 4 more years of Bush’s mismanagement, many of these people turned to me for comfort. Out of my efforts to comfort these fellow activists, I developed a newsletter, now a blog, to help progressives find their niche of activism and to help people find their voices to speak out. So out of a whim to organize protesters came my role in a Spanish Documentary and my new voice as an advocate for Progressive Democrats through my blog:

http://www.moleprogressive.blogspot.com/

And a great memory of my pregnant wife chasing terrified Republican delegates down the street, shaming them with their exploitation of 9/11.

I hope this narrative is helpful to you.

Sincerely,

David Michaelson

But as things turned out, I couldn’t leave. The city may have been filled with some obnoxious conventioneers and even more obnoxious restrictions, but I barely saw or sensed them; instead, my path was filled with political activities, and—to my initial surprise—I could not turn away. I knew that all the events would go ahead smoothly without me, but it turned out that I, on a personal, emotional level, needed to take part in them.

One glorious afternoon found me in the packed auditorium of Cooper Union, listening to the Constitution being read out loud. Who knew that hundreds of people would want to spend perfect-weather summer hours that way? But there we were, absorbing everything that document guarantees us, applauding it over and over, filled with a kind of amazed awe. When the reading was done, the Constitution got a standing ovation.

I cobbled together a schedule for the week that made room for marches and the beach, political readings and seminars and a visit to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. On the last day of the convention, I came from an afternoon at Coney Island to the final-night protest gathering in Union Square. Amid the crowds, a small group of attendees sat silently, legs in lotus position, eyes closed. This appealed to my ocean-calmed mindset, so I joined them, taking a spot between a guy with an “I Heart NY—and Baghdad” button and a woman with a “Suck My Dick Cheney” bumper sticker on her knapsack. As cameras flashed wildly (what was so interesting to photograph about us, I’m still not sure—are our faces now pasted onto naked bodies on the internet?), and as George W. Bush spoke a half-mile and a world away, we sat together in tranquil remove.

I did leave town for Labor Day weekend, and it was a lovely time—bike paths, wildflowers, Emily Dickinson’s house. My determined smile in the photos from the trip says, “See, damn it, I took a vacation!” But I’ll never regret staying here for the convention; or getting up at 6 AM on a Saturday in early October to go door-to-door in a downtrodden pocket of Philadelphia (in the rain), registering voters; or any other involvement I had during the election season. It felt like an honor to be so engaged, and to witness the intelligence, decency, humor, and dedication that I saw all around as Americans came together, refusing to be complacent or dismissed. A popular political-rally chant: “Tell me what democracy looks like!” “This is what democracy looks like!” As long as we keep showing up–reading, listening, voting; speaking out and diving in, no matter how disaffected or discourgaged we may sometimes become–our right to challenge, and change, the powers that be cannot be taken away.

>From: "LL Smooth J"

>To: Subject: RNC Diary: Day One

>Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 04:59:29 +0000

>

Hello Friends.

Pat Flynn threw down the gauntlet with his Boston DNC diary, and no one’s picked it up just yet: Whatever, No Problem! I can do it!

Day One of the RNC was quieter than expected, and besides I had to work. The Republicans have wisely decided to acclimatize us to their presence by showing their cuddly side: Koch, Bloomberg, Giuliani, and McCain. Yawn. Sorry, what I meant to say was: Maybe the Republicans are more moderate and warm blooded than I thought.

There was only one rally today, "Still We Rise" at Union Square. I got there an hour-and-a-half late to find only two protesters. One was a fat guy carrying a sign that said "George Bush is Not Pro Life". He was being yelled at by a woman who kept shouting "Have You Ever Had a Vasectomy? Have You Ever Had a Vasectomy?" over and over and over. They were surrounded by 40 camera men. There were a dozen news vans.

But this restful late August Monday is not where the important story lies, because (and this is directed specifically at you Pat Flynn) New York can already say that it’s kicked Boston’s ass: before the convention even started, we beat you in arrests ten times over. And the credit for that goes to my unsent "RNC Diary: Day T Minus One", aka The United for Peace and Justice rally, 120,000 strong, 200 arrests. And which I also got to late.

Since I missed the kick-off at Union Square I hopped the subway right up to Madison Square Garden, and, after being deflected at several intersections by the well-equipped NYPD, I finally set up camp for myself on 34th Street across from Macy’s, near the display window from which a giant, naked Beyonce gazed unflinchingly. Where the protesters asked Beyonce to choose an alternative to Bush for president in November, she offered them True Star, her signature new fragrance, in return.

Some special interest groups and lobbyists out in support of being against Bush, in loosely alphabetical order:

Another Uninsured Ivy League Grad Against Bush

Crowhaven Circle Pagans for Peace

Femininist Guerillas [sic]

Holland Says No to Bush

Jewish Mets Fans against the Occupation

Librarians for Peace

Mathematicians for Peace

Public Health Researcher Against the G.O.P.

Raging Grannies and their Daughters

Taiwan Loves Iraq

Other significant expressions of opinion:

Ashcroft Is a Pious Toad

Bush: Morituri Te Malediceremus

Drunken, Coked-Out Frat Boy Drives Country Into Ditch!

Fuck B*sh [read that again, it's super awesome]

Keep Your F_____ Hands of my Child [sic, sic]

Mr. President Your Pants Are On Fire

My Country: Love it or Make it Lovable

Out Source Bush (The Worst President in U.S. History) Use the No Carb Diet

No C-haney No A-sscroft No R-umsfeld No B-ush and No Rice Please Leave Our City. We Don’t Like Republicans Here. Go Back to Crawford.

Re-Defeat Bush

Send Jenna

These Colors Don’t Run the World

Who Would Jesus Bomb? [But interestingly, not the Safire-approved "Whom Would Jesus Bomb?"]

After taking in almost two hours of this, most of it with Linehan, I was standing around in a sunstroke daze when the street simultaneously and spontaneously flipped the fuck out. The crowd started running, and generally panicking, none of which really registered until a girl near me who was trying to get to the police sidewalk barricade freaked out to (what I took to be) her mom:

"Why are they wearing those masks?" I looked over to see a cloud of smoke floating toward us from around the corner where Madison Square Garden was, and on the street, marching toward us: the Anarchist Idiots. They were, like she said, all wearing masks (which was pretty frickin scary at the time), and they were being chased by the riot police, full gear and everything. Looking at them and then at the smoke, and then back at them, I put two and two together and realized: This is awesome!

The police started closing the march off and pushing all the stragglers down the street. They were obviously looking out for the public’s safety. But who wants to listen to that! I managed to sneak around to where the press photographers were on 7th Avenue to get a better view: The anarchists had "accidentally" set a papier mache dragon on fire. Somehow this managed to get three blocks of 7th Avenue and 34th Street shut down while the FDNY put the fire out (which they did very efficiently). It was right in front of MSG, though, which created a wonderful tableau: on one side the MSG’s electronic sign, which read "Thank You New York"; on the other the billboard the Daily Show put up for the event: "Welcome to New York City. That Smell is Freedom." Both looked down on the smoldering embers of the anarchist dragon. (OK. I don’t know how many grad students or Linklater fans were there, but this image really kicked ass for anyone interested in intentionality, authorial presence/absence, or appropriation and the subversion of meaning through critical audience reception. You’re in the Matrix now, Aidas.) Across the street the Fox News telecast showed live footage of the fire, but decided it wasn’t real news and went back to their story on the youngest reporter at the republican convention, age 12.

When the march got going again, a group of anti-protesters, one of whom sported both a metallica tattoo and a yankees tattoo, set themselves up on the corner with a sign stating, specifically and unequivocally, that God and Jesus support both Bush and the war in Iraq. Mistake. The Peace protesters got right in their faces and, while countering that Jesus was a pacifist, threw water bottles, food, and other objects at them. So I guess consistency is not one of the protesters’ top concerns; then again they’re just a focus group.

Met up with Katie, grabbed some dinner, and on the way to the hippie non-rally in Central Park passed by a Republican party at the Central Park boathouse that was being accosted by the Billionaires for Bush. Interesting 1) because it was hard to tell the difference between Billionaires for Bush performers in their black-tie drag and attendees of the Republican soiree; and 2) for the amount of security it had. The boathouse was barricaded with police barriers and black SUVs dropped off the delegates into NYPD custody, who ushered them safely inside. It gave the scene a strong "occupying-power-being-protected-from-the- restless-natives" feel that would even make Henry Kissinger proud. The heat made the banana republic/puppet government/green zone aura of the whole thing even stronger.

Reportedly, the boathouse scene got violent later that night, and there were more sporadic protests and arrests in midtown, near theaters and where the delegates are staying. So apparently I’m not getting the good information.

Celebrity sightings: No Jenna or Barbara Bush, who hang out in much cooler neighborhoods than I’m allowed in. I didn’t get invited to their celebrity-filled Young Republicans gala at Roseland: http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/

08/30/gop.party/index.html. And it was filled with B-List celebs. You better be sure my publicist is fired.

I did however get to take some photos with Officer McNulty from The Wire (whose highly anticipated new season debuts on HBO Sunday, September 19. Do Not Miss It, it’s the most awesome police drama since the invention of crime)

All told I got about 200 photographs, mostly of my foot (stupid cheap camera), but I won’t forward most of them, because I know you never clean out your hotmail accounts.

Local Coverage: According to the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser ("Ignorance on the March"), the protesters were all really rich white folks who can afford lots of things that I can’t. So now I feel really dumb. She’s calling them "The Starbucks Revolution", which is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard: http://nypost.com/commentary/

29611.html.

I know I’ve just written a ton for everybody. But I wrote most of it at work, so who cares! Woo-hoo! I shouldn’t have as much to say tomorrow, unless McCain has any zingers.

Cobra Kai is gonna getcha! Your friendly New York Republican, Steve

Tomorrow: The sure to be awesome "Shut Up-a-thon" at Fox News HQ.

P.S. A special note of gratitude goes out to the women from Boobs Against Bush. We appreciate your contribution most of all. Carry that torch. Peace.

>From: "LL Smooth J"

>To:

>Subject: RNC Diary: Day Two

>Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 22:06:36 +0000

>

Day Two.

Besides one request to move the RNC to Vegas in 2008 (I’m sympathetic, but it’s currently out of my control), the only feedback I got for my Day One diary was a censure for sloppy misspellings and grammatical errors. Not what I was looking to hear, but since I’m an editor by profession, I ought to stand humbly corrected. So thanks, Katie, I’ll do a proofread today.

Moving on to the Republican Convention:

Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. Who knew they had it in them?

A whole generation of McCain Democrats accidentally sat on their rose-colored glasses last night. Remember, friends: time heals, there’s more politicians in the sea, you’ll learn to trust again.

We learned a couple of things. We were reminded that on 9/11 something big and world-defining happened, not just to Republicans in New York, but to Republicans everywhere. And for that, the Republicans deserve to be re-elected. Also, we learned that America has an enemy more hated and feared than even the terrorists: .

I found out maybe Maureen should have been writing this, since she actually went to the convention and got to go to the big Young Republican gala I fired my poor publicist over. Also, Stephen Baldwin is starring in the role of Ben Affleck this week.

Today, Tuesday, was civil disobedience day. Disruptions were planned at offices and headquarters of perceived front groups for Bush administration war crimes, such as the Carlyle Group, the Rand Corporation, and the Hummer dealership on 11th Avenue.

Here’s the Michael Moore column that nobody read because it’s in USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2004-08-30-moore-gopamerica_x.htm.

Went to crappy Max Fish with the Cobra Kai to look at an exhibition of downtown hipster election posters, some by some pretty well-known people. By general agreement we found our awareness not significantly raised. Missed the McCain speech because they insisted on playing Lord of the Rings on both of their two TVs. Way to keep us informed, politically concerned bar owner.

Had only a brief window to sneak out of work, so I chose "Fox News Shut Up a Thon" over the "Defend Johnny Cash" rally (http://www.defendjohnnycash.org/). Arrived only 15 minutes late this time, but they had already started arresting people. So the crowd wasn’t shouting "Shut up Shut up" so much as "Let her go Let her go". But overall, people seemed to be having a good time. At 4:20 on the dot, a giant George Bush "Pants on Fire" vehicle rode past on Avenue of the Americas. That got a good response.

Tomorrow’s highlights: Wall Street unemployment line (8 am, ugh), Panty Protest, StopKillerCoke, and March on the Media.

Current number of arrests, as of midday Tuesday: 584. What was Boston’s final number again?

OK friends, Rock the Vote!!

Stephen

Student arrested after getting too close to Cheney: http://1010wins.com/topstories/winstopstories_story_244140236.html

>From: "LL Smooth J"

>To: Subject: RNC Diary: Day Three

>Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 05:57:22 +0000

>

>Day Three. Oh, where to begin. Hmm. Let’s start with that shiny new seaside >resort, "Guantanamo on the Hudson." >

>I use the word ’shiny’ a little loosely here, but I’ll get back to that if >I have time.

>

>It’s been a busy 24 hours. Since yesterday’s Fox News Shut Up a Thon >report, around 1000 people have been arrested. T he majority of these were >not violent protesters: not only protesters who were following police >orders, but bystanders–and NYC has a few of those–have been taken in.

>Legal observers are reporting being harassed and intimidated, and many have >been arrested. Trish just told me they were arresting reporters too, though >they were released as soon as they were brought in. A photographer had his >camera smashed and is being charged with possessing a dangerous weapon >(yes, the camera). How are they arresting so many people? Large orange nets >they sweep the streets with. It’s the new doctrine, pre-emptive arrest: >http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/02/politics/campaign/02protest.html?hp

>The assumption, according to Commissioner Kelly, is that it worked so well >as foreign policy, it’s time to test the market at home.

>

>What do these arrested protesters have to say for themselves? Don’t know. >They’re not being processed until tomorrow.

>

>But in spite of new obstacles, the awesomeness continues. Act Up broke onto >the floor today while Andrew Card was speaking. I can’t wait to see what >these guys do tomorrow. Tonight in Madrid, a group of about 60 people >congregated in front of the U.S. Embassy in Solidarity with the unfair >arrests of "A31." Massif Respeck to the Madrilenos.

>

>After I finished teaching class last night, a little after 10, I got caught >in Union Square as it was descended upon by cops, who "secured" the >entrance to the subway station and formed a human shield around the >entrance. It looked sort of like they were beating on someone in the stairs >but it was hard to get a good look. The square was packed with protesters >who began to heckle them. The crazy guy next to me told everyone that the >cops weren’t actually ever chasing anyone: this was all in fact a show, >they were making it up to shut Union Square down. The standoff lasted about >20 minutes, then the cops marched off in formation. The protesters formed a >large circle and started to act out some pagan victory dance, with lyrics >that used the word "justice" a lot. And to top it all off, I waited all >that time but they still didn’t open the subway station. I ran into Gniewko >who had just come down from Herald Square–he said the cops there were just >picking them off the barricades like berries.

>

>This morning I went to The Unemployment Line: the Pink Slip protest, that >went from Wall Street up to MSG. I swear: the most boring protest I have >ever been to. Which I guess is what you get from people who schedule their >actions for 8:15 in the morning. I thought, since I was downtown and had >time before work, that I’d head over to Linehan’s Free Speech Monument on >Foley Square. As soon as I took out my camera the guards were on me: "You’d >better put away your camera, young man. I’m not kidding." So no photos of >the monument. Again, to sum up, I was trying to take a look at the Free >Speech Monument.

>

>Meanwhile, last time on the Real World:

>

>Jenna and Barbara Bush had their coming out last night. We learned that >hamsters have little chance of surviving around their father. Hamsters, heh >heh. >They said some other stuff too, supposedly in the guise of attracting the >elusive single woman vote, as well as the not-as- >elusive Maxim reader vote. But they did show that young Republicans are hip >to the latest pop culture, such as Sex in the City, U2, and last year’s >Outkast single. >The Times called them goofy. The Post, staunch Bush supporters, took a more >critical tone: http://nypost.com/news/nationalnews/27895.htm

>Courtesy the city of Boston, you can now track the first daughters’ daily >whereabouts: >http://www.boston.com/news/politics/conventions/celeb_rnc/twinspotting/

>

>I had some stuff to say about the first lady too, but I started to write it >and it was too mean. Anyway.

>

>Bonus! Secret symbolism, courtesy of Maureen: look at the wood of the >podiums and side table on the speakers’ stage (I think GW may not have a >podium tomorrow night). They are all clearly built in the shape of crosses. >The Republican Party: bringing church and state closer together.

>

>Oh, man. I’m watching Cheney on CSPAN right now. Flip flop flip flop flip >flop. Ahhh. Maybe tomorrow. It’s been a tough day.

>

>Remember, on Election Day give those Democratic "Kindergarten Cops" a "Raw >Deal"!

>Good night.

>Stephen

>

>Tomorrow’s the last day: street action is amorphous.

>

>Tally: Over 1500 arrests since Friday. Yeah, Shake THAT like a Polaroid >Picture.

>From: "LL Smooth J"

>To: Subject: RNC Diary: Day Four

>Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 02:29:31 +0000

>

>Sorry I didn’t get around to writing my RNC diary right away, but as Cheney >would say, "I had other priorities." Very happy to see we got a dialogue >going. I feel the love. As the lady with the nappy >dreadlocks and the "My Bush would make a better president" T-shirt said >last night, "Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy >looks like."

>

>It’s V-Day here in New York. We have chased the Republicans back across the >river to the hinterlands, we have regained sovereignty, and the city is >secure.

>

>I’ve been catching up on Bush’s speech from last night. Iraq is stable and >the world is safer. That’s good to know. We couldn’t have done that without >moral clarity. You know, he’s too modest to use these exact words, but: >"Mission Accomplished."

>

>Manifest Destiny’s back. That’s pretty cool.

>

>And, of course, it’s clear this is going to be the most entertaining and >vicious election season ever! They’ve released the hounds. This is going to >be better than when Shannen Doherty tried to scratch Paris Hilton’s eyes >out. This is going to be better than when Bijou Phillips decked that >smacked-out Playmate.

>

>I was worried, during that interim period before the swiftboat ads and >after the Democratic election, when Edwards had asked both parties to run >an optimistic campaign and stick to the issues. But I forgot the cardinal >rule of engagement: the pretty boy gets no respect. I think that was the >point of Cheney’s opening remarks about hair on Wednesday. Always pick the >ugly guy in a fight.

>

>And then Kerry attacking back within the hour from Ohio! This is only going >to get better. Of the news reports this is the best "headline": "Bush and >Kerry Trade Blows on Jobs" >http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=576713§ion=news

>

>

>Zell Miller: flip flopper (fourth item):

>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/02/politics/campaign/02points.html

>Alternatively, we’ve all just been brainwashed by the liberal media: >http://nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/28020.htm

>

>If you get a chance, read ‘Why people vote dumb’ by Louis Menand (last >week’s New Yorker, not available online) and Bob Herbert’s article from >Monday, "Of Campaigns and Breakfast Cereals" >(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/30/opinion/30herbert.html –this may be >archived by the time most of you get this email, but I’m going to save a >copy)

>

>I don’t have Louis Menand’s article here to quote from, but basically he >lays out in a systematic and balanced manner how American voters go wigga >retarded as soon as they start thinking politics. The statistic: less than >10% of Americans can think consistently ideologically (ie, ‘I want lots >more social programs and big tax cuts’ doesn’t work if and when you put >them together, but most people can’t). He cited a study showing more people >voted in 2000 based on their dissatisfaction with the weather that year in >their states. Menand has been consistently on fire for the past two years >(his history and gender-political deconstruction of Dr. Seuss’s corpus is >unforgettable). Dig it out if you haven’t read it–it’s the issue where >Cheney’s blood pressure is color coded to Homeland Security.

>

>Pat Flynn: Your man Mitt Romney’s quite a chahmah! "I don’t want >Presidential leadership that comes in 57 varieties!" Classic diss, but I >think he stole it from the Wu Tang Clan. I just read your email–the >Republicans have a babe of the week? Why haven’t you craplinked this?

>

>In the news: Karl rove to personally cook and eat the person responsible >for Jenna and Barb’s speech (that would be "strong willed, opinionated >woman in communications" Karen Hughes): >

>

>–Andre 3000 interviewed the Bush girls, then showed up to show support for >protest prisoners; members of his crew arrested: >http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58117-2004Sep3.html

>

>–Yesterday an anonymous group dyed fountains all over NYC blood red. >Likely Republican delegates in symbolic outpouring of support: "Today, New >York is a Red State." I ran up to Washington Square Park as soon as I heard >but they had drained the whole thing already.

>

>On to why I couldn’t write yesterday.

>Snuck up after work to the A.N.S.W.E.R. rally at the MSG protest corner. >Decent, but the sound system played a bit too much Rage Against the Machine >and the speakers were all about dismantling capitalism and how America is a >police state. They tried to get us to chant something about rights issues >in the Phillipines but it didn’t take.

>

>My favorite sign: I Went to Washington DC to Protest the 2000 Inauguration >and All I Got Was This Lousy President

>

>Walked down from there to the vigil at Union Square. Trish was hanging out. >A group of people had wrapped themselves up in some of the "freedom fence" >and hobbled around chanting "The People, United, Will Always Be Arrested." >There was a Die In at 10:00, when Bush was supposed to start speaking, so >what the heck, I lied down. As soon as we all got settled some crank came >up and started yelling, "What are you doing? You’re not optimists. Get up >and take action. This is what they want you to do."

>"Quiet! We’re supposed to be dead."

>That’s when he said:

>"Vote for George Bush."

>The dead people went nuts. Corpses raised up their middle fingers at him, >shouted for him to get out of there, booed. This got louder and louder, >until one of the dead people dissented: >"Stop! Let him speak! Did you forget about Freedom of Speech?" >So now they’re all shouting "shut up, let him speak" so loud that he still >can’t speak. Eventually some dude comes up and says something to the crank, >who quiets down and walks away. Then dude says to us: >"If you get up, I just talked to the Police Chief, and they’re going to let >us walk to Madison Square Garden. But we have to do it single file on the >sidewalk." >And that news was enough–wait for it–to raise the dead. Linehan had come >back to Union Square, and we walked up to 15th Street, where everyone was >congregating to march. When we got up front, the march was now going to be >two at a time. But some of the people there had just been released from >Guantanamo, and they started saying not to march, that it was a trick, that >this was what they did to the Ground Zero protest on Tuesday and then they >arrested everyone anyway, and they didn’t get released for 48 hours. >So now everyone was confused about whether it was okay to march. Linehan >didn’t want to get arrested, because he was going to Montreal today, and I >didn’t want to get arrested, because I had to drive my brother back to >school in Baltimore on Saturday. We decided that while everyone was >fighting about whether to march, we’d go grab a beer. So we went across the >street to Coffee Shop. Which after four days of watching political >speeches, marches, and arrests, was the most surreal culture shock you >could experience. The bar, in the middle of the Union Square vigil, was >filled with second tier fashionistas watching the Yankees game and being >served by aspiring models. But whatever, we’re a melting pot, so we ordered >beers anyway. >When we got back out the march had started, but by now the cops had agreed >to shut down traffic and gave us the whole street. And everyone was totally >psyched, because we were marching on Madison Square Garden during Bush’s >address, and it was all unplanned.

>There was fuzzy love everywhere, to the point where the marchers were >chanting "Give the cops a raise" at each intersection, where the cops just >stared back at us in full riot gear. People on 15th Street were pouring >onto the sidewalk to show support. the shopgirls at Bebe danced in the >windows for us. But then we got up to MSG, where the cops tried to close >off the side streets to let through traffic. When they cordoned off the >second block of protesters, everybody flipped. Within five minutes, "Give >the cops a raise" degenerated into "Tell me what a police state looks like. >This is what a police state looks like." So the first block, where I was, >staged a sit-in. And then someone took one of the cops’ bullhorns and just >told everyone to go home, and they did.

>A.N.S.W.E.R. and UFPJ estimated the crowd at over 10,000 (there were no >city or news estimates), and when we got to 30th and 8th to rally it >stretched for five blocks.

In my protest zeal I was as sure as Republicans >are in Jesus that a spontaneous march on the convention during Bush’s >speech would have made the front page, but none of the TV stations covered >it, and the Times buried it in the second paragraph of an article on page >P8 ("Protesters Try to Get in Last Word"). Oh well. Maybe they’ll have >better luck when Bush runs for a third term.

>

>I took a little over 300 photos, again mostly of the backs of people’s >heads and the night sky. Not sure if/what I’m going to do with these yet.

>

>And that’s it. RNC is over. Hope I didn’t blow out your hotmail limits. >Remember, half gig account sizes coming this fall. Also remember, as the >protest sign said, "It’s not over till your brother counts the votes."

>

>Final tally: 1800 arrests. Most held for 48 hours, in violation of judge’s >orders. Commissioner Kelly: "We can’t process that many." This after >boasting last week they were prepared to smoothly handle 1000 arrests per >day.

>

That day, I thought of working in the library and showing up at the front steps where demonstrators will gather at 6pm. I got involved in my work, reading about globalization when I realized that it was 6:20pm. I decided to go downstairs and somehow participate in the demonstration. Since I study public space and I am quite interested in the transformation of public space while terrorism and other ideologies run rampant, my interest was manifold. Was it not only to participate in the demonstration but also to observe the way the space was going to be monitored, how state of the art surveillance and crowd control would shape the situation. I was interested in the choreography of conflict between the police and the demonstrators. That dance of control and yes, maybe I would get to photograph some dramatic moments.

As I went downstairs with lots of anticipation, I expected a large crowd congregated on the steps. People chanting slogans against the Bush agenda and what an additional 4 years of Republican government might mean: a very gray and dark cloud over the United States, even darker than the one generated by the collapse of the Twin Towers. When I went outside, the steps were empty. They were cleared from all people. Instead, only different kinds of state forces were lined up on the steps. Different lines of order, subsequently guarded each line of steps of the library, the “public” library. The hygienic sense of order lined up the space with all kinds of force, cleaning the streets from undesirable demonstrators.

The first row from the entrance door to the library was made up of policemen. There was the emptiness of the esplanade between the first set of steps and the second where another line of riot police provided the backdrop to the display of a yet third and fourth line of mountain bike police, and beautifully arranged motorbike police set at the ends of the steps, towards each extreme, respectively. On the street between the sidewalks on 5th Ave the mounted police and vans were conveniently located, ready. T he steps set the stage, the spectacle was choreographed like a Broadway play, and the actors stood proud and accomplished. There were no demonstrators. They were cleaned from the sidewalks, pushed to the corner where police was busy pushing them even further away. Running towards the steps riot police passed the red mobile fence to other riot police already in place, lined up at the top of the first set of steps.

They had the situation under control and to a certain extent I wondered: were the demonstrators to help polish and refine the police skills on how to control crowds and establish order? Their sense of satisfaction was obvious, their preemptive strategy worked since they knew, as it was posted in the website of anti-republican demonstration organizers, the date, time and location of the demonstrators’ events.

Everything worked as planned. I, in the meantime, was accompanied by one of the workers of the library, right outside the main entrance, observing how power is really displayed. We were perplexed and surprised that they allowed us to stay there, looking and taking pictures, for as long as we did. We were just a few observers. We were not a threat since everybody was taking pictures: bystanders, tourists, demonstrators, and the police itself. Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle was in full display for and by everyone. The dance of power was not as captivating as what someone could imagine. Actually, it was very boring because, nothing, absolutely nothing worth participating was happening, the event was sealed off, packaged and out of reach. There was only a lousy and not so convincing facade of fear: hermetic. Repression though, the anticipation and suspicion of what might happen was stronger but all the same, vacuous.