2/1/2002
A little before 6PM tonight I walked into Washington Square park. It didn't look more crowded than usual, if you didn't count the police. But they were there in eye-opening numbers; police vans parked all around the park, mounted police in pairs at the corners, and umpteen cops on foot along the south side of the park wearing riot helmets, just milling around.
This was all preparation for a rally of sorts. Specifically, it was a public ceremony, a pagan ceremony led by the famous Starhawk, as a part of a days-long series of rallies and protests occasioned by the presence in New York of the World Economic Forum, which is one of the places where things like the FTAA get hatched. One of these days I'll get to writing up some of the issues that underlie the whole picture. In the meantime, it was a mongrel atmosphere tonight; we were at a rally, a ceremony, but it was preparatory to protests and marches, and attended by the same people. And the police were prepared to receive it as they do protests.
I milled for a while, and actually missed the beginning of the ceremony, as there was no amplified sound and I'd been standing a bit further away than I guessed. But I saw Miriam when she showed up, and we walked around the edge of the circle of people, looking for Rebecca, trying to follow what was happening in the circle. Starhawk was talking, and phrase by phrase her shouting assistant shouted out what she'd said, and I couldn't really follow that either. So in the end I saw precious little of her and heard less. (Getting a look at Starhawk was my original reason for being interested in going tonight.)
I definitely had a show, though. It was a colorful crowd tonight; similar to the gathering you might see at a big folk music festival, maybe. Shaggy hippies, wiry goat-bearded men, women in dreds, black-clad goth types with spiked jackets, pale serious people with red armbands, an old man hawking the "million marijuana march," blue-haired NYU students, and a lot of more or less unremarkable New Yorkers, mostly youngish ones. There were an assortment of agendas, not always entirely harmonious ones.
But it was friendly. It gets tough to express that believeably, and I don't mean to suggest that a world full of hippies would automatically be smiley and friendly all day every day, but generally when you gather them together it's awfully simpatico. A funny barometer of the atmosphere: I'm a tall man, and none too pretty, especially wrapped up for a chilly night. But maybe eight pretty young women who caught me looking their way tonight just smiled, quite pleasantly; that's jarringly unusual. It's not unusual for me to scan a crowd for pretty women, but if they meet my eye they routinely look away, and so do I; anything else would make them feel unsafe, in most of daily life. Here, though, I was presumed trustworthy just for being where I was. Not a recommended life strategy, maybe, but a subtle clue to the mentality of the people in attendance.
So the inaudible ceremony recessed for an ill-planned tour of shrines, spots designated for the expression of grief, rage, and a couple other big issues I currently forget. Meanwhile signs were waved, dogs sniffed around, masks and puppets were flaunted, flyers were handed out every which way, and drums were drummed. Starhawk was supposed to regain our attention for the closing of the ceremony by beating a drum, which I suspect was the little doumbek she had at her side; that, I see in retrospect, was a foolish plan. She was trumped early by some bigger drums that toured the park, gathering a crowd with flutes and tambourines that finally settled somewhat behind the original circle--and right where we were. Of all the dancing people, one young curly-haired guy was far the most energetic, bounding off the flagstones the moment he touched them, back and forth with no great worries about style, still steadying his briefcase/satchel at his side. He became the focus of attention when the drummers sat down, until a ferocious red-haired girl (with a ferocious hat), as though she had been personally challenged, came flying into the empty space in front of him--sailing in over one of the drummers, I think--and commenced to throw down in much the same artless fashion as he was. (I made a note of that--dance in general intimidates me horribly, but this I understood, it's much the same sort of thing I used to do in front of punky bands in high school and college.) The people whooped and clapped for the two of them. Another flute arrived, and from somewhere a harmonica, and so on. Just a bunch of people having a lot of energetic fun. Somewhere under it was some politics, and everybody knew that, but there and then you could look a long time without finding any sign of anger.
I don't mean to sound like I'm just singing the praises of lefty activists indiscriminately; in many ways I felt much of the night that I was lost among the Silly People. One wonders sometimes whether they might actually be able to maintain their enthusiasm for each other's speeches just as well even without jingling tambourines--and if so, whether they realize that. But really, I find over time that I care less and less how silly they are. Their silliness is inoffensive and sometimes even charming. Their goodwill is real. And their understanding of the way the modern world works is generally vastly more clear than most Americans'.
We milled, we bumped into one friend and then another, we watched. Starhawk made the best move she could; she found her way to the center of the drum circle and commandeered it with some rabble-rousing chant until she had their attention enough to fire up an old favorite protest song and wrap up with her trademark, the Spiral Dance. This is fun and impressive to watch--a line of people joining hands and walking a spiral which then wraps back in toward the center, so alternate rows of people seem to be circling in opposite directions. Finally this dissolved, and for a while folks were humming om with their hands stretched upward; if there was any more formal finish than that, I didn't catch it.
I am more and more interested in the phenomenon of the political protest, though I haven't shaken my old doubts about its usefulness. I've heard a lot of stories about them now, and I'll be writing some about the idea of them when I can. But this isn't that essay yet. I don't begin to know enough about protests, for one thing. Tonight was my first look at one, leaving aside anti-abortion demonstrations which had an entirely different vibe. Of course, it wasn't a protest, mind you, this event tonight. But it was nevertheless my first look at the atmosphere of a protest.
I've told you about the second half of my evening in the park. Well, it was more than half. But the first part of my experience was wholly other. Waiting for the ceremony and watching for the girls, I stood below the spot where Starhawk's folks were setting up, more toward the center of the park, where I imagined a crowd might gather to hear an address with amplified sound and stuff. And maybe that's what the police thought, too; there was a crowd of thirty or so of them in the middle of that plaza. No riot helmets on these guys, they were just cops in blue, milling around, watching. I stood next to them, more because it commanded a good view of most of the possible approaches than for any other reason.
The atmosphere there was frightening. It was tense, like a schoolyard where a fight is brewing. To an extent the people on both sides of the divide behaved the same way; laughing appreciatively at virtually any remarks made by any of their own, shaking their heads in disbelief at the antics of anyone from the other side. But that symmetry only held true where the two crowds met. The hippies only had any contact with the police in smallish groups, whereas the police all knew each other, or anyway felt as automatically aligned as though they did. And the police were entirely overwhelmed by the tension, the adrenaline, the feeling that something exciting and dangerous was on the verge of happening. It was hard to stand near them without catching it.
There was a woman standing not far from me, a very short woman in her late forties, who commented loudly to her friends and anyone else around about her memories of other protests "ten years ago," and her refusal to be caught on camera (the place was full of cameras), and the excessive presence and odd behaviors of the police.
After a bit of this, a small, wiry cop named Sullivan (Irish-looking with dramatically pointy ears, maybe forty years old) walked over to the woman and talked to her. I never heard a word he said, but her side of the dialogue was pitched for the crowd, so I can gather some of it. Yes, she said, I do have a loud mouth, and it's right that I should, and it's my right to speak, and so on.
Officer Sullivan pretty much held to showing no expression, apart from the pauses to collect himself when he was frustrated. He showed no particular sign of losing his self-control beyond that. Except--why was he there? What possible purpose could there be in initiating this conversation with a civilian--especially with such a directionlessly hostile comment as "you have a loud mouth," seemingly the first thing he said?
The woman--who really was aggravating, to be sure--asked him something I didn't catch, about his badge. I looked and saw that all the cops there had their badges in pockets so cut as to cover the number on the badge with a strip of fabric across the front of it. She asked Sullivan, as he walked back to join the others, what that was for, and then asked another, who stood with a mirthless grin frozen on his face, too full of adrenaline to find words and clearly determined not to address the question. Very small woman. Big strong young man. The big man is all charged up with adrenaline and practically above the law. It was disturbing to watch. "That's not legal," she told her friends loudly. I wonder. This site agrees with her, and it makes sense to me, but those pockets were pretty clearly made for the purpose. That's pretty damned brazen if it's not legal. I'll keep looking for facts on that.
Anyway, that was about the end of that conversation, and before long she and her friends wandered away. Standing as close as I was, I could hear the cops chatting amongst themselves. "I thought you were going to backhand her," the big guy said to Sullivan, laughing. (I hadn't noticed any such inclination on Sullivan's part myself.) "I thought I was going to have to pull you back." Great. The cops laugh. Not content, the tough guy goes on: "But then, I thought, nah, it'd be fun to have a little action!"
Now, I know what macho humor is like. I've even perpetrated it, in the distant past. And I don't suppose that guy actually thought striking a small woman who'd dared to speak some uppity English in a public park was actually a good idea. But these are police. They have a responsibility to keep the peace--to protect citizens, including that woman. And if they're given the power to initiate the use of force against civilians, they must be held to a high standard of self-control, to keep those civilians safe.
Unfortunately, all the cops I've known--and I lived directly beneath three of them in my last apartment--have been deep in a culture of machismo, and it seems all to clear that the urge to throw their weight around is precisely what draws a lot of people to the force in the first place. Somebody should be watching them closely and correcting that kind of thinking, but it looks like nobody is.
So there were riot cops, why I cannot say, with helmets and clubs and bundles of plastic-strap handcuffs, standing by. A helicopter kept circling intermittently over the park, low and loud. And there were those thirty men, trying to hide or sublimate the fact that they were all surprisingly on edge. And in that mood they were on the verge of picking fights with anyone who stood nearby. Indeed, taken out of that context, the stances they were taking would have screamed "looking for trouble." And maybe they were, consciously or not.
And then after all that--after getting to think that was what the evening was going to be about--I spotted Mir and headed up to where the scheduled event was happening, and all the goofy business I described above was going on. Hippies standing next to the cops would tend to be similarly edgy, but as soon as they got out of that presence, they forgot all about it and got just remarkably affable. Because, in the end, they weren't there to talk to cops, or to think about them. They were busy.
It was toward the end of our time there when I remembered the cops, still standing down below, and realized they were still in the same mood of armed vigilance they'd been in before. Somebody high up in their chain of command goofed, somebody misunderstood tonight entirely, and so did all the footsoldiers. They were standing there believing a tension existed between them and the hippies, when in fact the tension only existed in them. I wanted to tell them, wanted to gather them up and explain: guys, this isn't about you. Tonight has nothing to do with you at all. There's no fight, there's no crime, we're not even interested in what you're doing here. You could be home. You could have left us with the typical Friday night complement of officers in the park and nothing would be different but you.
So many more things I need to write up these days. I'm trying to find the time. More soon.