The Nation Magazine Reports From NYC...
Instead of a Riot, A Riot of Pink
After a year of planning, months of legal wrangling over the city's refusal to allow a rally in Central Park, and mounting warnings of violence from every quarter of the media from the Murdoch-owned New York Post to The Nation and the Village Voice , the mass march protesting the Bush Administration went off brilliantly. It was festive, colorful, spirited, creative, humorous and huge--tens of thousands, a quarter million, or 500,000, according to police and activist sources cited in the New York Times.
I met people who had traveled for days to shout, "Boooo!" while sweeping past Madison Square Garden: a Viet Vet Against the War from New Hampshire, a contingent of steelworkers from Alabama, A pair of professors from Eastern Illinois University, a fantastic pink-clad, glitter-spangled and flamingo-themed drum band called Turn Up the Heat from Florida. (Pink, by the way, is definitely becoming the new black of protest culture: besides the antiwar women of Code Pink, who dressed up in lingerie to promote their Pink Slip Bush campaign, I saw lots of pink T-shirts in the crowd. And why not? Pink carries so many meanings we like: female, gay, antimacho, peaceful, playful and, well, pinko.)
Others had come a political rather than physical distance: Staten Islanders for Peace and Justice had ventured out of the city's one Republican borough with a beautiful banner showing doves, or possibly seagulls, surrounding the Verrazano Bridge; looking like he'd wandered out of a play by A.R. Gurney, a lone gray-haired WASP in a rumpled button-down shirt and chinos carried the day's most poignant sign: Republican for Choice. There were papier-mache monsters, a giant globe, whistles and kazoos, Raging Grannies and Men without Pants (in flag-patterned boxers--hmmm, is underwear the new protest outerwear?), and endless vaginal puns on Bush. Three artists from Hell's Kitchen fashioned red-and-white-and-blue balloon hats--I wore one happily all day. Sticker that best sums it all up: "'Yee-ha' is not a foreign policy." Sign that best reminded us all why we were there: "GOP: Our City Is Not Your Commercial."
Two points: The Republicans may be on the verge of locking down all three branches of the federal government for the rest of time, but protest culture has been reborn. Our demos get better and better, our organizations smarter (thank you, United for Peace and Justice !), our crowds bigger, more diverse, more attractive to newcomers. A few years ago, the savvy word was that street protests were hopelessly old- fashioned and square, the very embodiment of the cultural stodginess of the left: Demonstrations were boring to the media and irrelevant to the young, busy with their computers and skateboards. Wrong. Yesterday's demo got lots of press and it was full of young people--to my eye at least half the crowd looked under 30. (Interestingly, while it's unfortunately true that the crowd was largely white, the youngest group, the high school and college-age kids, were much more diverse.)
Second, constant warnings about possible violence, mass arrests, anarchist rock-throwers and such may have had a dampening effect on turnout. I spoke to several people on the march who said friends had stayed away out of fear of getting caught in an out-of-control situation. Granted, any time you get hundreds of thousands of people together there is a risk of trouble, and definitely the Republicans would love some l968-style footage of cops bashing Black Blockers, and that may still happen, but can't we have a little bit of faith in our own mass organizations? In ourselves? Think Pink.
Katha Pollitt
After a year of planning, months of legal wrangling over the city's refusal to allow a rally in Central Park, and mounting warnings of violence from every quarter of the media from the Murdoch-owned New York Post to The Nation and the Village Voice , the mass march protesting the Bush Administration went off brilliantly. It was festive, colorful, spirited, creative, humorous and huge--tens of thousands, a quarter million, or 500,000, according to police and activist sources cited in the New York Times.
I met people who had traveled for days to shout, "Boooo!" while sweeping past Madison Square Garden: a Viet Vet Against the War from New Hampshire, a contingent of steelworkers from Alabama, A pair of professors from Eastern Illinois University, a fantastic pink-clad, glitter-spangled and flamingo-themed drum band called Turn Up the Heat from Florida. (Pink, by the way, is definitely becoming the new black of protest culture: besides the antiwar women of Code Pink, who dressed up in lingerie to promote their Pink Slip Bush campaign, I saw lots of pink T-shirts in the crowd. And why not? Pink carries so many meanings we like: female, gay, antimacho, peaceful, playful and, well, pinko.)
Others had come a political rather than physical distance: Staten Islanders for Peace and Justice had ventured out of the city's one Republican borough with a beautiful banner showing doves, or possibly seagulls, surrounding the Verrazano Bridge; looking like he'd wandered out of a play by A.R. Gurney, a lone gray-haired WASP in a rumpled button-down shirt and chinos carried the day's most poignant sign: Republican for Choice. There were papier-mache monsters, a giant globe, whistles and kazoos, Raging Grannies and Men without Pants (in flag-patterned boxers--hmmm, is underwear the new protest outerwear?), and endless vaginal puns on Bush. Three artists from Hell's Kitchen fashioned red-and-white-and-blue balloon hats--I wore one happily all day. Sticker that best sums it all up: "'Yee-ha' is not a foreign policy." Sign that best reminded us all why we were there: "GOP: Our City Is Not Your Commercial."
Two points: The Republicans may be on the verge of locking down all three branches of the federal government for the rest of time, but protest culture has been reborn. Our demos get better and better, our organizations smarter (thank you, United for Peace and Justice !), our crowds bigger, more diverse, more attractive to newcomers. A few years ago, the savvy word was that street protests were hopelessly old- fashioned and square, the very embodiment of the cultural stodginess of the left: Demonstrations were boring to the media and irrelevant to the young, busy with their computers and skateboards. Wrong. Yesterday's demo got lots of press and it was full of young people--to my eye at least half the crowd looked under 30. (Interestingly, while it's unfortunately true that the crowd was largely white, the youngest group, the high school and college-age kids, were much more diverse.)
Second, constant warnings about possible violence, mass arrests, anarchist rock-throwers and such may have had a dampening effect on turnout. I spoke to several people on the march who said friends had stayed away out of fear of getting caught in an out-of-control situation. Granted, any time you get hundreds of thousands of people together there is a risk of trouble, and definitely the Republicans would love some l968-style footage of cops bashing Black Blockers, and that may still happen, but can't we have a little bit of faith in our own mass organizations? In ourselves? Think Pink.
Katha Pollitt
posted by BLONDIE at 11:57 AM
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