THE PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS for today’s net-column have, as you might expect, been pre-empted by the major mega-weirdness in Seattle on Tuesday.
So many things, so many odd and amazing and disgusting and just plain strange things, have gone on this day (I’m writing at 9 p.m. Tuesday night) that I know at the start I can’t do it justice.
But I’ll start by noting this was a media event first and foremost; on all sides of the WTO debate.
And, as it happens, I’m writing this while the CBC is running a hyper-slick documentary about Marshall McLuhan, who knew what “media events” really meant even back in the days of press agents staging spectacles to get their clients into the newsreel.
In this day of email and teleconferencing, the foreign ministers of all the 135 or so World Trade Organization member countries, and their minions and lackeys, didn’t really need to meet at one time in one place (let alone in a place so full of and/or accessible to tree-spikers, third-generation punk anarchists, and white gangsta-wannabes).
(But then again, past anti-free-trade demonstrations (and, in some cases, police over-reactions) have been in such supposedly turmoil-free towns as Vancouver, Montreal, and Geneva.)
Anyhoo, the WTO chose to come to Seattle, just weeks before the big 0-0 year thang, as a way to gain attention for its agenda, in what the group was apparently led to believe was North America’s #1 or #2 friendliest town toward its message–that Sacred Business is the end-all and be-all of all human endeavor in the post-Cold-War, pre-Millennial age.
After all, this is the town that has pushed onto the world “gourmet” coffee, mediocre software, and the machines that made the whole international jet set possible.
But appearances can deceive. Seattle may be Microsoft Ground Zero, but that means it’s also HQ for disgruntled MS refugees (and bystanders such as myself) who’ve had just a little too much of the deification of Gates as God, Ayn Rand as the Goddess, and money, power, and acquisition as the only worthy ends of human existence.
It’s also a town with a heavy organized-labor heritage, a town of old and neo hippies and punks, and the town that taught New York City how to impose and enforce an upscale monoculture on an increasingly reluctant populace.
Add to that mix, the means of communication and transportation that can bring protesters from all over into one spot almost as efficiently as information and products can be transported out, and you get what KCPQ called “Seattle Under Seige.”
Let me briefly attempt to explain what happened.
There was the WTO convention itself, gathering all these dignitaries to engage in closed-door confabbing about tariffs and quarrantines and environmental concerns that limit commerce and other potentially arcane stuff.
Then there were the big, officially-permitted protests. They involved some 40,000 or more union members, church members, and other members of “respectable” quarters of society, marching to protest an organization which symbolizes the rule of business over contemporary life and the rule of a few huge mega-corporations (not all of them U.S.-based) over business and, via stooge outfits like the WTO, over governments.
Then there were the unauthorized demonstrators. These came in all assorted flavors.
People who wanted media attention for specific trade-related causes (WTO crackdowns on individual countries’ health and species-protection laws).
People with causes related to international affairs in general (denouncers of China; supporters of Cuba).
People whose causes had nothing at all to do with WTO (people who hate meat or fur, or who like Mumia Abu-Jamal or hemp).
Street-theater artists.
Civil-disobedience practitioners who trained weeks in advance for nonviolent actions to try to shut the WTO conference down.
And, yes, a few dozen thugs who called themselves anarchists.
I saw some of these sanctimoniously violent boys smash store and car windows, spray-paint walls, and overturn Dumpsters. I didn’t know any of them personally, but I’ve known (and lived with) plenty of their ilk. White males utterly and incurably convinced of their own complete moral superiority to all other white males. (While they smashed stuff up, women and minorities pleaded at them to stop their unproductive jerk-off actions.)
These random incidents, and the nonviolent street-blocking actions of the separate civil-disobedience groups, joined to provide authorities with the excuse to bring out the threatened-in-advance forces of over-reaction. Police scattered parts of downtown with tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets during the hours just before and just after the AFL-CIO-run authorized protest march. Once the union people left, the whole downtown core was declared a “State of Emergency.” An overnight curfew was proclaimed, and was enforced by some heavy-handed cop tactics.
But it didn’t end there. Well into the night, demonstrators continued on Capitol Hill, outside the curfew zone. Only now, the remaining hundreds of protesters were protesting not WTO but the police over-reaction earlier in the day, and getting more police over-reaction for their trouble.
So much, for now, for Tom Robbins’s old proclamation of Seattle as “The City of the Nice.”
TOMORROW: More on this.
ELSEWHERE:
