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