Voices
from the march to nowhere By Tom
Engelhardt
NEW YORK - Let the numbers battle
begin. The first unofficial police estimate of Sunday's
mega-march in New York: 120,000. The organizers'
estimate: 400,000. The earliest news pieces used the
usual vague "tens of thousands" or "more than 100,000",
but the Washington Post wrote of "more than 200,000",
and the usually march-unresponsive New York Times picked
the phrase, "hundreds of thousands". So the choice is
yours.
On a boiling-hot late-August day, on the
eve of the Republican Convention,
100,000/200,000/400,000/500,000 upset, angry,
anybody-but-Bush marchers (with the odd Green Party or
Naderite supporter thrown in), walked up Manhattan's
Seventh Avenue, doing for small businesses - delis,
corner groceries, Tasti-Freezes - what several thousand
Republican delegates and the massed imperial media will
do only for a few fancy hotels, posh restaurants, and
theaters. There was a rush on bottled water, on in fact
almost anything drinkable, and at one point when the
well-branded Fuji surveillance blimp, stamped with an
NYPD (New York Police Department) logo, passed overhead,
blocking the fierce sun and throwing a shadow on the
crowd below, a cheer went up from the massed marchers on
their way to nowhere in particular (having been denied a
permit to rally in Central Park).
The anti-war,
anti-Bush movement, which had disappeared from New
York's streets after a final massive but depressed
demonstration with the war already under way in April
2003, was back - and the mood was different indeed. Gone
was the carnival atmosphere of early anti-war marches.
The hand-made signs were still there, and some of them
were still funny or clever ("Kerry dodged bullets, Bush
dodged the war, Rove calls the shots" or "Back by
popular demand" next to a peace sign), but most of them
caught the essence of the moment: They were angry
("Worst President Ever", "Stop Mad Cowboy Disease"),
even outraged ("War Monger, War Criminal", "No one died
when Clinton lied. F--- Bush", "How many people must die
for 'your mission' to be accomplished?" - with the quote
marks as drops of blood). And the single most
omnipresent word in all its various forms on people's
lips, and on their signs, was "lie" ("lying", "liar") -
"Bush lies, who dies?" "The war on terror is a lie",
"Liars, thieves, murderers", "George Bush, 971 Dead ...
and still lying" - while Bush (Rumsfeld, Cheney,
Ashcroft) photos, masks, and puppets all had noses that
would have made Pinocchio blush.
Given the
months of intimidation - the Bush administration Code
Orange alert, the endless discussions of possible
terrorist acts, the hair-raising statements of Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki, the highly
publicized showing off of new police weaponry and
tactics of a sort fit for a police state, the regular
labeling of the New York Police Department as larger
than all but 19 militaries in the world, the rumors that
the world's most dangerous anarchists were headed our
way, and so on - given the attempts, that is, to scare
protesters out of town, this was a march you had to
think about. You had to make a decision to attend. You
had to have a reason (or multiple reasons) for coming.
When asked, marchers tended to stress the "seriousness"
of the moment and to suggest a sense of being at the
edge of a volcano.
It was hardly an upbeat
crowd, but it was certainly a determined one. When,
right in front of Madison Square Garden where the
convention was scheduled to begin the next day, a giant,
papier-mache green dragon was doused with gasoline and
set on fire, perhaps by the small group that had been
inside it - a dangerous and malicious act - and police
on motorcycles, horses, and scooters as well as on foot
with billy clubs at the ready and plastic handcuffs in
quantity attached to their pants' legs, promptly closed
in, shut the march down, made a few arrests, and looked
ready to end things right there, a man near me
exclaimed, "This election is the end. It's the last one.
I don't think we can survive this election!" But the
marchers who had not already passed the Garden waited
with determination until, to shouts from the sidewalks
of "Whose streets! Our streets!" the police moved aside.
Then they simply marched on.
With hovering
helicopters, serried ranks of police, and visible police
dogs (which, I have to admit, brought to mind Abu
Ghraib), not to speak of that Fuji blimp shadowing the
march from beginning to end, you could sense how blurred
the distinction between dissent and terror was becoming.
Dissent is now something that, by definition, should
take place in penned-in locations between lines of
militarized police. While many protesters were clearly
driven to the march by the war in Iraq (and other Bush
administration horrors), fears of loss of liberties were
also a powerful motivator. Marchers - at least those I
talked with - almost uniformly felt that their presence
was a statement in favor of the very existence of civil
liberties. I was struck as well by how many people made
the decision to come in the face of a sense of
intimidation and how many were willing to travel
sometimes surprising distances to attend. In the course
of perhaps six hours on my feet (from the first
gathering moments downtown until I peeled off at 34th
street and Broadway and headed for Central Park), I did
my best to talk to as many people as possibly in a crowd
that, though predominantly white and young, was nothing
if not varied.
Since articles on demonstrations,
whether in the mainstream or the alternative press, tend
to be short on the voices of the actual demonstrators -
and since almost to a person those I talked to were
thoughtful and articulate about their decisions to
demonstrate - I thought I might offer their voices as
best I could catch them, perhaps a tad telescoped by my
limited ability to scribble stenographically.
Voices from the march The Republican.
When I saw his sign, "Republicans for
Kerry/Edwards", bobbing just ahead, I immediately
tracked down Henry Engelbrecht, a modest-looking older
man in an all-blue outfit topped by a Masonic cap
("Masons Lodge #163, Bernardville, NJ"), marching with a
group called Somerset County Voices for Peace. He was,
he told me, a merchant-marine vet from World War II.
"I'm an elected Republican districtman from my district
in Somerset County, New Jersey. In the last election, I
worked very hard for Bush. On phone banks. I contributed
financially. I persuaded people to vote. But I slowly
turned against the Bush administration and particularly
George Bush because of the terrible lies. The WMD
[weapons of mass destruction] lies. They all lied,
[Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, [National Security
Adviser] Condoleezza Rice, and the rest of the cabinet,
to fortify their decision to attack Iraq. We lost all
those wonderful young men for those rotten lies."
As we were talking, we passed one of a number of
home-made signs exhibiting variations on "George Bush,
war criminal". He grabbed my arm and with excitement
said, "Exactly. Were Bush and his cabinet tried under
the same rules as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, they
would be condemned to hang. They plotted aggressive
warfare, for one thing, and that was a charge at
Nuremberg.
"Why did we attack Iraq? Why did we
tell all those lies about Iraq? For all that oil in
Iraq. Vice President [Richard] Cheney has stock in
Halliburton which has gained at least two times its
value due to the billions of dollars awarded to the
company with no competitive bidding. He handed it to
them on a silver platter!"
He was, he told me,
just three months short of 80 years old, and when I
complimented him for his fitness, he responded, "It just
depends on how much scotch you consume."
High-school student. She was wearing an
orange tank top and carrying a sign that caught
something of the mood of the moment for at least part of
this crowd. It read on one side, "Peacekeeping", and on
the other "Kerry-Edwards, they suck less." She was a
17-year-old from Teaneck, New Jersey, part of a group of
high-school-age friends, one of whom made the sign she
was carrying. When I asked if she had similar feelings,
she said, "Exactly the same. He's my friend," as if I
were a complete idiot. "I am protesting Bush," she told
me, "and I'm for peace." She belonged to Moveon.org and
the Teaneck Peace Coalition.
Bank audit
manager. Dark-haired and wearing sunglasses, in
shorts and a checked shirt, Orlando Torres, 44 years
old, was using a small hand-held video camera to take
pictures of several flag-covered caskets piled up on a
side street, part of a thousand-casket march being
organized to honor the US dead in Iraq
(www.onethousandcoffins.org). He had, he told me, just
flown in all alone from Puerto Rico to attend the
demonstration.
"I hate Bush, that's why. There
are so many reasons. First of all I started disliking
him when the Supreme Court stole the election for him.
If Bush was not president, maybe [the attacks of
September 11, 2001] might not have happened. He's just
created such hate around the world.
"I was just
watching television and debating whether to come or not
when I saw Bush one more time and I thought, for my
peace of mind, I better come. I don't know whether the
demonstration will make any difference though. It
depends so much on how the media [cover] it. I live in
Puerto Rico, so I don't vote. But I'm pissed off anyway.
I work in a bank as an audit manager. I understand the
corruption of Cheney and Halliburton. Most people
haven't had economics. They don't know about audits. I
do. If it wasn't for the war I wouldn't be here because
I don't think I would be that mad. I see the coffins
down there in Puerto Rico too. The Republicans are so
Christian, so high and mighty with moral values. I don't
get it. Where's the heart?"
Marshal. Like
Torres, she had flown in for the event. Blond, dressed
in black with a black armband of mourning tied around
one arm, Joanna Wyndham had flair. She attracted
interviewers. She was 55, in public relations, and had
arrived from Dallas, Texas - "Bush's back yard," she
told me mockingly - to be a marshal for the dramatic
march of the 1,000 caskets. ("We were gluing them
together in Brooklyn for the last week. At the end, we
have black caskets to honor the Iraqi dead.")
"I'm so angry and frustrated about this
administration's lies and secrets. If the American
people could only see the cost of the war, more than two
caskets at a time ... but all of this has been
suppressed. When do you remember our treating our
military dead this way? I'm just an outraged citizen -
and by the way, Bush is not a Texan, in case you didn't
know.
"If this administration were Democratic, I
would be going out of my mind trying to get them out of
office. It's not that I'm anti-Republican. I'm
anti-George Bush, anti-Dick Cheney, anti-[Attorney
General John] Ashcroft. And do you really think that our
presence in Iraq is making us any safer? The transfer of
government really needs to be put into effect and we
need to leave. But have we ever done that anywhere once
we arrived?"
North Dakota for Peace.
Michael Page was tall and young - 22 he told me - and
his home-made T-shirt said "Support all Troops" on one
side and "North Dakota for Peace" on the other. He is
going to be in his final year at Amherst College this
autumn and he'd driven down from Massachusetts with a
group of friends whose T-shirts indicated that they
represented California, Tennessee and Massachusetts. He
was originally a supporter of would-be Democratic
presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. We began talking
about the printed-up sign he was carrying that called
for the end of the US occupation in Iraq.
"Iraq
is the rallying point. And I'm just here to be another
number and support the dissenting movement. I know
that's very important, but a lot of other things will be
in trouble and important too if Bush is re-elected.
People are making decisions on the sexy but superficial
issues of character right now, but I'm here because I
care about getting the real issues out.
"I am a
[John] Kerry supporter, although like many people I
disagree with a number of his positions. I have a lot of
problems with his pro-Israel position, for instance, but
I feel we may be pleased with what he actually does in
the next four years as opposed to what he's saying now.
I'd rather have a manipulative Kerry elected than go for
someone who supports my views but never gets anywhere.
Kerry is a good choice in the end.
"I come from
Fargo, North Dakota, and the state is basically a
farming community which traditionally supports a lot of
Republican agricultural policies, but I'm hoping for
change. My grandfather, for instance, who has never
voted in a presidential election, says he's going out to
vote against Bush. He's a patriotic man and things like
the Abu Ghraib issue embarrassed him."
Puppeteer. He had hoisted an enormous
papier-mache Bush face on a pole and strained under its
weight. His name was Greg Kline and he identified
himself as a "programmer for a newspaper". This was his
first puppet. It had an enormous tongue (a huge loop of
material) that emerged from the mouth covered with the
repeated words, "Lies, Fear, Hate".
"I got an
image in my head for this. I came down to a few projects
I would do to get rid of the darkest administration of
my lifetime and this is one of them."
Laura
Perry - "he's my fiance" - marched in front of the giant
head. She's an "administrative assistant", though for
this day she was the official "tongue-puller". She lives
in upstate New York, but had no hesitation about coming
down to Fortress Big Apple. "There are certain things
you just know are bullshit and you're just going to do
what you want to do."
Kids in strollers, a
strolling dog, and a son (not in attendance) It
was a measure of this march that children in strollers,
a mark of so many prewar marches, were few and far
between. There's probably no better barometer of the
sense of embattlement, of danger people felt, even when
deciding to make the march.
Designer
family. Laura Freedman, 40, a blond designer and
artist, was accompanied by her husband, Gerhard
Schlanzky, 52, an exhibition designer wearing a
home-made T-shirt that said, "Family values, 3
generations against Bush". Their daughter Anna, 6, sat
calmly in her stroller, all of us squeezed against a
store window, chatting while the crowd surged past. ("My
father's here too," Laura said, accounting for the third
generation, "but we lost him in the crowd.")
"Why are we here?" she began, unasked. "Let me
count the ways." And she began to tick them off. She
talked in succinct headlines. "No reason for war.
Escalating deficit. Tax breaks for the rich. Bad
diplomacy".
Gerhard put in, "But Iraq is
emblematic of everything."
Laura: "I find this
whole thing very shocking. Another thing I find shocking
is Florida. The intimidation of African-American voters.
I'm very nervous about the fairness of the election."
As for their daughter, she simply said, "It's
important for her to see what's going on. She really,
really wanted to stay up to see Kerry's speech. And she
was watching so intensely, waving her American flag ..."
Gerhard added: "We have family values and we're
not going to be afraid."
They carried their own
family designer poster, headlined "Flip W Flop", which
offered a listing of various Bush flips and flops (Iraq
WMDs, No WMDs; No child left behind, Children left
behind; and so on).
Problem solvers.
Rasha, 28, is a teacher in New York City's Harlem
district. She was at the march with her sister, her
mother (who reminded us that Rasha first attended a
demonstration when she was three years old), her
husband, and Jibreel, two-and-a-half, in a stroller. "He
comes with us to all demonstrations. I grew up at
demonstrations. I started early." She pointed to her
mother. "If it weren't for her political activism, I
wouldn't have been here and neither would he. I'm
against the convention. The war. Lack of dollars for
education. Oppression of people of color. Everything
connected to this administration. Not just the war in
Iraq but the ongoing war in Palestine-Israel and the
wars we've been perpetuating around the world. I'm half
Sudanese Muslim and half Jewish, and," she waved at her
son, "he's half me and half Puerto Rican. What I'm
against, it's the same thing I teach kids in the
classroom, the same thing I teach him. We don't solve
problems by fighting."
Labradoodle. Abby
was light-brown, stood on all fours, and sported a sign
that said "Dogs for Peace" on one side and "I pee on
Bushes + Shrubs" on the other. Her owners, Randy and Amy
Crafton, perhaps in their 30s, are musicians who own a
recording studio. They live in New Jersey with their
lab-poodle cross ("They call them labradoodles," Amy
told me.) They get e-mails from moveon.org, but this is
their first protest march - and, Randy added, "Abby's
first walk in Manhattan." Randy said, "We were finally
fed up. Too many bad ideas from this administration, the
last of which was holding a convention in New York." Of
this demonstration he said proudly: "Something like this
is too big for the media to overlook." Amy added, "Abby
says it's all about love."
Anesthesiologist. Eric, 58, is an
anesthesiologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He
carried a small sign - made on his computer, he told me
- that said, "Doctor for Kerry" on one side and "Former
Republican for Kerry" on the other, though he admitted
that he last voted Republican "a number of elections
back". He wore glasses, a paisley tie, pulled slightly
open at the neck, a white shirt and slacks, and a Club
Med cap ("the only thing I could find in the closet").
This was his first demonstration.
"The way I see
it, there are ways to get despotic rulers like Saddam
Hussein out without invading a country that never
invaded us, and I'm against an administration that has
converted us from a nation that had trillions of dollars
of excess to a $7 trillion deficit that my son and his
children are going to have to pay for. But I'm mainly
here for civil rights. I'm really here to demonstrate
that my First Amendment rights [in the US constitution
guaranteeing freedom of religion and expression] have
not been taken away from me.
"I went to services
this morning, then got into our car and came down here
from upstate. It doesn't matter to me how large this
demonstration is. I'm here representing myself and my
wife and 16-year-old son. He didn't come. There were a
lot of concerns about safety. Do I think that the
Republicans have put instigators here? You better
believe it. I'm a child of the '60s.
"If I can
represent a more somber mood here, I'm glad to do it. I
want to say that you can be a person who looks like a
Republican and still doesn't have neo-conservative
values.
"We can't be intimidated. It's still the
greatest country in the world, even though we have a
president I strongly disagree with."
The
message is the man Vet. Seventy-three-year-old
Gil Gleit, retired from the chemical industry, let me
know right away that he's a vet. Korean War and on a
disability pension ("not that it matters"). He enlisted
in 1948. ("I was only 17. What did I know?") He was
angry about the city's denial of a permit for a rally in
Central Park: "I think it's a right I have to go to this
park. Freedom is more important than grass. [The excuse
for denying the permit was damage to the park's grass.]
And I've been there with huge crowds at Simon and
Garfunkel concerts. One of the reasons they denied the
park is that they didn't want to show the huge swell of
people who are anti-Bush.
"It's horrendous, the
lies, the wrecking of the environment, the denial of
civil liberties. This is not the America I fought for,
and my grandchildren are going to have to pay for all
this."
John Kerry, he believes, will "bring in
change ... This is the first time I've given to a
political cause. I've never donated. But now I've given
to moveon.org and to Kerry. It's an investment in my
grandchildren, so they won't have to pay."
Lawyer. Lowell Willinger, 62, was perhaps
the only man at the rally on this blistering day of
shorts and T-shirts who was wearing a gray suit and tie.
He's a lawyer and a lifetime Democrat who lives in New
Jersey.
"Why am I dressed in jacket and tie?
Because of the seriousness of the occasion. I want to
add to that and I wish everybody treated it that way. I
always remember as well that Martin Luther King wore a
jacket and tie to every occasion and I think he did it
for a similar reason. Bush's policies are not
conservative, but radical. I want a more conservative
approach to solving our problems. I would take the same
position if the person in charge were a Democrat.
"The jacket and the approach were important to
me except that I leaned on a wall and got red paint on
the jacket. But that's a small price to pay."
Defense-industry worker. He's
American-born but of Indian background, in his 20s, an
engineer for a large defense company. "For war
profiteers," he said. ("It's not like the '90s anymore.
I don't like it, but these are the only jobs you can
find.") He's tall, friendly and adamant.
"I'm
against W. Just wholeheartedly. I'm not a liberal, not a
radical. I'm such a centrist. I'm into balanced budgets.
When W was elected, I was somewhat relieved and excited.
Maybe he wouldn't meddle so much in the world. He had
promised no nation-building. But it was all lies, lies,
lies."
He voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. "I
probably would have voted for Bush otherwise. Bush had
promised to get us out of conflicts all over the world.
But instead he's taken over two nations. After
[September 11], when you're attacked, you support your
chief. But he used [September 11] to push his own agenda
without any opposition. Now I'm an anybody-but-Bush
supporter. I want to love Kerry, but I wish he had a
more charismatic quality as a leader. He's a little too
rehearsed, but I support him."
Three
women Woman of justice. "I'm a Latino, a woman of
color, and a short person," Maria Luna told me
emphatically and with great good humor as she walked
with a friend in front of a large "Paz + Justice"
banner. It's her organization. ("We promote peace all
over.") "I was one of the first supporters Kerry had
here in New York. Although he voted for the war in the
beginning, I'm sure he was misled, just as we were. I
look for someone with seriousness, not just a
politician. And one more thing, he's married to an
immigrant and she's a power of her own!" At 64, in a
wide-brimmed blue hat, carrying a small US flag and
decked out with numerous "Women vote Kerry" buttons, she
is a retired accountant. "I've been to many, many
demonstrations all over. I feel the sense of unity here.
Young people, old people walking around wanting to make
peace. What we need, though, is to respect other people
all over the world, so that they can respect us. There
is no reason to sacrifice so many young people for the
benefit of so few."
Sister of Charity.
Joanne Ward, a small, kindly-looking, gray-haired lady,
was walking behind a huge "Christians for Peace" banner.
When asked her age, she smiled. "You can say 75-plus."
Behind her a friend said to me, "And she's a Sister of
Charity too." She spoke quietly and calmly.
"What we're concerned about is peace, jobs,
health insurance, all the things we see people needing
all the time with all the money that's going into
destructive acts. We are in an age when you can't have
war. The weapons are so destructive. It's not like a gun
against a gun anymore. We have such an arsenal against
people who don't have them. It doesn't add up. Force
just doesn't work anymore. We take 'Christianity' and
'Christian' as labels, and then we adopt them to our
use. I don't see how war can be considered a Christian
undertaking. But we use force for our own ends and then
we label those ends Christian."
Outreach.
Katherine Kline, "longtime New Yorker", is 58 and
teaches English as a second language to adult
immigrants. A former supporter of would-be Democratic
candidate Wesley Clark ("I'm still Clark in my heart"),
she was handing out palm-sized flyers for America Coming
Together (ACT) that promise "New Yorkers can help beat
George W Bush" and offer "swing-state phone banking" as
well as "regular outreach trips to Pennsylvania". She
was typical of a number of people working the crowd,
offering ways, after such a demonstration, not to go
home.
"I've gone twice to Pennsylvania with ACT
to register new voters. Because I live, thankfully, in a
Democratic city, there's a frustration with not enough
to do. We figured there are a lot of people energized
and let down after an event like this. I think one
reason people don't vote is because they don't believe
their actions make a difference. That's where we come
in. People are so grateful we're here."
On Iraq,
she just added, "A great mistake. I was once a diplomat
and I'll tell you we have done everything the British
did wrong."
Last words At about 4 in
the afternoon, finding myself on the other side of
Madison Square Garden, I descended into the subway and
like many other demonstrators made my way alone up to
the Great Lawn in Central Park where the demonstration
was denied its rally. Demonstrators were streaming in
when I arrived and it was like a vast Sunday
picnic/carnival on the lawn, with political theater,
music, baseball and assorted souls just stretched out on
the grass in the still blazing sun. Overhead, as had
been true all day, the Fuji
blimp-cum-police-surveillance-craft floated in a blue
sky. When exhaustion got the better of me, I headed for
home. On the way out of the park, I met David Kogelman,
55, a lawyer. He had a green "legal observer" card
dangling around his neck. His is the last word:
"I was a legal observer for the National Lawyers
Guild. Our function was to be neutral observers and take
notes on any arrests, make a record of anything we saw.
My personal estimate is that the march was at least a
million people. Of course, you'll never read that
anywhere. We got to 23rd Street at 1:15. The parade had
already been going for more than an hour. The tail end
of the parade didn't come by until 3:15. Basically it
was a two-and-a-half-mile-long [four-kilometer] march
and it was simply packed. It was also peaceful. It was
an atmosphere of people peaceably assembling to express
their displeasure - their extreme displeasure - over
what's being done to the country. It was definitely not
a celebratory mood.
"There was a moment at 2:15
when a fire truck came up to the crowd and the marchers
were so orderly that the march stopped on its own to let
the truck through, though it didn't end up going. It was
significant that the crowd was so well behaved, orderly
and determined. But I just wonder to what degree the
demonstration will be heard, given that the media [are]
so controlled."
Tom Engelhardt is
editor of Tomdispatch http://www.tomdispatch.com/
and the author of The End of Victory Culture.
