More Protest Thoughts

Covering something like a large politcal protest well is really, really hard. I checked yesterday's happenings out for a while, then disengaged and tried to walk elsewhere, and ran into a colleague. I told him I was struck by how few normal-looking average New Yorkers were at the event. Everyday regular folks in this town hate the president, and yet no one seems to have shown up except for the out-of-town freakshow types. The colleague had the precise reverse impression. The truth, it turned out, was that we were both stuck in different bits of the protest mass and, naturally enough, similar people tend to lump together. After I moved on a bit I saw a lot of nice-looking family people. And of course there's a tendency to equate politics with aesthetics and just assume the nice-looking family people have moderate views while the folks with the green hair have crazy ones, but it isn't the case. One blue haired guy turned out to be an IR major somewhere who painted a nuanced portrait of where Bush has gone awry. One paunchy looking man had dressed his very young son in a "Lick Bush" shirt and explained to me that "if we just stopped using all this oil, then we wouldn't have a problem with terrorism" which, even if true, is pretty clearly neither here nor there from the point-of-view of policy formation.

At root the issue is that large contemporary protests have become these carnival-like escapades. It is accepted -- and, indeed, encouraged -- for as many people as possible to show up, whether or not they agree with the United For Peace and Justice platform, know what the UFPJ platform is, or even know what UFPJ is. As a result, it's hard to know what protest attendance signifies. When thousands of people showed up for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington we understood that to mean that all those people were supporters of the Civil Rights Act demanding congressional action. At the UFPJ event, by contrast, you had people with all manner of views on Iraq policy a lot of people whose problems with the Bush administration really have nothing to do with foreign affairs, and my favorite fringe group of all time, the Spartacist Youth League complaining that the US needs to stop interfering with North Korea's right to a nuclear bomb. Most of the people there seemed to be impassioned Kerry supporters, but the best-organized elements were Nader's people. Obviously the message of a pro-Kerry anti-Bush protestor and that of a pro-Nader anti-Bush protestor are bound to be rather different.

So I don't really have a "point" to make here, just those thoughts. But there's a good analogy to the protest -- each and every person there had something to say, but the protest as such didn't have much of a message, so it's hard to know what to say about it. That's not necessarily the worst thing in the world, I've been known to write rambling discursive things myself, but -- like a discursive blog post -- it seems to me that such activity is far more about personal self-expression than about efficacious political action. Which, again, is fine, we're all human, we can't be efficacious all the time. But we should be self-aware about what we're doing. Emma Goldman famously said, "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution," thus expressing a sentiment that is as wrongheaded as it is widespread.