The fear
Political conventions take place in an extra-Constitutional bubble. This is nothing new, of course, as we were reminded when we played last week’s Chicago 1968 “reenactment” in Grant Park (a picnic — literally for some of us, who lunched on the green — compared to the original). But with the militarization of law enforcement and the empowerment of the national security state in recent years, this dynamic, in which host cities become, in essence, rights-free zones for protesters, has only gotten worse. Nowadays, every city is Chicago, 1968 — a four-day officially sanctioned police riot, more or less.
Thus, as we chugged towards Minneapolis-St. Paul, we began hearing reports of activist houses, infoshops and other centers of organizing for the protests being raided by police with guns drawn, everybody twist-tied and select local activists arrested. The aim: paralyze the protests by putting organizers on ice for the duration of the convention and scaring the bejeezus out of everyone else. We saw similar, if somewhat less selective, tactics at work here in New York four years back. People are arrested for nothing, held for as long as possible and hit with scurrulious charges sure to be thrown out in court, but only years later. The host city will eat some hefty fines, but not before harrassing the crap out of the rabble with the aim of incarcerating them until the circus leaves town and/or intimidating and impoverishing them through legal fees, court appearances, etc.
So we role played police harrassment scenarios and drilled ourselves in rights trainings, and we were ready when our Big Green Gay Bus was detained not once but twice. Through the skill of our onboard lawyers, as well as a little luck and help from the National Lawyers Guild and Coldsnap, the local legal collective, we were able to persuade the cops that these were not the droids they were looking for. Of course, many others were not so fortunate.
These tactics are bipartisan — demonstrators in Denver saw the same shit we did. But fear has long been the entire platform of the Republican Party — fear of people of color, fear of Teh Gay, fear of women’s sexuality, fear of equality, fear of foreigners, etc. Since 9/11 in particular, they’ve had a good run of infantilizing the crap out of us and playing on our fear of terrorism. It’s allowed them to strip us of our civil rights while destroying every international covenant they could get their hands on. Torture is now official policy, war without end the guarantor of the freedoms they whittle away at.
That’s why we went to St. Paul — to tell them, four years after they brought their fetid little circus of hate, greed and fear to our hometown, forty years into their small and tawdry but powerfully destructive backlash politics, that we will not be afraid anymore. We’ll drown out their fascist squawks with our joyous noise.
