While the local anti-genocide community was out at Triangle Park demonstrating against the “peace” movement (Jamie Delton has the best wrapup of blog coverage I’ve seen), Jack Langer was at a contemporaneous rally in Washington.

And he was…unimpressed?

The protestors, around 8,000 in all, soon lined up in marching formation. But there was some major organizational problem, and they remained in place for over an hour before setting out for the Capitol. Once the march began, it got about two blocks before organizers temporarily halted it, informing us through bullhorns that we had to allow large groups to catch up who were still back at Lafayette Park, unaware that the march had begun. I was mystified how so many people failed to notice thousands of banner-waving, drum playing, chanting protestors leave their vicinity.

The rest of the march was equally disorganized. The massive lead banner, stretching around 40 feet across the width of the protest, ripped in half, hindering the lead protestors’ efforts to hold a straight line. Then they had to endure a three-block stretch that was lined with around a thousand flag-waving, pro-American counter-protestors. The marchers at first tried to ignore the interlopers, but their self-control always seemed to break down right around the guy who was singing into a bullhorn “All we are saaaying, is give soap a chance.” Some heated exchanges ensued, but the cops maintained order and the marchers eventually arrived at the Capitol.

Yeah.  “Unimpressed” is the word.

They stopped at a wall, about waist-high, that separates the Capitol steps from a large field split by a walkway. Behind the wall stood a line of dozens of cops, some in riot gear. Sensing some action was about to break out, I rudely shoved my way to the wall. I was joined in the front row mostly by other, equally uncouth reporters, none us caring one iota about basic manners when a big story seemed about to break.

It was at this point that the “die-in” commenced. Hundreds of protestors lied down and, I suppose, pretended to be dead. I think the spectacle was somehow supposed to help end the Iraq War. After all, nothing conveys the dignity and solemnity of a noble cause like a “die-in” does.

And, hopefully a portent of things to come in Saint Paul…:

The anarchists really disappointed me. None of them jumped the wall. They portray themselves as the most militant wing of the antiwar movement, but they didn’t even have the guts displayed by the Code Pink grandmas. The anarchists claim to want a revolution, but apparently not a single one of them is willing to risk a misdemeanor arrest to achieve that glorious goal. Instead, they sufficed with yelling a lot of slogans about class war at the cops. This was ironic, seeing as the anarchists were almost certainly all college kids, while the cops were about the only working class people in the entire crowd.

Back “in the day” when I was a wanna-be punk rocker and weekend talk show host, I interviewed a bunch of kidz from the “Backroom Anarchist Center”, the old narky commune in Minneapolis, on my old graveyard shift talk show.  I took the liberty of checking into some of their bios.  To a kid, they were from upper-middle-class neighborhoods – Edina, Woodbury – and apparently going through some sort of rite of rebellious passage.  As I’ve written before – I’d kill to know what those kids are doing now, when they’re all in their late thirties.  Not living in the back of a van, I’ll hazard.

And in the end, what had the protestors achieved? Not much, it seems to me. I asked a cop about the fate of those arrested. He told me they’d be processed and then released, probably spending no more than a few hours in a holding cell. The entire spectacle was really just a kind of performance art, acted out for the benefit of a gullible media that laps up these exhibitions and presents them to the nation as if they reflect some meaningful social current.

I hope to spend the first  week of next September documenting the silliness.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 7:05 am and is filed under Days of Adolescent Rage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.