Protest: Manhattan's Alternate Reality

"Boys, let me tell you something," said the NYPD officer. "You go to Columbia, you're probably smart kids. So why don't you get away from this trailer and stay off this street."

With this generous postscript to a statement of "no comment" regarding the anti-war demonstrations planned for later in the day, the cop unceremoniously removed Spectator photographer Jesse Coffino-Greenberg and myself from the NYPD Command Unit parked on 1st Avenue. No matter--it was true that, as college journalists, we didn't have the coveted NYPD press badges, and getting thrown out of the trailer made a nice prelude to getting run down by police horses later in the afternoon.

It was 9:30 in the morning on Saturday, Feb. 15, and in two and a half hours the street two blocks north of the NYPD camp would be filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war demonstrators. The cops were girding up in anticipation of an afternoon of pitched battles with protesters, but most of them appeared to be in good spirits, sipping coffee to stay warm in the bitter cold wind coming off the East River.

If the police seemed less tense than usual for a major street demonstration, the protesters seemed downright giddy as thousands of them assembled on the steps of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue. For the first time in three decades, the rest of America and much of the world was paying attention to them.

This suddenly heightened profile of the anti-war movement can be traced to a specific date: Oct. 30 of last year, four days after the last major demonstration in Washington, DC. On that day, The New York Times ran an article under the headline "Rally in Washington is Said to Invigorate the Antiwar Movement."

The article was the result of an exposé on the Times by the media watchdog organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which called the media behemoth on the flagrant inaccuracies in their initial coverage of the protest. Many saw the incident as symptomatic of a national news media that since Sept. 11 had grown accustomed to printing the official story and little else.

After a deluge of letters, a sheepish Times not only printed the aforementioned article, but also began paying a great deal of attention to subsequent demonstrations. The flattery was often embarrassingly unsubtle, but at least the coverage was generally more accurate, and the newspaper began actually speaking with protest organizers, not just police spokespeople.

As a result, standard protest chants like "The whole world is watching!" which once seemed either desperately optimistic or pathologically deluded, were now suddenly statements of fact. Nor were the words coming from the mouths of seasoned activists alone, but rather a surprisingly diverse population in which elderly black couples and blue collar workers rubbed elbows with the usual array of anarchists, aging hippies, and predominantly white college students.

It would not have been unreasonable to see, in the mainstreaming of Saturday's demonstration, the emergence--however briefly--of a sort of Carnival for the United States. Clad in the polyester wardrobe of a televangelist and supporting an immense pompadour on top of his head, guerrilla theater activist Reverend Billy presided over a crowd of protesters wearing Mardi Gras beads and masks of various types, the Carnival Bloc organized by Reclaim the Streets! activists. When he paused for a moment from barking out mock-religious exhortations against the war with Iraq, I asked him why they had decided on the carnival theme. "Why?" he said. "Because peace is fun, peace is music, peace is making love! Peace is ... [hysterically] a good time."

Billy had a point. After all, Americans lack the safety valve of ecstatic celebration present in most cultures--Mardi Gras in New Orleans doesn't count: we stole it from the Creoles--and it seems forces from both sides of the demonstrations are pushing the experience in that direction anyway. The activist community employs with increasing frequency guerrilla theater techniques borrowed from annual festivals like the Caribbean Carnival and the Mexican Day of the Dead, and the NYPD now brings the same street blockades to Chinese New Year in Chinatown and Halloween in Greenwich Village as it does to political demonstrations. Perhaps it is that public expressions of joy, in the post-Giuliani era, just feel illegal, or maybe that protest is becoming an act of celebration for its participants.

At any rate, much of the activity among demonstrators packed into streets west of First Avenue had a distinctly hallucinatory quality.

Police blockades made it impossible for many attendees to make it to the stage where the speeches and performances that were the focal point of the event took place. As protesters trickled in from the subway stations west of 5th Avenue to the library, they had to wind their way through the detritus of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, which was occurring on the opposite side of the block.

Derelict and unplugged Evian vending machines, enormous Caterpillar generator units, and the occasional perplexed fashionista littered the sidewalk, thrown in with demonstrators carrying signs and props in what seemed like an alternate reality.

On Third Avenue an hour later, the cavalry arrived--officers in riot gear rode in on horseback, trying in vain to clear the demonstrators out of the street. The ensuing chaos was more a barrage of absurd images than a sequence of events: bursts of vapor from the nostrils of a chestnut thoroughbred plowing into a World War II veteran's wheelchair, the Reverend Al Sharpton walking alone along 52nd St. until he was mobbed by middle-aged admirers with disposable cameras, a massive black man throwing his weight against the side of a police van in anger alongside an eleven-year-old white child screaming "Whose streets? Our streets!"

When the police finally cleared a sizable portion of asphalt, one young man in a navy peacoat pushed past the officers in riot gear and paraded around with his arms raised high in the air and an enormous grin on his face, more the product of instant celebrity than idealism. The grin did not vanish even when he was pinned down by four officers and handcuffed. As he was marched away by two of the policemen he walked in exaggerated goose steps, to cheers from many demonstrators and accusations of bad form from others.

I had to walk north to 68th St. before the crowd was dispersed enough that police barricades did not prevent moving towards First Avenue. There, a handful of protesters whose excitement had obscured their judgment had surrounded cars stopped in traffic, their owners still inside, and were slapping stickers for the standard array of causes on their bumpers. Even that far uptown, First Avenue was filled to capacity.

No one above 60th St. caught much of what was occurring on the stage nine blocks south: police barricades prevented movement from block to block, and the display system on the back of a truck at 60th was shorting out, the static on the enormous television flickering in time with the rhythm of the speaker's voice.

But this seemed of little consequence. For most, the experience had subsumed the intent that brought them there in the first place. This was an experience made up as much of the horse manure, the costumes, the bodies of strangers, and the frozen pavement as it was of anything occurring on stage at 51st St.