The American Spectator

“Free trade means sweatshop labor,” received quite a bit of press. The man carrying it screamed at me when I passed by in my “Enjoy Capitalism” tee. I stopped to ask if he’d prefer starving in the streets to working in a sweatshop, a real possibility in countries that still allow such labor practices. He looked as though that alternative had never crossed his mind, but he righted himself by calling me a fascist.

NOT LONG AFTER, I bumped into a Bureaucrasher who was selling Che Guevara T-shirts made in Honduras. (“Hopefully in a sweatshop,” he said.) Before the march had begun, they sold out of all the Che shirts, and even the Enjoy Capitalism ones, which were meant to provoke the crowd. Instead, several lefties took the statement as a sort of faux ironic dig, and happily paraded them around.

These Whitmanesque contradictions rendered the whole event more performance art than protest. A girl on her cell phone telling her friend to meet her at the anti-capitalist march; a man selling T-shirts accusing Bush of being a draft dodger next to a woman selling books that hailed draft dodgers and card burners as heroes; a crowd of girls who appeared to be from Swarthmore shouting, “Are you hungry? Eat the rich! Are you horny? F—k the rich!” — only in America, as they say.

When the event finally got underway about a quarter past one, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 marchers, it felt like a parade. Rather than outrage, the mood was a kind of jubilant resignation, as though it were a celebration of the protesters’ very, very principled opposition to the World Bank and IMF, not a denunciation of those bodies’ policies. So no one seemed to mind when I ducked out of the march and ran into Starbucks for a vanilla latté.