WASHINGTON — When I arrived at Franklin Square a quarter past
eleven this Saturday, there were more cops than protesters. A dozen
police officers on motorcycles waited outside the Metro outlet
across the street and several boys in blue dotted every block for
miles. As for the park itself, police on horseback were in opposite
corners, squad cars and motorcycles surrounded the place, and
D.C.’s finest — in uniform and plainclothes — mingled with the
rabble. Just in case.
Most vocal this early in the proceedings were the avowed
socialists, though for anti-capitalists, they certainly seemed to
be hawking an awful lot of goods. Of note were dozens of books and
pamphlets about how capitalism has ruined everything, from rivers
in Africa to coffee shops on American street corners.
Other lefties sold T-shirts, propaganda buttons, CDs,
newspapers, magazines, and jewelry. This anti-capitalist protest
was a hot-bed of economic activity, and the vendors were all about
profit margins. I asked several paperboys and girls if they would
give me copies of their rags gratis, in order to help get the word
out, seeing as how I would be writing about the event. None
obliged.
As I perused the many wares for sale, I noticed a number of
unique-looking individuals, all dressed in black, congregated under
a tree. “Who are they?” I asked a girl peddling the latest issue of
the Socialist Worker.
“Oh, those are the anarchists,” she said, and smiled. “They’re
always fun at these rallies.”
The irony of a socialist talking about anarchists as though they
were her pesky younger brothers, who might occasionally walk into
the shower or freeze her bras, rather than a group who espoused the
exact opposite ideology as her own, failed to register.
THEN, A NEW GROUP showed up. Young, clean-cut, and in matching red
T-shirts, Bureaucrash arrived before noon. They quickly set up a
table stocked with literature and more shirts. The tees read “Enjoy
Capitalism” in the familiar scroll of Coca-Cola. The job of the
organization, as one wag related it to me, was to protest the
protesters.
Surprised reporters made a beeline for the Bureaucrash table,
interviewing Crasher-in-Chief Jason Talley, and several other
startled members. After Talley explained his organization’s mission
to one reporter, she asked a follow-up question.
“Free markets? How would that work?”
“Econ 101,” he replied.
After watching the Bureaucrash folks field questions for bit
(full disclosure: they gave me a free t-shirt, unlike the
socialists, who gave me nothing), I wandered over toward the
anarchists, one of whom had climbed a tree, perhaps to make some
point about how the International Monetary Fund interferes in
arbor-day activities.
I snapped a picture, which I learned is a big anarchy no-no. A
man, apparently a designated spokesman, approached me and said that
the anarchists don’t like to have their pictures taken.
“Well, that’s not very anarchist of them, now is it?” I
asked.
He gave me a blank look and explained that they prefer to be
photographed “in mask,” with bandanas around the lower half of
their faces, so the feds can’t identify them. He further explained
that the bandana stood for the solidarity of the anarchist
brotherhood.
I wanted to ask about this “brotherhood of anarchists” but the
guy had tremendous body odor so it seemed the better part of
consciousness to move on to the homemade signs that people were
carrying. “Capital kills like crack,” was my favorite, though the
author was a bit dodgy on its meaning. Explaining it, he told me,
would only be a waste of his time.
“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.
