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Later that afternoon, I rode the subway up to Bushville, a makeshift tent city set up by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in a North Side vacant lot. All week, Bushville provided excellent copy for wire-service wage slaves, people from Toronto, and European journalists, the good-hearted sucker types who actually come to political conventions to find out the truth about America. When I arrived, a group of deaf-rights people was in the main tent, doing a sign-language recitation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No offense to them, I passed, choosing instead to observe two young men with a hardscrabble woman named Katie sitting between them. They were being photographed, looking somber and hot, with signs that read "Give Me Health Care Or Give Me Death." "Well, you could smile," I said. "I usually do," said one of them, "but the photographer told me not to." Bushville was as advertised: a bunch of camping tents and ramshackle cardboard houses with tarps thrown over them, laying over a cozy landscape of weeds and shattered, discarded brick. The tent city had been a source of melodrama all week, as the KWRU was forced by police to move it from its original location a few blocks away after the owner of the mosque next door complained. Its main purpose, as far as I could limn, was to host a world-record number of press conferences, up to six a day. The KWRU was also offering "reality tours" for the media to call attention to the "other side" of Philadelphia. The tours were the subject of a hilarious editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer that appeared to have been written by the executive secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. The paper warned journalists not to believe that the bombed-out buildings of North Philly represented the whole town. As alternate possible stories, the Inquirer offered up the thrilling possibilities of writing about the local Puerto Rican Association or "Sister Mary Scullion, a local treasure who will give you the unvarnished truth about how the city's homeless people are doing." Despite the establishment's desperate desire to paint a pretty face at convention time, the tangential media reality tour has become a staple of political gatherings in recent years. In Chicago in 1996, I went around with a literature professor who had covered the '68 convention for The Evergreen Review. Like a lot of former radicals that year, he was dining out on his former street cred. He gave a dull, rambling performance centered on his memories of the riots in Lincoln Park. Nonetheless, this got him a lot of press. Bushville was far more immediate, more sophisticated, and more frustrating. I talked to a young guy who told me he had missed the Unity 2000 March because he was on his child-care shift, since the encampment had a lot of kids running around. But the day before, he said, he had been to a health-care march that had really inspired him. "It's just amazing to walk down to the commercial area and see people with their shopping bags staring at you," he said. "It's that kind of mentality that's screwed up health care." "What kind of mentality?" I said. "Consumerism." "OK. But what does that have to do with health care?" "I'm against for-profit managed care," he said. "Well, Jesus, so am I. But what does that have to do with shopping?" "It's all part of the system," he said. Under an insane sun, I next talked to some very nice, committed people from DeKalb, Illinois, who were enduring a week in Bushville to make a point. "This is a real people's movement from the ground up, step by step," said one of them. "We're changing the world. People from all around the country are coming here, and the only way the system is going to be changed is if enough people come together and demand change. We have very specific demands. The goal of this organization is to end poverty, not poverty for the welfare moms, not poverty for Philadelphians. It's to end poverty." A contingent of reality tourists arrived in a school bus from the Liberty Bell. The bus was full, but the deaf activists made a stink, so the "Reality Guides" were forced to give up their seats and stand in the aisles. I got on board, and was bombarded with way more reality than is necessary for an ordinary Sunday afternoon. We passed what you might expect: an abandoned brewery in which homeless people were drying their laundry, desperate slum housing, neighborhood bars at the end of their lines, abominable sidewalks. We also went to a shuttered church and saw a graffiti mural. "For kids who can't afford to go to the movies or to the mall," our press sheet assured us, "graffiti is an activity." We then drove by Elbow Alley, the heroin distribution center of Kensington, which was depressing, but I admired the fact that they showed it to us. The rest of the tour was overwhelming, but not because of the poverty, of which I have seen plenty in Chicago. Rather, it was wiltingly hot, and the KWRU didn't seem to care. There is nothing like being on a parked, badly-ventilated school bus in the middle of a hopeless ghetto and listening to rehearsed five-minute-long testimonials from reformed drug addicts to make you want to quit journalism forever. My seatmate, Gordon Corera, the World Affairs Editor for the BBC, seemed somewhat interested in the goings-on, but he was also obviously very hot. He showed me the scars he had received while covering the IMF protests in D.C., and I was impressed. The other media on the tour were two sneering guys from the National Journal, and a bunch of "independent media" people from such truth-telling organizations as digitalanarchy.org. Of all the people I met in Philadelphia-and I met a great many people-the independent media were the least appealing, and the least trustworthy. There were hundreds of them, it seemed, always hectoring, always observing you, always taking notes, and always looking for Fifth Columnists. Admittedly, when things got bad on Tuesday, they shot some decent photos and some valuable digital video, but they weren't reporters. They were more like spies, and not as subtle as the police ones. I met one Indie Media guy on the bus. "How's it going?" I asked. "I don't know you," he said. He asked too see my credentials, because they are always asking to see your credentials. He also informed me that everyone involved in the convention protests had signed nonviolence pledges, "except for the city of Philadelphia." In this guy's case, he was largely interested in copying my pass that got me into the convention hall. "Why?" I asked. "Because," he said, "we need information." I told him that if he wanted information, he should get a newspaper job and get his own damn credentials. Even if I was wrong, I didn't care, because that shut him up, and allowed me to gaze quietly out the window at the hideous wreckage of a city passing by. NEXT INSTALLMENT
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