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If you find yourself dropped into an unfamiliar urban American hamlet with reportorial duties, it is often helpful to know people who work in radio news, as they are forced to cover events that other, more esteemed media types can ignore, but with a greater depth than the television twinks. I happened to have a friend, Julia Barton, who was assigned the protest beat for WHYY, Philly's public-radio station, and was therefore was duty-bound to follow all interlopers. She proved an essential observer as the week inevitably progressed from triumph to tragedy. For instance, in what was widely considered to be the first surprise event of convention week, on Saturday, July 29, a dozen activists burst into Lord & Taylor in downtown Philadelphia and unfurled a banner that read "No More Sweatshops!" "Of course," Julie said, " it would have been more effective if anyone shopped at that store." That's the kind of perspective that only a local can provide. Julie and her colleague Jennifer Rehill, a WHYY employee who was acting as a "special correspondent" for KCRW radio in Santa Monica, pretty much saved me at the Monday anti-poverty protest, which was very long and disorienting and full of potted melodrama. It was a Death March, an uninspiring nightmare crush of stereotypes. Again that day, the air was pudding-like, and it didn't help that I had inexplicably decided to wear a shirt and tie. The Kensington Welfare Rights Union set off with a group of children in front, who looked terrified and were forced to hold onto a rope. The journalistic horde blocked the children from starting, creating some scary traffic logjams. This put the police in the strange position of protecting the protesters from the media. At some merciful moment past noon, people began to flow. The children remained in front, followed by a group of wheelchair-bound activists from the radical disabled-rights group ADAPT, followed by a bunch of mothers pushing strollers, which was a miracle in itself because the city had tried to scare them from marching earlier in the week by saying that it had reserved a thousand extra shelter beds to house the children of the arrested. We crawled forward, with Philly police chief John Timoney and his squad of bike cops at the lead, gently guiding, and hogging the media's time. Over the week, Timoney, with his white shirt, white helmet, and Terminator sunglasses, logged more camera minutes on a bike than Lance Armstrong had during the Tour de France. This prompted one local columnist to compare the slavish TV media folks with paparazzi stalking Princess Diana. After a single-file march down Broad Street that seemed to last 48 hours, but in fact only lasted three, and featured well-reported appearances by Johnny Rotten and Newt Gingrich, the protesters finally began to dribble toward the domed paradise of the First Union Center. The Drunkards and Fornicators Will Join Tupac in Hell guy was there to greet them, and he got into a pointed debate with a young woman. "You're a whore," he said. "I'm a virgin, you stupid fuck!" she said. "Virgins don't say the f-word," he retorted. Someone then informed him that the Bible was given to us by men, not by God, and that God spoke to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. The man put his hands over his ears, jumped up and down, and shouted, "Nah, nah, nah!" Then came a tense moment of uncertainty. Around 3 PM, the protesters arrived en masse. Reports began to filter down that the police had talked to the march's organizers about diverting them to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, which abutted the convention hall, but that the marchers gave no guarantees that they would comply. Ten full-sized buses and ten police vans waited behind a cordon of silent, baton-holding cops. Each one had a dozen plastic handcuffs at the ready. Journalists perched in front of the barricades, on the medians. The protesters reached the blockade. They stared the cops down. The cops stared back. And then they turned right, most of them, down the most generic South Philly street imaginable. Julie Barton and I followed, but Jen Rehill stayed behind at the standoff, and she later filed this report to us. "About 200 people were in front of the barricades. Mounted police rode adjacent to the people who were sitting on the grass. The KWRU people were screaming at protesters to keep moving, and the crowd wasn't moving. It was all the kids, in their black and with their bandanas. They put the bandanas over their faces and sat down in the shade. The pro-lifers stayed with their horrible fetus picture. They were chanting at each other. A pile of giant puppets lay on the ground. There we were, all kind of poised. Then there was this sudden thing where a call came up among the police. They moved the barricades and flying down Broad Street came the cars and the vans and a troupe of bike cops. That kind of broke the moment. The protesters split into two fronts-anarchists and drummers and puppet people-and the puppeteers led the anarchists away. They looked exhausted." Meanwhile, Barton and I found ourselves marching down a shadeless street, with middle-class tract housing on one side and vacant lots on the other, with no water, and no place to run. When we reached FDR Park, with maybe 200 remaining marchers, we were forced across a vast expanse of uncut grass, again with no trees. Everyone had gone limp. A few people behind us were wanly chanting "We Shall Overcome." We arrived at the designated area. The First Union Center loomed before us, behind a ten-foot fence. On the other side of the fence was a phalanx of bike cops, plastic cuffs at the ready. One kid tried to poke at the fence, and a cop batted him away with a baton. Cheri Honkala, the ever-dramatic leader of the KWRU, launched herself over the hood of a van, and spoke to the crowd. "Let today be symbolic," she said, "of us taking over our country, and let America no longer take away our rights to food, clothing, and health care!" The remaining protesters could only muster a faint reaction. Most of them were sprawled under trees, drinking water and napping. John Timoney, J. Edgar Hoover on a bicycle, showed up, examined the situation, and found it to his liking. Honkala had managed to march without a permit, and Timoney had managed to herd the protesters into a cage without too much trouble. The cops could claim order, and the protesters a radical victory. But it looked to me like the cops had won, substantially. Then the Adopt A Greyhound Coalition, which was from Maryland, manifested itself. Weeks before, the police and the American Civil Liberties Union had worked out a protest zone inside the park, behind the fence. A set number of groups would be given 50 minutes apiece to speak, until the end of the convention. The police assigned 76 slots, and for the first two months, no one applied. By the time the convention started, only 23 of those slots were filled. The greyhound people were the first to apply, by a month. They brought their doggies, which were hot and panting maniacally, and a scale model of a dead greyhound on an autopsy table. One man wore a T-shirt that read, "I participated in the National Greyhound Adoption Program's Republican National Convention 2000 March." Well, I thought, not too many people can say that, and the greyhound people went to the assigned protest area to begin their rally. Their voices boomed out into the parking lots, over buses full of Republican delegates who couldn't hear them. But the remaining protesters in the park could. "Who are you?" said one of them into the air. "Where are you? I can't see you." "They make wonderful pets," said a disembodied greyhound-owning voice, into the microphone. "They lie in your bed. They lie next to your bed. And then they are fast." NEXT INSTALLMENT
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