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About 20 minutes later, I found myself in the middle of the big protest, which was centered at 15th and JFK. A group of people wearing goat's heads were dancing around, chanting "We've got to free. Mumia. Abu. Jamal." Some other protesters stretched a thick line of yarn across the street to try and stop a troop of horse cops from pushing them away from the center. The horses advanced and I backed into, and tripped over, the string. "Fucking string," I said. The protesters sat down in front of the cops, and someone let off a smoke bomb. A brave cop plunged into the crowd to cut the string, and was seized by a group of protesters, who began clawing at his clothes. Two other cops jumped in to rescue him, and some minor head bashing ensued. Then a group of protesters, dressed as clowns, rode up and began running around and making all kinds of noise. Some people were laughing, some were crying. Some were fleeing in terror. One moron stood in front of a horse-bound cop and said, "Hah, hah. Your horse just took a shit!" For some reason, this person wasn't harmed. At this point, you may be asking, as I was: What is this all about? In the middle of the chaos, I was fortunate enough to back into Matt Ruben, one of the organizers of the day's events, who set me straight. Ruben is 31, and has lived in Philadelphia for nine years. Starting next month, he will be a professor of English and Urban Studies at Bryn Mawr University. He was very excited, and through the smoke delivered unto me the following monologue, seemingly without breathing: "These are not a bunch of Ivy League elitists out here. Those people are all in the convention hall. These are not empowered kids. They're working class, or at least many of them are. The fact is that they're pissed off and they're dedicated. They've got a lot more fucking guts than the people who are criticizing them. We are all worried about the increasing use of repressive measures to write off large portions of our society. We have 35 million people living in poverty, 45 million with no health care, and we have two million people living in prison, which is a record in the history of this country. And it's a record for the industrialized world. We think that the policymakers have chosen incarceration and vilification and writing people off instead of forthrightly addressing the problems that we have in this country. Economic polarization. Public education is in trouble, especially in cities like this one. Environmental degradation. Institutionalized racism. Seventy percent of the people who are in prison are people of color. Half are African-American. You can't write these people off and say they're evil and there's something wrong with them, because the reality is that there are communities in this country where there are no opportunities, where there's not equality of investment, access to political power, and we think that needs to be changed. We think that conventions like this are the place to do it, because this convention is a perfect example of a democratic process that's been corrupted. "Bob Livingston, the Republican representative from Louisiana, said himself yesterday on network news that this convention is the tying of the lace of a shoe that's already been bought, polished, and put up for sale. The important thing is to get a lot of customers. And that's exactly what's wrong with this political system that we have today. It's embodied in this convention, and we're out here as part of organizations and affinity groups that have decided and planned these very protests as part of a consensus-based, democratic process. We are out here in the streets with the democratic process saying no to these kinds of policies of sham democracy and of the use of incarceration and force instead of thoughtful, creative political action to create equality for everyone." If that wasn't enough, Ruben added, "You can't calculate the amount of time that went into planning all this, in large part because it takes a long time if you do it right. It takes a lot longer to do it democratically than to do it top down. It was a lot of hard work. People had to work through their differences and to come together. It took a really long time. It's rewarding that it's paying off today. The people who are determined to do this and put themselves on the line did it, despite everything, and it's obvious now that we're getting the message out and we're saying no to this kind of super-smooth, Swiss-watch orchestrated schedule and PR event that this convention is. Nothing of substance is getting decided this convention. Everything of substance is out here in the street, and I am proud to be a part of it. This is a bottom-up movement. And we want to change this country. I worked my ass off to get this thing off the ground, and I'm gonna enjoy it." In front of us, a chant went up. "Let the horses go! Let the horses go!" Someone I had never seen before and have not seen since ran up to me in a panic. "Dude!" he said. "You see them stomp that dude in the red dreads?" The Billionaires for Bush appeared, and chanted, "No more billy clubs! We want yacht clubs!" By about 7:30 PM, The politics ended, and the evening quickly degenerated into an uneven game of urban cat-and-mouse. By degrees, the police had broken things up. They began to chase a group of about 200 protesters south, into the fashionable districts. I followed, partly by choice, and partly because I was simply caught in the downcurrent of people. The protesters began knocking over garbage cans and newspaper boxes, and dragging Dumpsters into the streets, which effectively stopped the horse cops. But the bike cops were coming out of every alley and every side street, swiping at protesters, who were swiping right back at them. At 17th and Chancellor, in front of the extremely swanky Warwick Hotel, the protesters made a stand, with Dumpsters. Then, from down the block, came the roar of motorcycles. The cops screamed down the street and along the sidewalk, and the protesters became consumed by fear. They split up into smaller and smaller groups, fleeing down alleys and tripping over themselves. I found myself at 17th and Locust, in an alley, where the bike cops had formed a wall. "Get out of here now if you don't want to get hurt!" one of them shouted. I got out. I passed a bistro called Chin Chin, where a young woman, bleeding from the temple, grabbed a wine glass off the table and smashed it on the sidewalk. I wandered and ran, gaining and losing speed. Back on 15th street, I saw that the horse cops had backed about 30 protesters into a parking lot. One of the protesters started hitting a horse with a newspaper. "Horses don't like pigs!" he shouted. It was about 8:30 PM, and I saw little more trouble in the streets. On my way to meet my wife for dinner, I happened to pass by the Independent Media Center. An independent media guy was hanging out in front. "So it's over, right?" I said. "Not really," he said. "We've still got people in jail." He looked at me suspiciously, as was his wont. "Where are you from?" he asked. I showed him. "Corporate media," he said dismissively. I wanted to say: No, you goddamn yutz. The corporate media are at the First Union Center getting their legs waxed or sucking Scotch out of the corporate teat at downtown hotels, or transcribing speeches off of television onto their laptops and eating their chicken Caesar salads. They aren't out here watching you and your buddies getting your collective ass kicked, that's for sure. "Well, sorta," I said, weakly. "Do you want a press packet?" he asked. I did not. Meanwhile, only a few blocks away, Commissioner Timoney was doing battle with his own subset of anarchist enemies. I missed the fracas, during which Timoney got scraped up and a protester rammed Timoney's partner in the back of the head with a bicycle, giving him a concussion. But my friend Josh, who was tooling around on his own bicycle, got there about ten seconds after protesters knocked Timoney off his bike. "There were two guys being subdued," Josh told me later. "Timoney was getting up, kinda shaken. There were bikes piled in the middle of the street. His supporting officers were asking him if he was OK. He looked pretty old. It was hilarious; he was in his bicycle shorts and white shirt. He was in the thick of it and he was not in control. Nobody there knew it was Timoney. People were filming it. I said, 'do you know what you're filming?' They said no. I said, 'that's the chief of police.'" The throwdown may have seemed funny at the time, but in the days following, Timoney got his revenge, and made great political hay of the fact that he had faced the anarchists, toe-to-toe and lived. "I want people to go out on a limb," he said. "Then I'm going to chop that limb off." NEXT INSTALLMENT
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