RNC: Post-sleep report-back

If you were able to follow along with my sporadic and unhinged twitter updates, or read my posts here on Feministing.com, you already know that the RNC security team delivered swift but massive blows to the infrastructure of dissent created to ensure political change in the next election. They targeted independent media, street medics, legal aids, and activists with mass arrests, illegal detentions, beatings, surveillance, harassment, and what can only be described as torture. 

One particularly brutal attack on the people came at the same moment as two CODEPINK protestors and one IVAW man interrupted McCain’s speech—one of two acts of dissent that actually made national news (the other being the Sarah Palin CODEPINK interruption of the night before). “You can’t win an occupation,” read one sign, with “McCain votes against vets” printed on the other. Elizabeth Hourican, Nancy Mancias, and Adam Kokesh were ejected from the building after rushing the stage with another sign emblazoned with “McCain = more war.”

Major media only gave the interruption a flash, and McCain followed suit.

“My friends, my dear friends,” McCain said from the stage on September 4. “Please, please don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static, I’m going to talk about it some more, but Americans want us to stop yelling at each other.”

Less than a mile away, riot cops, having leaked rumors in advance to the larger press organizations that anarchists intended to target anyone with a video camera, a still camera, or taking notes, were hassling what press did show up. They surrounded marchers—this was an anti-war march, specifically—and awaited the expiration of their permit. The “ground noise and static” complied with most demands but grew antsy; cops gradually began issuing warnings of dispersal and the pending use of tear gas.

Locals caught in traffic were getting restless, too. “If they don’t break it up, I’m going to vote for McCain,” one joked, before I reminded him that he might want to roll his window up if the teargas came out.

Eventually, the “ground noise and static,” intent on not being intimidated into giving up their anti-war message, was being pushed out of the city center and guided in front of a public housing facility. The riot cops lobbed flash bang grenades into the courtyards and playgrounds of the buildings, and committed such attrocities as nabbing one young man, cuffing him, dousing him with pepper spray, and then releasing him. Approximately four hundred more arrests took place that night, symbolized inside the convention center—and throughout all major media representations of the events of that night—only by McCain’s momentary interruption.

Of course, this was two days after the same security forces had trained thousands and thousands of weapons on, and then arrested marchers in, the Poor People’s Economic and Human Rights Campaign. McCain’s “ground noise and static” message was clearly code a headsup that he intended to silence the economically disadvantaged.

 For the last year and a half, after the shut down of the magazine I ran Punk Planet, I’ve been uniquely positioned to write about economic censorship of free speech—something I documented carefully in Unmarketable (The New Press, 2007). When I was finally free of the rigors of periodical publishing, and on a break between national book tours, I went to Cambodia to write about governmental oppression.

However the swiftness with which the gathered national police forces, sheriffs offices, FBI, and national guards intending to protect the RNC squelched most forms of dissent was shocking, literally bringing to mind one night (as I wrote here earlier) the Khmer Rouge moving into Phnom Penh. And don’t overlook the structural similarities between the two historic moments either: both groups of dissenters were simply calling for a change in national leadership. 

I returned home exhausted. I can’t stop crying over the smallest moments. In a video I didn’t get the chance to see until today, one friend, beaten and pepper sprayed by cops, maniacally tells the camera—“they can’t stop me, I’ve still got one eye left!” The night before I left town, I went drinking with some of the videographers most targeted in the raids. “We finally shut this thing down!” they joked. (We followed this with the infamous protest chant, “What do we want? BEER! When do we want it? NOW.”)

That night I was punditing McCain’s acceptance speech on Free Speech TV [http://www.freespeech.org/], except I didn’t hear it because reports of more police brutality kept coming in. I was asked by Laura Flanders what I thought eight more years of this administration might look like, and I blanked and sputtered. Then I threatened to impale myself.

I won’t, though: I’ve still got one eye left. I’ll use it to scope out the ground noise and static, because I don’t want to forget what democracy looks like.