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October
1, 2002, 9:00 a.m. By Ross Douthat |
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hey almost
had me convinced.
It was supposed to be a banner weekend for the anti-globalization movement, with thousands of activists converging on Washington, D.C. to "shut down the city" during the International Monetary Fund's annual meeting. And on Saturday afternoon, I was in the thick of it, in the shadow of the Washington monument, surrounded by placards and puppets and leather-lunged protestors.
Two of them — my new friends Todd and Mike, both smiling, earnest sophomores at George Washington University — had regaled me for 20 long minutes with their tales of the horrors that would result from an American invasion of Iraq ... which segued into the horrors that America had visited on other hapless countries ... which became, in turn, a discussion of the atrocities that the IMF and the World Bank had committed, or encouraged, or allowed, all across the developing world.
By the time they finished talking, I was practically sold. Somewhere behind me, beyond the black-clad anarchists and the Radical Cheerleaders ("1-2-3-4, we don't want your racist war" they yelled, waving pom-poms and high-kicking), a man with a Bob Dylan rasp was on stage singing about the Sixties. A squad of D.C. cops, body-armored and stone-faced, roared by on motorcycles, and overhead I could hear the thup-thup-thup of a police helicopter. It was Seattle 1999 all over again, or Genoa 2001, or maybe even Chicago 1968. The whole world was watching, and I was primed — no, I was pumped for the revolution.
I just had one more question.
"So what would you do?" I asked. "What would you do, if you were put in charge tomorrow? What would you do to change the world?"
Todd looked at Mike. Mike looked at Todd.
"I'd abolish it," Todd said. "And then I'd . . ." He trailed off.
"Yeah, we'd abolish it," Mike said. "And then . . . and then things would be better."
Thirty years later, we're looking through bullet-proof glass, the singer crooned on. Led by a gun-slinging preppie with his head up his . . .
"Yeah," Todd finished. "Things would be better."
And maybe they would. But neither of my enthusiastic friends could quite explain why — and neither could the copy of the International Socialist Organization's paper that they pressed into my hands (it looks a lot like the New York Post, oddly enough). The drummers "jamming for justice" nearby couldn't explain it, either — and neither, disappointingly, could the wild-haired rocker who took over the stage shortly thereafter to complain we were "destructing the Earth … destructing the environment and the plants and the defenseless animals!"
"Mad Cow!" he bellowed. "Mad Cow rages against all that!"
I was confused — was "Mad Cow" disease actually a nefarious corporate plot? And then I realized that it was the name of his band.
Maybe the clannish anarchists, who wore bandannas over their faces and identified themselves by "protest names" like Scorpio and Otter, could have given me a better explanation. But they weren't talking.
It was that kind of weekend for the anti-globalizers. They expected 20,000 people, but maybe 5,000 showed up. They hoped to shut down the city, but after a rain-drenched Friday in which hundreds were arrested and D.C. went on with business as usual, the rest of the weekend trailed off into well-mannered sloganeering ("They say privatize, we say democratize!"). By Sunday , their antics had been bumped back to the Metro section of the Washington Post — this, a scant two years after the last anti-IMF rally had taken D.C. by storm, and finally given the anti-globalization movement the attention that they so loudly claimed to deserve.
The weekend's organizers wouldn't admit their failure, of course, preferring to blame the police for miscounting Saturday's crowds by a factor of, oh, ten thousand or so. But most of the people I talked to that sun-kissed Saturday admitted that yes, they had seen better protests.
It didn't help that organized labor, one third of the anti-globalization movement's supposed triple threat of "workers, students, and activists," largely stayed away. Maybe the unions were uncomfortable with the anti-American fervor that animated many of the protesters — after September 11, flag-burning and Amerika-bashing might be hard to justify to the AFL-CIO's rank and file. Or maybe they just didn't want to hang out with Scorpio and Otter all weekend.
Whatever the reason, in the unions' absence all that remained was a sea of students, activists and student-activists in long hair and shaggy beards, singing and dancing and eating granola (yes, there was a "granola stand" near the Washington monument). For a movement that claims to represent the oppressed, the sea of young, white, college-educated faces must have been a tad disheartening.
Even Ralph Nader, who addressed the crowd after Mad Cow's performance finally careened to a close, seemed somewhat diminished. Fumbling through a prepared text, he railed against corporate greed and corporate power, declared the end of democracy, ran down the list of global ills, demanded revolutionary change — but like Todd and Mike, he didn't seem to know what would come next.
"The genius of the Third World, not the IMF, " he cried thinly, "will save the Third World!"
It hardly seemed like a revolutionary program to me, but the motley crowd didn't mind. They yelled and hooted and waved their signs — Ghana's water not for sale . . . Bush is an insane, unelected maniac . . . Congress: Another Israeli-occupied territory . . .
From two blocks away, you could barely hear them.
— Ross Douthat is an editorial analyst for The Atlantic Monthly.