nypress.com
Signs of Life
by Alan Cabal
A certain mad hubris seems to have gripped the Power Elite lately,
what with the state of Illinois confiscating legally registered guns
from law-abiding citizens and Posse Comitatus safeguards tossed
down the old memory hole in the name of Homeland Security. It’s
like the opening of The Turner Diaries. The radical right is bubbling
with conspiracy theories and stockpiling guns, ammo, MREs and
water filtration systems. The right doesn’t march or demonstrate,
which is sad, because they tend to be a colorful bunch and all the
earliest warnings on groups like the IMF, WTO, CFR, the Trilats
and the Bilderbergers came from the right. Lyndon LaRouche was
the first to identify the IMF as a public menace, and the John Birch
Society was warning us about the CFR 40 years ago. The most
fascinating development in American politics recently has got to be
the unprecedented convergence of left and right in identifying as the
enemy the corporate sovereigns of the self-proclaimed New World
Order.
The 15,000 or so people who marched against the World Economic
Forum meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria last Saturday looked a lot
more diverse than I’d expected. I didn’t anticipate running into a
grizzled union man from Youngstown, OH, or a farmer from
Livingston, MT, marching with their wives and looking for all the
world like rural folk on their way to church. I found that quite
surprising, and I suspect there will be many more surprises ahead.
I headed up to Columbia University on Friday to check out the
atmosphere surrounding the workshops and planning sessions
there. There were no surprises. The college crowd fits very neatly
into the stereotype of the current state of the left: a lot of kneejerk
racist blather about the plight of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal;
economic utopians with grand schemes for redistribution of wealth;
the hopelessly tenacious Greens; various communist atavisms; and
the holier-than-thou posturing of the atrociously flatulent vegans. If I
can’t smoke in enclosed spaces, the least the authorities can do is
force vegans to take Beano or something, just to level the playing
field.
I noted with interest that the Spartacists had their little information
booth staffed by a couple of really butch women. These women had
that weird, kind of speedy intensity that you get from hardcore
religious fanatics and communists, and I consider it an indicator of
some sort of social progress that such a notoriously patriarchal
group as the Spartacists now has women in positions of public
authority. It is an endless source of wonder to me how people can
still believe in the viability of communism, but people have been
waiting for Jesus to come back for close to 2000 years, so it
shouldn’t really surprise me.
I found a fairly witty and clever bunch offering cool swag from
www.securethehomeland.com. They have t-shirts with the Office of
Homeland Security logo on the front and "Real patriots turn each
other in" written on the back, and I got a bunch of cool bogus OHS
stickers with "We have always suspected you" next to the logo. Their
website is both funny and informative. The Office of Homeland
Security is a creepy bureaucracy, and it isn’t going to go away. I’m
dubious about giving the government any additional funds or
authority to "protect" me without any sign of any kind of
accountability for what went wrong on 9/11. A lot of heads should
have rolled. I’m not inclined to believe that this government is any
more effective in protecting me now than it was when 19 towelheads
with boxcutters changed history, and I don’t think that the palliative of
pouring money on the problem is going to solve it.
The government does, however, exhibit considerable skill when it
comes to protecting our billionaires. The NYPD was out in force in
the days leading up to the march. Thursday it seemed like there was
a cop on every corner. I got down to 53rd and Park at 11 a.m. on
Saturday, forced into using an indirect and circuitous route by the
numerous street closures imposed by the cops. There was a rally of
maybe 1200 people penned uncomfortably into temporary
enclosures on the west side of Park from 54th down to 50th. I
couldn’t get a precise figure out of anyone, but it’s safe to say that
there were thousands of cops in the area. There were cheap, awful
loudspeakers blaring speeches into the crowd. The sound was so
horrible it was painful. It was impossible to pick out any more than a
few words from any given speaker, and it sounded very much like
they were auditioning Hitler imitators. I reached my threshold of
endurance when some half-witted minstrel-show Mumia groupie
started into some kind of mutant left-wing Southern Baptist rhyming
rant, whereupon I strolled off to find a drink.
On my way to the bar I ran into a small group of
counter-demonstrators waving the flag at 51st and Lexington. It
turned out that they were participants in the online forum at
www.freerepublic.com, a site dedicated to the idea of running our
government according to the Constitution, a once-popular notion
that has fallen into disrepute of late. I was stumped by their
opposition to a rally against the WEF. The Free Republic website
has numerous threads discussing the WEF, and the participants
seem fairly unanimous in their appraisal of the WEF as a major
threat to our Constitutional Republic. I guess they just couldn’t get
past the show of support for a cold-blooded cop-killer evinced by the
vegan antiwar crowd. They looked like meat-eaters to me.
As I rounded a corner onto Lexington Ave. I was swept up by the
head of a line of some 15,000 people marching on the Waldorf. It
was great. I was amazed at the range of types in the crowd and the
focus on the WEF. The march was a snapshot of America, and it
reminded me of the later phase of the Vietnam protest era, when it
began to seem like the whole country opposed the war. Sure, there
were self-righteous vegans and Mumia yahoos, but there were also
veterans and union guys with their families–mainstream Americans.
The cops were great, totally professional and scrupulously polite. I
saw three separate demonstrators carrying signs calling for more
pay for the NYPD, and the interactions between the demonstrators
and the cops were almost uniformly friendly. There were a couple of
incidents involving a small band of anarchist wannabes, but it only
amounted to a couple dozen arrests that day (there were more
later), which is pretty good for a crowd that large.
The farmer from Montana wouldn’t give his name. "You media
people have a way with twisting up what a fella says," he explained.
He and his wife appeared to be in their early 60s, and they most
definitely didn’t look like any kind of left-wing types. I asked them
why they were marching. "We voted for Pat Buchanan," the lady told
me. "And Ross Perot. We think American companies ought to keep
American jobs in America. We elect our leaders here, we don’t
need the WEF or the IMF or the UN dictating policy. And we sure
don’t need cheap flimsy clothes from sweatshops in China, which is
just about all you see in the stores these days." Her husband
interjected, "Look, a lot of these kids out here are just plain confused
about some things, like this open-borders nonsense, but they are
absolutely correct about this forum and these corporations. A nation
with no borders isn’t a nation at all. We have too many people out of
work here, we’re losing the family farms to big business, and our
manufacturing base up and took a slow boat to China. If we ever
have to fight a real war, we’re in some serious trouble."
I stuck around until the sun went down. The event was enormously
uplifting, a very pleasant surprise. It was a glimpse of an open,
democratic society. The possibility that a consensus among the
working and middle classes of this country could form and mobilize
against the various rapacious corporate conspiracies currently
looting the world’s economies is a very exciting idea. It seems like
an idea whose time has definitely come. |
