The Politics of Protest
On Saturday afternoon, I found myself sitting for what seemed like an interminable time in a line of traffic waiting to cross the intersection of Denny and Fairview. There was a police car with its lights on up ahead, so I craned my neck to see if there was some kind of an accident holding things up. Just then it crept into view, heralded by the beating of a kettle drum and the blare of noisemakers: a serpentine throng of people waving signs, shaking fists, hollering and pointing as they cantered slowly up Fairview Avenue toward the lakefront. It was The Protest.
Having been out of town for the week, I had not seen the inevitable signs and announcements, so I was caught unaware as to the time and place. As I made calculations of how to extricate myself from the traffic jam and find an alternate route to my destination, I thought fleetingly about parking the car and joining in the march. I hadn’t been in a “protest” since college, but the thought of the now-inevitable unprovoked and possibly unilateral attack on Iraq makes me sick and ashamed for my country. I’ve never felt so completely voiceless and powerless. Perhaps it was time to exercise my seldom-used right to assembly and add a body to the ranks of the visible dissenters.
But then of course came the second thoughts. The vast majority of the march was comprised of the “usual suspects” – the motley gang of professional protesters waving shopworn paper mache anti-globalism heads and “Free Mumia” banners; the folks with their “Zionism=Racism – Free Palestine Now!” placards; the anti-fish-farming people; the wannabe anarchists in their Seattle ’99 nostalgia gear. Unfortunately, this description isn’t malicious caricature by hostile corporate media: it really was the shape of the protest, at least what I saw of it here in Seattle. Disappointed, I stayed in my car and proceeded with haste toward my alternate route home.
It’s not my place to tell the marchers how and about what they should protest, of course. Everyone in that march was giving up their Saturday afternoon to express themselves politically on issues where there is little public discussion, and I acknowledge that their commitment confers authority over the tactics and agenda. I recognize also that a certain amount of coalition-building and spectacle is necessary to build a critical mass of participation such that the protest will achieve its goal of media coverage and attention. The hard left, shut out of mainstream dialogue, has mastered this technique of making itself heard, and appears satisfied with any attention at all, even if what gets through is, at best, the faintest echo of a coherent agenda.
The problem is, hardly anyone in America cares what the hard left thinks about anything, coherent or not. Their predictable opposition to everyone and everything and their clichéd chants and street theatre tactics make them easy to tune out. And while there are reasoned positions behind many of the issues they espouse, it is painfully clear to any observer that many of the participants in street-theatre events are motivated by personal issues and agendas that need not concern the rest of us (same, incidentally, as many right-wing activists). The character of the most fervent protests and protesters on hot-button issues (globalization, abortion, etc.) reveals in depressing detail how much of American politics these days is an outgrowth of junior-high clique rivalries and the irreducible hatreds among certain types of personalities, irrespective of whatever issue happens to be the subtext.
All of this makes it very hard for someone like me, who thinks that opposition to Bush’s senseless war policy is a common-sense mainstream issue, distinct and unrelated in any way to the laundry-list of concerns of the protestariat. I want to participate. I want to make my voice heard. But I have no desire or intention to carry baggage for a hodgepodge of malcontents who are using the noble cause of protest as a kind of group therapy to satisfy unmet needs for attention and adolescent rebellion, or, worse, for a hard-core of hateful revolutionaries whose platforms I find at least as objectionable as those of the administration.
Yes, yes, I know, if I don’t like it, I should go out an organize my own protest. The problem, beyond the practicalities, is that the crazy left has so totally appropriated the medium of the street march that they have almost consigned it to irrelevance as a means of expression. Any demonstration organized around a narrower opposition to Bush’s goals and tactics in Iraq in particular would immediately be co-opted and colonized by hardcore hangers-on and reduced to irrelevance by a media trained by years of covering kooks to trivialize all political spectacle. Thanks to the damage done by knee-jerk demonstrators in the 80s and 90s, it may take decades before the public street march (outside of union activities, which can control the character and behavior of their events) is a viable tactic in American politics again.
9:33:44 AM 
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