(repost - my first posting ran into a dk4 bug)
Living in the DC area is a mixed blessing. It was a lot more painful during the W years. I do have to give W and his wars credit for my evolution to the elite progressive status of Protester - the man got me out on the streets! For various reasons, I have a problem with hivemind actions, so protests were for me still uncomfortable. I chose to minimize my discomfort by participating as alt media, providing support for groups that were working to provide alternative media coverage. That meshed with my interest in video, and the meta-perspective of communicating progressive ideas constructively.
That also allowed me a detached perspective on protests - I could participate in them, without belonging to them. All of the post-WTO-Seattle protests were tagged as actions by communists, anarchists, the "black bloc", eco-terrorists, and so on. Post-9/11 the W admin made sure that there was always a strong security presence - hundreds of riot cops dressed for war, snipers on rooftops, command/control vans coordinating motorcycle cops, police cars, SUVs and so on. After 9/11, I drover regularly past manned Hummers with mounted machine guns protecting the Pentagon, newly installed Patriot missile banks, protective peripheral swarms of cops around the Capitol and White House. I followed the online discussion threads of the groups that were putting the protests together, and there was a lot of paranoia, mistrust, and inter-recrimination.
I'm sure this was partly par for the course, for progressive action-oriented groups. But also an easily exploitable wedge. A less-principled person than I could easily have trolled these initiatives painfully, either as a Defender of America, or as an Ambitious Consultant. Cheap. Given the stuff that's coming out now about UK police covertly penetrating eco-activist groups, Patriot Act-based surveillance and infiltration of peaceful US groups, and the explicit and deliberate violations of civilian/protestor rights in DC, it's obvious that a lot of powerful people were focussed on blunting/smothering/killing progressive protests against the WOT - Iraq, Afghanistan, Terrorism, Islam, and so on.
Hell, it was obvious then.
One of the core weaknesses of protest actions is message control. Send in a few people to act as trolls/spoilers, in cooperation with media bitches, and you can suck the oxygen out of any earnest, meaningful action. 5 people running a counter-protest with cool signs, 5 people who choose the right offensive/outrageous action, 5 people who start a fight in a crowd of 5,000, 5 people who hack an organizing meeting and turn it into an unpleasant, alienating experience for well-intentioned participants, while contaminating the moral authority of genuine leaders.
WHILE THE CAMERAS ARE ON THEM. Except for the last example, cameras count. Tainting/disillusioning a small group of people is easy. Doing it on a national scale requires cameras. Which is part of why I was interested in video media - I understood that a significant component of how national consensus was built was through video media, and I thought that I could participate meaningfully in that process.
I was wrong. I shot footage of protests, I documented police violence, I went to meetings and followed email threads, and really really wanted it all to mean something, BUT IT DIDN'T. We had been hacked before we started, and for all the crowds that the hard work of progressives brought to protests, it didn't mean anything. It barely hit the media, and when it did, it got equal time with those 5 troll/spoiler counterprotestors. Nuns got put in jail, hundreds were detained illegally, some fake blood got thrown in congress, but to my knowledge, no significant change was effected.
Which is why now is so awesome! People are standing up to tyrants and getting results! They're fighting and winning! Ok, not in America, but actually, that's even better. Since WW2, America has worked better as a dream, then it has in reality. And fine, Wisconsin, yes totally awesome, but I think that's an Egypt-inspired action. And it hasn't yet succeeded.
Point being, part of why now is working is that there isn't a sinister suppressive regime in power. There aren't snipers on the rooftops in Wisconsin, or black helicopters, or riot cops with shields and mace and so on. Part of the reason for that is the President of the United States, Barack Obama. I went to his inauguration, and it was a beautiful experience. I'm not perfectly happy with everything that's happened since, but the recent protests/actions inspired me to re-edit something I wrote about participating in the 2004 Inauguration protests, for perspective:
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After a few hours with a march, you adapt to it, acclimatize to a new community, to the flow of faces eyes bodies, the murmuring rumble of breath feet voices, the ripples of chants, the slow-rolling foot-pace of a superorganism, feelers reaching ahead and to the sides, swarm intelligence feeding into collective decisions. A protest march is a transcendence of individuality, groupthink, a cohesive decisionlessness.
I started within the mob, but it didn't offer me good video perspectives. I'm short, not much of a chanter, and I like my personal space. I was biking, which gave me freedom of movement, which the crowds of protestors curtailed, so I switched to the periphery of the march, moved inside the security perimeter, paced the mob as the police blunted and deflected their forays towards the center, the cozy core of patriots come to celebrate the Presidential Inauguration, Texans in tuxes and fur coats.
I wanted to catch the anticipated clash from the periphery, ideally get shots of the crowd breaking through the cordon towards me, into the empty streets around the inauguration. There were squads of police - motorcycle cops, bicycle cops, schools of police cars, metro busses blocking blocks and serving as detention units, adjusting and shifting to the mercurial flow of the march, anticipating, warding. They'd zoom past me, and then turn towards the march, set up a barrier, nudge the horde away from the center, from the boundaries around the inauguration, the parade from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.
One protest group had split off from the approved march, moving southeast from the official protest route down 16th St. towards Lafayette Square. I'd been coasting at the front of the main march, picking out good locations to catch the vanguard of police, and then the carnival crowd, moving past, had just set up at an overpass and was shooting video as the crowd flowed beneath me, dancers and drummers, pallbearers with cardboard coffins, when I got called from someone else on the video team - "The anarchists have split off, we're following them, heading towards Logan circle." Implicit was an anticipated thrill of violence, an expectation of a clash. Good footage.
I've been going to marches since 9/11, usually within the detached role of informal media - of the event, but not within the event - framed by the device of the camera, the broadcast, the concept of audience. The crowd creates, and I record. And what do they create? What does the audience consume? Speeches, signs, a mobile human density. There is a visual appropriateness to coffins, black cardboard draped with flags, and so there are coffins. A visceral thrill to the message "Fuck Bush", and there it is. Or "Buck Fush". Or "Bush is a Motherfucker". Instinctive to the human race is an appreciation for attention - constantly we refine and remodulate our aesthetics, filtering out the cliche, expanding tweaking evolving, searching out the new bounce toy that will bop and spin across the collective minds, catch the camera's eye, jump to the internet, ripple out across our conceptual community, across the world...
The anarchists were distinguished by black - black boots, black jeans, black clothes, facecloths covering the lower halves of their faces, pierced metal, wiry tattered blonde-dyed hair, painted messages, red banners, patches and tatters - an evolving look, United Anarchists of Benetton, a polished grit to them, the art of well-washed, well-worn jeans, the studied casual contempt for dress. Did the facecloths, the intifada scarves, really protect them from biometrics, from that scattered array of remote cameras, the pepper spray, the tear gas, the sniper perches on the roofs above? Irrelevant. They walked as a crowd, and the crowd walked with them. The chants came from their pace -
"whose streets?
OUR streets
Whose Streets?
OUR STREETS!"
Scouts ahead, and on the peripheries, along with medics and legals. I was outside of their loop - I could follow their moves, but didn't know their plan. Was there a plan? Was there an opposition? Did they know what they were fighting? There was a reality of movement, from which tactics, decisions could be extrapolated. The group had a goal or goals, in theory, and the authorities had a goal or goals as well. Both groups composed of individuals, of evershifting evanescent whims and desires, fears and ideals. Hive tactics. Social instincts. I'm fascinated by eusociality, and social insects, collective organisms, composed of individuals, individual actions and decisions, and that's what I saw in play that day.
I called it right, caught the spark, the money shot, climbed up on a New Jersey barrier two blocks away from nothing, between the anarchists and the inauguration, at the last possible point before the anarchists could be deflected into irrelevance. They stopped and milled, uncertain but not aimless, the crowd still containing an unresolved tension, unwilling to turn away, unsated, wavering on the crumbling brink of that Now-Glory, of a Story for the Future, and quite honestly, now that I'd followed them this far, I wanted it too, wanted something, viscerality, the blood of a fight, the epic momentness of an Event.
The woman standing beside me on the New Jersey barrier saw it start at the same moment I did, and while I zoomed and stabilized, bracing the camera against my chest, adjusting the viewfinder, trying to still the wobble of my breath and blood-beat, she started sobbing - loud moans, disconsolate determined wails, an eerie tempo to her fear as the phalanx of police cars drove at the wall of people, too fast I thought, but I was filming, detached. The event was beyond me, outside. My role was to frame the shot, and to suspend whatever else would distract from the frame. Beside me, the woman was wailing, and I considered for a moment the audio, trying to get her to stop, and realized that it wasn't worth the effort, that the visuals were more important, and that her audio might accent the scene.
The crowd faltered, pull-crumpled away from the attacking cars. I was tight in with the camera, but watching wide-eyed, trying to see what was going to move next. If anyone did get hit or run down, the camera would catch it. The woman beside me crescendoed - her despair incongruent as she balanced on the barrier beside me. Her sobs emphasized her disconnectedness, the empathetic detachment of her panic - nothing was threatening her directly.
She's been through this before, I thought, had maybe been within it, the charge of the police, the swarming panicked skitter - like ants, when you roll over a log, the audio tumult of a mob, acrid with sweat and rage and fear, adrenal. Or maybe she'd never seen it before. Her fear was seperate from herself - instead of running away, or looking away, she was caught, paralyzed - trapped watching, audience as victim. The cops waded in with helmets and riot shields and clubs, vicious on a faltering wave.
I watched her beside me with quick flicks from the corner of my eye, while tracking the tumult in front of me - white long-sleeved shirt, taut brown pony tail, slightly taller than me, standing with a woman's slight-curved arabesque, smooth open face, no tears. The front ranks of the march split, then merged around the police cars, bursting inwards and pulling to the sides with a breathless, maybe-imagined voice of shock as the cars broke their ranks, and then rage surged through the crowds lining the sidewalks, plastic bottles arcing through the air at the police, snowballs, sandwiches.
The boundaries crumbled, coalesced as an arena, like a gladiator match in the Colosseum - clots of cops at the center holding charging against groups, grabbing people. An officer got knocked down, rolled and picked himself up, chasing, raging, ineffectual. The crowd roared, a scurrying darting panic, the police with clubs out, swinging, feet wide-braced, shoulders wide-hunched forwards, as if riding horses, mouths wide open, in that adrenal suck of aggression, of combat.
I zoomed out, got the wide shot, tracking the raging officer, the tangled clot of police and anarchists, still not absorbing what I was filming, just scanning the viewfinder's frame, while watching the wider scene, following the flow of the action. The cars had broken through the protest line 200 feet away, but within seconds the clash lapped up against the barrier we were standing on. I stood calm on my New Jersey barrier within the panicked press of a suddenly brutal game of red rover, kids breaking past us, flowing towards calmer pockets, others jitter-bursting into the arena, bouncing off the gladiators, the riot cops, pressing and surging.
The woman was still scream-sobbing beside me - I wanted to explain her, explain the audio to the future audience of the video, considered turning the camera on her, and suddenly felt viciously distasteful of my indifference to her suffering. I braced the camera in my left hand, still shooting the crowd, and started rubbing her shoulder with my right, a half embrace. She didn't respond, back hunch-tensed, sobbing, distant like an animal, a toddler, her eyes wide-watching as the arena in front of us cleared, as the cops asserted their territory, still sway-swaggering with a half-controlled rage, concealing their desperate bluff of fear within a resolute commitment to escalation. They were more attached to the dignity of this patch of asphalt than the scraggling streaks of the anarchist crowd, which wavered and faded, coalesced towards the periphery.
"Everything's ok, Everything's ok" I chanted to her "Everything's fine", and she just kept sobbing, while I wondered why, exactly, with snipers and copters overhead, within a militarized city zone, breathing the faint rake of pepper spray, as police bristled and charged in front of me, as people screamed, ran, panicked, stood, fought, waves cresting and dropping, in that incoherent irrational naturalness at the core of a crowd, the unvoiced communal understanding of fear and self - fear of others, and sense of the self of others, even as the self amplifies, accelerates with fear and empathy - why exactly, did I think that everything was fine. She didn't stop screaming.
Fifteen minutes later, I was wandering within a strange mix of protestors and celebrants - fur coats and black masks, protest signs and flak jackets. The anarchists had broken the perimeter, and now we all were wandering together, strangely civil together. I later sent my footage of what I believed was overt and egregious police violence to an independent media video group, figuring that it would be useful documentation for civil rights lawsuits. 6 months later, I realized that they might not even have viewed it, hadn't shared it with any other groups. This was before Youtube was a strong presence.
I still work for the good, but don't much believe in crowds. I don't go to protests expecting much but meeting friends. The last month of actions has embodied everything that I used to believe that protests could do, and it won't take much to get my lazy cynical butt back in play...