[Imc] Inaguration Day... One reporter's opinion

[Danielle Chynoweth]

This is from my friend Ezra who attended the DC protests.  It's an on the
ground report.
-- danielle

-------------------------

thought I'd write a bit about the inaguration while it's all pretty fresh in
my mind.  I was very excited about going to and protesting this year's
coronation of King George II, since I didn't really know how many protesters
would be there, what people would try to do, and what the police response
would be like, etc.  So for those who were seeing it all on the news, here's
what it looked like at ground level:
First, it was really hard to estimate how many protesters there actually
were, certainly in the tens of thousands, possibly a hundred thousand or
more.  There seemed to be protesters everywhere-- in the parts of the city I
saw, those who were there to protest the inaguration outnumbered those there
to celebrate by a large majority.  This could mean that 1) most people who
came to washington came to protest, not to celebrate, or 2) that the powers
of social
control managed to effectively isolate the protesters from the revelers.  At
this point, I honestly don't know which was true.  There was a lot of energy
there, folks of all different ages and races and lots of great signs-- "A
thousand points of light and we got the dim one," lots of great chants:
"President bush watch your back; anti-asian, latino, black" and the like.
There was a great variety of issues being championed, from Mumia and the
death penalty to drilling in the artic, lots of anti-Ashcroft signs and
slogans. There was a loud and sizable contingent of new Black Panthers, and
lots of college kids playing homemade drums and dancing.  There was a
contingent of "black-block" anarchists, who I heard managed to get into a
scuffle with the police, although I wasn't around to see it.

There were also lots of morons in cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats, big hair
and fur coats stompin' around-- i can't believe they are the folks gonna be
runnin' this country now.  Plus there were tons and tons of police, more
than I had ever seen in one place.  Along the "parade" route, there was a
policeman every six feet, with a marine staggered in between every cop.
Where the protesters had amassed along the route, the police stood in a
solid line, six cops deep.  The roofs of the neighboring buildings were
covered with SWAT snipers.  After wandering, drumming, dancing, chanting,
and eventually just standing in the cold rain for hours, the inagural
"parade" eventually went by, and we all got to hurl insults and make obscene
gestures at our new leader.  As Bush rolled past the part of the parade
where I was standing, the crowd was heartily chanting "Gore got more! Gore
got more!"  The parade was really lame and seemed to consist mostly of
police cars and military vehicles, with the occasional important government
type in a limo or SUV.  King Bush II, the wimp that he was, rode through the
protester part of the parade in his limo, with the windows rolled all the
way up.  Cheney, who came along a few minutes (and about 1000 police cars
later) at least kept his window down.
So in the end, I don't know if we accomplished anything, really.  The
coronation, I'm sorry to say, seemed to go off without a hitch.  I knew we
weren't going to be able to stop it, but I had at least hoped to throw a bit
more sand in the gears, to disrupt the ceremony a bit more.  It felt like
they were able to push all of the protesters in one place, where we could
wave our signs at each other pose no threat to the illegitimate transfer of
power going on in the city.  In Serbia, a supposedly "un-democratic" country
that we are at war with, when a politician tried to cook the election
results and assume office illegally, hundreds of thousands of protesters
overran Belgrade and refused to leave until Milosevetch resigned.  In this
country, we have a history and political tradition of protest-- it was
satisfying to assemble with so many like-minded citizens in the nations
capital and yell insults at our "elected" leaders, and the cops mostly kept
their distance and everything was mostly peaceful.  But that same political
tradition means that even a protest as noisy and energetic as this one poses
no real threat to the political elite, so that we can all vent off some
steam and then go home happy and malleable.  So in the end, it was
encouraging to see so much energy and creative resistance, and to see that
there are at least 100,000 people in the country who see our incoming regime
as illiegimate-- but we really needed about 2 million people here.
Hopefully the Greens are right when they say that a far-right regime will
wake up and radicalize the population.  I hope so, otherwise, we're in for
some dark times.

Anyways, sorry for the long rant.  I'm in a bit of a media black hole here
(no tv or newspapers, very slow internet), so I have no idea what sort of
press the protest got or if indeed it got any.  If you've read this far,
please let me know what you have seen or heard in the news during the last
few days.

Don't let the bastards get you down...
--Ez--
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