Column: Protesters' Tactics Drain Credibility
21st Century Protesters Fail To Make Waves In Bogus Battle Of Los Angeles
Mass arrests and a massive police response to demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles topped national headlines this week, sending a frenzied jolt of excitement through the media and an indifferent shrug through the convention floor.
To look outside the Staples Center arena and the LAPD Rampart precinct house, one would think that Mayor Richard Daley's bloodthirsty zombie had been resurrected to stage a fascist coup in the City of Angels and start napalming Cambodia.
Live Internet video showed the real-time footage of masked "black bloc" rioters storming barricades, scaling fences and hurling rocks at police after Monday night's Rage Against the "Sony-Signs-Our-Paycheck" Machine concert. The police, of course, responded on horseback, with truncheons and tear gas billowing. As in Philadelphia, protesters and the ACLU accuse police of over-reaction and abuse.
But these are not automatons put in place to protect the elite. These are working-class Joes sent to enforce "public safety." They take all the heat -- accused of being too lax, as in the NBA championship riots and the New York Central Park attacks, or too strong, as in Philly, Seattle and now L.A.
Who Deserves This Abuse?
Try standing in 90-degree heat for 12 hours in a gas mask and flak jacket while being pelted with rocks and glass and see if you don't get the urge to thump a few dreadlocks.
I still can't help but think that if the Portland Trail Blazers hadn't poured out their innards on the floor of the Staples Center back in May, a catastrophe which set in motion the chain of events that led to berserk Laker fans torching police cruisers, the militarism of the LAPD wouldn't be so overbearing. But then again, this is a town that really can't go more than a year without a good barn-burning mutiny anyway.
This mishmash of knee-jerk demonstrators will ultimately fail to garner the attention span -- let alone the support -- of the average American voter for the primary reason that there is no unifying thread or alliance to one political cause or ideology.
Some Kind Of Anarchists
Since the Seattle WTO riots of late 1999, loosely affiliated protest groups have been described as an anti-corporate "anarchy movement." Most of the press -- and the protesters themselves -- fail to see the inherent fallacy implied by this definition. If they really were anarchists, they wouldn't hold meetings and rallies, now would they? The same goes for the amorphous goals espoused by the simple-minded thugs bent on taking down an economic system that has in actuality created the most prosperous, healthy and educated society in human history.
The sentiments expressed on topics ranging from animal rights to police corruption to more bike lanes are fragmented and vague. It's also unconvincing coming from a crowd that craftily uses the American principle of free speech while decrying this nation as a bastion of oppression and brutality. Throw your little fits in front of the Beijing police department and see how much they let you get away with.
Wednesday night, after protesting the "racist, sexist" Rampart division of the LAPD, rabble-rousers began denouncing the federal case against Wen Ho Lee, the Asian-born Los Alamos scientist, a case borne of national security secrecy. The case is a political football, being handled by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Justice Department. Not quite a story that will be resolved by shouting slogans and raising irate fists of rage.
Does one need any more evidence that these people have nothing better to do?
Sorry, Wrong Decade
The civil rights marches of the '60s worked because they gave a voice to the then-voiceless. Marching in the street was necessary in a much bigger world, where the metaphorical public soapbox didn't reach so high. The will of the people was expressed through a common goal in the simplest way they knew. The absence of bandanna-wearing kids with anarchy T-shirts and a knack for breaking things didn't hurt, either.
It is illogical to try and equate activism then and now. Every individual who is even semiliterate has access to the most powerful media outlet ever seen. You go marching in the streets now, and the only thing that happens is that you get pelted by rubber bullets and then thrown in jail. This by itself does not generally result in social change.
Protests against the war in Vietnam, whether right or wrong, again showed that mass demonstrations could gain the attention of the powerful. But here was the single-issue cause that could unite a generation.
The cries of "global corporate oppression," however, have failed to galvanize a constituency, and ring hollow in the midst of such a prosperous society. History has taught us that social movements that start out fragmented are doomed to fail.
According to an article in the Weekly Standard by Matt Labash, there's word on the street that some local homeless advocates have taken to videotaping protesters -- to document who's who and try and avoid a police backlash against those on the street, long after the hordes of righteousness have fled the battlefield.
But they know on which side their bread is buttered.
"They don't know what the freak they're doing, all the well-meaning college kids," Ted Hayes, who runs an L.A. homeless encampment, says. "If you have mass arrests, tear gas and s--- all up and down the street, (the activists) will leave on Aug. 18, go back to college, and become an executive one day. We homeless people are left in the street being criminalized ... These are a bunch of white privileged kids pissed off at something, and they don't even know what about."
Hayes hits the nail on the head. Activists will say that they come from all walks of life, and that is probably true. But the fact remains that there is a chasm between individual causes and the umbrella chant of ending corporate dominance filled only by ideology. And it is an ideology rooted more in self-righteousness than anything else. It's easy to be indignant about the death sentence of a cop killer when you don't have to actually put your life on the line every day to protect people who want you dead, or live with the grief of a wife who has to continually relive the facts of her story.
It's easy to complain about workers' rights when you don't have to spend all of your time actually working.
Paradise Lost
Change is not the goal, though. The goal is the false hope of a idealistic Utopia, the same vision that has doomed idealists for centuries."It is the idea of returning to an earthly paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice," ex-radical David Horowitz says in Front Page Magazine. "It is the enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. ... The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved (is what) makes the believers so self-righteous. For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal -- 'social justice' -- is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest ... their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. 'Social justice' for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a restructuring of human nature and of society itself."
Granted, many people feel alienated by a political process dominated by big money and corporate interests. But can we really leave it up to the puppets to change the system? I've always found the best results to come from within. Some call it subversion, some call it selling out.
Activists shout about "direct action," meaning protests and confrontation, but where are they when it actually comes to doing something for a cause? Racist police? Join the force. Corporations trashing the planet? Grab a mop and get to work. Plant a tree for Che.
The Internet has given an outlet to anyone with anything to say. Of course, most Web sites don't, but that is hardly the point. When individuals learn to harness their own abilities, there is no limit to the change that they can accomplish if that's their cup of meat. The DIY (Do-It-Yourself) ethic means more than "organizing" and screaming into a bullhorn.
But that goes far beyond the point of the temper tantrums that we are witnessing in L.A. Solving complex problems is hard. Whining about them is easy.
Editor's note: David Krough is an editor at Channel6000.com in Portland, Ore., and writer of 's Web Site of the Week feature. The views expressed in this article are his own, so don't blame us.
