-
You Say You Want a Constitution
By Nation contributors
The last time I read the US Constitution all the way through was almost fifty years ago, when I was a student at Swarthmore College. My roommate Marc Merson and I were at work on a one-act play (United We Stood); its premise was that an English literature professor had stumbled on the fact that the founding fathers had inadvertently signed the wrong document. (Patrick Henry fell in a beer vat at a party the night before the signing and misplaced the original.) The document they signed had a different ratification requirement and as a result, the Constitution was unconstitutional! The problem of the play: Should the professor reveal his finding to the world, risking all the chaos that would cause, or should he hide the truth?
I won't tell you the ending but I will tell you that when Bobby Handman called on behalf of People for the American Way to ask whether I would join Kathleen Turner, Floyd Abrams, James Naughton, Roger Rosenblatt, Richard Gere, Judge Jack Weinstein, Ossie Davis, Betty Friedan and others in a reading of the Constitution at Cooper Union's Great Hall on the third day of the Republican convention, I said yes, absolutely.
My hope, as I explained to Roger Rosenblatt in the green room before the reading, was to get the Fifth Amendment. No, stupid, said Rosenblatt: You're not supposed to take it, you're supposed to read it.
(0) CommentsSeptember 2, 2004
-
A Stage for 9/11 Grief
By Nation contributors
"I think this commission should point fingers." So said a bereaved family member of a September 11 victim in response to 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste's plea on the first day of hearings that the proceedings not "point fingers." That indignant quote was just one of many dramatized in Testify, a short reading of moving excerpts from the 9/11 commission hearings and the summary of the 9/11 commission report.
Testify was compiled and directed by Tomi Tsunoda of Brooklyn and performed by her theater company, breedingground, as part of the Unconvention, a theatrical response to the RNC. I went to see Testify just after Bush delivered his speech on Thursday night. (While the timing may have added poignancy to the subject it probably hurt attendance as the majority of likely audience members were either out protesting or home.)
Tsunoda said she chose the project in order to bring the wealth of information contained in the 9/11 transcripts to people who otherwise might never see it--especially New Yorkers. While Tsunoda and the performers read the quotes straight, rather than attempting to impersonate the speakers, they managed to convey the fury and frustration of the 9/11 survivors and family members through their choice of evocative passages. For example, a trader from Cantor Fitzgerald, who was in the elevator when the first plane hit and was severely burned by a fireball and hot jet fuel, said of his dead colleagues: "They can no longer speak for themselves and I am left with the unchosen task of speaking for them. But neither they nor I have a choice."
(0) CommentsSeptember 6, 2004
-
Hot Button Protest
By Nation contributors
Damned billboards! Former Mayor Koch posed avuncular and jesterlike next to the cuddly Bronx Zoo elephant, telling us New Yorkers that "The Republicans are Coming" so we should "Make Nice." This went on all summer but enough must have been enough, because one morning not long before the convention I woke up and said, "Buttons!" I googled and found a place that would do 2,500 for $700, quick. The slogan came to me without thinking --
NYC to RNC: Drop Dead.
(I tried it on friends. They said locals would get the 1975 allusion, when Washington refused to bail out a bankrupt Gotham and the tabloids here ran headlines that said "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Here everyone would know that my button's curse is a venerable New York wisecrack. As for those who took "drop dead" literally, they'd be out-of-towners, including, mostly, the Republicans). I harrassed my kids into teaching me some Photoshop and came up with a decent graphic. The plan was to sell them at a dollar each untill I recouped the $700. Then sell more for the cause. Or what the hell, just give them away.
(0) CommentsSeptember 3, 2004
-
The Hue and Cry of Still We Rise
By Nation contributors
As Still We Rise: A Poor People's March for Justice and Equality rose up in Union Square, moved at an aching pace across 15th Street to Eighth Avenue, and made the northward turn to its destination at the gates of the RNC, I wondered about the exact nature of the battle to which we were marching.
The march was comprised of a varied group, one that might be called diverse if you are feeling optimistic. A brief roll call of regiments present would first confirm the stated goals of the event, which was sponsored by "a coalition of over 38 of the strongest community based organizations working in low-income communities on welfare, immigration, AIDS/healthcare, housing/homelessness and criminal justice issues throughout New York City. The march will raise the voices and issues affecting poor New Yorkers."
The earnest calls of those voices were loud indeed: the contingent from Housing Works rolled a wheelchair-bound bass drum at its head; Mothers on the Move were consistent in their chant of "We're fed up, can't take no more!" The children of FUREE, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, held their banners high. But as I moved through the ranks, and alongside them, such unity of purpose proved elusive among the rear guard.
(0) CommentsSeptember 3, 2004
-
Does a Pink Slip Make You a Girlie Man?
By Nation contributors
The 8 million jobless Americans have been invisible this week at the Republican National Convention, since it seems only girlie men would dwell on such an unpleasant subject. But a little after 8 am on Wednesday, they appeared out of nowhere along Broadway, in an "unemployment line" organized by the AFL-CIO and People for the American Way that stretched for three miles from Wall Street up to 34th Street. Five thousand people registered online to participate in the action--organized entirely electronically--and received their block assignments by e-mail the day before. At the appointed time, they suddenly congregated and stepped into a single-file line, facing north, their pink slips held aloft. From my vantage point at Duane and Broadway, just north of City Hall, it was pink as far as the eye could see.
Behind me stood Yvons Carriotte, 35, a former Sheridan Hotel bell captain laid off after 9/11, who has been surviving since on part-time work, driving a school bus four hours a day in eastern Pennsylvania. A Haitian immigrant and father of a 5-year-old son, Carriotte's been without pay all summer while school's out, but since he technically has a job, he was turned down for unemployment benefits. A block and a half north stood Kelie Bowman, 25, a print photo technician who's been laid off from two jobs in the past year and a half. She, too, is eking out an existence without unemployment benefits, because her last boss successfully challenged her claim. Nearby stood a reporter whose wife is unemployed and a film production assistant who's been "between jobs" for months. At 8:31 am, the block captains said thanks, and the line evaporated as mysteriously as it had appeared.
That afternoon at 4 pm, some 25,000 of the employed held a gathering of their own, a rally sponsored by the New York Central Labor Council just south of Madison Square Garden that was characterized by lots of girlie talk of the uninsured, the underpaid and, yes, the unemployed. In perhaps the most multiracial protest of the week, Asian electricians, Latino janitors, African- American transit workers, Caribbean homecare workers, and white bricklayers with biceps the size of Dick Cheney's head sang the "Star-Spangled Banner" and lustily chanted "Bush must go." "Inside Madison Square Garden, delegates are painting a picture of an America that's prosperous, caring and sharing," said AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. "We're here to say that America only exists for the privileged and the wealthy." He promised that the federation would work around the clock for the next sixty-two days to mobilize the union vote. Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, was introduced by girlie man James Gandolfini, who said, "I can't tell you how mad I am that these people are in my city. I can't tell you how mad I am that it took George Bush four days to get here after 9/11," a frustration that was echoed by the leaders of city unions, such as transit-worker head Roger Toussaint, whose members "worked the pile" in the months after the attacks.
(0) CommentsSeptember 2, 2004
-
Women Against Bush: One Message, Many Messengers
By Nation contributors
You know there's mad internal politics going on when NOW's classic "Keep Abortion Legal" signs are conspicuously missing at Saturday's "March for Women's Lives NYC" and Planned Parenthood organizes a Pub Crawl smack during NOW's "Code Red" rally in Central Park Wednesday night.
With only four days to distract the media away from the GOP and toward the issues (and the costumes), it makes some sense that the gazillion die-ins, ring-outs, and blocs of all sorts are happening all at once, but the overlapping feminist/pro-choice events were confusing to more than myself.
There was the Planned Parenthood march on Saturday, the NARAL rally on Tuesday and the NOW rally on Wednesday. "Is the Planned Parenthood march feeding into the UFPJ march?" emailed a friend and assignment editor at one of the major networks. Her mixing up of the two marches--one Saturday, the other Sunday--was understandable. Why wasn't the pro-choice march happening in conjunction with Sunday's march? Or at least during the RNC along with all the other side marches and rallies? And what was going on Wednesday? There were so many questions. "We wanted to own the day," PPNYC's Roger Rathman tells me of the decision to march over the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday. A "separate" rally, he says, "would give us the advantage of having a day to ourselves and not get embroiled in blade-of-grass politics."
(0) CommentsSeptember 2, 2004
-
Rage Against the Big Media Machine
By Nation contributors
The TV news networks knew that the protests in New York would be a story. They may not have known that they themselves would become part of that story.
On Tuesday afternoon, with virtually no publicity beforehand, a few hundred boisterous demonstrators gathered in front of Fox News headquarters in Midtown, chanting "Shut up Fox," "Fox Hates Freedom," and "Racist, Sexist, Antigay; Rupert Murdoch, Go Away." The "Shut-Up-A-Thon," organized by Code Pink, attracted dozens of riot-equipped police and drew a large crowd inside the protected Fox courtyard, including a chuckling "Big Story" host John Gibson. Bill O'Reilly, Fox's lead political propagandist and chief inspiration for the shut up imperative, did not make an appearance, though rumor had it that he was taping on the ground floor studio during the festivities. New York's local Fox station showed up to cover the action. "I don't make the decisions," the cameraman said. "I just do what I'm told."
The next day, a few thousand people assembled for an anti-corporate "March on the Media," organized by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). First, at CBS, protesters chanted, "Two, Four, Six, Eight, Separate the Press and State," haranguing the network for devoting a mere one percent of coverage to antiwar protests in the run-up to the Iraq war. As the demonstrators marched down 6th Avenue toward CNN, the white-suited Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping led a public recitation of the First Amendment. The crowd reached Fox HQ around 8:30 PM, just as O'Reilly was interviewing Bono on the big screen. "Every one of us, despite what we work on, has got to become a media activist," said Code Pink's Andrea Buffa.
(0) CommentsSeptember 2, 2004
-
Iraq Vets Protest; A New York Welcome for Delegates
By Nation contributors
Arriving at Ground Zero yesterday afternoon, as a group led by the War Resisters League gathered to begin a sidewalk procession to Madison Square Garden, I encountered some unexpected protesters: National Guardsmen in full uniform. They were members of Iraq Veterans Against the War; formed just over a month ago, the group already has forty members, including some soldiers who haven't yet returned from Iraq.
"I saw bombed-out cities, and entire towns on fire," said Michael Hoffman, who served as a lance corporal in Iraq beginning in March 2003. "Some of my friends lost people in their unit, who died in their arms." A number of WRL marchers planned to engage in civil disobedience after the procession, a "die-in." Hoffman and his fellow veterans wanted badly to take part, but couldn't risk arrest. If they went to prison, the new organization would suffer. "There are still so few of us," he said. "Someone has to answer all the e-mail, all the calls."
The WRL had gotten permission for their procession from Billionaire-in-Chief Michael Bloomberg himself. It was a quiet, peaceful crowd, but before the march from Ground Zero even began, two hundred of the participants had been trapped in a bright orange net, arrested and charged with "obstructing governmental administration."
(0) CommentsSeptember 1, 2004
-
What's A Protest Without a Bicycle?
By Nation contributors
There's a disco ball speckling light across the high ceiling of the Times Up! HQ on Houston Street but it hardly has the feel of a ballroom or even a bike shop. "Were you arrested?" reads an easel board inside. "Have you been debriefed?" For the bulk of August, Times Up!, a pro-cycling organization, was using the space to organize "Bike National Convention" and fix busted old cycles, which were then given to medics and legal observers and loaned to out-of-towner protesters. But since Friday, about 400 cyclists have been arrested, and the space is now an embassy of sorts. "These are our people," says Bill Sims, who founded the group 18 years ago, through sagging eyelids and taut vocal chords. "We need to help them get their bikes back, we need to help get charges dropped and we need to get a class-action lawsuit going."
"The cops are singling out cyclists," says a similarly exhausted Matthew Roth. "These are spite arrests." He's just spent 23 hours at the toxic bus depot-cum- jail at Pier 57 and is now the group's impromptu media coordinator. He confesses that he's never organized a press conference.
Police had promised a crackdown on Friday's unpermitted Critical Mass ride, but an unprecedented 5000-plus showed up anyway. Critical Mass happens the last Friday of every month in cities throughout the world, and in NYC, cops have historically been accommodating--Roth can only remember seven arrests over the last four years. The swarm of cyclists, usually in the hundreds, unapologetically holds up traffic along an improvised route to make a point about air pollution and congestion and US dependence on oil, yelling to pissed off drivers: "We're not blocking traffic, we ARE traffic!" and, "If you were riding a bike, you'd be home by now!"
(0) CommentsSeptember 1, 2004
-
Watch Them Spin: Inside the DNC War Room
By Nation contributors
Seven blocks south of Madison Square Garden, at the Democratic National Committee offices, DNC chair Terry McAuliffe indignantly compared Republican constituents handing out "Purple Heart Band-Aids" to ridicule John Kerry's war record to the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "Both of these things happened because the tone was set at the top," McAuliffe said. "The Republican leadership must have been aware--there were 250 Band-Aids passed out."
McAuliffe later took pains during a question and answer session to strike down the notion Democrats are allowing Republicans to set the tone and subject of the debate. But as quick as the Democratic spinners were to express disgust at the amount of ink spilled on questions about John Kerry's war record, they still spent the first fifteen minutes of their press conference on Tuesday responding to them.
Around 80 staffers and a constant flux of volunteers (about 400-500 went through training) work the Democratic National Committee's Rapid Response office, the headquarters for all things officially Democratic (though not paid for by the Kerry campaign) in the city this week. In the "war room," rows of staffers sit behind laptops, monitoring five TVs tuned to the convention. Staffers schedule TV interviews and spit out press releases. Plan pressers. Get people to pressers. Rangel at noon at Grant's Tomb. Who's driving Terry McAuliffe? The site (www.democrats.org/ mna/) delivers off-the-cuff sounding updates, on such topics as the deployment of volunteers dressed as Republican-themed cartoon characters. "we have once again deployed the Super Zeroes. All five, Enron Ed, Hal E. Burton, Lt. G.W. Bush, Miss Leadership, and the Un-Credible Hulk are roaming the streets, looking for their GOP buddies and ready to take a bite out of the Big Apple!"
(0) CommentsSeptember 1, 2004
- Atrios
- Arts and Letters Daily
- The Caucus
- Campus Progress
- Crooks and Liars
- The Daily Gotham
- Daily Kos
- Echidne of the Snakes
- Ezra Klein
- FAIR
- Feministe
- Feministing
- Firedoglake
- Glenn Greenwald
- Gothamist
- In these Times
- Hendrik Hertzberg
- Huffington Post
- Hullabaloo
- Matthew Yglesias
- Media Matters
- Mother Jones
- My DD
- New York Review of Books
- Openleft
- Pam's House Blend
- Pandagon
- Political Wire
- The Progressive
- RaceWire
- Real Clear Politics
- Roberto Lovato
- Romenesko
- Swing State Project
- Talking Points Memo
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Tapped
- Tech President
- Tompaine
- The Washington Note
- Utne Reader
- Wonkette
- ZNet
RSS