Hot Button Protest

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.

I hadn't been in business since Girl Scout cookies, and there was lots to learn. Late in August, after I pinned buttons on a canvas bag and gazed eagerly at people on the subway, a few forked over a dollar. But when I didn't gaze--when someone bought one and then we started chatting, for instance--that's when other people swarmed, even asked for multiple buttons. I mentioned this to real vendors and they told me about shills. I tried to recruit my kids but they were embarrassed.

I also learned I wasn't the only one with micro-enterprise urges. Near the black cube by Astor Place, a 28-year-old drummer and music therapist named Brendan Ormsby was selling homemade CDs in which the president confesses the evil of his war effort. It's a computer cut-and-paste job, of course, but it shows how cut-and-pasted Bush's words are, and Brandon said the product was moving well at $5 a pop, days before the convention started. Blocks away, a fast-talking guy who said he was a lawyer hawked anti-Bush shirts, the proceeds intended for some political-investigative-DVD group on the West Coast. Stickers with tart declarations, upended pachyderms and slashed "W's" were everywhere in the East Village, too, often downloaded from the internet but sometimes made from scratch.

By Saturday, the day before the big United for Peace and Justice event, protest capitalism was riotous. A Latino guy in Williamsburg had made 50 Tee-shirts, $20 per, on a whim. An apple-cheeked girl with big, bare shoulders competed with him just around the corner, with a similar story of impulse, ire and creativity. During the otherworldly bell ring-in by the WTC, a button vendor who looked like Mr. Natural scolded me for charging one dollar instead of two. "That's the problem with leftists," he lamented. "Afraid to make money. And where does that get the movement?"

In the end, I made up my costs and then some, and now I have a check for the creator of this glorious bazaar, United for Peace and Justice.

"The Republicans Took Away My Civil Liberties," said one item on the market, "And All I Got Was This Lousy Tee-shirt." People laughed at that one. They laughed at my buttons, too. They laughed on Broadway in the Nineties, Broadway and 14th, Broadway way up by Dyckman, Broadway at the Stock Exchange, Broadway near the big labor rally near the belly of the beast in the Garden. White students and hipsters and Eurotrash and old Upper West Siders laughed. So did graying postal workers, brown people near the Bronx, homeless men and women, even cops.

I sold, I traded, I gave away (so did my kids, in the end). No transactions with cops, though: I didn't have a license, and knew their anti-vendor ways. Still, when they laughed and confided that having the convention here was bullshit, I knew the big march was probably going to turn out OK. Friends and kin had called long distance from places without crazy-hopeful-sudden souks. They were scared of this, scared of that. "Should we? Should we?" and I told what I'd learned from the buttons, and said sure, help sell, just come.

Debbie Nathan

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