that women are involved is hardly the issue. this kind of response belies an inability to "get it" and may be why--*may* be--anarchism won't have an appeal to anyone other than kids from relatively privileged backgrounds. as i read these exchanges and the [i hope] tongue-in-cheek self-ironic commentary on the total hip kewlness of arnarchist fashion and attitude, i have to wonder just exactly what is going on. now, don't get me wrong. i never once denounced those actions and found all the concern over them to be quite beside the point when the debates where had here. furthermore, i'd consider myself much more of an anarchist; i thoroughly detest top-down, bow before the campaign slogans of an ossified, bureaucratic marxism. nonetheless, i am a little concerned with the above statement and i do wonder about the point of smashing storefronts. i have no problem with symbolic protest. it is necessary and inevitable and you only have to look at the history of labor struggles and boycotts that have always accompanied them to find it. you know, the 60s radicals that helped us devise strategies for protesting the gulf war suggested, based on their experience, that we ought to appropriate the flag first, before the counter protestors did. and so we did. i'm sure doug wants to loose his breakfast: it does sound as if it's capitulating to and ultimately promoting blind nationalism. but it worked in the sense that it wasn't so easy for others to paint us as a bunch of unamerican flag burning freaks. and it was the way i felt at least: king's "letter from a birmingham jail" and hughes' "what does america mean to me" really resonated with me --those immanent critiques of what had yet to be realized for all people--and i hadn't yet read all the postmodernist critiques of universalism, essentialism, humanism (=nationalism) yet. ;-) i guess what i'm struggling to say is--and this comes from my own exp. in these kinds of protests--why not grab on to some symbolic performances that catch "them" off guard, that "they" can't denounce so easily, that "they" do not expect?