On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Be sure to check out the reports on The Nation's website, including the
> dazzling entries by Liza Featherstone
> <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/protest>.
Those were excellent reports. Is the Nation blog often up to this mark?
BTW, Liza bends over backwards to be fair to the fears of the harumphing chrous of the 1968 riots:
As Editor and Publisher pointed out on Friday, Hubert Humphrey, 1968's
Democratic nominee, actually enjoyed a bounce in the polls right after
the convention. True, images of the convention riots may have hurt the
Democrats when they were later used by Nixon in campaign ads, but even
if that's so, it's not clear that such tricks would work today.
and she goes on to argue why. But I would also like to add that one could conceivably make the argument that the riots actually helped Humphrey by pushing him more to the left on the war:
> In other words, post-riots, Humphrey, who had trailed by 12.5%, had closed
> the gap to 9.5%.
> The next poll, taken Sept. 19-24, showed almost no difference. Only later
> did Humphrey make his run, nearly catching Nixon in the popular vote (partly
> due to the vice president belatedly taking a more dovish position on the
> war).
I also wanted to say that it's conceivable that the chorus of Cassandras and necromancers prophesying doom could actually help the march get better press. I mean, it's just a march. But now if nothing happens it looks like news.
Lastly, I just want to give two cheers for anarchists. In the first place, they are almost always best thing in marches -- the most colorful, the most musical, the most energetic, the most creative. And secondly, at least in all the marches in New York in recent years, everything disruptive that anarchists have done has always been done at separate events. They seem long ago to have decided that marches and more creative stuff are complementary and not competing tactics -- and that both are better served by being staged in separate times and places. The chorus of harrumphers seem to be caught in a time warp, still thinking about Seattle and the anti-capitalist gatherings of pre-9/11 when everything blended together. But that was years ago. And faict from New York, the strategy seem to have subtly but very distinctly evolved since then.
Michael