--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Bad attitude is not a crime and you have a
> constitutional right to taunt the police at a demo.
> If
> they bust your head for doing it, I and other Guild
> lawyers will defend you zealously. But the question
> here is not rights but smarts. You have a right to
> do
> lots of things it's dumb to do. Pointlessly
> provoking
> armed men and women who have a certain degree of
> immunity to bust your head and throw you in the can
> is
> basically annoying to everyone. It distracts from
> the
> point you might have been trying to make at the
> demos
> (end the war, etc.) and causes NLG lawyers, who work
> enough pro bono hours as it is, unnecessary unpaid
> work that might have gone to defense of people the
> cops brutalized without provocation. Besides, do you
> want to have your head busted and be thrown in the
> can
> just to make the point that cops can act like pigs?
> Don't they make that point clear enough a lot of the
> time without provocation? Why wave, ahem, red flags
> in
> front of angry bulls when there's no purpose to it
> or
> need for it?
[WS:] I am 100% with you on this. However, provoking confrontation with the police serves an important purpose - makes a demo more "newsworthy." This is generally the kind of activism that that is mostly showmanship and little substance. Like its commercai cousin advertising, it is designed mainly to appeal to individual consciousness, and as such it is vying for attention and publicity by any means necessary. N nothing creates such publicity better than a rucus involving the police.
I can illustrate this point with two Persian Gulf War 1 anti-war demos I attended (I do not do this kind of activism anymore) - one in Santa cruz, CA and one in New Brunswick, NJ. Both demos started as peaceful protests obstructing traffic, both were rather small, a two dozen or so protesters. In Santa Cruz, the cops started arresting people, handcuffing them and pushing them to the buses already prepared for that occassion.
That pissed off the bystenders, who hitherto remained indifferent, and they started joining the protest. So even with the arrests, the protest started to grow, so the cops finally gave up and stopped arresting people.
In New Brunswick, by contrats, the cops simply redirected the traffic and did absolutely nothing. Since the demo was a "die-in" (people lying on the pavement pretending to be 'war dead') and it was February, the demo ended quite quickly and uneventfully.
FInally a more general comment. Personally, I do not think that demos are an effective form of exercising political influence. As I already mentioned, demos are like advertising, they appeal to individual consciousness, but unlike commercial marketing - they do not provide readily available mechanisms or venues to act on that consciousness.
If people hear a commercial message appealing to their consciousness in one form or another, there is usually a vendor nearby conveninetly offering merchandise featuring in that message, so people can actually act out their feelings. This achieves the very purpose of advertising - pushing a product.
By contrast, if people see a demo or similar appeal to consciousness and are swayed by it - there is very little or no follow up that would tranform their feelings into political action, save a few symbolic and rather ineffective gestures like signing a petition. As a result, this form of activism ends in frustration wihtout achieving any discernible political change.
This point is nicely illustrated in the new British flick "Amazing Grace" http://www.amazinggracemovie.com/ on anti-slavery movement in the 18th century England. Initially the movement activists were making moral appeals to the public and MPs, but even though those appeals were received mostly favorably, no legislation was passed due to the influence of commercial interests profiting from slave trade. Only when the activists started moving stealthily and without much fanfare to undercut those commercial interests, they got somewhere (I do not want to spoil the film, so I will not reveal any details.)
Wojtek
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