\n| \n The rain is falling in sheets on the streets
\n of Boston as the stage is set for the quadrennial display of rite and
\n ritual which the coronation of a Major Party Candidate has become. The
\n temperature is hanging in the low seventies, and is expected to drop
\n steadily over the next few days, at least according to the 5-Day Forecast
\n on channel 7. Of course, as Norma Yvonne likes to say, "Those meteorologists
\n should have stuck with studying meteors."<\/font><\/p>\nThe Charles River was wind-tossed
\n and rain-splattered as we drove to our
\n office a bit before eight this Saturday morning, strangely bereft
\n of the college and boat club crews working out in the early morning
\n calm,
\n the singles
\n rowing in solitary mechanical focus, the fours working on their turns,
\n navigating the grey-green stanchions which divide the lanes as they
\n pass under the bridges, and the magnificent eights, nine with the
\n coxswain, functioning absolutely as one organism with a single purpose,
\n to propel
\n that shell through the water as fast as humanly possible, even in
\n the summer, even in the rain, hell, those maniacs are out rowing
\n in
\n the SNOW, but not today. The river is completely empty.<\/font><\/p>\nDowntown, less than a mile from our office, they
\n are buttoning down the Fleet Center step by step. The Secret
\n Service took control of the area last night at 8. The nearby
\n train station and Green Line subway stop are closed. There are literally
\n police on every corner for a 10 block area, and bomb-sniffing dog are
\n continually
\n making the rounds and sticking their noses into everything. The Big
\n Boys are coming to Boston, and the Powers That Be are not taking any
\n chances with the possibility of an unsightly incident. <\/font><\/p>\nThe result is a sight to be seen, and puts new
\n meaning into the phrase "Police State". The number of police dogs in
\n evidence is awesome. They must have called for a convention of
\n all of the Bomb-Sniffing dogs in the entire country, and we wouldn’t
\n be surprised if a few Drug-Sniffing or even illegal alien dogs have
\n been brought in as ringers, to multiply the effect. They say 5,000
\n delegates, party hacks and upper-crusters will arrive in the next 48
\n hours, as well as 15,000 media types, including yours truly as a part
\n of the
\n miniscule
\n contingent of 30 Bloggers in this dynamic display of how politics works
\n in the new millennium in the most powerful empire the planet has seen
\n to date.<\/font><\/p>\nWe wonder how many agents the forces of order
\n will field in their parallel display of how Police Power works in that
\n same Empire. Of
\n course, the true total can never be revealed. First we have
\n the Boston Police, those brave boys in blue who even now, less than
\n 48 hours before kickoff, are threatening to actually picket convention
\n events. Oh, the horror! Democratic delegates forced to cross a Union
\n picket line! At the same time, what could be more American than a group
\n of hard-working first-defenders exercising their God-given right to
\n organize
\n and protest
\n what they see as unfair working conditions. Then, backing them
\n up, we have a Cadre of – Prison Guards. Yes, due to their determination
\n to field the absolute largest team possible, the forces of order have
\n called up all of the State Prison Guards, to be equipped and used
\n as crowd control and riot police, and empowered by a special order
\n to arrest civilians and throw them in the clink. Naturally, the
\n president of THEIR union is crying bloody murder, basically saying
\n "We didn’t sign on for THIS."<\/font><\/p>\nOn top of these local jokers, we have the heavy
\n hitters from out of town. State troopers from all over Massachusetts,
\n SWAT teams from all over the country, the entire Secret Service in
\n their 3-piece uniforms with the screwy high-tech earrings, Treasury
\n Police,
\n FBI, Homeland
\n Security,
\n Nuclear
\n Regulatory
\n Commission guys, all sorts of armed forces specialists and doubtless
\n numerous groups so clandestine that their very existence is considered
\n a State Secret of the highest order. As we walked into our office a
\n few minutes ago two unfamiliar but obviously law-enforement vehicles
\n cruised slowly by, like sharks sniffing their way around unfamiliar
\n waters. On their sides it said "Capitol Police K-9 Unit".<\/font><\/p>\nThe City and County lockups have cleared out over
\n 3,000 jail spaces for the expected arrests. Over behind the Fleet
\n Center they have constructed a steel cage, double chain link fence
\n topped with razor wire, splatter guards to protect against thrown
\n urine or acid, patrolled by armed guards with dogs, which is the Officially
\n Designated Protest Area. Unroofed, covered with a fine nylon mesh to
\n stop thrown objects, without water or toilets, a thousand protesters
\n at at time are to be released into the cage for the purpose of exercising
\n their 1st amendment right to express their political views.<\/font><\/p>\nMeanwhile,
\n the Dowbrigade is worrying about how to keep a decent buzz on in
\n the face of this massive display of Law
\n and Order, how to mobilize in a city to tightly controlled and closed
\n up, and the fact that his driver’s licence is about to expire, and
\n his University
\n ID
\n has
\n delaminated
\n to the degree
\n that
\n the
\n dirty
\n plastic film with the ten-year-old photo has completely separated from
\n the hard plastic card, and we don’t get paid until Friday.<\/font><\/p>\nBut we are nothing if not resourceful. After
\n all, this is OUR home turf, and they (and here we are including delegates,
\n party officials, secret service, all of those bastards) are the invaders,
\n and as we have seen in Vietnam and Iraq, even the mightiest powers
\n on Earth can be humbled or at least temporarily confounded by a stubborn
\n and resourceful local population.<\/font><\/p>\nAnd temporary it shall be. In another week
\n it will all seem like a bad dream. The rock stars and puppet-masters
\n will have left town, and with them the global media spotlight, gone
\n sweeping restlessly back and forth across the globe, looking to illuminate
\n a convention here, a bomb blast there, a promising new drug or the
\n birth of sextuplets on the other side of the planet.<\/font><\/p>\nWhat will have really happened? The Dowbrigade
\n believes that the American Experiment in Democracy has either been
\n hijacked or has evolved into a sort of Merchant’s Dream, a highly
\n organized production and consumption mechanism designed to harness
\n the resources of the planet and the efforts of the far majority of
\n the population for the vision of a tiny privileged elite. In the United
\n States the practitioners of this methodology have been so successful
\n that they have the far majority of the people convinced that there
\n is still functioning representative democracy in place which actually
\n gives a shit what the majority of the people really think, feel
\n or want. In fact, by forging an unholy alliance with the Major
\n Media, the Merchant Kings are now largely TELLING the American public
\n what to think, feel and want.<\/font><\/p>\nHowever, every once in a while, something happens,
\n or someone writes a book, or a song, which pokes a hole in the hypnotic
\n tapestry of information which maintains the modern democratic illusion.
\n Sometimes, somehow, the fraying fabric of the subterfuge is revealed,
\n exposed,
\n visible to the rank and file. "Pay no attention to that man behind
\n the curtain." <\/font><\/p>\nThose among the thinking who still have a modicum
\n of hope for the resurrection of an authentic American democracy still
\n believe in the existence of the mythical, slumbering, American People,
\n a People who believe in their core in an absolute sense of Justice,
\n a People who do not trust their government, or any government, a People
\n who just basically want to be left alone to live their lives and pursue
\n happiness in the manner that seems most natural to them, and who accordingly
\n go to political sleep for long periods of time, until a major war or sufficiently
\n gross malfeasance in their elected representatives awakens them from
\n their slumber to sweep the state clean in righteous disgust and so
\n renew and revitalize the American spirit of revolutionary democracy.
\n <\/font><\/p>\nIf that fairy tale is even remotely possible,
\n it is the moments when the fraying fabric of the current ersatz democratic
\n elusion are visible when the possibility exists to awaken the sleeping
\n giant. The
\n real reason we are all here is to see if one of those moments occurs
\n in Boston in 2004, as it did in Chicago, in 1968.<\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The rain is falling in sheets on the streets of Boston as the stage is set for the quadrennial display of rite and ritual which the coronation of a Major Party Candidate has become. The temperature is hanging in the low … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |