The
First Amendment:
Good When You Can Get It
by David Rovics
January 30, 2007
The organizers with
United for Peace and Justice and all of those participating have
once again pulled off a giant protest march and rally. As has
happened every few months since the invasion of Afghanistan, hundreds
of thousands of people have converged for a national protest,
this time in Washington, DC.
The major media outlets
decided this time that the protest was worth covering. This time
it was aired on CSPAN, reviewed by the New York Times, the Chicago
Tribune and the Houston Chronicle, and even recognized as the
socially diverse crowd that it was - young and old, veteran activists
and first-time protesters, soccer moms and socialists.
As usual, crowd estimates
given by the major media varied wildly from "thousands"
to "tens of thousands" to "just under 100,000."
Some, including the New York Times, dared mention one estimate
of 400,000. This is particularly notable since the NY Times was
one of the many outlets guilty of barely reporting on past protests,
and frequently using vague terms like "thousands" when
reporting on crowds that had virtually filled Central Park.
I missed this rally,
being on tour on the other side of the Atlantic this time around.
But looking at it from afar, it seems to have been a model event.
UFPJ was given a permit to have a march and a rally. The masses
descended, and the major media took note, at least to some degree
reflecting the reality that could be seen by anyone present -
that there are a lot of people in the US against the war.
For people attending
or reading about this weekend's anti-war protest, there are certain
assumptions that could be made, that the media also seems to be
confirming:
It may or may not make
much difference, since democracy is mostly about voting, but we
have a First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech and
freedom of assembly. When there's a really big national protest
like this, you will hear about it in the mass media.
Reading the corporate
media over the years and listening to the government spokespeople
as well, certain other assumptions are clearly to be understood:
If it wasn't reported,
it must not have been very big or significant. If there is any
violence at a protest, it was probably started by protesters.
Protests are dangerous places with lots of angry people at them
who generally don't really understand what they're angry about.
For some reason because of the "war on terror," we have
to have more police security at protests since 9/11, since terrorists
might target or take advantage of otherwise non-terroristic protests.
There is some kind of relationship between protest and terror.
As we know from our history books, since the Civil Rights movement
the authorities have learned from their violent excesses in the
past, and now when civilians commit acts of nonviolent civil disobedience,
they are gingerly carried off by the police. Police do not attack
nonviolent protesters without provocation.
Of course, all of these
assumptions are false. For those of us who regularly find ourselves
on or near the front lines of dissent in the US, this is obvious.
But for every one of us like that, there are hundreds more sympathizers.
People like most of my extended family and I'll bet many of yours,
who are against the war, against much of what Bush stands for,
but they haven't quite made it to a protest or done much else
to make their views clear, at least not in several decades. Or
if they have done something, they've been one of the millions
over the past several years who have been to one protest, and
not managed to get to another. So very likely they don't have
a very firm picture of what goes on out there in the land of free
expression.
CNN's polls have supported
the notion for years that most of the country is against the war
and not supportive of the president. Yet most of the protests
are barely reported by CNN, if at all. And if they are reported,
they are rarely given the time necessary to show how the protest
movement truly represents civil society. If you weren't there,
you probably wouldn't know it happened.
And if you weren't
involved somehow with the organizing of the event, you'd be unlikely
to know that the organizers were given a permit to march but not
to rally, or to rally but not to march, or were given no permit
at all for any central location. Or that the police were penning
people into cages who wished to protest. Or that many people were
not even being allowed into the cages in the first place.
Or that people committing
acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, or in some cases just walking
down the sidewalk, were being tear-gassed, beaten with clubs,
shot with rubber bullets and electric tazer guns, crushed with
horses, held in unsanitary prison cells. That protest organizers'
houses were being raided by police, beaten bloody, computers and
cameras stolen. That spaces rented by protesters had been attacked
by the police, with everything inside the building being seized.
That people were being attacked frequently for the crime of riding
bicycles in groups.
And that all of this
had been going on under the false pretense of security since long
before 9/11.
I thought I'd recount
some of my personal experiences with protest, speech and the First
Amendment over the past decade or so, as illustrations of how
things tend to go, in the hopes that some readers might find these
stories illuminating.
For those of us who
come with what might be called the "radical narrative"
of history, it all starts with an understanding that democracy
largely happens in the streets, and that the rights we have only
exist if we continue to fight for them, otherwise they are taken
away. It starts with the understanding that the 20th century began
with the authorities brutalizing and arresting thousands of people
every week for giving pro-labor speeches on the sidewalk. With
the criminalizing millions of members of the IWW (the Industrial
Workers of the World) by calling them "German agents"
because they called World War I a "bosses' war." Many
opponents of the war were jailed for years, including socialist
leader Eugene Victor Debs, who won a million votes for president
of the US while in prison for his anti-war views.
It starts with the
historical understanding that we live in a class society which
operates under the golden rule - those who have the gold make
the rules, and everybody else has to stand up for their rights
by other means. Those who have the gold declare the wars, consistently
lie about the real purpose of the war, and profit from the war.
Those without the gold fight and die in the wars.
It starts with the
understanding, also, that the smooth operation of any society
requires that most people do not see history and reality this
way. That efforts will be made on the part of the powers-that-be
to prevent this from happening. And that if it seems this kind
of awareness is spreading, and manifesting itself on the streets,
one frequent way to deal with this is through disinformation or
omission of information, and both subtle and overt forms of repression.
February 15th, 2003
was an interesting case. Many of us already knew about the imperial
intentions of the US in Iraq, and didn't need to see the disaster
unfold before we knew invading Iraq was a terrible idea. The protests
worldwide involved many millions of people, including all over
the US. Half a million people, maybe more, were flooding into
New York City. It was a bitterly cold, windy winter day.
The NYPD had denied
UFPJ a right to march. Citing security as a concern, the police
created pens for each block, to make sure it was impossible to
march. A block away from the pens, the police were sending thousands
of people walking dozens of blocks in order to then be turned
away from entering the rally area there. It seemed from my observation
that perhaps half the people trying to go to the rally weren't
able to get in.
As with most of the
major anti-war rallies in the past several years, most of the
people coming to the February 15th rally hadn't been to a protest
since the 60's, or ever. For those of us who had, the police behavior
was outrageous, but not surprising. For many of the well-dressed,
middle-aged folks from the suburbs or further a field coming in,
the way the rally was being controlled by the police was shocking,
and many of them gave the cops a good piece of their minds.
A year later the NYPD
this time prevented organizers from holding a rally, only allowing
a very controlled march during the Republican National Convention.
This time the hundreds of thousands of people attempting to represent
civil society and engage in their right to assemble were told
we would damage the grass on Central Park if we held a rally there
on New York's commons, where so many other events had been held
through the years.
On another occasion
more recently, a permit to march was only granted when organizers
threatened to march without a permit anyway. And what of the 100,000
or so people who protested the war in Afghanistan in Washington
in April, 2002? Or the 300,000 or so who protested the wars in
September, 2005? These were massive events, huge undertakings
for many organizers and many communities from around the country.
Each person at each of these rallies represents a hundred more
who didn't make it. But they got a fraction of the media coverage
that this most recent one has received.
February 15th, 2003
and January 27th, 2007 will at least for some time be a part of
the memories of many people, including the media consumers who
far outnumber the many people who were actually in attendance.
But for these other equally massive outpourings of national discontent
with the regime that were hardly covered? If you weren't there,
they may as well not have happened. They do not enter into the
national discourse any more than current events in Micronesia.
And if this is how
our right to assemble is dealt with, what of those following the
Gandhi-MLK tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience?
When people think of
the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, the popular imagination is
filled with images of young people dressed in black trashing Starbucks
and McDonalds in downtown Seattle. A couple hundred people participated
in this activity, and it has not been repeated to any significant
extent at any protests in the US since then. Most of the other
60,000 people protesting in Seattle miles away from downtown were
being drenched with tear gas for sitting in on the streets, nonviolently
surrounding the WTO meetings taking place in the Seattle Center.
But as usual, as soon as anyone started throwing rocks somewhere
in town, this was to be the media's primary focus.
Many people in the
US feel in some way that everything changed after 9/11. But in
terms of a nation-wide campaign of disinformation and repression
against an activist community, the WTO protests were the bellwether
event of recent years. What had been local campaigns of various
sorts against rapacious corporations had grown into a nationwide
(and already international) movement against corporate globalization
in general. The corporate media responded with fear-mongering
and disinformation, and the authorities responded with repression.
For years after Seattle,
the disproportionality of the reaction of the local and federal
authorities was at times comical. Anybody who was on the right
email lists leading up to Seattle knew it was gonna be big. Anybody
on the right email lists knew the protests at the IMF/World Bank
meetings in Washington, DC the following April (A16) was also
going to be significant. Anybody on those lists would also have
known that the May 1st protests calling for the shutting down
of the Stock Exchange on Wall Street was going to be small, but
Mayor Giuliani was taking no chances.
The day began with
what was being billed as a march for undocumented workers. Several
thousand Latino men, women and children marched, flanked by what
appeared to be almost an equal number of cops. As I recall, the
cops stood on either side of the march, two rows deep on each
side. Most of the cops were also about a foot taller than most
of the marchers. These marchers had a broad and thorough understanding
of their role in this society. The most popular sign on the march,
in English, read simply "workers of the world, unite."
This march was clearly
never intended to be anything but a peaceful march with no plans
for civil disobedience. What was at some point intended to follow
the march was perhaps some kind of action, which I don't think
had ever gotten much beyond the planning stages, probably because
most of the organizers were too busy with A16, which had just
taken place two weeks before in DC.
In any case, to deal
with the 200 or so anarchist youth who ostensibly wished to shut
down Wall Street, several thousand police were literally tripping
over themselves in the streets, which were awash with motorcycles,
paddy wagons, and bored cops feeling pretty stupid with nothing
to do. In preparation for the shutting down of Wall Street the
cops had actually shut down the entire business district around
Wall Street, looking at the ID of workers and residents wanting
to cross police lines. Groups of police were deployed to guard
every nearby Starbucks or other corporate chain store, as well
as the World Trade Center and other places they thought might
be potential hotspots.
It was two weeks before
then that police in Washington, DC had mass-arrested 600 or so
people for daring to hold an unpermitted march. This happened
in the days leading up to the IMF/World Bank meetings, so the
cops held everybody over the weekend to keep them away from the
protests.
On the first day of
the meetings themselves, 20,000 or so people surrounded the large
area of town the police had walled off. The organizers of the
meetings had to bus delegates in during the wee hours of the morning,
and other delegates were stuck driving around the city for hours
looking for a way in.
Police behavior there
didn't descend to the kind of wanton brutality of Seattle, but
I personally was walking past a group from Arizona who had taken
over one street, and witnessed an unmarked police van just drive
into and through the group. One man was on the ground. At first
it was unclear whether he was injured, but he had apparently gotten
pushed to the side, rather than underneath the van. The group
quickly reassembled their line afterwards.
That week in DC the
police raided the main convergence center for the protesters and
confiscated all of the puppets and other artistic representations
people had been working on. They did the same thing in Philadelphia
a few months later leading up to the Republican National Convention
there in 2000. By the time of the Democratic National Convention
in Los Angeles, and given the well-deserved reputation for corruption
and brutality of the LAPD, the US Justice Department was actually
involved with overseeing the police for the occasion, and specifically
ordered them not to steal the puppets this time.
No event was too small
or too large to warrant the hysteria of the corporate media when
it came to "anti-globalization" protesters. "The
anarchists from Seattle are going to come destroy the city."
This was the mantra of the corporate media in the weeks leading
up to any protest for some time. "Seattle anarchists"
were the outside agitators of the day. Nowadays it's "foreign
fighters."
I think it was an anarchist
book fair I was singing at in Bloomington, Indiana around then.
It was the sort of event in a small university town that would
a few years before have been considered quaint and very Bloomington-esque.
But now it was a cause for alarm, and for fear-mongering about
anarchists from Seattle, and maybe an excuse for the police department
to apply for federal grants to buy some new equipment.
When the anarchist
youth took to the streets on bicycles in a fairly small Critical
Mass ride, the police took the occasion to strike, throwing young
people off of their bikes, handcuffing them and arresting them.
I'm not sure for what. Some kind of obscure traffic violation?
Disorderly bicycling?
My concert was happening
a half block from where the arrests took place, and as usual,
I was setting up to play, and not on a bicycle getting brutalized
and arrested. One young man came up to me and gave me a CD. "This
is from my friend," he said. "He was trying to come
to your show, but he got arrested. This was actually the third
time he had been trying to go to one of your shows but got arrested
first." It was then that I was sure I was playing in the
right sorts of places.
The protests in Miami
were a defining moment. By now it was 2003, two years after 9/11.
The "war on terror" and the war on "Seattle anarchists"
had merged. Miami's police chief, Timoney, had been responsible
for the brutality of the Philadelphia police during the RNC there,
and now he was police chief of Miami, in time for the FTAA (Free
Trade Area of the Americas) meetings and accompanying protests.
For weeks leading up
to the protests, the Miami media was whipping up a frenzy with
talk about downtown being destroyed by anti-globalization rioters
from all over the Americas. Police Chief Timoney was showing videos
to the Miami police that were implying that police were killed
during what were increasingly being referred to as the "riots"
in Seattle. By the time we arrived, the cops were out for blood.
Downtown Miami was
completely shut down, almost no businesses were open, many were
boarded up. The few businesses that were open were on our side.
The downtown exits on the highway were shut. Nobody was there
but us, the cops, and the media, who had mostly imbedded themselves
fearfully behind police lines.
Some of the cops and
media were quite clearly afraid of us, which was another one of
those things that would have been really funny if it weren't terrifying.
Thousands of cops in riot gear, driving around in armored personnel
carriers, flying around in multiple helicopters circling overhead
at any given time, and they're afraid of 20,000 or so entirely
unarmed people, most of whom are fairly scrawny white college
students…?
The scheduled events
included a rally in an amphitheater, a march, and then another
rally back at the amphitheater. However, the cops decided not
to let more than 200 or so people into the 10,000-seat amphitheater
for whatever reason, either before or after the march. I managed
to get in, and was, as programmed, singing for the small crowd
that was in there when the police began their unscheduled, unprovoked
assault on the demonstration outside.
I was doing a tour
up the east coast immediately following the FTAA protests, and
it was like a gallery of wounds. Every town, every gig was full
of people who had been injured by the police in Miami. Here was
one friend with a big red splotch from being shot in the breast
by a tazer. Here's another with a hard lump the size of a baseball
on his thigh from being shot point-blank by a rubber bullet. Then
the word that someone from New Jersey died mysteriously days after
inhaling too much tear gas. Those "non-lethal" weapons
again. By the time I got up to New York City I was singing at
a benefit for Indymedia there, who had gotten most of their cameras
taken by the police.
I was reminded of one
visit to the Lower East Side in the 90's, during the final siege
of Tompkins Square Park by the police, to try to seize it along
with the rest of the neighborhood, to make it safe for gentrification.
There were garbage cans burning, crowds yelling and banging on
things, overall it was a very festive occasion. I remember seeing
an older guy I knew as Uncle Don there, and he had a broken arm.
I asked him what he thought the prospects were. "Too many
people are getting their bones broken," he said. "It
can't keep going like this."
The blatant tactic
is essentially to use overwhelming military force in order to
keep a social movement from getting too far off the ground. And
while these brutal and bizarre events receive gobs of local media
attention, they are virtually ignored by the national press.
Many thousands of people
from all walks of life representing hundreds of different organizations
were pouring into the streets outside of these various meetings
of the corporate elites, and this was generally not national news.
If any national media might have considered covering the protests
in Miami, they scrapped those stories in favor of breaking news
having to do with Michael Jackson's nose, if I recall.
The local Miami TV
stations were actual comedy, however. We were being given a bird's
eye view of scenes of the protests. We could see beneath us the
police attacking demonstrators, but the newscaster was saying
things like, "I think there's some kind of scuffle. The police
are defending themselves."
Of course, we have
the internet (at least as long as Congress maintains net neutrality
laws). We've got Pacifica Radio and many other means of reaching
people with useful information. But this kind of drumbeat propaganda
on the commercial and so-called public airwaves has a profound
impact. It is still a huge part of how most people find common
reference points, common understandings of broader reality, most
of the time.
And what about just
setting up a soapbox and speaking on the sidewalk? Well, you're
partially blocking a public walkway. Incredibly, I can tell you
from personal experience that in most places where people congregate
in this country, including on most subway platforms, you cannot
sing a song with your guitar case in front of you without being
told to leave by the police. The few places where it is legal
to do this, such as Boston, it only became legal after court battles
over the First Amendment were won by the Street Artists Guild
in the 1970's.
I remember listening
to BBC World Service a couple years ago. They were doing a piece
about street music being banned in Singapore. They obviously thought
it was a bit of an extreme measure on the part of the authorities
there. They joked that they liked the musicians playing in the
London Underground. Little did they know, evidently, that their
own government had banned music from the subway platforms a few
years before, in 1995, as part of the Criminal Justice Act. I
remember it vividly, as it happened just before the summer I was
planning to make a living busking in the tube…
It seems to me there's
something to be said for knowing your situation. And whatever
happens, some things can be known. We've got freedom of speech,
sometimes. Every once in a while the media might even pay attention,
though most of the time they'll get it entirely wrong. And freedom
of assembly? We've got that sometimes, as long as you apply for
a permit and actually get one. Just make sure to move when they
tell you to, if they give you time to move after they tell you
to. Otherwise you may be beaten and tortured with "non-lethal"
weapons. But usually they won't fire live ammunition. Viva democracy!
~~~~~~~~
David Rovics is a singer-songwriter
who tours regularly throughout North America, Europe, and occasionally
elsewhere. His website is www.davidrovics.com.
DRovics@aol.com
DRovics@gmail.com
(617) 872-5124
P.O. Box 300995
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
www.davidrovics.com
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