Protest, Poverty & Politics.

• Author: Lynch, Michael W.
• Position: Activities at political conventions

Our man in Washington travels to the national conventions.

This summer, REASON'S Washington editor and Capital Letters columnist, Michael W. Lynch, headed out of D.C. to attend the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia and the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

Over the course of the two events he filed daily dispatches about the official and, perhaps more important, unofficial goings-on for Reason Online. Here are selections from his analysis of the events' two most enduring themes: political protests and poverty. Lynch's complete coverage--including his trip to the infamous Playboy Mansion in L.A.--can be found at www.reason.com/bi/convention.html.

Subj: Committing Capitalism

Date: 7/30/00

From: mwLynch@reason.com

I headed into Center City Philadelphia early to catch the Unity 2000 demonstration, one of the many protests planned for the week of the Republican National Convention. Unity 2000 was designed as a noisy parade of various left-leaning groups. Not much news happens at political conventions anymore, and the buzz in and out of press circles is that the protests will be the big story. If this morning's effort is an indication, that story won't be above the fold on the front page; in fact, it may end up struggling for space in the food section. There were more cops than protesters--well, that's a bit of an exaggeration--but both were appallingly well-behaved.

Not that folks weren't prepared for violence. "I don't like cops, and I don't like government. They have too much power," Mike Shane, a ninth-grader from a Philadelphia suburb, told me in a thick Philly accent. Shane doesn't plan to commit violence. He's committing capitalism, selling gas masks for $5 each. He'll sell you a navy blue shirt with Protester over the left nipple for the same amount. He nets $2 on each item. "Pretty much sell stuff, that's all I can do," Shane answered when I asked him what he planned to do during the week. "Anybody that wants to buy a gas mask, they come to me."

While interviewing Audrey from the United States Marxist Leninist Organization (she feels we need a new kind of democracy in America), I spotted an attractive brunette with a temporary "Fuck Bush" tattoo on her deltoid. As I tried to chase the brunette down for a question or two, I ran into the source of the tattoo, Barry Adams, sitting on a concrete traffic barrier, wearing an American flag as a skirt, oversized purple sunglasses, and a red vinyl rain cap. He's a transpartisan capitalist, hawking "Fuck Bush," "Fuck Gore," and four other tattoos. Politically, he likes either Ralph Nader or Alan Keyes but figures that after Clinton, who he says is "the Kennedy of our time," anyone will be a letdown.

Adams expects to sell a thousand stickers at $2 a pop over the next four days and a thousand more in Los Angeles. The money will help finance his next semester at Temple University, where he will study mass media and communications. Then he plans to head to Las Vegas to do stand-up comedy. I told him he's a mini-capitalist. "Why not?" he replied. "The government doesn't take 31 percent from me."

The Unity 2000 protesters were pushing sundry issues: Free Philadelphia's own Mumia Abu-Jamal, kill the death penalty, tax the rich, end police brutality, close the School of the Americas, dump the Star Wars missile defense program, etc. Such a smorgasbord is bound to generate some conflict, especially with libertarian counter-protesters and Bible babblers present.

Just as the march started to move, a group of 20 or so libertarians showed up in orange shirts with black Ls on the front and a Lao Tzu quote, "The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be," on the back. They carried signs proclaiming "More Good, Less Evil," "Big Brother Abuses Earth Mother," and "Free the Market." Like Adams, they're no fans of the Internal Revenue Service. They chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, the IRS has got to go.

They weren't marching for 10 minutes when they got into an altercation with a representative from Unity 2000, who wanted them to march on the sidewalk, not the street, since they were counter-protesting. "Our protest is only against your means," said Kendra Okonski, the libertarian leader. The guy retorted that capitalism kills children.

Safely past the Unity 2000 rep, the libertarians ran into Andru Ziwasimon, a doctor from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who was holding a sign that said, "Privatize Our Lives, Publicize Our Resources." They stopped for a brief dialogue, although no one's mind was changed. When I interviewed him after the dialogue, Ziwasimon still wanted Canadian-style single-payer health care. Ziwasimon's friend, David Pennise, who's working on his Ph.D. in environment and health sciences at University of California at Berkeley, yelled, "Transaction costs! Externalities!" as the libertarians marched away. Nice touch, I thought. The discourse, at least, is a level up from the IMF/World Bank protests in D.C.

The altercation with the libertarians was mild compared to what Unity 2000 protesters faced just a few blocks away, where three people of faith stood with signs and megaphones. "Fornicators and Drunkards Will Join Tupac in Hell," read Stephen White's sign. A chubby, middle-aged male protester, perhaps recalling better times, told White, "I'm a fornicator." This set White off: "I know you are, because you are following Al Gore," he screamed through his megaphone. "Al Gore is a Nazi who kills babies."

The march terminated at a stage, where a woman sang the national anthem and encouraged the crowd to boo. Somebody burned an American flag. I checked back with the orange-shirted libertarians, who were being led around by a man in a pink, Disneyland-style pig costume chanting, "Hey hey, ho ho, corporate welfare has got to go.

Subj: Poverty Tour of Camden

Date: 8/2/00

From: mwlynch@reason.com

I took a three-hour tour on Tuesday and ended up stranded on the Island of North Camden, New Jersey. It was a poverty tour, part of the Shadow Convention put together by the Eva Gabor of American politics, Arianna Huffington. You may have seen the media results: news stories chronicling the plight of the Philadelphia region's poorer neighborhoods, left to deteriorate when manufacturing jobs moved elsewhere.

Camden's been on my mind for the better part of this year. I've spent a good deal of time there working on a forthcoming welfare reform story for REASON--and chronicling the involuntary demolition of downscale businesses to beautify a strip of highway for the Republican Convention. If a city's demise can take on tragic dimensions, Camden's story is the Oedipus Trilogy.

So going into the tour, I had a working knowledge of the city and its problems, but I'm hard pressed to think of any solutions, partial solutions, or even effective painkillers (other than a shift from crack to heroin, the ultimate painkiller, for those still living in this miserable place). On the tour, I knew I'd get the liberal view. Perhaps they had the answers.

The trip was disturbingly like a poverty peep show. Fifteen journalists boarded an over-the-road tourist coach. The last time I was on such a coach I was hitching a ride with French tourists to get from Italy to France. Yet instead of peering at mansions on the Mediterranean coast, we were looking out at boarded-up buildings...