October 12th Protest

I was smoking a cigarette and watching the Chicago Hilton across the street from my 26th floor apartment. From up in the sky I could see legions of tiny police, police cars and barricades blocking off Balbo, 8th street, Michigan Ave and Wabash, encasing a tight perimeter around the Hilton. Police were herding people across the streets and they stood still, congregating on corner streetlights next to dingy little bars. I could hear the screaming whirl of a helicopter above my head and looking up to see a fire truck red whirlybird circling over the high-rises.

From the window I watched as four armored vans pulled onto the street followed by a wide limousine with two American flags flopping wicked in the wind, followed by six or eight more armored vans toppling behind. When I got on the street it was still there; a dark Cadillac, tinted windows and the robust, brazened Presidential seal.

The student protest was planned for 4 O’clock in front of the Wabash campus building, but when I got there it was empty, students standing and smoking, huddling themselves like polar bears against the frigid frost wind.

I walked around the Hilton watching police huddled on corners, with pointy, beady little eyes. I walked passed two cops talking, the woman was saying in a loud, irritated voice; “Everyone is trying to get in and they’re all like ‘we’re press’ and I just tell them I don’t care they have to go around like everyone else.”

I went back to the Wabash building and went inside. In front of the plate glass windows I could see a half a dozen students were working on signs and pulling and arranging bullhorns into little stacks. Several of them stepped into bright, luminescent jumpsuits that mimicked those of hardened jail birds.

Eventually one came out with a clothe encasing his head, covering his face and holding a sign that read;

5PM Fight Back

Trucks pulled up to the curb and more signs were pulled out and littered the sidewalk with all kinds of protest paraphernalia; banners, signs, bullhorns, flyers, anything available to get the point across.

When I went outside I was thrust into a mob of forty people. A student with a bright red Mohawk was yelling into a bullhorn, his voice bouncing around the street, off the buildings.

Someone thrust the end of a three man banner into my hands and instantly I was at the forefront of this little movement. Everyone was holding signs that screamed “The World Can’t Wait” and began to march towards Grant Park, led by students in prison garb and costumes that mimicked the Hellish scenes from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

The cheers started slowly, with self consciousness, but as the group turned the corner off Wabash there was a gaining fire and by the time Michigan came under our feet there was a booming thunder from the voices; “The World Can’t Wait,” “Students Rise Up, Bush Step Down.”

The urgency of the voices surprised me, it had erupted from a putrid purr to a full blown sense of anger and red faced realization that what we said stood for was right and relentlessly necessary.

The police corralled the group behind barricades in Grant Park and a Taxi honked in unison to the yell and war cy that was hammering from the sixty voices of design majors and film students. The student arrival created a stir among the protesters, the rest of the group was older with grey hair and loud shirts that accused Bush of every conceivable action from genocide to incompetence to killing Palestinian children, all of which were plausible to varying degrees.

The students took a stand on the south end of the protest and left the other groups on the other side to their right. All kinds of people were there from the more moderate students and Catholic groups to the far fringe groups of everyone from the Socialist Workers Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party. At the apex of the crowd there was 300 or 400 disgruntled Americans, all screaming and chanting.

I got crammed against the barricades, holding a frigid metal pole and started to freeze my hands and digits off. There was a pile of costumes littered in the middle of the crowd and people were walking around in caricatures of Hilary Clinton, wearing Bush masks painted with little Hitler moustaches and dressed as all kinds of gargoyles and disfigured victims of war.

Things started off with a kind of fervor, chants of “Go Home George” and hisses and boos. A couple of people gave speeches prefaced with the summer of love epitaph “Brothers and Sisters” and then they were whisked away to do interviews in front of big TV cameras.

Things began to lose momentum quickly and at one point a man who was yelling turned from the microphone and asked me “Do you know any?” I shook my head and said “How about ’Fuck the Police-Fuck You George? You know get things riled up.”

He shook his head and let the crowd die down to a low simmering murmur as nothing came out of the microphone. From that moment on the only noise was the static of the student leaders vomiting out of their bullhorns.

After a few minutes someone stepped over to the microphone and announced that the “Exorcism” was going to start. A man in a priest outfit was waving a cross in the air, pounding it at a man in a Bush mask, yelling out various indictments of his crimes and shaking that large, venomous crucifix around in the air. Which crawled a moderate roar from the crowd.

After that people started to disappear and as it got dark, many of the banners disappeared and left behind only the hardcore conglomerate was left, yelling individual concerns at the indifferent building. People from the different political causes were passing out flyers, soy soup and a dry, tasteless sesame seed bread.

A woman from the Revolutionary Communist Party peddled a newsletter off on me and gave me a hearty spiel about the basic tenets of her faith.

“We’re for REAL communism; Lenin, Tolstoy communism. You know there hasn’t been real communism in Russia since the fifties and in China since Mao died, but I’m sure you knew that.” When I asked her if they were with or similar to the Socialist Workers Party and she shook her head contemptuously with a border line level of disgust.

“Oh god no, we’re REAL communists.”

I walked around and saw that the group had fizzled down to two or three dozen people huddled around in tight circles and drinking coffee and sipping soup. I spotted a student organizer who was an acquaintance of mine and walked up to him. I asked him what he thought and why the turnout was so bad. (The Oct. 4th protest had 2000 marchers, many of them students.) He shook his head and gazed around the cold. “The organization was bad. I don’t think they even called everyone and it’s so cold.”

I nodded, the mood had been low key the whole time, there weren’t even any riot police on the streets or in the park and there was only one cop walking through the crowd. There was no real sense of confrontation or victory, only 400 poor souls had come to protest to the highest level available, to jeer and petition the PRESIDENT.

It could be further witnessed by the refusal to scream “Fuck You George” or anything that would get the blood moving more than the Vietnam cry of “How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?”

All in all it was a small group of people parading around in a kind of self righteous, self indulgent display of “hey it’s the 1st Amendment,” but in all honesty it wasn’t any more dead and lifeless than the corpse fundraiser inside the building.

That night I watched the President’s speech on C-SPAN and smoked a joint in front of my apartment window, less than 500 feet from the Hilton’s Presidential suite. As I watched his lips move I thought to myself that this act of protest was just as effective and powerful as anything that the four hundred protesters or 500 cops had done today.