Fences and Windows (17 page)

But even though the threat of anti-FAO violence was dreamed up by Berlusconi, his actions are part of a serious assault on civil liberties in After-Genoa Italy. On Sunday, Italy’s Parliamentary Relations Minister Carlo Giovanardi said that during November’s FAO meeting, “demonstrations in the capital will be prohibited. It is a duty,” he said, “to ban demonstrations in certain places and at certain times.” There may be a similar ban on public assembly in Naples during the upcoming NATO ministers’ meeting, which has also been moved to a military compound on the outskirts of the city.

There was even talk of cancelling a concert by Manu Chao in Naples last Friday. The musician supports the Zapatistas, sings about “illegal” immigrants, and he played
to the crowds in Genoa. That, apparently, was enough for the police to smell a riot in the making. In a country that remembers the logic of authoritarianism, this is all chillingly familiar: first create a climate of fear and tension, then suspend constitutional rights in the interest of protecting “public order.”

So far, Italians seem unwilling to play into Berlusconi’s hand. The Manu Chao concert took place as planned. There was, of course, no violence. But seventy thousand people did dance like crazy in the pouring rain, a much needed release after a long and difficult summer.

The crowds of police ringing the concert looked on. They seemed tired, as if they could have used a day off.

May 2001

The idea of turning London into a life-size Monopoly board on May Day sounded like a great idea.

Despite familiar criticism lobbed at modern protesters that they lack focus and clear goals such as “Save the trees” or “Drop the debt,” the current wave of anti-corporate activism is itself a response to the limitations of single-issue politics. Tired of treating the symptoms of an economic model—underfunded hospitals, homelessness, widening disparity, exploding prisons, climate change—campaigners are now making a clear attempt to “out” the system behind the symptoms. But how do you hold a protest against abstract economic ideas without sounding hideously strident or all over the map?

How about using the board game that has taught generations of kids about land ownership? The organizers of yesterday’s May Day Monopoly protest issued annotated maps of London featuring such familiar sites as Regent Street, Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square, encouraging participants to situate their May Day actions on the Monopoly board. Want to protest against privatization? Go to a rail station. Industrial agriculture? McDonald’s at King’s Cross. Fossil fuels? The electric company. And always carry your “Get out of jail free” card.

The problem was that by yesterday afternoon London didn’t look like an ingenious mix of popular education and street theatre. It looked pretty much like every other mass protest these days: demonstrators penned in by riot police, smashed windows, boarded-up shops, running fights with police. And in the pre-protest media wars, there was more déjà vu. Were protesters planning violence? Would the presence of six thousand police officers itself provoke violence? Why won’t all the protesters condemn violence? Why does everybody always talk about violence?

This, it seems, is what protests look like today. Let’s call it McProtest, because it’s becoming the same all over. And of course I’ve written about all this before. In fact, almost all my recent writing has been about the right to assembly, security fences, tear gas and dodgy arrests. Or else it has tried to dispel wilful misrepresentations of the protesters— for instance, that they are “anti-trade,” or long for a pre-agrarian utopia.

It is an article of faith in most activist circles that mass demonstrations are always positive: they build morale, display strength, attract media attention. But what seems to be getting lost is that demonstrations themselves aren’t a movement. They are only the flashy displays of everyday movements, grounded in schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods. Or at least they should be.

I keep thinking about the historic day, on March 11 this year, when the Zapatista commanders entered Mexico City— an army that led a successful uprising against the state, yet the residents of Mexico City didn’t quake in fear—200,000
of them came out to greet the Zapatistas. Streets were closed to traffic, but no one seemed concerned about the inconvenience to commuters. And shopkeepers didn’t board up their windows; they held “revolution” sidewalk sales.

Is this because the Zapatistas are less dangerous than a few urban anarchists in white overalls? Hardly. It was because the march on Mexico City was seven years in the making (some would say five hundred years, but that’s another story). Years of building coalitions with other indigenous groups, with workers in the
maquiladora
factories, with students, with intellectuals and journalists; years of mass consultations, of open
encuentros
(meetings) of six thousand people. The event in Mexico City wasn’t the movement; it was only a very public demonstration of all that invisible daily work.

The most powerful resistance movements are always deeply rooted in community—and are accountable to those communities. But one of the greatest challenges of living in the high consumer culture that was being protested in London yesterday is the reality of rootlessness. Few of us know our neighbours, talk about much more at work than shopping, or have time for community politics. How can a movement be accountable when communities are fraying?

Within a context of urban rootlessness, there are clearly moments to demonstrate, but perhaps more important, there are moments to build the connections that make demonstration something more than theatre. There are times when radicalism means standing up to the police,
but there are many more times when it means talking to your neighbour.

The issues behind yesterday’s May Day demonstrations are no longer marginal. Food scares, genetic engineering, climate change, income inequality, failed privatization schemes—these are all front-page news. Yet something is gravely wrong when the protests still seem deracinated, cut off from urgent daily concerns. It means that the spectacle of displaying a movement is getting confused with the less glamorous business of building one.

 

IV
CAPITALIZING ON TERROR

In which September 11 is used to silence critics, ram through new trade deals, “re-brand” the U.S.A.— and turn bra shopping into a patriotic duty

October 2001

This speech was delivered at the Mediemötet 2001 conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The “Media Meeting” was a three-day gathering of journalists celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Swedish Federation of Journalism
.

It’s a true privilege to be able to address so many of Sweden’s leading journalists at this important juncture for our profession. When I was invited to this conference six months ago, I was asked to talk about globalization and corporate concentration in the media, as well as the issues at the heart of the global protest movements: widening inequality and international double standards. I’m still going to touch on these themes, but I’m also going to discuss how they relate to the events that I know are on all our minds today: last month’s attacks on the U.S. and the ongoing U.S.-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan.

To this end, let me begin with a story. When I was twenty-three, I had my first media job as a copy editor at a newspaper. The newspaper closed at 11 P.M., but two people stayed until 1 A.M. in case a news story broke that was so significant it was worth reopening the front page. On the first night that it was my turn to stay late, a tornado in a
southern U.S. state killed three people, and the senior editor on duty decided to reopen the front page. On my second night, I read on the wires that 114 people had just been killed in Afghanistan, so I dutifully flagged down the senior editor. Remember, I was young, and it seemed to me that if three people warranted reopening the front page, then 114 people would surely classify as a major news event. I will never forget what that editor told me. “Don’t worry,” he said, “those people kill each other all the time.”

Since September 11, I’ve been thinking again about that incident, about how we in the media participate in a process that confirms and reconfirms the idea that death and murder are tragic, extraordinary and intolerable in some places and banal, ordinary, unavoidable, even expected in others.

Because, frankly, I still have some of that naive twenty-three-year-old in me. And I still think the idea that some blood is precious, some blood is cheap is not just morally wrong but has helped to bring us to this bloody moment in our history.

That cold, brutal, almost unconscious calculus works its way into our shared global psyche and twists and maims us. It breeds the recklessness of those who know they are invisible, that they are not among the counted. Are we, in the media, neutral observers of this deadly mathematics?

No. Sadly, it is we who do much of the counting. It is we who have the power to choose whose lives are presented in Technicolor, and whose in shades of grey. It is we who decide when to cry “tragedy” and when to shrug “ordinary;” when to celebrate heroes and when to let the bloodless
statistics tell the story; who gets to be an anonymous victim—like the Africans killed in the U.S. embassy bombings in 1998—and who gets to have a story, a family, a life—like the firefighters in New York.

On September 11, watching TV replays of the buildings exploding over and over again in New York and Washington, I couldn’t help thinking about all the times media coverage has protected us from similar horrors elsewhere. During the Gulf War, for instance, we didn’t see real buildings exploding or people fleeing, we saw a sterile Space Invader battlefield, a bomb’s-eye view of concrete targets—there and then gone. Who was in those abstract polygons? We never found out.

Americans still don’t get regular coverage on CNN of the ongoing bombings in Iraq, nor are they treated to human interest stories on the devastating effects of economic sanctions on that country’s children. After the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (mistaken for a chemical weapons facility), there weren’t too many follow-up reports about what the loss of vaccine manufacturing did to disease prevention in the region.

And when NATO bombed civilian targets in Kosovo— including markets, hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains—NBC didn’t do “streeter” interviews with survivors about how shocked they were by the indiscriminate destruction.

What has come to be called “video-game war coverage” is merely a reflection of the idea that has guided American foreign policy since the Gulf War: that it’s possible to intervene in conflicts around the world—in Iraq, Kosovo,
Afghanistan—while suffering only minimal U.S. casualties. The United States government has come to believe in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe war.

And it is this logic, mirrored repeatedly in our lopsided coverage of global conflicts, that is helping to feed a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which twisted revenge seekers come less with a set of concrete demands than a visceral need for U.S. citizens to share their pain.

It’s easy for those of us in the media to tell ourselves that we have no choice but to participate in this brutal calculus. Of course we care more about the loss of some people than others. The world is simply too filled with bloodshed to grieve each death, even each mass slaughter. So we make arbitrary distinctions just to get through the day: we care about children more than adults; we care about people who look like us more than those who don’t.

This is, perhaps, natural, if one dares use such a word. But these calculations become much more troubling in the context of rapidly consolidated global media empires, which are now the primary news sources for so many people around the world. CNN, BBC and NewsCorp—though they may try to appear international, even placeless—still report from clearly American and European perspectives. When they say “we,” it is a we filtered through Atlanta, London or New York. The question is, What happens when the narrow cultural assumptions of that “we,” that “us,” are beamed out to the farthest corners of our deeply divided world, badly disguised as a global “we”?