Left turn

Catching up with the Shadow Convention, and getting down (on the pavement, that is) with the protesters

by Dan Kennedy

PHILADELPHIA -- Now this is my idea of left-wing activism: air conditioning, entertainment, and a not-too-revolting box lunch for $7, complete with a 20-ounce Diet Coke.

No, I'm sure as hell not talking about the Seattle-style protests, which were intensifying by late Tuesday and about which more in a moment. Instead, I spent the better part of the day at the Shadow Convention, the week-long "citizens' intervention" at the University of Pennsylvania organized by Arianna Huffington, the Picasso scholar turned conservative congressman's wife turned liberal (sort of) doyenne.

It's a sign of how corporate and cautious the two major parties have become that the Shadow Conventions (there will also be one in Los Angeles two weeks hence) can even be considered left-wing. Tuesday's session was devoted to ending the insane war on drugs; the deeply moving highlight was a chorus of children whose parents have been imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses, singing "People Get Ready" and reading poetry. But most of the issues have been -- or should be -- mainstream: campaign-finance reform; the growing gap between rich and poor; and the role of the media in reforming a corrupt political culture.

One of the speakers and organizers of the Shadow Conventions is Common Cause executive director Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts attorney general and 1998 gubernatorial candidate, who expresses sheer disgust at the scripted, richly funded conventions the two major parties are holding.

"The excesses of this system are on display," he told me. "A lot of people think it doesn't matter. This is one of the major reasons that people are totally turned off. This isn't just about campaign-finance reform. It's about re-engaging people with their government."

Despite the outsider tone of the Shadow Convention, mainstream politics has nevertheless managed to seep in. At Sunday's session, John McCain delivered his standard pro-reform spiel -- and also used the occasion to release his delegates and repeat his previous endorsement of George W. Bush, which earned him a chorus of boos. On Tuesday, the Reverend Jesse Jackson treaded more carefully, endorsing Al Gore while barely invoking his name, raising instead the specter of Richard Nixon's narrow victory in 1968. "When I see Gore and Bush and Cheney, I can make a choice," Jackson said. ("Nader!" shouted someone in the audience, to a smattering of applause.) "Don't get trapped," Jackson admonished the several hundred in attendance. "They said Nixon and Humphrey, there is no choice. That wasn't true."

During a break, I talked with a few activists, all of whom turned out to hold surprisingly nuanced views. Ed Harding, of Takoma Park, Maryland, a Green and a self-described advocate of "personal growth, social change, and ecology" (he asked me to mention his Web site, which is EmpowermentResources.com), appeared -- with his long hair, beard, and tie-dyed shirt -- to be Gore's worst nightmare. Yet his mild comment on Jackson's speech was, "I oppose Bush, and I believe it's up to the individual to decide whether to vote for Gore or Nader." Abbie Blumberg, a young Philadelphia woman with a pierced tongue and some serious inkings, said, "I'm basically probably backing Nader at this point. I'm not backing the lesser of two evils." But Frank Fulbrook, the gray-ponytailed president of the Cooper-Grant Neighborhood Association, in Camden, New Jersey, and a staunch advocate of ending drug prohibition, said he's backing Gore even though both Ralph Nader and Libertarian Harry Browne hold views closer to his. "Pragmatically, I vote for viable candidates," he said.

The other left-wing activists -- arguably the real left-wing activists -- had been fairly quiet until late Tuesday afternoon. Sure, an estimated 10,000 protesters marched through the downtown on Sunday in the Unity 2000 event, and another several thousand protested homelessness on Monday. But there had been no real disruptions until Tuesday, when a reported 282 (as of Tuesday evening, when I'm writing this) were arrested for attempting to mess with the Republicans and the police.

Receiving word from a colleague that things might get ugly, I ran out of my hotel and down the street, where somewhere between 30 and 50 protesters had laid down on the entrance ramp to the highway that would carry delegates to the First Union Center, the armed camp on the outskirts of the city where the convention is being held. Not long after I arrived, a young woman from "Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)," with fake dollar bills stuffed in her ample cleavage, was bitching out this poor reporter with a short blond haircut and a blue blazer, dumping on the "mainstream media" for focusing on how the protesters dress rather than on their economic issues. Apparently even radicals with a sense of humor don't have a sense of humor.

I hung out for a few moments with Bonnie Tocwish, who's covering the Shadow Convention and the protests for Heads, a new pro-drug-legalization magazine in New York, and who claims to have just won a $19,000 settlement for being falsely arrested for her Yippie-inspired activities at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago four years ago. No fool she, Tocwish bailed out just before the cops moved in, and was waiting for word from her photographer, John Penley, who finally emerged from behind police barricades.

"They're taking their goddamn sweet time about arresting them, I'll tell you," Penley said, explaining that the cops gave the protesters several warnings before finally moving in to drag them off in a big old bus labeled SHERIFF. A few moments later, he asked me about a group of 20 to 30 protesters clumped near a fence, all of whom had left the entrance ramp rather than get arrested (and who had exchanged some hearty "fuck yous" with a knot of beefy male office workers who were standing on the roof of a nearby building). "Socialist Workers," I told him, a fact I had noted when looking at their anti-Bush signs. "Oh, they're not going to get arrested," Penley replied. "They've got too many newspapers to sell, or give away, or whatever."

Finally, by 5:30, the bus had driven off, although the evening's action was just beginning. And though the protesters got the media attention they were looking for, the local TV news focused mainly on hero cops versus skanky radicals with a mysterious, though no doubt dubious, agenda. In fact, the protesters do have an agenda -- or, rather, many agendas: economic justice, animal rights, an end to capital punishment, a new trial for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. But it's hard to get your message out when your principal means of communication consist of lying down on the pavement, jumping up on police cruisers, and shoving and abusing cops, members of the very working class the protesters so enthusiastically champion.

Bush himself arrives here on Wednesday. It's only going to get wilder.