Together in the same Big Apple, the delegates and protestors lived a world apart

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
This journalist traveled to New York to cover the Republican National Convention for Utne Magazine, and chronicled both the perspectives of delegates as well as the anti-Bush protestors who took to the streets to show their opposition to the administration’s policies.
NEW YORK — For the delegates who gathered at Madison Square Garden at the Republican National Convention earlier this month to officially nominate George W. Bush to defend his throne in the upcoming presidential election, New York City was an unnerving place, and not just because America’s cultural Mecca lay thousands of miles from home for many of them.

Here, rats owned the subway tracks, homeless men owned the benches at night, mad-dashing foreigners in yellow taxicabs owned the streets, and, for the most part, stories of suffering outside America’s borders owned the newspapers’ pages. Worse, for the visiting delegates, much of New York’s populace viewed them as ignorant, inferior and everything short of arboreal. That is not uncommon of many large countries. Parisians look down on their fellow Frenchman. Londoners loathe watching a football match with someone from Manchester. And Madrideños know that the best Tapas bars are found in their own city.
But residents of the Big Apple openly consider themselves New Yorkers, first, and Americans, second, when they are traveling abroad, in the words of my friend Anthony, a playwright and actor who lives in Brooklyn. A framed poster of the well-known cartoon in The New Yorker, featuring the five boroughs in the foreground and little more than a flat wasteland between New Jersey and the West Coast, hanging in the kitchen of the apartment where I stayed this week on the upper-west side of Manhattan hammered home this point.
Pain endures at Ground Zero
It should come as no surprise, then, that there were only two places where the visiting delegates felt at home here. The first was inside the Garden, which was sterilized of all that’s liberal and worldly in New York, and cordoned off for several city blocks in each direction before the convention began on August 30 to keep the hundreds of thousands of anti-Bush protestors — from New York and the rest of America alike — at an arm’s length. The second was the area in lower Manhattan conspicuously absent of any buildings. Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers stood before terrorists rudely toppled them three years ago this month, was the obvious attraction for the Republican Party to hold its convention here since the event ushered in a new chapter in world history and gave Bush a license to plunge the country into two wars, and maybe more. He has also deprived American citizens of many civil rights and kept the nation in a state of paranoia. As such, many delegates have flocked to the sacred ground this week to weep and pay homage to the fallen.
Bush’s supporters from the heartland hark back to the attacks of September 11, 2001 compulsively, as if their right to continue breathing fresh air after this November depends on it. But many of the outsiders swarming the streets didn’t seem to get the message that New Yorkers had for them: “Don’t use our pain for your political gain!” (More than 80 percent of all New Yorkers registered with political parties are Democrats.)
The gaping hole here left a void in the hearts and psyche of many locals. Most cried; many screamed; some chanted “USA, USA, USA” when the commander in chief visited the wreckage three days after the attacks; and many supported the Bush administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan to root out the culprits. But a Republican National Convention boasting an oversimplified message to reelect an incumbent who is very unpopular in this city blending into New York City’s worldly, progressive and complex culture is like oil and water mixing. Don’t count on it.
“If using the legacy of September 11 is a publicity stunt, it’s a bad stunt,” Dorsett Santos told me during the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign march on August 30. “This is the only thing Bush can write on his presidential resume. But New York does not want to be known for that.”
Larry Nodarse touted a sign at Ground Zero the next day reading, RNC delegates, Stop exploiting the mass murder of 2,749 people on September 11, 2001. He talked to me about his rage as a homeless man nearby played “Amazing Grace” on his flute:
“Using the deaths of people to further a political cause is disgraceful. I don’t think that any political party should have held their convention here. Still, it wouldn’t be quite as appalling if the Democrats had, because they’ve done it before. At least they have a history of embracing New York.
“The Republicans have never embraced New York. I’m not talking about all conservatives, but a good majority of conservatives, especially in the heartland, have always looked down on New York, seen it as sin city: Sadom and Gomorrah — a lefty, pinko, Commy town. Suddenly when September 11 happened they tried to embrace New York and make it their own, and tried to adopt it as the symbol of their party. I think it’s sick that they tried to push the calendar as far back to nearly coincide with the anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
“[Former New York mayor] Rudolph Giuliani’s speech [on the convention’s opening night] really offended me, talking about a guy who jumped out of the 102nd floor [of the World Trade Center]. How dare he use somebody’s death to push forward George W. Bush’s re-election. Who knows who that guy was.”
Mass arrests of protestors
At St. Paul’s Cathedral next to Ground Zero on August 31, protestors from New York and all over the United States clashed head-on with the black-and-white message the Bush administration has forced on the people since that awful day three years ago: “You are in constant danger. Obey orders, and above all, conform.”
New York City Police arrested upwards of 200 activists who sought to march from St. Paul’s Cathedral, next to the epicenter of the post-September 11-world, to Madison Square Garden to protest the Republican Party’s abuse of this city’s pain as a means to get reelected in two months. Though they didn’t have a permit to march, organizers were given temporary permission to do so by the NYPD as long as they stuck to the sidewalks and didn’t disrupt traffic. After walking one block, the arrests began. Ironically, the police used the pretext of marchers crowding the sidewalks to shut the march down in its infancy stage, as they closed off the street, themselves, to facilitate the arrests.
In what then became ordinary scenes all over New York during the convention, the police roped in protestors with an orange net, slowly condensing the crowd as if they were rounding up cattle, then made them wait for hours as paddy wagons and tour buses with NYPD labels on them came to take the activists away. Some were not even part of the march, just unlucky pedestrians caught up in a police action whose message was handed down through the Secret Service in Washington D.C., which takes over for local police whenever the president comes to town. Representatives of the National Lawyer’s Guild in their light green baseball caps were also among the fenced-in.
A young man wearing a F—— Censorship shirt yelled to journalists, “I don’t think Bush should be here manipulating 9-11” as the police handcuffed him. A policeman nearby was overhead admitting that he has the same shirt at home.
All over the city, anti-RNC activists were getting the picture. Now that the convention had started, there would be no more permits, no more marching, no more opportunities for mobile free speech. The successful and peaceful half-a-million-man march held the day before the convention began was a thing of the past. A four-block area around Madison Square Garden had been closed off, and the city’s police force had been ceded to the Republican Party. Battle lines had formed.
Police arrested more than 900 on August 31, alone, The New York Times reported — at the New York Public Library, at a “Die In” protest on 28th Street just south of the convention, at Ground Zero, even inside the Garden, where Medea Benjamin, a member of the feminist, anti-war organization Code Pink, got within spitting distance of Dick Cheney before she was subdued.
By the time Bush arrived on stage for the convention’s final evening on September 2, the NYPD had detained some 2,000 people, forcing most to sleep on cement floors reeking of oil, other chemicals and asbestos in the now infamous Pier 57 on the Hudson River, and feeding them a paltry few apples and stale bologna sandwiches during their ordeal. Many, though, were vegetarians.
The incarcerated found other uses for the unwelcome gifts. They reportedly played soccer, using the bologna sandwiches as goalposts and paper cups rolled up into soccer balls. The protestors also sang and danced with each other to keep their spirits high.
Protestors register moral and legal victories
Activists were released en masse from the Criminal Courts Building on the convention’s final day as New York judge John Cataldo ruled that the city was in contempt of court for denying thousands their legal rights during cruel incarcerations that lasted as many as 60 hours. He fined the NYPD $1,000 for every protestor jailed during the week without charges who had not been released by 6 p.m. on September 2.
A crowd of hundreds congregated near the Courts Building on Centre Street in lower Manhattan that morning to show their solidarity with fellow activists, and cheered as they exited, one by one, onto the street. “There was a big crowd of protestors in the courtroom who weren’t allowed to cheer because it was a court environment, but after my hearing took about 30 seconds, I turned around and they all gave me a thumbs up and a smile,” said John Cheatwood, an activist who traveled here from Florida and missed his ride home because of his incarceration that lasted almost two days. When Cheatwood exited onto the street, cheers and hugs from strangers were there to greet him instead. “It really helped being in there knowing that all of these people were out here fighting for us. We weren’t just forgotten.”
Meanwhile, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union explained to the crowd waiting outside the Courts Building for the release of their friends and family that the detainees essentially “didn’t exist” and “had no rights as citizens” until they were formally charged by the city. Once they regained their rights as citizens, some protestors faced prosecutors for as few as14 seconds before they were released onto the street, uncharged.
Americans inside the convention are a world apart
Perhaps the Republican delegates shouldn’t be faulted for misunderstanding how they were perceived by New Yorkers who either left town in dismay, took to the streets in protest or simply sucked in their pride and waited out the storm when the invaders converged in Manhattan. Large tour buses carted the delegates around all week, from their hotels, to Madison Square Garden, to Times Square, shielding them from the public, as they took in Broadway shows. How were they to know how New York really felt? And how were they to know that the Big Apple largely opposed the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, using the gaping hole at Ground Zero as its impetus, when their young stallion from Texas had beaten the horrors of September 11 into their brains over and over again for three years?
Two hours before Bush was to speak on Thursday night, I noticed Johnny Horn, staring toward the arena of Madison Square Garden with tears streaming down his cheeks. Horn is an African American, a Vietnam veteran and a candidate for state representative in Chattanooga, Tennessee on the Republican platform. “My emotions were set off out watching the protestors,” he said candidly. “I’m perplexed that we’re not all one accord like in every other war we’ve fought except for maybe Vietnam. The Republicans are saying we have to proactively fight terrorism. The others are saying we have to take a softer approach. But what happens to the guy in the middle? Many people have no idea how ruthless our enemies really are.”
Horn applauded Bush for going into Iraq because now the terrorists “are busy defending their home turf, so they can’t focus on us in New York.” Horn is convinced that if John Kerry wins the election in November, “they” will strike within six months.
On the prowl before the gala was to reach its climax, I asked other delegates about the decision to invade Iraq given what information we have now, and most of their answers always seemed incredibly rehearsed, as if they had recited them each morning upon waking up … or heard them rehearsed on Fox News. Nowadays, most delegates paid as much attention to the question of the Weapons of Mass Destruction as they would a tip jar at a café.
“So what if we didn’t find the WMD’s. Freeing 25 million people is justification alone,” said Bruce Motheral, a delegate from Texas.
Helen LaRue, an alternate delegate from New Jersey, said she didn’t want to get into a discussion over the war in Iraq, just seconds after admitting to me that, “we do lack debate here” at the convention. “Iraq is a tough topic,” she said. “I don’t want to discuss it because I know that not everyone agrees with me, and I don’t like to debate. But I do have my personal feelings.” She followed that with, “I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about it, but my personal opinion is that we have very good elected officials who know all the ins and outs of this situation. They’re the ones who should be on top of it. I believe in George W. Bush.”
And with that, the commander in chief walked onto the stage and encouraged his constituents to continue supporting him in the war on terror.