The L.A. Convention Proves the Police State is Here

"Round the corner" is actually an optimistic way of putting it. The police state is here. How else can you designate a state of affairs in which the mere threat of political dissidence elicits suspension of all constitutional guarantees for assembly and free expression, the sealing off of entire neighborhoods by battalions of heavily armed riot troops and helicopter squadrons, and deployment on a 24-hour basis of thousands of patrol cars and motorcycle squads, deployment on an interim basis of troop carriers, horse and bicycle cops? In all, several thousand uniformed "law enforcers" for bearing down upon a group of anarchists maybe 200 strong, and never more than 1000 protesters at any of the events I saw.

Once in a generation you can catch the ruling class off guard. Then you spend the next 20 years paying for it. In Seattle at the start of December last year, the Direct Action Network, the Ruckus Society and other organizers outmaneuvered the cops and shut the World Trade Organization down. By the time these same demonstrators got to Washington, DC, the following April, the ruling class had pulled itself together. The Republican convention in Philadelphia and the Democratic affair in Los Angeles allowed further refinement. The way things are now, a peaceful display of civil disobedience is likely to provoke tear gas, pepper spray, "pain holds" (i.e., torture), plus brutalization in prison and, where necessary, indictment under the RICO conspiracy laws.

I was lodged at a small hotel on the corner of 8th and Flower in downtown L.A., a couple of blocks from the Staples Center. A few times I was able to look down on demonstrations routed down South Flower. The pre-board signal would be the roar of police helicopters overhead. Then, from eight stories up, I could see massed platoons of squad cars and motorcycle cops. Up each side street I could see further deployment of riot carriers?police vans fitted out with wide platforms on both sides and at the back, on which more riot police were perched. Most prudent people removed themselves from the side streets to avoid being hassled, so there were few onlookers to observe the marchers themselves?a few hundred young folk, usually with some puppets and drummers.

One time, walking along a sidewalk opposite the Staples Center, I could hear the roar of motorcycles and an instant later saw an elderly woman scuttling away from the center of the sidewalk, just in time to avoid the first of some 40 motorcycle cops, two abreast, hurtling along this crowded pedestrian alley at some 40 miles an hour, horns blaring. No demonstration was in progress at the time. It was purely a cop statement from the uniformed and helmeted bikers: "We rule."

They did rule, and even with the small and almost entirely peaceful demonstrations that did occur, it's amazing the cops didn't kill someone. The nearest they came to it was Monday night, when Rage Against the Machine played outside the Staples Center and a few anarchists threw rocks over the chain-link fence. The police gave the order to disperse and charged almost at once, with horses and rubber bullets. The anarchists made good their escape and the rest of the crowd got pinned against the fence, with nowhere to go. I met a photographer the next morning who'd had a rubber bullet fired at his head at close range. It had torn up his ear badly. He'd photographed the cop aiming his gun directly at his head, then turned slightly to one side, thus saving his eye.

Civil libertarians did score some victories. They got a judge to forbid the planned police shutdown of the "convergence center" used as hq by the demonstrators. There will be some civil suits against the cops, one of them filed by the photographer who had his ear torn. But even if they are successful, these suits won't slow the trend toward the violent criminalization of all protest, which is the mission of police states down the ages.

Long Goodbyes It was fun to watch Bill Clinton doing his "History will absolve me" routine on Monday night. There's no moral presence like that of a confessed sinner, particularly one with no contrition. The delegates rose to him, and my only sadness was that Monica, America's most charming Other Woman, was not there to take the ovation she deserved. Without Monica, remember, we would have just lived through one of the most tedious presidential second terms in history, enlivened only by the bombing of the Serbs, the starving of Iraqi children and the tumult of NASDAQ. With a single snap of her thong, Monica mothered Hillary's New York candidacy, the outmaneuvering of the Republican right, the ebullience of the stock market and the chance for Al Gore to sell himself as his Own (Family) Man, with another Family Man as his partner. Tuesday night was "last hurrah" time for the liberal icons of the Democratic Party?Kennedys and Jacksons. I spent it in the Shadow Convention organized by Arianna Huffington, part of a "Rapid Response" team whose function was to watch the speeches on tv and then comment upon them in amusing terms for the benefit of the packed audience in Patriot Hall, seven blocks south along Figueroa from the Staples Center. My copanelists included Paul Krassner, Tommy Smothers and a man from Time whose name I forget, with Al Franken as my immediate neighbor.

I didn't care much for Franken and the antipathy was evidently mutual. Franken's an ardent supporter of Al Gore. In this undignified posture it's hard to be a comedian, and Franken certainly didn't meet the challenge. After I'd made a few disobliging comments about the Clinton-Gore record, the Time man glared at me from the other end of the panel and said something to effect that "In other words, everyone else is wrong and you're right"?an unusually accurate statement from an employee of Time Warner.

As one might have predicted, the audience was mostly interested in whether a vote for Nader would help George W. Bush win the election and usher in Republican Armageddon. I pointed out that in 1996 they'd voted for Bill to keep out Bob Dole and got Dole anyway, at least in terms of economic policy, though Viagra is probably not yet in Bill's bathroom cabinet.

The only silly thing about the panel was the requirement to watch clips of television coverage from the Staples Center. Who can say anything amusing about five minutes' worth of Bill Bradley declaring his allegiance to Al Gore?

I passed up Lieberman on Wednesday night in favor of a trip to Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, now in the final months of a lengthy rehab program. The towers soaring 100 feet into the air over the misery of Watts are as glorious as ever. I'd never fully appreciated that one of the main railroad commuter lines from Long Beach to downtown L.A. ran along the west side of Rodia's property line, and that therefore in the 34 years that Rodia worked on his towers between 1921 and 1955 his was most certainly one of the best-attended artistic projects in our history. Day after day thousands of commmuters saw this tiny man toiling on his great work, often perched 90 feet above the ground, wiring the iron struts together or applying mortar and broken china.

These days the railroad has gone, as have the trolley cars, and the motorists on the Century and Harbor freeways can't see the towers. If Rodia started a similar project today he wouldn't get higher than 10 feet off the ground before the Building Dept. hit him with a demolition order. As things are it was a close shave for the Watts Towers back in 1959 when the Building and Safety Dept. declared them to be unsafe structures. By then Rodia had moved to Northern California, his house having been burned to the ground by vandals. When Kenneth Ross, general manager of the Dept. of Municipal Arts, asked the heads of the Building Dept. what they would do with the Leaning Tower of Pisa if it were located in L.A., the bureaucrats answered without hesitation that they would declare it to be unsafe and recommend its demolition.

But the bureaucrats were outmaneuvered. Defenders of the towers organized a load test, in which a winch truck applied a 10,000-pound pull on the towers and succeeded only in bending its own equipment. Amid the cheers of the crowd, the head of the Building and Safety Dept. handed over the red "unsafe" sign to the Defenders. The innate engineering skills of the Italian immigrant had triumphed.

If the Democratic liberals inhabiting the Staples Center, with the same strained relationship to the external world as those poor Russian submariners in the Barents Sea, had any sense of drama or history they would have held their own convention in some abandoned lot within eye sight of the Watts Towers. That would have been a declaration of faith in the human spirit. But they sat in the Staples Center and got what they deserved?Al Gore.