Rebelling against "Whaddya got" in St. Paul

Let me start out with some movie dialogue.

First from The Wild One:

"Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?"
Marlon Brando's character's reply: "Whaddya got?"

"Some men just want so see the world burn."
Alfred, played by Michael Caine, in The Dark Knight.


Which brings me to the men, and the women, who call themselves anarchists and came to St. Paul to disrupt the Republican National Convention.

They say they're against war in Iraq, but if there was no fighting there, they'd find something else. Afghanistan for sure. But global warming would suffice, as would globalization, nuclear power, the internal combustion engine, and the imprisonment of Mumia abu-Jamal.

"Whaddya got?"

Permits were issued to various groups to express their First Amendment rights in St. Paul, presumably the anarchists broke rank and are members of some of them. Maybe the guy in the photograph made the hat himself, but the group named on it, the National Lawyers Guild, is an extreme-leftist group. You name the loony-left cause, and the NLG supports it. For some of the anarchists, it's a just a show, as it is for the man I call "Mr. Candy Cane."

Masks were in abundance. At the RNC in New York four years ago, the police there arrested people just for wearing them. But there are complaints that the police in St. Paul were overly agressive in preserving order.

I decided it was part of my journalistic responsibility to cover at least on protest. Since I missed the big ones in St. Paul on Monday and Tuesday, as well as the riot in Minneapolis after the Rage Against the Machine concert (I'm sure some of the anarchists attended that one), I headed to the state capitol, about a mile away from the RNC proceedings at the Xcel Center--accompanied by bloggers Midnight Blue and Stix on Thursday. We crossed Interstate 94 from south at around 6pm, just as the police blockade of the bridges, formed mostly by St. Paul cops, but supplemented by officers from the Minneapolis and Ramsey County police forces, was being put together.

From seemingly out of nowhere, the anarchists--in a very organized fashion--appeared and headed straight for the 12th Street bridge--where they were met by mounted Minneapolis cops. Then the chants started. Again, these sure were organized anarchists. "Resist, resist, shake your (deleted) fist." Some creep threw what looked like a rock at one of the horses, the horse moved around a bit, and fearing a cavalry charge, the protesters sat down, chanting that tired phrase from the 1968 riots in Chicago: "The whole world's watching, the whole world's watching." They were trying to recapture tear gas in their parents' bottle.

Stix told me he smelled bleach, and the three of us decided it was a good time for us to leave. Earlier in the week two Connecticut delegates were sprayed in the face with bleach by one of the peace-loving anarchists. There were also media reports that the protesters, aping their 1968 spiritual ancestors, had made do-it-yourself stink bombs--feces and urine lovingly deposited in baggies. Midnight Blue and I had a lot of expensive equipment on us, including our laptops, and we weren't being paid for covering the convention--or the civil disturbances. Some were, and several journalists ended up getting caught in the net of arrests when the police had to to their duty and clear the street of people who were breaking the law by blocking roads, and were marching after their permits had expired.

It is unfortunate that these journalists were arrested, but I have little sympathy for them. When you are near police officers dressed like Robocop, with clubs and tear gas guns, gas masks--as well as of course firearms, it's best to keep a safe distance. We left, they didn't.

I didn't catch his full name, because I couldn't find him on the station's web site, but WMEQ 880 AM radio host, Joe, out of Menomonie, Wisconsin, phrased it best when he said, "Covering a building on fire is fine, but would you run into the building during the blaze?"

Not me.

I'll do another post on St. Paul in the next few days, but the city is beautiful, the people are very nice (Garrion Keillor is right about Minnesotans), but it's very sad that this town now has a black eye because some goofs, about 2,000 of them by my estimate, came to rebel against "Whaddya got."

Technorati tags: Politics RNC St. Paul elections Republican protests Minneapolis National Lawyers Guild photography photos police