Anti-War

The National Park Service no longer gives official estimates of the size of marches in downtown Washington, but from the roof of the Hotel Washington on Saturday morning, there seemed to be at least 75,000 anti-war protestors swarming around the White House. Of course, even before the event organizers had finished dotting the last ‘i’ on the placards screaming ‘BUSHIT!’ and setting up the main stage on the lawn near the Washington Monument, the whole thing had morphed from an anti-war protest to one pretty much anti-everything Bush. Everyone from aging hippies to hipsters to kids waving the Iraqi flag, from a gaggle of old ladies calling themselves the “raging grannies” to teenagers in black playing anarchist – they were all out there, to rail against the war, the deficit, African poverty, even the repeal of Section 8 housing vouchers.

Taken in conjunction with the administration’s falling poll numbers, not to mention the general anger over everything from rising gas prices to FEMA, one thing is clear: The state of the union is officially Pissed Off.

Minutes before the march, on a grassy space near the main stage, a small group of people are putting the finishing touches on 75 flag-draped cardboard ‘coffins.’ A woman whose daughter had been with the Navy at Annapolis is busy making the red, white and blue on every box militarily crisp. “It’s important to get it right,” she says. Behind her, a protestor in a yellow shirt brandishes a megaphone and roars for volunteer pall bearers for a “dramatic theatrical event.”

“I don’t like what he’s saying,” the woman says, before going back to pin the edge of a flag to the cardboard.

This is not the first time that John Lake, standing nearby, has done one of these events, in which the crowd bears the line of coffins before the eyes of crowd and media to represent the dead. He was at the RNC last year, where he says more than 4,000 people volunteered to carry the boxes aloft. For him, it’s all about getting the troops out of Iraq; everything after that, he believes, should be up to the Iraqis themselves. “When Mt. Saint Helens blew, it took down all the trees. In a year they grew back. These things happen naturally,” he says.

On the main stage, the first of the day’s speakers begins to whip up a crowd that doesn’t need much prompting. When Cindy Sheehan gets up to speak, they explode in a flurry of sign-waving and cheering. A man on stilts wearing a ratty Uncle Sam outfit and a Pinocchio nose teeters above the Raging Grannies, who are busy letting the press snap their photos.

Some of the protestors are familiar faces. The men in Bush, Satan and Cheney masks, making their way up 15th during the march with world globes aloft and slugging from oil canisters, made an appearance nine months ago at the inauguration, taunting the crowd trying to file through the C St. underpass.

The atmosphere then was as bitter as the January cold; the proximity of dejected protestors to bling-laden Texans trying to squeeze their way through the security tents was too much for many. A few thrown rocks at the 7th St. checkpoint resulted in two lines of riot cops stomping in to cordon everyone off. Today, though, there seems to be a sense among many protestors that Bush is now on the run. “We’ve got him surrounded!” someone in the crowd yells at one point.

But Bush himself is under a mountain in Colorado, monitoring the hurricane Rita relief efforts. Nonetheless, the Secret Service has snipers on the roofs. A line of well-trained horses, ridden by equally well-trained Park Police, keep the crowd from spilling onto Independence Avenue, south of the White House. Behind a waist-high gray metal barrier stretching the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, a line of DCPD and Secret Service in riot gear stand at attention, watching impassively as the crowd heaves and surges and whistles and roars a few feet away. A lone helicopter chatters overhead.

There are the counter-protestors, as usual, but not in massive numbers. A fat man on the corner of 15th and Pennsylvania screams through a megaphone that all assembled are headed straight to the fiery pit, while his companion holds up a sign saying, among other things, ‘REPENT.’ He is there in the early morning; by the time the main march rounds the corner, people breaking off to climb statues and the sides of nearby buildings, he is gone. Billionaires for Bush, decked out in evening wear, conducts an ironic sing-a-long in a corner of Lafayette Park.

Further down the street, another man with a megaphone is busy bellowing: “Get this straight: Terrorists are bad. America, good. Christianity, good.” A protestor sneaks up behind him and holds a sign saying, ‘RIGHT WING BIGOT’ over his head. A group of college Republicans verbally battles it out nearby with anyone willing to engage. “I don’t like deficit spending, either, but we have to do what’s necessary,” one of them says when asked about how the administration can keep spending on Iraq, hurricane rebuilding and the recent highway bill.

Al Sharpton makes an appearance just after 1 p.m., striding down Independence with an entourage in tow. He says nothing, but his 4’11” assistant more than makes up for it, yelling, “Get back! Get back!” at the crowd swarming behind. This same assistant, apparently, booted photographers out of a Louisiana refugee shelter when Sharpton made an appearance down there a few weeks ago, and seems apparently intent on repeating the same performance up here. No luck. Photographers and gawkers buzz close. A black Secret Service SUV on some undefined mission roars down the street with a man in a suit running behind, stops, and then takes off again, rounding the corner.

The march, meanwhile, keeps swarming up 15th St., part of the circuit that will take it in a tight circle around the downtown core. A light rain falls, briefly, and then stops. People fall out of the crowd, sitting on the traffic medians or the middle of the street, climbing on top of cars. The riot cops stand at loose attention beside their cars and buses. The anarchists give up and head for Starbucks, where long lines of protestors are already forming for their early afternoon latte break.

In the Hotel Washington, a few photographers file past the tables of people having lunch to snap some bird’s-eye view shots of the crowd. At these heights, it’s still somewhat business as usual. People are here for the conference, not the protest, and you have to wait ten minutes for a table. A woman drives a Segway down a hall.

Back on the street, past the student groups pumping their fists and the theatre people carrying a giant effigy of Wolfowitz as a bloodthirsty Roman emperor, past the protestors in front of the White House screaming, “The People’s House!” and the New York Times photographers taking shots of them, past the lines of cops on horseback and bikes ringing them all in, life continues on. Buses and taxis zip back and forth. People cross 16th St. bearing big bags of shopping. But from blocks away you can still hear the crowd roar.