Deja Vu

The Enemy

Tags:

Chicago,

Denver,

elections,

police,

protests

“Protesters: To the Streets,” The Denver Post, Aug. 25, 2008.

Maybe it was too hot Sunday afternoon, or maybe they hadn't gotten warmed up yet, but the tens of thousands of demonstrators that protest organizers promised would march through Denver turned out to be tens of hundreds.

Demonstrations began early Sunday and kept up a steady beat of marching, sign waving — and tying up downtown traffic. But through most of it, protesters were vastly outnumbered by police and, occasionally, even by those who came downtown just to watch the spectacle.

Lt. Ron Saunier, a Denver Police Department spokesman, said the number of protesters that actually showed up was nowhere near what groups had told city officials to expect.

Recreate 68 had projected that as many as 25,000 or even 50,000 people would participate in activities this week. Instead, a group estimated by police at 1,000 to 1,200 participated in a Recreate 68 anti-war march Sunday morning, with a much smaller group parading up Colfax Avenue later in the day.

“Politics Is the Art of Controlling Your Environment,” from Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child In the Final Days of the American Century, by Hunter S. Thompson, 2003.

I was standing at the corner of Michigan and Balboa on Wednesday night when the cops attacked . . . and I remember thinking: No. This can’t be happening. I flattened myself back against a wall of the Blackstone and fished a motorcycle helmet out of my friendly blue L. L. Bean kit bag . . . and also the yellow ski goggles, thinking there would probably be Mace, or at least gas . . . but that was the only time they didn’t use any.

On Wednesday evening they used clubs, and it was a king-hell bitch of a show. I stood against the wall, trying to put my helmet on while people ran past me like a cattle stampede. The ones who weren’t screaming were bleeding, and some were being dragged. I have never been caught in an earthquake, but I’m sure the feeling would be just about the same. Total panic and disbelief—with no escape. The first wave of cops came down Balboa at a trot and hit the crowd in the form of a flying wedge, scattering people in all directions like fire on an anthill . . . but no matter which way they ran, there were more cops. The second wave came across Grant Park like a big threshing machine, a wave of long black truncheons meeting people fleeing hysterically from the big bash at the intersection.

Others tried to flee down Balboa, toward State Street, but there was no escape in that direction, either—just another wave of cops closing off the whole street in a nicely planned pincer movement and beating the mortal shit out of anybody they could reach. The protesters tried to hold their lines, calling back and forth to one another as they ran away: “Stay together! Stay together!”

I found myself in the middle of the pincers, with no place to run except back into the Blackstone. But the two cops at the door refused to let me in. They were holding their clubs out in front of them with both hands, keeping everybody away from the door.

By this time I could see people getting brutalized within six feet of me on both sides. It was only a matter of seconds before I went under . . . so I finally just ran between the truncheons, screaming, “I live here, goddamnit! I’m paying fifty dollars a day!” By the time they whacked me against the door I was out of range of what was happening on the sidewalk . . . and by some kind of wild accidental luck I happened to have my room key in my pocket. Normally I would have left it at the desk before going out, but on this tense night I forgot, and that key was salvation—that, and the mad righteousness that must have vibrated like the screeching of Jesus in everything I said. Because I did live there. I was a goddamn paying guest! And there was never any doubt in my mind that the stinking blue-uniformed punks had no RIGHT to keep me out.

I believed that, and I was big enough to neutralize one of the truncheons long enough to plunge into the lobby . . . and it was not until several days or even weeks later that I understood that those cops had actually planned to have me beaten. Not me, personally, but Me as a member of “The Enemy,” that crowd of “outside agitators” made up of people who had come to Chicago on some mission that the cops couldn’t grasp except in fear and hatred.

This is what caused me to tremble when I finally sat down behind the locked & chained door of my hotel room. It was not a fear of being beaten or jailed, but the slow-rising shock of understanding that it was no longer a matter of Explaining my Position. These bastards knew my position, and they wanted to beat me anyway. They didn’t give a fuck if the Democratic National Committee had issued me special press credentials; it made not difference to them that I’d come to Chicago as a paying guest—at viciously inflated rates—with no intention of causing the slightest kind of trouble for anybody.

That was the point. My very innocence made me guilty—or at least a potential troublemaker in the eyes of the rotten sold-out scumbags who were running that Convention: Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, Lyndon Baines Johnson, then President of the United States. These pigs didn’t care what was Right. All they knew was what they wanted, and they were powerful enough to break anybody who even thought about getting in their way….

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