NYC Welcomes the GOP - With Clenched Fists

You kinda get the feeling that most of the coverage of the GOP convention will be outside MSG.

New York Lockdown

There's a showdown coming to Manhattan. Backed by the most intense security the city has ever seen, the Republicans are about to turn the blue-state bastion of New York City into the backdrop for George Bush's coronation. The RNC chose New York because it was the site of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, which to Bush's opponents and even some ordinary New Yorkers seems a brazen provocation.

On one side are 36,000 cops - a force that City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. calls "perhaps the world's tenth-largest standing army." On the other side are at least 250,000 protesters expected to converge on the city from all across the United States and Canada - a demonstration six times larger than the legendary anti-globalization protests that rocked Seattle in 1999.

They're facing off at a time when police are increasingly adopting military tactics in response to protest, and protesters are responding likewise, conducting their own reconnaissance on Republican plans and plotting actions designed to hit where the cops are weakest. The police have infiltrated the protesters, but the protesters have infiltrated the convention; according to anti-RNC organizers, they have at least two moles working undercover with volunteers the city has recruited to help makes things run smoothly at Madison Square Garden.

Plans to oppose the convention are multiplying, suffusing activists with a giddy, growing tension. Marches and rallies, legal and illegal, are being planned for every day that the Republicans are in New York. There will be street theater, including a Roman-style vomitorium in the East Village a few days before the convention starts, meant to signify Republican gluttony. Cheri Honkala, an organizer from Philadelphia, is mobilizing homeless people, public housing tenants and others for a big, illegal "poor peoples' march" on Aug. 30. Activists are holding weekend workshops where direct-action novices practice street blocking, and DIY medics learn to treat victims of pepper spray and police violence.

No one knows where it's all going - whether it will look like Chicago '68 or Seattle '99 or something altogether new. But activists see the coming conflict as history-making.