n February 2, I spent time with the World Economic Forum (WEF) marchers in Central Park as they gathered to rail, rock, and rout.  My sympathies, of course, fell entirely on their side, not only for their arguments but also for the thrill I get whenever I witness people exercising their right to speak freely.

Thus shone the sunny picture.  The darker edge consisted of hundreds of police officers cordoning off a small "ghetto" around the statue of William Tecumseh Sherman given to the participants for their activities.  They planned to deliver a series of speeches and presentations in front of the Park Plaza at 59th Street, then march to the Waldorf-Astoria to deliver their voices there -- all allowed by the permit mavens of New York City.

The police had phalanxed themselves in this way to make sure the "protestants" followed the permit -- punctiliously.  Several weeks prior to the gathering, the major news organs (think of the implications of that noun) dutifully fell in step by raining down stories about possible violence, the "specture" of Seattle and Italy, masked "anarchists" who dared break Starbucks' windows, and what in the 1950s school principals would call "bad elements."  Nothing substantial came out about the WEF meeting itself or the issues at stake on both sides -- the organs only dispensed stories of plagues being visited on the city by outsiders coming in to raise dust and trouble.  They did this, of course, in order to make exercising one's free speech rights equivalent to an act of violence, right in line with the new terror-definition of patriotism that disallows any independent thought about U.S. policies.

By February 2, with the city primed for bear, the police employed what I can only call a round  of fascist theatrics as bold a lesson in the power of spectacle as any overblown Broadway chandelier-crasher.  They had crammed 59th Street from 4th Avenue to 6th Avenue (the southern edge of Central Park) with dozens of police vans, NYC Corrections buses (with their cyclone-fenced interiors ripe for rowdies), patrol cars, unmarked cars and vans -- an impressive display of automotive tax dollars at work.

Even more fearsome, though, was the squad of perfectly aligned, stomping-at-the-bit cavalry from the NYPD stables, these centaurs groomed and rampant. In front of them stood, at a perfect symmetrical lean, forty or so motorcycles, all faithfully attended by their drivers, the metallic version of the equines behind them.  At some signal, the riders got on their bikes, and in formation peeled off like some road-bound version of the Blue Angels, revving their motors to drown out the speakers.

Then, as the time got closer for the march, those hundreds of officers, in riot helmets, flanked by people on the rooftops and not very well-concealed plainsclothesmen in the crowd, and scouted by police helicopters circling vulture-like overhead, began inching in, inching in, their ranks getting more and dense until a long blue channel appeared that blocked the marchers from the view of the pedestrians, isolating them, squeezing them along, keeping everything ordered and buttoned.

No, it was not Nuremberg or Leni Riefensthal or the Cossacks in 1905, but they made no secret of the power of state power not only to project its power through spectacle, choreography, and scripting for ritual but also to define what images would be publicly available for memory and as the truth. (For instance, in the next day's New York Times, the front page sported the photograph of a long-haired young man being arrested.  The caption read that out of 7000 estimated marchers, police had arrested 36.  But despite the overwhelming peaceful nature of the march, the Times did notsay that 6964 marchers had marched without incident, and it did not show a picture of marchers with signs or babies in carriages or anything humanizing.  The fables had to be upheld.)

Aristotle may have ranked spectacle as the least important of the six elements of tragedy, with plot and character being most important, but Authority reverses the ranking.  Spectacle is most important for its project, plot and characters (with their attendant nuances) the least useful.  And on that Saturday, for those that cared to watch, Authority served and protected the established order with its own forms of pageantry, steeped in blue and dressed in visored plexiglas, inching, inching, inching us along until we, branded as "protestors," marched in our proper files down the memory hole.

© 2002 Michael Bettencourt

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays
 produced in New York, Chicago,
Boston, and Los Angeles, among others.
  Continued thanks to his "prime mate"
and wife, Maria-Beatriz

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