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Decaffeinated protests
Would-be anti-corporate crusaders encounter the unexpected as they take on Starbucks, Gap and the Washington police.
By Alicia Montgomery
[04/14/00]

Showdown in Miami
Janet Reno's deadline came and went, but Elián stayed put. That didn't stop the city's Cuban-Americans from putting on a Hollywood show.
By John Lantigua
[04/13/00]

Why they can't all just get along
In the unfolding telenovella over custody of Elián, the Gonzálezes look more disturbed than the Sopranos.
By Myra MacPherson
[04/13/00]

Political shootout over Columbine
As the anniversary of the high school massacre approaches, President Clinton meets with opponents to see whether everyone can agree to close the gun-show loophole.
By Dave Cullen
[04/13/00]

Setting the record straight
Holocaust denier David Irving loses his London libel suit.
By Heather World
[04/11/00]

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"Totally for sure I just got a manicure; The sun I swear is messing with my golden hair; Go go buy buy; Gee I hope I look alright; Consumption consumption what's your function? Consumption consumption what's your function? Tell me I should buy more to feel good; When I'm depressed buy more to impress; For only $19.95 you might let me stay alive."

A guy from Public Citizen stands and makes an announcement for "anyone interested in shaking the pillars of power." A contingent is heading down to the National Press Building to protest WTO President Michael Moore. "The cool Michael Moore's going to be there, too," the Public Citizen guy says, "both the good one as well as the evil one."

"Bring your Generation X angst," he tells the crowd.

Celeste's shift as a media escort will be done at noon, after which she and Conner will look for a local vegetarian restaurant that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist. Then she'll sign up for workshops. "There are a lot of workshops I took in Seattle that I should take again," she says. "Like jail solidarity."

This is the united-we-stand process in which arrested protestors refuse to give their names, or even eat, so as to stand together and increase the odds they all will be freed without any charges. According to Adam Eivinger, one of the organizers for the Mobilization for Global Justice's protest, "99 percent of the people arrested in Seattle were freed" because of jailhouse solidarity, a process he says was brought to the forefront of the protest movement by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

The other workshop Celeste wants to take again is on nonviolence, training in the art of going limp and spreading peaceful vibes so cops have not even the slightest excuse to hurt you.

She sighs. She got majorly tear-gassed in Seattle, she says, and she's worried that Washington's Metropolitan Police Department's about to do the same thing. The first day of the WTO protests she was tear-gassed six times. "You can't breathe at all. You sneeze. Your eyes burn. It suffocates you." She fell victim after a cop had confiscated her gas mask, she says.

Then on the second day she was gassed four more times. "This one had a weird odor to it," she says. Speculation ran rampant that it was nerve gas. "It didn't burn your eyes as much as it just knocked you out. They were gassing whole neighborhoods. All the women started their cycle," she says. "One woman had a miscarriage -- obviously she thinks it was because of the gas." After she returned to Texas, she was sick for four days.

Ugh. She wasn't even really protesting in Seattle, she was the designated "jail support," responsible for getting out of jail members of her "affinity group" -- one of the many ragtag consortiums of protestors brought together to stick together. Those assigned to jail support aren't even supposed to be at the protests, they're to wait by the phone to help bail out their fellow affinity group members. "That's a big role and a big responsibility," she says, "which is why I don't want to do it this time."

"All of us are working so hard, training for months in nonviolence," she says, "and the cops are being trained in how to control us and how to be violent. We're prepared for a peaceful demonstration and they're prepared for war. I don't want to be gassed again."

Celeste's fear is rooted not only in her Seattle experience of police overreaction (to put it charitably), but that of Washington, D.C., cops. Wednesday night, only three blocks away, seven protestors were arrested for carrying raw materials that would be used to make modern protestors' tools known as lockboxes, a construction through which protestors all weave their arms in order to form a more united physical force. "As far as I know there's no law against chicken wire," Celeste says. But the cops, calling the chicken wire, plastic pipes and duct tape "implements of crime," didn't see it that way.

"They weren't plumbers, they weren't electricians, they weren't chicken farmers," a D.C. cop told the Washington Post. "The use was for the protest, to disrupt traffic."

But Eivinger disputes this, saying that at least some of the materials were going to be used to construct the humongous puppets. As of Thursday afternoon, one of the chicken-wire-smugglers was still in jail, having refused to give his name. These weren't the first protest-related arrests of the week. On Monday, seven others were busted for blocking traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue for an hour and trying to put up anti-World Bank banners on the World Bank itself. "World Bank Kills," said the smaller banner, which was successfully unfurled.

Celeste and I go upstairs to some of the workshops. "You can't go in there," she says, pointing to the one on blockades, in a corner room. In the front room five white people sit with a black woman who is conducting a seminar on diversity. On the side a crowd of 30 or so listen to lessons on being "medical monitors," freelance faux-First Aiders.

And in the middle room, 20 protestors and three toddlers stand in a circle moaning. This is the seminar on "magickal activism," conducted by a witch known as Star Hawk.

"She's, like, super-highly regarded," Celeste says.

The crew is being instructed by, er, Hawk on creating a "circle of protection." When she was much younger, she was cycling on a country road one night while sporting a circle of protection, when she was hit by a car, she tells the earnest faces before her. "The car ran into my bike and sort of bounced off," she says. "I thought: 'That didn't happen!'"

A middle-aged guy with Velcro sneakers comes over to me and makes sure that, as a member of the media, I'm accompanied by a media escort. Celeste waves him off.

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