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Unlikely jailbirds
Being in the wrong place at the wrong time gets a duo arrested -- and admired.
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[04/17/00]

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Camp IMF
The protests remain peaceful and the chief gets a photo op as decorum dominates the Washington protests.
By Alicia Montgomery
[04/16/00]

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Two young people sat down by the rear tires and chained themselves to the axle. On top of the truck, the wooden box opened and out popped John Passacantando, executive director of Ozone Action, Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, and Beka Economopolous, director of Ecopledge.com. They unfurled banners down the sides of the van with the slogan of the day: "No World Bank Dollars for Oil, Gas, Mining" and then began making speeches about global warming through a bullhorn. Meanwhile, the purposeful passersby converged on the truck and signs appeared just in time for the TV crews that arrived on schedule, thanks to a prearranged rendezvous.

It was almost too easy. For a few moments the crowd forgot to chant, taken with the sheer sweet precision of it all. The A16 demonstrations in downtown Washington were under way, and the new face of civil disobedience could be seen, even more clearly than last fall in Seattle.

The Web ethos -- speed, technical savvy, an almost instinctive understanding of media -- has informed both sets of protests, and organization over the Internet will bring most of the thousands of protesters expected by week's end to Washington. The three environmental groups and the Gandalfian Ruckus Society organized the kickoff demonstrations on a tiny budget: some cell phones, a rental truck, a few banners, some bail money, all in all an outlay of several thousand dollars that has already leveraged millions in free coverage.

It worked. World Bank officials, who do indeed spend vast sums to subsidize fossil-fuel developments instead of backing small-scale renewable projects, were on the defensive from the start of the week, sputtering out the backpedaling, hedging qualifier-filled evasions we all have come to expect from politicians and corporate flacks under fire.

What a remarkable role reversal. For a couple of decades, big institutions and big corporations have been able to set the public agenda. Their sheer slickness made them nearly invulnerable, offered no traction for activists. The glossy brochure, the TV commercial with the herons nesting on the drilling platform, the op-ad in the Times -- your average vegetarian Oberlin sophomore bounced harmlessly off that plexiglass surface. But now, as everyone is finding out, she can be just as shiny, maybe more so. Her Web site certainly looks better than Chevron's. And she can be endlessly more nimble.

This week's demonstrations run on cell phones. On Monday, staffers were calling Passacantando, Washington's feistiest environmental leader, with speech suggestions while he stood on top of the van. One of the arrested Ruckus Society activists, "Sprout," talked live via cell phone from the D.C. clink to a press conference that followed the bust.

And if the cops (who have so far been calm and professional) had decided to move in à la Seattle with tear gas and rubber bullets, that would have worked at least as well on the evening news. In short, the activists who planned all this were every bit as adept as the folks who once made sure Ronald Reagan never posed without an American flag behind him.

Next page | Can such sweet precision make the emotional impact that civil rights protests did?