SEATTLE, Wash.
An eerie half-calm, enforced by marching columns of police and troops in full-body armor, settled over downtown Seattle today. Street corners that had been scenes of dramatic confrontation yesterday saw small-scale, unthreatening protests this morning and early afternoon, as demonstrators, trade delegates, journalists, and everyone else in this stunned city got down to the important business: trying to make sense of yesterday’s vast confrontations. What did it mean that Seattle, the mellow upper-left-hand corner of the richest nation on earth, had seen perhaps the most confrontational political demonstrations since the end of the Vietnam war?
What a gas.
Photo: World Trade Observer.
This correspondent would like to make a few factual points, on the theory that this will prove to be an historic moment in American progressive political history, one that’s already being misrepresented by the images and words that float across the tube. My biases have been made clear already: The idea of standing up to the endless globalization of economy and culture strikes me as powerfully sane. Add t... Read more
