Funny, I thought there was a "demo" in democracy
Over the last several months a few of my acquaintances have exchanged their American passports for German ones. (The marketers have got it right: national brand loyalty is not what it used to be.) My German wife recently suggested that I do the same. “Eighty-five percent of the American people admire President Bush—dig him,” she argued. “You don’t fit in.” America has lost its humor, its irony and its let-the-good-times-roll. There is only unrelieved vigilance, righteousness and implacability. What’s with this Reich-like homeland nonsense: mass detentions, interrogation roundups, curtailed due process, military tribunals? The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, has turned into mere para-poetic hyperbole: a flag planted in my head.I was very close to exchanging passports—until February 2. That was the date when the Bavarian SPD showed itself to be the most cowardly, unimaginative and opportunistic political party this side of the CSU. One day before the Munich Conference on European Security Policy was to convene—in order to convince all of us that the world is in a general state of perpetual peril—Mayor Ude was cowed by the Bavarian FBI into believing that the city was under siege by a violent horde of 3,000 foreigners converging in the Athens on the Isar from all sides. The clarion call went out to ban all demonstrations. The Bavarian courts approved of the move and it instantly became illegal to gather outdoors in groups of more than three people.
Brought up in America, I never doubted that the freedom to engage in peaceful demonstrations is a basic democratic right and civil disobedience is on occasion a requirement of good citizenship. So, off I marched to Marienplatz with my wife and son. The police quickly closed off all the exits from Marienplatz except im Tal, which leads down to the Isar. We were informed that if we didn’t leave we would be fined € 500 per person. We obeyed and left en masse with the intention of walking to the Siegstor. The city fathers apparently desired a walking-demo less than a standing one, so we were forced to funnel into the small park lying between Westenrieder and Frauen Streets. (Boy, did I miss those wide Washington Avenues, down which those in my generation marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.) The city of Gemütlichkeit was suddenly awash with the sound of sirens, the clunk-clunk of troopers stomping on the sidewalks and the whirr of police helicopters. After about an hour there was a breakout, but the police had it all under control and the demonstrators were herded back toward Marienplatz. And there we stood, peacefully, for the next couple of hours. The 3,000 villains, it turned out, were a mere figment of the imagination, a product of the Bavarian intelligence and policing community famous for such exaggerations.
The group—which one newspaper estimated to be 7,000 strong, but I guessed to be about 2,000—was outnumbered on three sides by police and east German paramilitary forces with years of experience at preventing democratic demonstrations. On the fourth side we had the alleged targets of the antiglobalists: McDonalds, Arthur Anderson, the GAP, Nike. The job of the police changed from stifling the demonstration to preventing laughter, saving face. The line between a protector of the populace and a schoolyard bully is a relatively fine one. A few kids were allegedly arrested for laughing at or pretending to spit on the robo cops. I asked one policewoman if she could have refused to take part in the action. If refusal had been possible, she didn’t know about it. She said fire fighters have to fight the big fires as well as the small ones. She was just doing her job. I couldn’t quite get her to see the difference between beating out fires and beating on people.
The next day, a Sunday, my wife and I peddled down to Marienplatz. We were stopped by the police and told we were not allowed entry. The signs we had taped to our backs, “I’m a demonstration wherever I’m standing,” was an attempt to incite a riot. The international security experts from the Bayerischer Hof strutted around the square while we were forced to cower in a corner. Where every act of defiance is interpreted as violent, there is no place for peaceful demonstrations, collective or individual.
I’m as out of place here as I would be in the States. But I never wanted to be in
the majority. If it’s true what Alexis
DeTocqueville wrote in his 1830s study on the American character—that Americans dislike having to lead their lives under the despotism of the majority—then I am 100% American. This tyranny is not some unique miasma drifting up from ground zero and settling over America. It has been around for some time, has turned global and is going to get worse the more we submit to the primordial impulse to be secure. Our lives are going to get grimmer than ever, until more people begin to poke fun at the new cold war. Democracy resides in the inarticulate, frightened, confused, wondering-where-it-will-all-end teenager in all of us, sniggering at enforced orderliness.
