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By Root 1192 0

days before the conference began. They planned attention-getting but peaceful demonstrations. An advance cadre of anti-WTO organizers had rented warehouses where they built floats and constructed elaborate “street theater protest costumes” that would call attention to species and habitats threatened by globalization. They would take on the forces of transnational capitalism by dressing as endangered sea turtles and owls. So efficient were their preparations, organizers planned a brigade of volunteers whose sole job would be to march alongside the sea turtle and owl people—as well as the steelworkers and other labor union protesters, the socialists, the students and “Free Mumia” people—and pick up their litter. Organizers whom I interviewed days before the protests revealed an obsession for order that likely would have impressed the corporate interests they were taking on. In one meeting I sat in on, they used Microsoft PowerPoint to lay out organizational charts for their nonviolent protests.

But within hours of the peaceful demonstrations beginning on the morning of November 29, Seattle’s four hundred riot police deployed on the streets began firing tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets into the crowd of nonviolent protesters. Tens of thousands of demonstrators, WTO attendees and downtown office workers were caught up in the melee. Much of downtown Seattle was enveloped in clouds of tear gas and smoke from trash fires (some set by tear gas canisters, which detonate with a small, fiery explosion; others set by protesters). State police, then National Guardsmen armed with military-grade CS tear gas, joined the fray. More than five hundred citizens were arrested. But Wingnut and his anarchist friends from Eugene were not among those arrested. For four days, they eluded the paramilitary crackdown and roamed the city, smashing windows, throwing rocks at police, setting fires and redecorating storefronts with anticorporate slogans. The rampage cost Seattle business owners some $20 million.

Police, the media and many nonviolent protesters have blamed the anarchists for sparking the riots, and anarchists like Wingnut are more than happy to take the credit. “The Battle of Seattle,” as the media have since dubbed the four days of rioting, was a high point for American anarchists in terms of their ability to wreak havoc and draw attention to themselves, which are key goals of the movement. Havoc, as they see it, makes the state look incompetent and forces it to expose its true face of repressive brutality, typically in the guise of club-wielding, tear gas-spewing police. Attention, it’s believed, attracts more followers to the cause, bringing them closer to their final goal: revolution. As one would expect, overthrow of the state and allied corporate entities remains the traditional goal of most anarchists. But where anarchists used to see themselves as battling to defend the human spirit from the degradations of the state, the goal of the movement, as it has evolved in the past fifteen years or so, is to defend the environment from the degradations of humankind. The state remains the enemy, but not because it destroys the individual’s soul. Instead, the state must be dismantled because it allows the clear-cutting of forests, the creation of genetically modified crops and the construction of ski resorts on pristine mountains. As Wingnut inevitably says, when asked by police who his leader is, “I work for Mother Earth, arrest her.”

In the Battle of Seattle, Wingnut was at the center of the action, earning a reputation as one of Eugene’s most hard-core revolutionaries. He fought cops and National Guardsmen, brawled with security guards, “unarrested” three friends by yanking them from the arms of the police, and almost single-handedly wrecked a Starbucks, a Gap and a McDonald’s.

“Wingnut kicked a lot of ass for all of us,” says Carlos, one of Wingnut’s comrades in the riots.

In the past few days, images of anarchists have been splashed across national television, picked up in shaky news camera shots as they ran through smoke-filled