Hella Nation - Evan Wright [39]
Many factors are converging to create today’s anarchist movement, Dreiling says: “The 1970s and 1980s were a period of consensus and conciliation between environmentalists and the power elite, but the economic boom of the nineties has benefited primarily the upper reaches of society. The kids identifying themselves as anarchists today are mostly middle-class white kids. They are offered the neon-pleasure-dome vision of society on TV. They are promised life will be an endless Mountain Dew commercial, but they end up with jobs assembling burritos. They have a lot of anger. No one wants to hear their rage. And they can’t afford to plant a million-dollar lobbyist in the Beltway to solve their problems.”
Eugene, Oregon, has long been a haven for militant anarchists, going back to the labor movement among loggers. But in the past few years the new wave of eco-anarchists has made its presence known. The tree-sitters, dedicated to taking on the lumber companies, arrived in the mid-nineties. In June 1999, they stepped up their anticorporate campaign in the town by smashing storefronts and tagging shops along the main commercial strip. A year before, they trashed the local Niketown. Eugene’s mayor calls his city “the anarchist capital of the world.”
While most anarchists define their goal as something along the lines of global revolution, many of the most ardent “brick-tossers”—as some like to call themselves—admit they would be satisfied if their efforts changed how existing corporations and states do business. Even Wingnut’s friend and fellow anarchist Shade believes his extreme acts like smashing windows and defacing corporate storefronts helps make more traditional environmentalists and their causes seem more reasonable to the public. For Shade, it’s okay if smashing the window of a Gap doesn’t lead to the abolition of corporate franchise shops, so long as the action brings scrutiny to their business, labor and environmental practices. As Shade puts it, “When the anarchists do their thing . . . the liberals look middle-of-the-ground all of a sudden.”
I NEVER WOULD HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED a story on the WTO protests by Rolling Stone if the anarchists hadn’t smashed up the city. Weeks before the demonstrations in Seattle, I found out about elaborate preparations being undertaken by nonviolent protest organizers and began meeting with them, visiting a warehouse factory where they were assembling agitprop costumes and gearing up to peacefully confront the WTO. They expected a turnout of tens of thousands of demonstrators and predicted—rightly, as it turned out—that this would be one of the largest protests in an American city in at least the past decade. I wrote this up in a pitch to my editor at Rolling Stone, and a few days later the magazine rejected the story idea. Rolling Stone had no interest in covering the protests, however huge or colorful or significant the cause might be. It wasn’t until the second day of the protests, when TV news showed anarchists rioting, that my editor called to assign the story. “You’ve got to find those black-clad kids,” he said.
After I found Wingnut, I initially questioned whether my presence would influence him to perform for me, the media. Later I realized I’d had it backward. It was the anarchists who had succeeded in influencing Rolling Stone and other media through their destructive acts.
Riots are made for television, and news broadcasts around the planet lavished viewers with those images of black-clad anarchists smashing windows, of burning trash cans, of police firing tear gas and wielding batons. The images were presented with a simple narrative: that peaceful protests had turned violent when anarchists went on a rampage. Reports from Seattle included wild embellishments. The New York Times published (and later retracted) a story that anarchists had attacked police and WTO delegates with firebombs.
Events on the ground