It's safe to say anyone who showed up in a salacious frame of mind at last Friday's "We'd Rather Wear Nothing Than Wear Gap" rally went home disappointed. On the corner across from the Georgetown Gap, the gang of so-called "Gaptivists" took a page out of the old PETA playbook, evoking the "I'd Rather Wear Nothing Than Wear Fur" ads of the early 1990s in which nude supermodels bared all to save their furry friends. However, when it came time for the rally's closing communal striptease, only a few brave souls dared to show just how naked their sense of outrage was. And they only got down to their (presumably non-Gap) underwear.
In fact, it's hard to imagine that anyone who showed up Friday, no matter what their motivation, felt they got their money's worth. The rally was jointly organized by "Save the Redwoods/Boycott the Gap" and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees' "Global Justice for Garment Workers Campaign" -- and its agenda was as cluttered as those facts might suggest. The sweatshop plank was easy enough to make sense of: The Gap has been public enemy No. 2 (after Nike) for the anti-sweatshop movement, despite the company's seemingly earnest but admittedly ineffectual efforts to address its critics' demands.
The redwood connection wasn't immediately evident, but, according to a flyer passed around, the Fisher family, which owns Gap, Inc., also owns a company that logs California's redwood trees. And the "No license to kill fish" sign? That could be explained by the salmon that choke on the runoff from treeless hillsides. But while it's easy to chalk up the cries of "there will be no freedom until there is revolution" to the emotion of the moment, what do we make of the speaker who talked at length about the vital but totally unrelated question of South American water privatization?
Besides all that, there was the discouraging impression that the whole thing was simply being tolerated, like a tantrum. It was a sort of Potemkin protest, with journalists nearly outnumbering demonstrators and everything cleanly hemmed in by lines of police in samurai-like riot gear. At the end of the rally, as the strippers were gathering up their clothes, a call-and-response chant went up: "Whose streets? Our streets!" Not 30 seconds later, one of the organizers announced that the police were asking that everyone clear the sidewalks so people could get through. The Gaptivists docilely complied; after all, it wouldn't do to obstruct pedestrian traffic. Whose streets were those again?
The sun came out Saturday for the main rally and march and everyone played their roles to perfection. The police were grim-faced and stolid, the demonstrators were plastered with stickers and full of chants and the 20-odd anti-demonstrators brandished Old Glory and spat anti-communist invective with a glee that showed just how much they missed the bad old days of the Cold War. But no matter how often the protesters shouted "No more business as usual!" business as usual was exactly what was going on.
The rally started around noon along the southern slope of the Mall just under the Washington Monument. From the stage came a liturgical intonation of the injustices and cruelties of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- from nongovernmental-organization leaders, Bolivian union organizers, South African workers, Ralph Nader, American AIDS activists and a hardcore band called Blowback. Above the crowd rose a tugboat-sized blow-up shark with the earth in its jaws ("Stop IMF Loan-Sharking") and an even larger blow-up pig ("Hog-tied by Corporate Greed"). There was a life-sized cardboard tractor protesting Caterpillar's sale of "the machinery of death" to Israel (the bulldozers used to level Palestinian Authority offices and Palestinian homes) and a woman on stilts dressed as the Statue of Liberty, her tablet reading "Not in my name." A small knot of people sporting Service Employees International Union T-shirts only served to emphasize the striking lack of local labor union presence. Halfway through, an anti-war march made its way across the Mall and joined the throng, and a little later a band of black-clad anarchists came through, beating drums in a grim conga line. At one point the emcee passed along a request from the park police that protesters not climb in the trees: "Please remember that we are an environmental organization. We don't want to hurt the trees."
There was the usual mix of activists and the merely active. Josh Dimon, an intern at Environmental Defense who specializes in export-credit agencies, was happy to speak at length about the strangulating effects of U.S. trade policy on the markets of developing countries. Fellow protester Elaine Russell's grievances were more general. She wanted to see "a paradigm shift in the terms of ownership of property" because "our ego is where we realize the oneness of all of us; that consciousness is hardest to achieve by people with excessive power and privilege." She held a sign with George W. Bush and the number 666 beneath him, an anathema he had earned for his "predatory spreading of fundamentalist Christianity." Another man made his way through the crowd passing out flyers urging a change of the American national symbols -- a green fringe on the flag instead of gold, a globe or sheaf of wheat instead of the finial Roman eagle -- to something less martial and more celebratory of grassroots organizations and social justice.
In The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer's account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam war march on the Pentagon, the author laments the futility of the idea entertained by some of his fellow marchers that they would be able to get inside the building and disrupt its inner workings. The Pentagon's power, he observes, is not centralized, but diffused among the warren of offices; there is no one place to strike. The IMF and the World Bank present similar difficulties. But for Saturday's marchers, these difficulties remained, at best, theoretical ones -- because they never got near the buildings.
The march, when it started around 3 p.m., was a few thousand strong. It proceeded north along 15th Street by the treasury department. Along the way, it picked up a young woman named Lissa Tucker. She'd been out on a power walk and had been "swept up in a tsunami of protesters." She professed to not knowing much about the IMF or the World Bank, but said she was concerned about where President Bush was taking the country. She seemed happy enough with the slow pace and frequent stops and only mildly concerned that the barricades made it impossible for her to get out when she wanted to. So she and the marchers turned left on I Street and, after a few blocks, spilled out into Farragut Square, where they milled around between the perpendicular phalanxes of police that marked the terminus. Then she slipped out and across the street and went to get a late lunch.
