WTO Memories

[from 12/2/09]

I'm writing this a full week before it's due out, because Glorious Editorial Manager wants Thanksgiving Day AND Thanksgiving Weekend off, and he has the better union. Whenever I have to write a column so soon I wonder what irrelevant topic I'll write about this time. It should seem vaguely entertaining, while not having anything to do with anything recent.

One possibility was to talk about squirrels. I think squirrels can be very funny. You know the expression "squirrels away"? When I hear it I think of Seafair Pirates loading squirrels in their brass cannon, and firing it off, shouting "squirrel's away!" Technically, I'm not so amused there by the squirrel as by the apostrophe. But it's fun to imagine the squirrel's high pitched squirrel curses as it sails through the air. Don't worry, they aim him at a tree and he lands safely. I abandon this line of thought, on the grounds that it not only has nothing to do with anything recent, it has nothing to do with anything ever.

Because I'm writing this so early, I'm not over the whole WTO Ten Year Anniversary hoopla that's sweeping Seattle, as you are. You there, with your cigarette in your rosy future one week from now. You are so blasé about WTO now. "I'm done; I'll turn in as soon as I smoke this down," you say.

Well you shouldn't be blasé! The WTO and the protests surrounding it continued from November 30 all the way to December 3, when the conference collapsed. So if it's not Friday yet you can still remember it in that cute annual way that you all enjoy! Because secretly you all worship the Sun, and still think the seasons are due to its progress through space, when they are actually due to changes in the Earth's position relative to it!

Here are some personal memories of WTO.

1. Watching two files of storm troopers form on 3rd Ave between Pine and Stewart by the Bon before a crowd of onlookers, to goose-step, literally, around the block to the west and back, just for show.

2. Walking north on 2nd Ave between Virginia and Lenora, and witnessing the "occupation"  of 2nd & Lenora by storm troopers delivered to the scene hanging to the side of a Humvee, after they first softened up the desired acquisition by lobbing gas canisters at it. The most memorable aspect of this was that there were no protesters, no anarchists, and no vandals at that intersection. There weren't even cars as the occupiers arrived. But, boy, did they look proud of themselves.

3. Several hours later after a prohibition against walking downtown was lifted, I remember walking from Belltown to Pioneer Square. I remember the helicopters with the searchlights trained on Westlake. I was most taken by the file of, I estimated, fifty cop cruisers, all with sirens on continuously, winding randomly through the city streets at fifty miles per hour, with no other evident purpose than to terrify.

As much as those memories mean to me, just because I saw those things myself, and in the case of #2, smelled them, I have to say, and I don't think I'm alone in saying this,  that the worst thing that happened at WTO 1999 was Mayor Paul Schell's downtown 50-block no protest zone.

We've all got over everything else. We've cleared our lungs of the pepper spray. Our courts dismissed charges against 200 wrongly arrested protesters. Our city paid 200 wrongly arrested protesters damages for having arrested them in the first place. Justice is what you get when get what you had coming to you. Like when you stand in front of a speeding ice cream truck, you get the ice cream you deserve.

But we haven't overcome the result of Paul Schell's illegal abrogation of the Constitution and the imprimatur it was given by the so-called liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Our Constitutional Rights have not yet been restored.

That's the current news.