Denver Day 2

One of hundreds of roses rests in a temporary police barricade.

There is a  lot going on in town.  Between actions and short hours of sleep I can scratch the surface but not much more.  I will give you a view through my eyes but look for other media. Democracy Now! is doing a special two-hour broadcast every day during the conventions and i would strongly recommend it.  Assume that anything you see on TV is extremely biased.  Expect typos.  I am going to just roll out updates when I can, and damn the spelling.

We are crashing at a friendly house in Denver.  We are holding conversations with other young organizers from around the country as they breeze in and out of this low-income apartment just outside of downtown Denver, where all the action is.

We share our microbrews that we towed from Seattle, and someone produces a bottle of Wild Turkey, and several conversations move through the room covering different issues.  I get some questions answered that have been bugging me.  I have been around good people most of my life I am glad to say, but these are really good people.  Open, accessible, exciting, fun, sharp as hell, and very in touch with the world.  The local organizers of course are stressed out, but the atmosphere at least in this pocket is good.

A word about our day.

I have put together a small gallery that includes some of the preparations this morning as we mobilized the first Backbone action here at the DNC.  Like our G8 experience, the week is themed. Today was the major anti-war march.   Participating in the march served the extra purpose for us of recruiting participants to help us on Tuesday when we execute the full procession requiring at least 150 people to carry street puppets and other imagery.

This morning we were all in the park early and unloading puppets while rubbing sleep from our eyes.

At 11:00 we began to fill out the puppets while the rally winds down  down.  The penta-gone has been assembled, and the master puppet builder is putting some finishing touches on the polar bear.  I crawl into the head as he stitches up the skin below me and shows me how to move and blink her eyes, open her mouth and turn her head.  She is an elaborate puppet held up by two backpack frames with a counterbalanced head. If you have not seen this bear in motion she is amazing.  Somehow the movement of the two people carrying makes her come alive and move like a real animal.  I of course set down my camera when I picked her up so the pictures end with her partial assembly,  and Chris the puppet builder and Carly leaning over her bindings.

Right off the bat we did an interview Fox News Live.  “Snowflake” has a particular concise message — this being will be gone forever.

 

The day went on and the heat didn’t stop until we were exhausted. The hardest part is getting all of the puppets ready and taking them down, and fitting them into the truck.   There are police everywhere and secret service are around too. I found about twenty police surrounding Bill at the back of the van this morning.  “We are having a world with your director,” they said in the most intimidating voice they could find.  On the spot they banned a few of our props.  Literally and metaphorically we had to scrap the constitution.  It was just too much for them.  However, despite all of our setbacks we did very well today.  The team is phenomenal — right now strewn about and snoring on the floor now in their exhaustion.  We had a major meeting last night and laid out our plan for Tuesday.  Each one of us coordinates a particular theme sometimes including up to 3 puppets.  The parade is also an entire political platform.

Tonight I asked our host how she thought Obama’s successful campaign has effected local turnout this week.   “I think people have been waiting for eight years for a savior and here he is,”  she said. “So they hear what they want to hear.”   Today Cynthia Mckinney and Fred Hampton Jr Spoke at the rally before the march.  I was standing in the audience dressed as Dick Cheney in prison garb.  People circled around me shooting photos while I tried to listen to the speeches.  They were saying some powerful and truthful things.  I was peering out from the only hole in the mask, Cheney’s mouth.  MTV and several print and radio networks interviewed us while we stood there.  Where do we start with these people?

On the other side of town there is a big  bandstand created by MSNBC to promote and stage their convention coverage.  It is so over-the-top that it verges on political satire.  It is theater, all of it.  I keep thinking… “What part does Obama play?”  I draw a blank.  Every time I get a little closer to understanding it at all his stance like the color of his skin changes like a chameleon.  In an interview in a Rolling Stone magazine that I picked up at the airport he declares his favorite song is “Maggie’s Farm.”  Then he takes a more conservative stance than Bush on Israel/Palestine, or votes for immunity for telecoms involved in the wiretapping of you and I.  He is either too good to be true or the same thing we have always had.  The savior and the oppressor at the same time.  Joe Biden looks like his alter ego.  Meanwhile he keeps the same perfect smile.   I start to wonder if he is even real at all or if he exists solely in our collective imagination as if we were firing the emperor to elect his new clothes.    Maybe we believe it because we have to, even if it dosn’t exist.  Isn’t that the nature of hope?

By the way, AT&T, one of the largest telecoms involved in civilian spying and granted immunity by votes from the Democratic Party including Obama, has sponsored the DNC this year.  Their logo appears around town on official DNC banners along side Qwest and others.  As Bill mentioned in an interview with Reuters this evening, “as citizens we should be immediately suspicious.”

One of our hosts, Adam, writes on a Tent State blog:

“Maybe you consider yourself a radical, maybe a democrat. Maybe you’ll vote for Obama, or maybe you think the whole system is corrupt. And maybe you think Obama can end the war, and maybe he can. One thing is certain though, the war won’t end without all of us demanding and forcing it. It doesn’t matter what ideologies are held, if some of us are planning to vote for Obama or vote NO to the entire system, we’re coming together in Denver this August to tell Sen. Obama and the Democratic Party that if they don’t end the war, we will!”

So anyway here we are.  Happy and tired, and strewn about this living room thinking about the next few days, and for my own part a little bit in awe of everything happening around me, feeling confused by the world but glad to be in it.  “What a day” Nick and I said in unison as we biked home.  The sun is setting over the mountains, and storm clouds are looming to the north.  At the same time a rainbow cuts over the quarter to the south.  We live in big times.

Logan