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| A Media Puppet Show | |||||||
| To reporters, the WEF protestors are just street theater. But are we intentionally missing their message? | |||||||
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| Feb. 4 — It’s very difficult to take a woman named Starhawk seriously. It’s even more difficult when Starhawk tells you that she represents an organization called “the Pagan Cluster” and that the “cluster” opposes the World Economic Forum, that gathering of global capitalists that relocated to New York last week from its home in Davos, Switzerland, to show “solidarity” with my battered hometown. |
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| BEYOND THE OBVIOUS contradiction—after all, money is the capitalists’ only god, so doesn’t that make them pagans, too?—Starhawk’s appearance did little else but reinforce the stereotype that people protesting last week’s gathering of the world’s most powerful CEOs, bankers and government officials were nothing but a bunch of naïve kids with weird hair. | |||||||||
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On some level, it’s not entirely our fault as reporters. We gathered dutifully at pre-Forum press conferences and jotted down everything the anti-Forum groups had to say. But it was tough to be completely objective: As difficult it is to take Starhawk seriously, it’s even harder to not giggle when a guy shows up in a black leather unitard, slicked-down, German techno hair covering 80 percent of his face and a nameplate that reads “Vegan.” You could practically hear the sound of the gristled New York press corps rolling its eyes. At one anti-WEF press conference, not only did Starhawk tell us about the Pagan Cluster’s plan for a vigil (a vigil! Wow, that’ll scare them back to Davos!), but Friends of the Earth said they would bring ten “Anne Robinson impersonators” to the barricades outside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to yell “You are the weakest link!” at the capitalists as they entered. And the eyes did roll. “So, they’re protesting the World Economic Forum by impersonating a low-rated game show host who everyone hates?” one reporter mocked. Next, another speaker announced her group’s plan for a protest march that sounded more like going to a matinee of “Mummenschanz” than a reasoned debate with the most powerful men on the planet. “We will use puppetry, music and dance to paint a picture of a better world,” said Brooke Lehman of a group called the Direct Action Network. More eye rolls: “Are we covering a protest or a 5th-grade arts and crafts class?” another reporter joked. And still other protesters complained that the media had misreported their mission. “We’re not anti-globalization,” said another group leader, Beka Economopoulos (whose surname sounded awfully convenient at a gathering of businessmen). “We oppose the globalization of corporate lawlessness, but we support the globalization of social justice and democracy.” (Sorry, we must have misinterpreted that last puppet show.) Finally, one contemptuous reporter stood up and asked if any of the protesters could offer a vision for how the world should be governed. After a long pause, a guy named David Solnit got up, grabbed a huge puppet head that bore the slogan, “Global Justice, Not Corporate Rule” and then ticked off a laundry list of government models that included “Chiapas, the landless peasant movement in Brazil and local school boards.” Apparently, he wasn’t joking. I don’t think I’ve ever met a public school parent who thinks his local school board is a model for efficient governance. And not even George W. Bush, with his 90-percent approval rating, could get re-elected advocating a shift from American-style capitalism to a landless peasant-style anarchy. | ||||||||
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So, of course, the coverage of the protestors was slanted towards ridiculing the kids. One columnist called them “pie-throwing, critter-liberating, bomb-building, arson-setting, spell-casting, utensil-stealing cop-haters” (despite little evidence of missing knives, forks and spoons from area restaurants) while even the venerable New York Times described the kids as “anarchists” (even though the only Molotov cocktails seen during the four-day Forum were the ones being served at the WEF-sponsored open bars). And through it all, the media continued to hype the threat of violence—as if groping to justify their wall-to-wall coverage of what is nothing but a boring trade convention for businessmen. I’m not naïve. There has been violence and property damage whenever or wherever the world’s top capitalists have gathered, most of it directed towards faceless corporations. (I abhor violence, but I must admit that I sometimes want to throw a garbage can through a Starbucks window. Anarchist? No, I just don’t think anyone should charge $3.85 for a large—excuse me, “venti”—cappuccino). Yet despite the complete absence of pie-throwing, critter-liberating, bomb-building or even spell-casting on the barricades at the World Economic Forum, the scorn from my fellow reporters continued. And it made me want to paraphrase Elvis Costello: What’s so funny about people who care about peace, love and understanding? Is there some kind of rule in journalism nowadays that reporters no longer have to be objective or analytical just because something comes out of the mouth of a woman named Starhawk or a hairy kid with a “Vegan” nametag? | ||||||||
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If you were willing to listen, protesters offered countless examples of how Western corporations run sweatshops throughout the Third World, abuse the environment, obliterate native cultures, depress local economies and then pick up and leave when they can find cheaper labor elsewhere—and it’s all sanctioned by repressive regimes and corrupt governments in the poorest parts of the world. Things that workers take utterly for granted in this country—the right to form unions, access to clean air and water, decent wages—are unheard of most everywhere else. But if such charges are made by some kid with a puppet outside the Waldorf Astoria, it’s somehow invalid in the eyes of the press. Clearly, it’s very hard to be an earnest young person in a cynical old world. And globalization has a hidden cost here at home: the increasing homogenization of our culture. It wasn’t lost on me, for instance, that I passed five Starbucks and four Gaps just walking from the office to the Waldorf. And it also wasn’t lost on me that 60 blocks from where the leaders of the free (and not so free) world were supposedly carving up the planet for fun and profit, a museum on the Upper West Side opened a show called “Family Matters: Century-Old New York City Businesses.” And this wasn’t the Museum of Modern Art or the Museum of American Life as It’s Lived Now, but the New-York Historical Society. It’s pretty compelling that a bunch of kids downtown were protesting the “corporate monoculture” of places like The Gap and Starbucks while uptown, Mom and Pop stores were on display ... in a history museum! If Mom and Pop are destined for the dustbin, certainly globalization is taking a toll on our culture as well as indigenous ones in Africa. I left the museum and returned to one of the protesters’ press conferences, where the reporters were still giving the kids a hard time. Although the protesters continued to focus on their puppetry and dance, a reporter asked Starhawk the same old question about whether there would be any violence at this year’s Forum. Starhawk questioned the reporter’s very premise. “No one is talking about violence, yet it is all we are ever asked about,” she said, practically crying. “These are young people who really care about this world, where the level of injustice is so great. We’re here to challenge you in the media to step out of your defined roles and listen to your hearts and see what’s in front of you. Why not stand up with us for a vision of the world that serves the majority of the planet?” She had a point. It might have taken a few days, but I actually took a woman named Starhawk seriously. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||
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