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| ‘No War’ Shirt? No problem | |||||||
| Our columnist wears his pro-peace T-shirt to a Manhattan mall just days after a man upstate is handcuffed for a similar action, but finds it’s much tougher to get arrested — or even to get an audience — in New York City | |||||||
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| March 10 — I couldn’t get arrested. I went to a shopping mall this weekend wearing a T-shirt that said “Peace on Earth” on it, and, can you believe it, I didn’t get hauled off to jail. Not like the guy in upstate New York who got arrested - handcuffed, even - for walking around a shopping mall last week with a T-shirt bearing the same inflammatory anti-war slogan. |
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STEPHEN DOWNS, 60, became an international celebrity — and an unwitting symbol of America’s sporadic commitment to free speech — after officers in an upstate New York mall hauled him to jail for the crime of proclaiming an anti-war opinion in a public place. ( The actual charge was for trespassing after he refused to leave the mall or to take off his shirt.) I assure you, this isn’t an Arlo Guthrie song. This really happened. So as America’s best-loved participatory journalist, I had to know whether Downs’s experience in upstate New York — which shares a governor with New York City, but not necessarily a century — meant that we all are in danger of being arrested for making our opinions known in these trouble times. After all, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer once warned that “all Americans. . .need to watch what they say [and] watch what they do.” Could he have been eerily prescient? To find out, I used my NEWSWEEK online gold card to order a variety of custom-made t-shirts with the appropriate sloganeering. But at $1 per letter — and $12 for the shirt itself — I quickly discovered that wearing your opinion on your chest has its limitations. Sure, “Peace on Earth” only set me back $24, but you can see how a slightly more complicated slogan like “President Bush has not made a credible argument for pre-emptive action by proving that Saddam Hussein is a grave and immediate threat to America and her people” can quickly break the bank. Not to mention an iron-on protest to my current pet peeve: “Why does Colin Powell stay at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel - where rooms start at $240 a night - when he’s in New York City for U.N. meetings? Can’t he stay at the Milford Plaza — the famed ‘Lulla-buy of Broadway’?” Clearly, the cost of these shirts will stifle debate more than the fear of getting arrested. So “Peace on Earth” is was. But where Downs said he was immediately approached by his fellow shoppers at the Crossgates Mall, I found myself completely ignored. Where Downs said he was tailed by security guards and ordered to remove the offensive T-shirt, I waltzed past the rent-a-cops at the Manhattan Mall in busy Herald Square without them so much as opening their eyes from slumber. I did get an approving nod from a guy in a vitamin store, but clearly “Peace on Earth” was not aggressive enough to inflame the passions of New Yorkers. So I moved onto Plan B: wearing the slightly more opinionated shirt that Downs’s 31-year-old son, Roger, had worn — but removed upon the security guard’s request — on that fateful day: “No War With Iraq.” Again, I paraded around the Manhattan Mall like a peacock looking for some tail, but the closest thing I got to a reaction was one guy who made eye contact — which is a form of communication so forbidden in New York City that I had no choice but to see it as clear approval. I probably would’ve gotten more reaction — and maybe even a rise out of the comatose security guards — if there had been any customers from whom to get a reaction. Indeed, if you’re walking around a mall in America right now, you’ll quickly be reminded that our economy is in such dire straights that you may be the only one walking around the mall right now. So even if you’re walking around in a “ No War” T-shirt, you’ll have plenty of quiet time to notice that the only things being sold in malls nowadays are DVDs, baseball caps, high-fat lunches and violent video games with titles like “Splinter Cell” and “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.” (No wonder we aren’t terrified by the prospects of real war with Iraq; we’ve all already played the PlayStation version.) Clearly, even more drastic steps were needed. But I was in uncharted waters. After all, Downs was operating in the polite-but-conservative waters of upstate New York. I was here in Sodom-on-the-Hudson. To get arrested in New York City, I’d need to wear a T-shirt depicting President Bush and Osama bin Laden engaging in a sexual act particularly well-suited to four-legged animals. Unfortunately, all those shirts were sold out. Like I said, it’s New York. Besides, I wanted to keep the discourse on a higher plane, so I opted for something a little less aggressive than carnal relations with a terrorist, but something a little more pungent than the naively utopian “Peace on Earth.” I opted for “Bush Stinks!” (You could argue that the exclamation mark was grandstanding, but I stand by it.) (If you want to see what I looked like, click here: gershkuntzman.homestead.com/bushshirt.html) |
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Finally, I started causing a stir — not enough of a stir to get arrested, mind you, but it was a start. Like Downs - who said that customers asked him questions about his anti-war position — I found that people were eager to ask about my provocative attire. “What kind of ‘Bush’ do you mean?” one man wanted to know. When I told him that I meant the president, he said, “OK. In that case, I’m in agreement with you!” Another man gave me a thumbs-up, while a Radio Shack clerk applauded as I walked by her empty store. To be fair, on the way out, a group of teenagers saw my shirt and shouted after me, “Bush rocks!” Despite this mild frisson of controversy, I still couldn’t get arrested. I asked Downs what I had done wrong and he surmised that I had the misfortune of making an anti-war protest in a city where the expression “Go to hell” roughly translates to “Good morning.” “The mall up here has a reputation for trying to avoid any controversies,” Downs said, referring to similar evictions of other peace protesters last year. “Ever since then, they’ve been on the lookout for what they consider disturbances like my t-shirt.” The chief operating officer of the private real-estate company that owns Manhattan Mall confirmed that I just might have picked the wrong place to attempt to enter the pantheon of international media celebrities. “Anyone can wear whatever he wants in our mall,” said Mark Teitelbaum, COO of Argent Ventures. “I can’t even imagine what was [the upstate mall’s] thinking to arrest a guy for a t-shirt. The only way you’d get arrested in our mall is if you were walking around naked.” I asked Teitelbaum if I’d be arrested for creating a disturbance. “No, but the sight of you naked might adversely affect business,” he said. “Especially if you were naked in the food court.” Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at www.gersh.tv © 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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