When Bush Comes to Shove

You've got to be doing something awfully bad to get thousands to come all the way to Quebec City when it's barely spring

By: Mel Watkins

  QUEBEC CITY, APRIL 20: The Peoples' Summit has happened. Now - late Friday afternoon - the people are coming in their multitude. Each hour the numbers grow and the average age of our side falls. Lots more will be coming overnight.
  The older folks' sit-and-listen Summit (some have dubbed it The Old Peoples' Summit) is over. The young people, footless and speaking free, are here.
  The formal, structured, part of the People's Summit ended yesterday. Saturday is the big planned day of protest. Friday is the in-between day. A day-long teach-in is taking place
  No wonder this aging radical sometimes thinks it's the 60s all over again. That was, after all, when we invented the teach-in.
  But most of the demonstrators aren't at the teach-in.
  Hundreds, thousands, of young people, who've just arrived and are housed at Laval University, began a march to the wall. Labour leaders, NDP MPs and others set out to march to meet the young people. Meanwhile, some protesters breached the infamous wall and the riot police came to its protection lobbing tear gas. I'm back in my hotel room watching it live on Newsworld.
 

Of course, we're not a mob, but a crowd, and crowds do have power, as Nobelist Elias Canetti argued...

  Oh, I forgot to mention, Bush and his gang are here. There'll be some loose talk, I suspect, about the "mob" outside the fence - Brian Mulroney has already weighed in - less about the "mobsters" inside.
  Of course, we're not a mob, but a crowd, and crowds do have power, as Nobelist Elias Canetti argued years ago in his brilliant book, Crowds and Power. They have power when the Emperor of the Free World alias George W. Bush demonstrably has no clothes and has to rely on his loyal lieutenant Jean Chrétien to resort to force to hide his, and their, nakedness.
  When Bush comes to shove, the result, as I watch it on Newsworld, is ugly. Too bad Newsworld didn't carry live coverage of the Peoples' Summit - so viewers would have some perspective, some context, in which to place the stone-throwing from outside the wall which brings the riot squad from inside. It would have been rather more educational.
 

CLC officers Jean-Claude Parrot (in blue), Hassan Yussuf (to his right) and Judy Darcy (to his right), along with NDP leader Alexa McDonough (partially obscured by flag) leading 1,000 trade unionists and others in a march Friday that met up with thousands of youth marching downtown from Laval University.

  The Montreal Gazette had a good top-of-the-front-page headline this morning: You're in or you're out. The in-side is more responsible than the out-side for that sharp dichotomy. From ancient Greece onwards, so I've been led to believe, democracy is about dialogue, about everybody listening and, I suppose, trying to come to a consensus.
  The 34 governments assembled here don't just refuse to listen. They don't talk openly and honestly. They don't tell us what's in the text of the trade agreement their officials have been negotiating for three years. When they realize, after Seattle, that this could be dangerous to their health they call in the cops and build a fence.
  This being Canada - I assume they know how to build fences in Texas that keep rustlers out - they've taken all the flak about a fence which got levelled the first time protestors tried. It isn't only high-tech in which we're deficient.
  Good fences, we're always told, make good neighbours. Bad fences foul relations and risk the worst from everybody.
  I've heard some people say: what alternative did the government have but to put up the fence? I guess the only good answer is: behave in such a way that you don't need to be protected. After all, governments do a lot of things, some of them pretty stupid, but there's no serious protest. You've got to be doing something awfully bad to get thousands of us to come all the way to Quebec City when it's barely spring here.
  After Seattle, rather than clean up its act, the WTO decided to meet next in Qatar. They should hold the next Summit of the Americas in Antarctica where there are no people. Or, not bother meeting till they can do more good than bad.

Mel Watkins is a political economist and a political activist who speaks and writes extensively on contemporary issues.

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Posted: April 21, 2001

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