NATO Game Over protest in Brussels

Laura is from Finland and has lived in the house with me for a week when she decided to hitch to Belgium for an anti-NATO protest and I joined her. The trip north went well, except for an unplanned 14 hour layover somewhere between Lyon and Dijon. We arrived at the action center in Brussels mid action, people were already going over the fence and at least 50 had been arrested. I thought it would be a bad idea to get arrested since I had some questions about my ambiguous legal status here in Europe. So I didn't rush in all gun-ho. I deciding instead to join a walk to NATO headquarters through some farms. It was as peaceful as 60 completly nonviolent poets and artists walking through a farm could be, but that did not stop a couple of paddy wagons full of police from chasing us down and at least a dozen cops of horses herding us away from the NATO compound. Here in the picture, two cops had Laura and I zip cuffed and were walking us back to there vehicles. Due, I think, to a 'lack of interconnectivity of police intelligence', the horse cops were pushing the rest of the protesters where we were being led. When I had a chance, I broke away from the cops and ran into the crowd. Some media people started interviewing Laura and there were lots of ridiculous pictures taken of us getting arrested on a farm, with nothing but grass and grass. These showed up all over northern European and especially Scandinavian newspapers, as a bit of a joke. I think the mustached reflective sunglasses wearing leader of the Anti-Farmwalk-NATO-Protest police didn't want all of this media attention, so the two cops who had cuffed us sort of slowly wandered away from Laura. We didn't have a problem getting the zip cuffs off. All the pieces in the mainstream media about the NATO Game Over protest talked about the excessive police violence toward the protesters that tried to enter the NATO compound over the fence (50 succeeded!) and the comically exaggerated police presence confronting us in the fields barely within eyesight of NATO headquarters. There were maybe 30 cops on foot, most in riot gear, at least 12 cops on horses, a helicopter over our heads, and more police cars that couldn't drive through all themud circling around the farms. There was not a lot of newsworthy stuff happening the day of and the day after the protest, so in terms of the media attention attracted it was a huge success. It was a bit discouraging that almost every report underestimated the number of people attending the action, the number of people arrested, and that a NATO press release claiming that nobody entered the NATO compound was included in most of the news pieces. I have not attended very many protests, but I think this sort of thing happens a lot. There were lots of good people there, and a two day antiwar conference in the days following. Laura and I were planning to hitch right back to Barcelona, but were convinced instead to stay with some new friends in Gent. More on that later.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

On this Tuesday, March 18, 2008 the Dali Lama threatened to resign, Gov. Paterson held a press conference to talk about the different affairs he and his wife have had the day after he steps in for Elliot Spitzer (who resigned after buying time with a prostitute after signing into law anti-prostitution laws that may be used against him), the Fed cut interest rates by 3/4 of a point to fend off the bear market, Fox news plays again and again old and new footage of Barack Obama's pastor Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright ranting against the racist state, the EU decides that China's murderous actions in Tibet to not justify boycotting the Beijing olympics, and perhaps I lost my great grandfathers ring. And then Barack Obama gives this speech:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html

Heck of a bunch of words. Lets hope some people were paying attention. I didn't vote for this guy in the primaries, but if we have to have somebody establishment in the white house, he might as well be able to put a couple sentences together. Its been a seedy, sordid, and foul smelling sort of day to give to reading and watching the news, but something about his speech blew across me like a not so nasty smelling sewer wafting over from the wrong side of the tracks.

This is an ominous beginning

I feel I should start all this by saying it was a long and sordid night. And it was all, it was all because of that god damned bear constume. Lindzey wanted Veronica and I to go to this costume party in the Barrio Gotic, but not in a squat. It was on the third floor of a real live apartment building and by the time we got there it was 1 and the karaoke pop coming threw the door gave me a bad feeling in my stomach. I had asked Lindzey if the Thunderdome people were going to be there, what was the scene going to be like? She said it was new people. What kind of people? She said it was a gay party. OK great. That I can handle. At the door, in our costumes, I was begining to have second thoughts. Perhaps American Gay diverged from Spanish Gay in some kind of shocking and startling way that I was unaware of and unprepared for. But it was Saturday night and it was too late to turn back. Veronica was dressed as some kind of antique space moon colony cadet, all tin foil shinny with a fire hoses coming out of everywhere and blinking flashlights affixed to her glasses. Her hair was definitly in some kind of antique space moon colony cadet hairdo, and she had some alien scrawl on her face. But it was my costume that was making me feel uncomfortable. I was wearing the bear suit. And I had to take drastic, although not entirely unprecedented, actions to get into it. I think you know what I mean. I gutted the crotch. These pictures I attached speak only to the pregame optimism that we all shared. How often in life is preparing for a costume party so much better then the party itself? The big groin level hole attracted alot of attention. From alot of the wrong sorts of people. I was accused of being everything from a zoophiliac to a furry. They were serious and it wasn't pretty. Only the Americans dressed up and we had no other option than to take full advantage of the open bar and the dark back rooms. Like I said, it was a dark and sordid night. Nothing about it will prevent the bear suit from being worn again. These costume freaks are worse then a sewing circle. It just wasn't a good showing from the oldest democracy in the world.

After we left things really went downhill. I took Veronica to the airport a couple hours after we got home. We were still drunk, and it was only after we were almost there that I realized that she had a RyanAir flight and there was no way in hell she could get to Girona in time. So we spent the day sobering up in the airport emailing friends and family until she could get a ticket to Dublin that night so as to connect with her flight back over the big pond. While we were waiting for people to write back and all of the necessary communications to be made we scoured what eateries the airport had to offer: mostly soggy french fries and most of sandwiches. By 8 o'clock when she boarded her plain and I headed back on the train, security was happy to see us leave. Although it was sad to see Veronica step on that escalator and get pulled up to the second floor and then the sky, I was glad to be going home, to a place whose ambiguous legal status at least made some sense.