Highly Organised Anarchy  

Crikey's US Election correspondent Guy Rundle desperately needs an editor to trim his dispatches down to something a bit more pithy, but he still has a few entertaining lines here and there. His latest effort compares the shoddy Republican organisation at their convention (seemingly just as random as McCain's methodology for choosing a vice presidential candidate) with the highly organised anarchists confronting them - The anarchists are more organised than the GOP. It seems chaos has more structural integrity than faux laissez-faire.

Halfway down Silper Street, between the advancing lines of riot police, in the full gasmask and riot outfit -- ah pigs, now I get it -- the trailing ranks of anarchist protestors, and the stray wisps of gas, I paused outside a cafe with MSNBC playing on a TV set, and the subtitles switched on. Ah, sweet luxury of press credentials! Like the gift of the fermata, I could slip back and forth between the lines unmolested, quelle luxe!

It was noon, and the major protest rally, ten thousand strong, was just starting to move from the park spread beneath the gold-tipped Capitol dome. But the black bloc, the armed vegan bloc, and the general mayhem bloc had broken off early, and were playing cat and mouse with the cops, trying to scatter and re-form close to the Excel centre for a front-on assault.

They never really got there -- the Minnesota burglary rate will spike this week given the sheer number of out of town cops in situ -- and the only really fun stuff was a couple of police cars set on fire, and a half dozen windows of Macy's broken, but they gebinerally outperformed the lumbering midwestern-beefy cops, who failed repeatedly to learn that if you face an entire riotsquad column in one direction, the protestors will -- anyone anyone Bueller Bueller -- yes, go in the other. At Harriet Island on the St Paul riverbank, Billy Bragg was opening a "reclaim Labor Day" openair concert, and a rocked up version of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land blasted through the lower blocks of the city. And, oh, according to the TV, Hurricane Gustav was a bust.

Wow, these Republicans just cannot take a trick. Having turned the whole convention into some sort of ghastly telethon in a half-empty stadium in the hope that the debacle of the Convention could be turned into a moment of patriotic rallying during a national emergency, the damn emergency is petering out into a mere storm. No spectacular death tolls, house blown to matchsticks etc, just lots of sogginess. God is clearly dicking with these people -- he's having a larf, playing with the weather controls to keep everyone wrong-footed. ...

It was never going to be a great day, but even before things had really got going it got much much worse, with a double-whammy on Sarah Palin hitting like, well, two tropical storms. First came the news that her 17-year-old unwed daughter was pregnant, a fact apparently released to deal with rumours that Governor Palin's most recent baby was actually her daughter, Bristol's (soon to be a tropical storm). Nothing per se wrong there for most of us, except for the fact that the GOP has been hammering everyone for years on the values question, importance of marriage, terrible effect of absent fathers blah blah BLAH.

These things ain't meant to happen. Doubtless we will find that Bristol was in one of those terrible "true love waits' teen virgin programmes -- the full title being "true love waits until three malibu shooters at a postprom party have gone to work on teens whose s-x education comes from the Book of Joshua". ...

With nothing officially announced for tomorrow, the Convention planners, are presumably, even as I write, working out whether to get back as much of the extravaganza as they can, or continue with the appeal for mittens (not Romney, woollen gloves). They will have their work cut out, as significant numbers haven't bothered to show up. This evening's party for the American Conservative Union -- the ol granddaddy of conservative ginger groups -- looked, this evening, like a trainspotters' mixer, until bizzarely a large Asian delegation turned up to swell the numbers. It appears to be like that all over the joint.

The anarchists meanwhile have reformed their convergence centre twice after police raids, and are promising a rematch tomorrow, their floating re-arrangement of meetings, press conferences and decision-making managed through a bewildering network of legal, medical and affinity groups. The irony is that amidst the whiff of tear gas, and the charging of police phalanxes, the anarchists seem better organised, more onto it than the Republicans.