New York is shaping up as a shitty place to be during the Republican National Convention at the end the month. I don’t know what thought makes me the most uncomfortable: the thousands of Republican delegates wearing their Bush/Cheney paraphernalia all over Manhattan, the 36,000 police officers, the thousands of expected protesters, or the fear of a terrorist attack.

Anyway, this article makes me want to stay as far away from the protests as possible. According to the article, 250,000 protesters are expected. I don’t know where that number comes from, but… yikes.

At the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, “the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of demonstrators, injuring protesters and journalists alike.” In April 2003, at an antiwar protest in Oakland, “police opened fire on the peaceful crowd with wooden pellets.”

Something similar happened in November, when some 10,000 union members and retirees demonstrated at a free-trade summit in Miami. They were met by 2,500 cops brandishing new crowd-control weaponry… Videos taken at the scene show nonviolent protesters being beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and pepper-sprayed in the face…

“Stark brutality can paralyze people with fear,” says Moran. “Miami hangs like a black cloud.”

So does the Chicago Democratic National Convention of 1968, where Mayor Richard Daley took a hard line against demonstrations and the cops clashed with protesters on the streets around the convention center. Few doubt that the police, if provoked enough, will respond with equal force this year.

And one of the organizers, Jamie Moran of RNCNotWelcome, doesn’t seem to mind. “I think people will fight back if they’re provoked… Usually a riot is an explosion of energy and anger at a situation. The cops create a situation where peoples’ desires are completely foiled, so they lash out. I don’t think that’s unhealthy.”

Come on. I loathe the Bush administration as much as the next guy, but what do the protesters hope to accomplish? It’s easy to go to a rally or wear a t-shirt, but what does that do? The Bush Administration doesn’t care about protests, and I agree with the commenter in the article who says, “The wilder and more disreputable the demonstrators look, the better for the Republicans.”

“At the height of the antiwar movement, Nixon specifically directed his motorcade to go through the middle of an antiwar riot in California in order to have people throw rocks at him or shout obscenities so that the TV would pose the question that night to the American public: ‘Whom do you prefer, President Nixon, or a dope-smoking hippie communist rock thrower?’ And the country had no doubt. This was just genius on his part. If Bush ends up winning the election, it will be because of this kind of tactic.”

The only possible benefit I could see is that anti-Bush people will watch the protests on TV and it will inspire them to greater acts of activism.

But you can’t just have something to protest against. You have to be for something.

Me, I’m for staying away from midtown Manhattan during the last week of August.