Rex Murphy

Post Reply New Topic

G-8 protesters
June 26, 2002

I don't know much about the GAP. I've caught some of their ads. They feature fashionably sulking young slackers twitching in front of the camera. I suppose they're meant to be hip. How would I know? I have a serious hip deficit.

But what has the GAP got to do with Africa or world hunger or the Middle East or the war on terror? I ask this because the highlight so far of the G-8 protest was in Calgary when a number of anti-globalization intellects performed this group moon for the benefit of the world's cameras in front of a GAP outlet – a billboard from hell. Yes, this is what they mean by Kananaskis.

I guess it's more dramatic than dressing up as a carrot. It was a strip and show for world poverty or the Palestinians or you pick the topic. It really is a reach into the basket with anti-global protestors. They're against so much, it gets hard to tell sometimes. But what mooning passers-by in downtown Calgary will do to reduce the suffering of this world or increase its justice really passes me by.

In fact the whole anti-global, anti-capitalist, anti-U.S. movement is passing a lot of people by. It's getting stale. They bear an uncanny resemblance to the groupies who follow once popular rock groups wherever these one-time headliners happen now to be playing, chronic fans of the Grateful Dead for example. Where there's one, there's the other. Except that the groupies of defunct rock bands don't make it a specialty to thrash or threaten to thrash the cities that they happen to visit and don't wind themselves up into all kinds of vague piety while they go about the business of ripping apart bits of Seattle, say or Quebec City.

They call it diversity of tactics which is a jargon string of weasel words that mean if we don't like something, then we can smash it up.

Unfortunately their politics has a limited target. They have a thing, they have a real thing about McDonald's. I'm not a fan of McDonald's myself but I've never really felt it was a force of evil on the planet like communism or dictatorship or corrupt governments. But McDonald's out, that's in any city that the G-8 groupies descend upon, board up first and serve egg McMuffins later.

Starbucks is another favourite. Thrashing a Starbucks is anti-globalization's idea of D-day. Actually I think it's all less social justice than old fashion snobbery. McDonald's is beneath them and Starbucks is too middle class.

Last on the list is somehow almost always contriving a clash with the police who are there in force only because previous protests have shown that it has become more and more necessary to be there in force. Having set up the clash, there is then the ritual and pious whine about police fascism and how it is only the actions of a few that are coating the protest, and how it is so awful that the corporate media only cover the violence.

It's a game, and as I say, it's grown stale.

But it's a costly game, whether in Calgary or in Seattle, Quebec City or Genoa. Cities close down, some get thrashed, millions are spent and normal citizens wonder sometimes whether it's safe to go about their own city. And for what? So a cluster of dubiously enlightened activists can flash their rear ends in front of a GAP store and then complain about the coverage of their uncoverage?

The anti-globalists are all theatre and no play, all tactics and no plan, attitude by the bucket, ideas by the gram. They know everything that they're against but they haven't the slightest clue finally what they're for. They make a really big deal about democracy which would be a whole lot more convincing if it included a dose of respect for the cities in which they stage their confused and often violent protests.

For The National, I'm Rex Murphy.

Its a shame that the real issues are being lampooned and ignored by many people because of this crap. Behind the 'student wadicals' there are a lot of things going on which people should pay attention to. The fight is right, the 'protest' methods are frickin stupid.