The narrators:
Frank Reynoso - Art coordinator of the Indypendent, a radical New York City newspaper.
Molly Fair - NYU Student activist, head of the NYU Disorientation Group in 2004
Kate Griffith - Anti-war protester
Elizabeth Press - Democracy Now! Producer, Documentarian
Ruth Benn - Anti-war activist, part of the War Resisters League
Maryse Mitchell-Brody - National Lawyers Guild (NGL) Lawyer
Film Transcript:
[Ravel’s “Bolero” starts]
Frank Reynoso: The RNC was coming, looming over the horizon, like a dark storm cloud.
“Sparse arena noise”
Molly Fair: In terms of my excitement leading up to the Republican National Convention…
[Convention, crowd noise]
Michael Bloomberg: Welcome to my New York!
Molly Fair: Like really re-energized because there was a lot of people from different organizing walks of life coming together. At spoke councils, it just felt like everybody’s voice was being recognized and heard.
Michael Bloomberg: The terrorists hit us there. Our knees buckled. But we stayed on our feet.” [Cheers]
Unknown woman: You got that side of the face now you gotta do this side. Thank you!
Michael Moore: Uh, we’re happy that the Republicans only have a couple of months left. And uh, so we’re here to welcome them, show them a good time. We know they’re feeling a little depressed, seeing how the end is near for them.
Kate Griffiths: By the time the R.N.C was rolling around, my experience with the labor movement and the antiwar movement, I was very demoralized about activism and politics of all kinds and sort of adrift in life.
Rudy Giuliani: The Democrats had a convention in which everybody said the same thing. We’re gonna have a convention where there’s some degree of disagreement, but not about the core things like Mayor Bloomberg said. We agree that George Bush is the person to lead us for the next four years. We believe he’ll do a much better job in leading us against the war on terror than John Kerry.
Kate Griffiths: To do without much kind of direction or clear analysis about where to go with things. I felt very doomy of just about everything.
[Cheers]
Arnold Schwarzenengger: And aldies and gentlemen, and ladies and gentlemen, if you beileve that if you must be fiecere and relentless and terminate terrorism than you are a Republican!
Frank Reynoso: Artistically, it was incredibly inspiring. It was so cool. It was just like, you could compare it to, like, uh when your friends start talking about, “Ah, yeah we’re gonna make this awesome music and we’re gonna make a band” and yeah, sure. But then when they actually start getting equipment and start rehearsing it’s like, “Oh wow wait, I wanna make a band too!” And thankfully because of the way this worked, it wasn’t like a band where there was a fixed number of. Like, anyone could just jump in. Could come in and just do stuff.
Frank Reynoso: Yeah I would have to take several avenues over to take some public transportation to get somewhere. And it was surreal. And that literally on one avenue you’d have hundreds, of thousands of people marching and protesting, you know. Civil Disobedience, direct action. Cops, you know, pepper-spraying, detaining. All this stuff. And beautiful and celebratory and angry.
Shepard Smith: We were talking yesterday about some of the protests happening around New York City. One of them as you may know was in front of the Fox New Channel headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Right around sixth avenue and 47th street. And as it turns out they had all kinds of people in costumes, and a number of people, at least one, was interviewed, you know, what you’ll hear today, they’re not even sure what they were sent out to protest. That’s how a lot of these protests have happened, and certainly it was interesting to watch what was happening in front of our building.
Randi Weingarten: The way in which you create an opportunity to live the American Dream is to make sure people have jobs. Real, good paying jobs. And ultimately what this administration, the Bush administration has done has taken us in the wrong direction.
Molly Fair: Getting into personal dramas which I wasn’t really privy to. But it felt like, for the first time, for me that even though I lived in New York for just a few years, my world opened up to a wider world of New York City organizing. And that I felt part of it beyond, like, my status at the time as a student. It was like, “Oh this could be what I do for the next ten years.”
Amy Goodman: And finally, Brandon Neubauer, organizer with Time’s Up!, an all-volunteer environmental group that helped organized the first Critical Mass bike ride. Brandon, explain what Critical Mass is.
Brandon Neubauer: Sure. Critical Mass is a gathering of people coming together at the same time and place, typically bicyclists and skaters, and we ride as a group, and we typically tend to go through red lights. It’s a way to create a temporary autonomous zone and a little bit of the world as we would like it to be. Essentially flying very much in the face of car culture, and the oil wars they require, and anyone whose participated in it pretty much has to go every month because it’s one of the most enjoyable, joyful expressions that you can participate.
Elizabeth Press: The Critical Mass ride was, big. Really big. Like, really big. And really fun. And a lot of people showed up to participate in it. And it was very joyus for a lot of it. And then there was a moment where in midtown in Times Square where the police cracked down on Critical Mass.
David Lee Miller: Now this demonstration was peaceful, as you mentioned but not all of them have been in the last 24 hours. Eleven hundred people or so have been arrested, among them a man named Jamal Holladay. He’s been charged with second-degree assault. Authorities say he was caught on videotape punching and kicking a New York City police detective into unconsciousness.
Elizabeth Press: My name is Elizabeth Press. I’m a producer at Democracy Now. I was just arrested at 26th and 7th avenue while documenting the Critical Mass bike ride. I was pulled up to a red light. In front of me, the cops were arresting a mass group of bike riders. I pulled over to the side and put my camera on the arrest, and the officer came up to me and said I was violating the law. After being detained, Iwas then released at 34th and 7th avenue.
Elizabeth Press: You know they had orange netting, and they had mass vans, and there was a moment where they pulled out that orange netting and cut off a street, and started doing group arrests of people, after some period of riding. It was maybe a surprising moment that those arrest were taking place. But then throughout the rest of the ride there were several points where different people were getting arrested. So there’s this mass there, then you get down lower to lower Manhattan, around St. Mark’s Church and there were more arrests there.
Ruth Benn: We were going from Ground Zero over to Broadway on one of those little streets by Trinity Church and the cemetery. So we got partway up the block, and [laughs], and then we were surrounded by bicycle cops and our march was stopped and um…
Ruth Benn: The orange netting was rolled out which we had not seen before, at least I had not. We had a ton of media there. There was a lot of media. Some of them with us in the march, some of them across the street. But there was a lot of media.
Ruth Benn: I just honestly did not believe, [laughs] that we were gonna be arrested there!
Maryse Mitchell-Brody: But I remember the first day they started kettling people.
George W. Bush: This election will also determine how America responds to the continuting danger of terrorism. And you know where I stand.
Maryse Mitchell-Brody: And I was like, “Something’s changed, these guys have gotten tactical”, alright it was different. It was not the same thing.
George W. Bush: In the heart of this great city we saw tragedy arrive on a quiet morning. We saw the bravery of rescuers grow with danger.
Maryse Mitchell-Brody: The police got militarized against their own people. Which they’ve been in a lot of ways in a lot of communities. Especially black folks, and people of color for a long time. But I remember hearing that people started to get arrested and being loaded into buses.
George W. Bush: Now that we have faced challenges with resolve, we have historic goals within our reach, and greatness in our future. We will build a more safer world, and a more hopeful America, and nothing will hold us back.
Maryse Mitchell-Brody: And I rememebr, the first person besides an NLG lawyer, to show up at the bus terminal on the West side where they turned it into, fucking overnight jailcells. Where people were sitting in cages, fenced in cages on the floor. The conditions were abominable. And that was really scary, and there was nothing we could do, right? Like there’s no process for supporting people. People weren’t getting calls, like people in the NLG. People were trying to shout out their names, and like contact information at people. But they were going so fast that we couldn’t do anything. And I think that sends a powerless message. It was very, very real.
George W. Bush: I’m running for president with a clear and positive plan, to build a safer world, and a more hopeful America.
Frank Reynoso: The person that I was when I first became art coordinator for the paper was in the crazy maelstrom of the R.N.C protests was in a different situation than the coordinator I am now. Yeah, so things shift, and what makes me happy.
Molly Fair: Even though, in the long run, there wasn’t like, any lasting repercussions. It was still felt like a blow. Seeing with what the cops were going to do to crack down on free speech essentially.
George W. Bush: We will help new leaders to train their armies, and move toward elections, and get on the path of stability and democracy, as quickly as possible.