The ravaging of Mr. Bartley

by David Benjamin

 

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire.” 

― Arundhati Roy

 

MADISON, Wis.—There was a riot. I remember the sights and sounds but I had forgotten what was the point. Looking back, it occurred to me that perhaps there was no point beyond the sheer impulse to raise hell and then, afterward, alibi it with the invocation of progressive pieties. 

Just as likely, the whole scene was a seasonal fever. I’ve noticed that demonstrations, marches, encampments and outright riots tend to proliferate in the brief interlude between spring break and Commencement, thence to peter out as the last blue book is graded and the student body disperses. Tennyson might well have written that in the spring a young man’s fancy fiercely turns to thoughts of torching police cruisers and looting Best Buy.  

This was April, 1970, before the National Guard’s atrocity at Kent State triggered a fresh wave of undergrad fury. My new wife and I stumbled into the melée by sheer happenstance. We’d been watching a double feature at the Orson Welles Cinema. As we bad adieu to Gregory Peck and exited the theater onto Massachusetts Avenue, we suddenly faced a line of grim police—booted, helmeted and visored, heeled with sidearms and brandishing nightsticks—that stretched across the street and onto our very sidewalk. They were sweeping everything in their path as they marched, mute and faceless, in the direction of Central Square. I beheld this menacing phalanx with puzzlement. “What the hell,” I said to Lynette, “is goin’ on?” Of course, she didn’t know. 

What we both knew was that the Harvard Square subway station was on the other side of the cops. So, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing to do with this mishigoss, I took Lynette by the hand and—politely excusing myself—pushed our way between Officers Toody and Muldoon. They let us through. Why the cops acquiesced so mildly to my presumption, who knows? Possibly, with everyone else running away from them, they had no manual for what to do with someone walking right up to them and saying, “Pardon me, fellas.”

In any case, we soon encountered a scene that evoked the Battle of Algiers. The insurrectionists of the moment, all of them young and mostly male, were sprinting hither and thither, trailing banners and throwing brickbats. We passed the obligatory burning police car. We noted that most of the streetlamps had been smashed, foreshadowing a long, dark night of chaos illumined only by bonfires, torches and news-copter spotlights. The pavement was strewn with debris, garbage and, for some reason, laundry. No traffic moved. In the midst of the violence, Lynette and I moved along unbothered. No one attacked us. No one, by the same token, seemed organized. The participants in the fracas scurried helter-skelter, breaking things, setting fires, stealing stuff and, in passing, lending moral support to their fellow anarchists.

“Power to the people!”

“Huh? What? Oh, sure … Right on!”

On our way to the “T” station—which turned out, unsurprisingly, to be closed—we encountered out first moment of heartfelt dismay outside Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. The window was broken. The interior had been trashed. I felt a pang of indignation. If any storefront on Harvard Square merited “one of us” status, it was Bartley’s, a Cambridge mecca of honest food and proletarian solidarity. As far back as anyone could remember, it had given employment to those Harvard students whose higher education relied on the quaint practice of “working my way through school.” To break and enter this hamburger haven was tantamount to leftist blasphemy. Bartley’s was innocent of the sins of the university. It lent no support to the war. It neither synthesized not manufactured napalm. It invested nothing in apartheid. It imposed no curfews on the girls’ dorms and it never asked a penny for room, board or tuition. Bartley’s was innocent. 

But the idiots had wrecked the joint. 

This proved to be symbolic of the whole ready-aim-misfire affair, and—as I’ve observed over the ensuing years—almost every demonstration of its kind. Although in those days  I read the Boston Globe faithfully and never missed an edition of the alternative Phoenix, I was never clear on the premise and ideology of the Harvard Square conflagration. If anyone knew, they didn’t volunteer an explanation and seemed to have forgotten within a month. 

The reluctant conclusion that I’ve drawn from the street protests that have burst forth in my lifetime, going all the way back to the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest, is that they almost always fail. For example, with a nod toward the invasion of Mexico in 1846, America’s stupidest war was our futile bloodbath in Vietnam. Despite countless anti-war gatherings, marches, sit-ins, tune-ins, teach-ins, love-ins, moratoria, guerrilla theater, campus occupations and the odd bombing, the majority of Americans stood stalwartly with our warmongering presidents—Ike, JFK, LBJ and Dick—almost to the bitter end. When campus protests escalated, regular people went the other way and rallied ’round the battle flag. 

From the Prague Spring to Tiananmen Square to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, and now the campus upheavals over Bibi Netanyahu’s ghastly pissing contest with Hamas in Gaza, the impact of mass mobilization tends always toward sound and fury, signifying “meh.” 

However, despite its impotence as a catalyst for change, I tend to regard your typical protest with a sort of ironic affection. The mass march offers catharsis not only to committed believers in whatever cause has filled the streets, painted a thousand protest signs and burned the odd effigy. It provides a safety valve to the mounting frustrations of an academic paper chase climaxed by final exams and oft complicated by feverish love affairs and bitter breakups, not to mention the last-minute fumble that blew the Big Game. 

More significantly, every protest, whatever its premise, reinforces the right to free speech, loud and righteous rhetoric, chants, slogans, profanities and poetry, shouted defiantly toward an Establishment that’s deaf to all words good and true.

Best of all, demonstrations are fun. When I attend, I do so for the circus, not the revolution—although I often share the crowd’s sentiments. In January 2017, for example, I hastened to State Street (a great street) for the local version of the Women’s March, where I bumped into friends, made new (fleeting) friends, took lots of photos and absorbed both the outrage and the boisterous goodwill of everyone around me. I’m convinced that the MAGA zealots at Donald Trump’s raucous rallies feel a similar emotional—rather than political or theological—kinship with their own festive throng. They go not to express ideas but to belong.  

One of my favorite days in Paris is the annual Gay Pride parade, whose political function is negligible. It is, rather, a galloping theater of song and dance, a spectacle of lurid and preposterous costumes, flagrant exhibitionism, laughter and surprise, fun and games, shock and awe, tits and ass. It offers no answers, drafts no resolutions, changes no minds. But, like every other demonstration, from the Boston Tea Party to the burning Bastille to the Morehouse grads who turned their backs on Joe Biden, it unifies its participants in a histrionic—physical—fulfillment of all that’s been pent up too long in all their tormented bosoms.

It demonstrates.