The Battle for Seattle

“There’s a rainbow of ways to profit from war — dissent is small potatoes.”
-Bill Gates

From the editors:

At times, we worry about the state of dissent in the U.S.

There’s always been pamphlets, and Wobblies, and organizers, and with some luck there will always be rabble-rousers and nogoodniks and punks. Every country has them, even ours. Ours is a philosophy of individual conformity.

Dissent is on the rise, it’s in the news, you can tell from the letters to the editor, the bumper stickers in rural towns, and other harbingers, like the Nov. 7 election.

It’s the war. It’s increasingly becoming the one thing Americans can agree on.

Buildings were felled, three-thousand lives were lost. Those with allergies know too well: it’s not the irritant that kills, it’s the reaction to the irritant.

We’re close to killing ourselves, but we’ve been closer. For the first time in many years, things are looking up.

Violence is also on the rise. Most of the world is a military-industrial disaster zone, and the rest is fat. Like us.

But we if we look really hard, we think we might see a speck of hope in this six-year restless night.

The last time we reckoned our eyes weren’t playing tricks — that ..., yes, my man, I think that is light! — the last time we could bring ourselves to begin considering the well-quantified possibility that the American people, society at large, the average citizen, saw the light, a collective satori, the hundredth monkey, was about seven years ago.

Nov. 30, 1999, 50,000 people occupied the streets surrounding the Washington state Convention Center in Seattle as a direct action to disrupt, and if possible, shut down, the third World Trade Organization ministerial.

We at Howlin’ Leroy Eenk were there. We had reporters at Pine and Sixth, and standing alongside pop star Dave Matthews we saw more than a few dramatic examples of courage and conviction, and stupidity and systematic cruelty. It was a monumental experience for each of us, in our own ways, and for the rest of the 50,000 plus who planted their feet in defiance, and for the rest of the world who demonstrated in sympathy or screamed at their televisions.

But what changed us, the experience that altered the direction of each and every one of our lives, and our families lives, was what happened when we got home and turned on the television.

In-between the lies, the teleprompter-readers packed bullshit. When they ran out of bullshit, they used up their remaining lies to fill in the gaps, and there were many gaps. Then they sanded their horror of nature with falsehoods, applied two coats of half-truths, two coats of unattributed facts, and strung up a grand opening ribbon made from that linguistic vampire VIOLENCE. We also witnessed the coming out party of ANTI-GLOBALIZATION.

The revolution we saw on television was not the revolution we fought. We were demonstrating against our global trade system, the one that turns lack of democracy and education in poor countries into a comparative advantage, that conscripts the world’s poorest people and bitch slaps the planet all so some first-worlders can throw away their refrigerator when it clashes with new spatula.

What we saw on television was fiction. And while we took bong rips and screamed at the television, we reaffirmed our commitment to serving the public interest.

That said, we probably should not be surprised that a cheap profiteer is going to film a fictional movie about the demonstration, cleverly entitled The Battle in Seattle.

We here at Leroy Eenk aren’t known for being prone to snap judgements or grossly uninformed mudslinging, although we do it fairly regularly. Such is the case with our denunciation of this movie.

A high-quality documentary exploring the unrest is in order, we believe, and we would be the first to pledge $500,000 to the production of the high-quality documentary and then back out.

However, the Battle for Seattle is not going to be a documentary. It’s going to be something else.

You know when you take a dump sitting sideways on the toilet — because you are poor and your lavatory is tiny — and you get that brown streak of shit on the side of he toilet bowl? The Mark of The Beast?

That’s what this movie is going to be: relevant as a shit stain in the toilet bowl of popular culture.

So that’s strike one.

Strike two: scenes of the movie will be filmed in Seattle, but the production is taking place in Vancouver.
Nothing against Vancouver, and it might save a buck, but what’s the opportunity cost of disingenuousness? The people most likely to see the movie are those who were there, some 50,000 of them. (citation needed) Is it a good idea to give 50,000 people who already don’t like the idea of the movie the right to say that The Battle for Seattle is fecal matter?

Strike three arrived in Friday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which reported that former Seattle Mayor Paul Schell, the disgraced white settler, had not been contacted by the filmmakers.

That’s a little shocking. We can pretty much rule out the chance that The Battle for Seattle will be a Battle for Algiers, or a serious reflection on the actual events.

Strike four ... we weren’t asked to be stand-ins. We hear they make $100 a day.