0.2 Apocalypso

Utterly disbelieving, I made my way through exuberant rioting throngs to the corner of Fourth and Union, near the heart of downtown Seattle. What exactly can be called the “heart” of downtown is left to the reader’s imagination. When I turned north there, to go up Union, I came face-to-facemask with a wall of policemen in black riot gear, standing behind huge shields and wielding massive batons, guns and tear-gas launchers. They looked like mannequins in a wall-to-wall Darth Vader display.

In a city where the public face of its police has always been more or less avuncular, this was an amazing shock. Seattle, after all, is the birthplace of the bicycle cop—that singularly benign public servant who tools around the streets in little bicycle shorts, helping the elderly cross streets and occasionally chasing a purse-snatcher down a downtown alley. It took a superhuman leap of imagination to picture the same officers in this futuro-fascist getup.

But as if to hammer home the point that this was real, one of them began broadcasting a loud, barely decipherable warning through his bullhorn: “You have two minutes to disperse…. We will begin firing tear gas in two minutes.…”

Hard as it was to take him seriously, I thought it best to scurry up the hill—and upwind. Friends had been fired upon with rubber bullets earlier that morning, and I had little reason to believe the police were bluffing now.

In the days leading up to the November 1999 World Trade Organization convention, there had been a great deal of debate about the form and scale of the attendant demonstrations. It is safe to say that no one at City Hall or in the media expected anything like this. My daughter Caitlin’s high-school AP Government class had been preparing for weeks for the convention and demonstrations as a kind of live-history-as-it-happens class project, and now I was frantically fighting my way through the riots looking for Caitlin, who had come downtown to walk in an organized parade. On the ferry over to Seattle that morning, she and her classmates had been happily making signs to carry in the orderly march they thought they’d be attending. Now, for all I knew, she had been arrested, injured, or killed.

Note to her teacher: “What the Hell were you thinking?!”

Half a block away, I turned and watched the police lob the promised tear gas canisters into the crowd. The mist scattered and softened the unusually harsh winter light, blurring the shadows around and distinctions between the rioters and the police. Then I watched the horde of demonstrators come running out of the cloud toward me, past me…to regroup with the crowd already occupying the next intersection. Watching the cloud drift past downtown’s splendid new storefronts (practically everything downtown looked new, part of a spectacular, dot-com-boom-delivered revival), seeing in the mist the ghostly silhouettes of protestors and gas-masked police, I thought I was looking at a weird experimental overlay: a 1960s Detroit riot set against a 1990s Seattle background. I was watching one of the biggest stories in Seattle history unfold around me, and I couldn’t help but note with a certain irony that it was taking place on the day I was walking away from 18 years in journalism for what I thought would be a far more exciting life in the Brave New Economy.