0.2 Apocalypso  (Page 3/7)

Downtown Seattle had spent the 1990s undergoing a depressing renaissance. By 1999, it sported arguably the spiffiest, newest, most fashion-forward and prosperous major urban retail core in the country. National chains moved here in droves, the past few years having seen Barney’s New York, FAO Schwarz, Banana Republic, Nike, Sega Gameworks, Planet Hollywood, Restoration Hardware, Tiffany’s, and other upscale merchants set up shop, muscling out locally owned businesses. The metastatic transformation of downtown was set in motion by the Seattle Silicon Rush, the technological revolution—spawned by Microsoft—that had suddenly enriched and exposed to the world a city and region that until then had been a nearly invisible, economically risible backwater.

Now, the newness and grand scale of these stores, set against the hordes rampaging happily in the streets, added to the apocalyptic eeriness of the scene: This was not some fading old civilization being trashed by rebellious hordes. Instead, it was a nascent empire, waxing rather than waning, stopped suddenly in mid-wax by a furious resistance it hadn’t even known existed.

It is impossible to overstate the obliviousness of Seattle in the days leading up to the WTO riots. The worst that city fathers and journalists alike had expected was a large, parade-like series of protests in the streets outside the WTO meeting halls, with the police having to intervene occasionally to keep demonstrators from spilling out over prearranged boundaries. The biggest concern in advance was that of downtown merchants, fearful that traffic and crowd problems would keep Christmas shoppers away on the heaviest shopping days of the year. Seattle Mayor Paul Schell, long derided by citizens for his self-styled “visionary” aspirations for the city, and for what now looked like a decidedly Panglossian optimism, expected the convention to be virtually trouble-free, declaring in advance, “This event is a momentous, exciting affair for Seattle. It speaks to the growing stature of Seattle’s place on the world stage, and it shows impressive confidence in our ability to serve as gracious and competent hosts for international dialogues.”

Seattle police, trying to be gracious, had worked out a plan in advance with protest organizers that allowed demonstrators to briefly block intersections, then submit to mass arrests. But the event itself proved not only out of the police’s control but also out of the organizers’, and now the police, clearly panicked, were resorting to tear gas and rubber bullets. It was the essential paradox of the riots: The police’s trust and solicitude had led them inexorably to overreaction and violence.

It later would come out that Seattle had resolutely ignored warnings from elsewhere that the city was getting in over its head. More than a month before the conference, Seattle assistant police chief Ed Joiner—who was charged with preparing for the onslaught—e-mailed desperately to Mayor Schell, insisting that the city was underprepared. “I hope that someone is considering what Seattle is going to look like—and what kind of economic damage it will suffer—if this event gets out of hand,” he wrote.