The battle for Pittsburgh

“I wonder where we go when we die,” Calvin, the cartoon character, says to his friend Hobbes. Hobbes guesses: “Pittsburgh?” Calvin asks, “You mean if we’re good or if we’re bad?”

The emptiness of that medium-sized city during the G-20 conference last week made me think I’d missed the Rapture or maybe the swine flu. Imagine everyone gone, except for 6,000 well-armed police and military guarding the sealed perimeter.

Then the protesters enter the city — about 4,000 of them, nearly all in their early 20s — shouting all manner of left- and right-wing slogans to the 200 or so onlookers who have gathered.

The police, brought in from as far away as Arizona, begin marching in formation and showing off their combat gear. “The police are looking for a fight,” one man tells me. But so are a few of the protesters, who break the windows of a local bank.

When it’s all over, everyone lightens up. The police put on smiles and pose for pictures with tourists. As one officer told me, “It worked out well. Nobody got hurt on either side. There was free speech as well as safety.” But did they really have to close the whole city and spend nearly $20 million to defend it? Officer Henry of the US Customs and Border Patrol tells me yes — “because the president was here.” It was worth it, he says, because “we were ready.”

“These are professional protesters. They go from one city to the next,” a local woman tells me disdainfully. She means most of the organizers, some of whom have camped out next to her apartment building. I meet that group later: the Seeds of Peace Collective has come all the way from Montana to cook food for the protesters. At their picnic, I also meet Brian, a 30-year-old from Boston who saves up his money and his vacation days to come to such protests. He’s covered his face to hide his identity, but he’s happy to have someone to talk to. “Fascism hasn’t quite arrived in this country, but it’s slowly creeping in,” he says. “We have to try to stop it.”

Next to us, a stylish young girl in Nike tennis shoes is excited that a meeting of the Socialist Workers’ Party is about to start. All are happy that the local media chose to cover them, rather than the diplomats. They’d made their point, whatever point that might have been.

Nathaniel, the young man in the last picture, sums up the irony of it all. “Protesting in America is a fashion statement,” he says.

All photos © Mike Pilewski.