Fortress Big Apple

By Nicholas Turse, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 21, 2004.

The tagline for John Carpenter's 1981 cult sci-fi classic Escape From New York went "New York City is now a maximum security prison. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in is insane." In that movie set in a then-unimaginable, futuristic "1997" Gotham, criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) was charged with rescuing the President of the United States, whose plane had been downed in the walled-in, armed and angry prison island that Manhattan had become. With his life and freedom riding on saving a man he holds in contempt, Snake eventually fights an epic battle in world famous Madison Square Garden in his bid to save the president.

Today, as in the movie, many New Yorkers are angry at the president, and as in Carpenter's grim vision of the future, at least parts of New York City will be in a state of lockdown for the President's arrival – with a major showdown due to take place somewhere in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden (MSG). In Carpenter's future, Manhattan was a walled-in fortress island under high-tech government surveillance, guarded by heavily armed security forces, with helicopters perpetually overhead – a futuristic Alcatraz Island of epic proportions.

In our 2004, the authorities have an eerily similar vision of how the city should be. Madison Square Garden will be walled in by a fence or "other physical barrier" with additional "movable barricades," complete with checkpoints reinforced with heavy weapons. A new "closed-circuit surveillance video system" will be introduced; armed federal agents and police officers will be keeping watch; and plenty of helicopters will be circling overhead. In Carpenter's future, however, the government was in control and New Yorkers were locked down. In our present, the Bush administration and the Republican Party are the ones retreating into a fortified bunker.

Once upon a time in a past not so long ago, New York City was viewed by many in the Republican Party as an enemy outpost in an alien land. Then came the 9/11 attacks and Manhattan became the Bush administration's ground zero in its war against terrorism. On January 31, 2003, with a supposed easy victory in the upcoming war with Iraq looming, it seemed the perfect place for the President to begin an inevitable march to a second term. But like the president's flight in Escape From New York, things have gone awry. New York once again looks like a threatening, alien land and the party of the President whose greatest claim to fame is that he's made Americans "safer" is about to treat the city as if it were Baghdad.

The free-speech limiting, life-disrupting, artificial-reality-inducing security "bubbles" that empty the globe's central cities as George Bush and Dick Cheney travel through them, are already well known. From August 30 through September 2, when the Republican National Convention invades New York, the GOP wants to see the same – a Manhattan emptied of life and the entire event "bubble-ized." The estimated 48,000 people who will attend the Convention including 2,509 delegates and 2,344 alternate delegates, their hotels, their outings, their travels around the city, the massive media presence (sequestered away in the Farley Post Office Building, connected to MSG via an enclosed, climate-controlled pedestrian bridge to be built across Eighth Avenue); along with the RNC's convention headquarters at Madison Square Garden will all be locked inside that bubble – and kept from the sight of the feared hundreds of thousands of citizens heading for the Garden to tell the President he's "not welcome."

To contain protesters and "protect" GOP'ers and fellow travelers, New York City is engaging in some of the same sorts of permit games that typified the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Mayor Richard J. Daley's Chicago. For example, Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office has, with a helping hand from the city's parks department, thwarted efforts of the national coalition, United for Peace and Justice, to secure a permit for a march ending in a large-scale demonstration in Central Park. Officials have cited fears that the park's grass, home in the past to large demonstrations and huge concerts, would take a beating. Just recently, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly decreed that the Park would be off-limits, as would Times Square. Instead, UFPJ was told it could utilize the sure-to-be-sweltering, distant West Side Highway. Even in Snake Plissken's Manhattan, Central Park was open!

Nicholas Turse is doctoral candidate at the Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He writes regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-industrial-entertainment complex.

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