All This Talk of Anarchy

Over the wire comes a report of an anarchist punching a police officer in the face, "repeatedly," during a street protest in Philadelphia. I imagine that little clot of information exploding outward through the endless fractals of the Information Age. I picture it reaching the suburban dinnertime conversations of a hundred million American Beauty households, and if I listen closely, I can hear America tut-tutting.

But then, there is something shocking about some punk putting one up in a cop's face. In a culture that can absorb, without flinching, the fact that certain individuals can afford to order take-out for the world's poorest billion without losing their seats in the Billionaire's Club, punching a cop remains a genuine shock. If you make an effort to understand it, your internal pop-psychologist kicks in: I'm getting the sense that you're angry. More than likely, you give in to an almost gut-level feeling that this is very, very wrong: In America, One Does Not Punch an Officer of the Law.

"In its immediate impression, anarchism is the intellectual equivalent to the place the socks go when they vanish from the laundry."

Sitting in a shady urban park, I bring this up with Closet Punk ("I'm kind of a punk, but I'm in the closet"). He has been sitting cross-legged with an almost Gandhian stillness, but now he stands and begins to act out the climax of a 1999 protest in Montreal, when riot police sealed death penalty protesters in an alley before they had even begun to march.

"You could just feel this panic building," he recalls. "Suddenly they ran at us -- a totally unprovoked police charge."

As people scrambled to escape up a single-file staircase, the cops closed the gap. Closet Punk mimes the way a baton to the face knocked his friend down onto the bike she was pushing. He stepped in as a human shield, felt the jarring pain of a truncheon to the thigh, then managed with one hand to grab the officer's weapon. "I just looked him in the eye and . . ." He gropes for a way to describe the complexity of an epiphany. "The state is going to crush you if it doesn't agree with you," he says finally.

The protest in Montreal ended when the police destroyed the activists' signs, then allowed them to leave, two-by-two, like animals off Noah's ark. And so, in Closet Punk's world, news of people striking back against police has a much different effect than it does on a person watching the nightly news and thinking that all these balaclavas and bandanas have grown a little stale.

In 1969, Carl Oglesby wrote about the effect in The New Left Reader: "The policeman's riot club functions like a magic wand, under whose hard caress the banal soul grows vivid and the nameless recover their authenticity." Closet Punk wraps up his story of cops and rebels. "That was really like a life-changing thing for me," he says, then laughs lightly. "It's ironic. They've unwittingly created a radical anarchist."

Anarchist. (Pause; roll of timpani, clash of cymbals.) Yes, the capital-A-Anarchist is back, and he's wearing a big black gas-mask and breathing like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. He's cursing the hippies and climbing the walls of the gated community. He's throwing bricks and lighting fires, and when he rolls out at midnight in his long black car, you better believe that he'll have Jesus in the trunk. This is an all-points-bulletin, and in Anytown, America, good citizens are scrambling to hide the booze and lock up their daughters.

That's the easy definition. Taking a truer measure of anarchy is puzzlingly difficult, as David Samuels found when he reported on the infamous radicals of Eugene, Oregon, for Harper's magazine. Samuels concluded, in concerned tones, that the anarchists suffer "the absolutist psychology of children whose parents split up or sold out or otherwise succumbed to the instability inherent in modern marriage." However wrong or right about his sample study, Samuels was opening an historical wound. Lenin himself declared anarchism an "infantile disorder" (best cured, added Trotsky, with an "iron broom"), and critics ever since have suggested that anarchists, as one historian put it, "project on to the State all the hatred they felt for parental authority."