Salon
By Natasha Lennard, August 16, 2012
This year, protesters plan to target the Democratic and Republican National Conventions with equal force
A Tampa police armored vehicle is parked outside The Tampa Bay Times Forum in downtown Tampa, Florida August 3, 2012. The Republican National Convention will be held at the Forum from August 27 to August 30, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Brian Blanco)
In Nobel Prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago’s 2004 book, “Seeing,” the people of an unnamed but uncanny nation take to the ballots and cast more than 80 percent blank votes in defiance of their corrupt, disengaged political parties. Saramago’s earlier novel, “Blindness,” tells of the same nation, four years earlier, when the populace is struck by a sweeping epidemic of blindness, producing havoc, despair and cruelty. What is the link, demand the authorities in “Seeing,” between “the plague of white blindness and the plague of blank ballots”?
If you see nothing hauntingly prophetic in Saramago’s near decade-old narrative, you may struggle to understand many of the protests planned for both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this year. Thousands of protesters will head to Tampa, Fla., or Charlotte, N.C., or both, with no intention of supporting either party. Unlike in 2008, when counter-DNC antiwar demonstrations numbering in the hundreds were dwarfed by anti-RNC crowds over 10,000-strong in Saint Paul, Minn., this year much of the planned protest takes aim at both parties and their corporate underpinnings. Much of the “Hope” (or, pace Saramago, “blindness”) from four years ago has long cleared up and the DNC and RNC protests look likely to share tone, relative size — anywhere between 2,000 to 15,000 protesters in each city — and even many participants.
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