Workers of the world, shop till you drop! Then belly up to a five-course meal! Say, how about a visit to a nice comedy club?
That’s how New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg might express his novel offer to the many protesters expected at the Republican National Convention.
In exchange for their promise to be peaceful, the violence-averse mayor has announced, protesters can receive discounts at local restaurants, theaters and other tourist attractions– much like (although not as upscale as) the discount offers Republican delegates receive.
All a protester has to do is to wear a “peaceful political activist” pledge pin, available at city tourism offices, to receive the discounts. Good sport that he is, Bloomberg also extended the offer to angry New York City police and firefighters who have been holding noisy demonstrations over work disputes at some of Bloomberg’s public appearances.
In fact, the mayor is extending his offer to all local citizens who want to express any beef whatsoever–a subset one newspaper writer termed “the indigenously aggrieved.” A protest is a protest, the mayor says. Just please keep it peaceful.
One also has to appreciate Bloomberg’s genius, as well as his New York chutzpah, in coming up with this free-market, entrepreneurial incentive approach to crowd control. “It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,” Bloomberg said cheerfully, hawking meal discounts in particular. Gandhi wouldn’t have argued.
It seems unlikely that hot-blooded, anarcho-socialists would moderate their outrage over global capitalism to receive a discount on a T-bone at Broadway Joe Steakhouse on 46th Street. Yet, even streetfighting men and women–should any actually surface in New York–eventually may want to take a guided walking tour of the city, shop for a new tattoo or perhaps take in a theater performance between arrests. At a healthy percentage off.
Bloomberg’s gracious welcome shows how far convention hospitality has come since 1968, when Chicago’s late Mayor Richard J. Daley offered dissidents, peaceful and otherwise, a face full of tear gas and a billy club over the noggin.
The peaceful protesters’ list of available discounts in New York does not quite match those offered to official convention delegates. That’s probably just as well, since it’s not clear how big a draw the Museum of Sex and a musical revue titled “Naked Boys Singing,” two offerings on the protesters’ list, would be for the ostensibly more sedate Republican delegates.
Then again, who knows how Republicans will react once they hit Gotham. Some may want to paraphrase that Las Vegas slogan: What happens in Manhattan, stays in Manhattan.
