Boston is quiet

Predictions of a chaotic Boston snarled by convention security and impassable by car, subway or foot have so far proven to be a complete bunko.  It seems like half the locals treated the warnings as a good excuse to get out of town for the week.  The road traffic during rush hour is significantly lighter than on less newsworthy days, the subways are brisk and even downtown restaurants aren’t bulging at the seams.  I have to believe that, convention hotels and temporary construction crews aside, the local business community is losing a bucket of money.

As promised I took the “T” down to the convention center to check out the action at about 7pm.  It was underwhelming.  Here are some snapshots.  Click on the thumbnails for a larger view.

This is the view of the convention center from the entrance of the “Free Speech Zone.”  I’m not a big sports fan, but my friends tell me that the crowds here are usually larger when the Bruins play whatever it is they play.  Low temperature water-polo, I think.

Here’s a sign in front of the fenced-in free speech zone.  It seems reasonable to me.  I guess the official name for this is the "demonstration zone".  Notice the lack of people pushed into the fence.  This will be a recurring theme.

The inside of the fenced-in area has one raised stage with a podium.  The stage was occupied by this group of protesters.  Apparently this was the real group, not the parody, but who can tell for sure these days?  There were maybe thirty people in front of the stage taking pictures and/or heckling.  Someone had written “This pen is shameful” on the podium, but they wrote it in chalk so I had to blink a few times before the message parsed.  The other side said, “Flee the pen!”, which makes sense in a “mightier than the sword” sort of way.  Notice the razor wire on the top of the overpass – this was the only place with razor wire and it might have been more for keeping the pigeons at bay than for controlling the protesters.

The rest of the protest zone was almost completely deserted.  There were a few signs hanging on the fences.  About half of the signs were protesting the protest zone itself.  It seems like the biggest controversy in this convention is the forum set aside for discussing controversy.  The meta-protesters hung up their signs and mostly left.  I can’t decide if this is true irony or just the sort of thing that Alanis Morissette would find ironic.

The only vocal group outside of the protest zone was a sizable gaggle of Lyndon LaRouche supporters handing out their strangely comma-suffused alternative DNC platform.  Here’s an example sentence from the section entitled “Monetarists and Physiocrats as Such”:

Among domesticated cattle, except those raised and killed as fighting animals for public amusement, the preferred tactic is a combination of genetic downscaling of the mental capabilities and impulses of the captive, with culling of those specimens which are considered, for formally rational, or utterly capricious reasons, as undesirable.

I’m not sure why the LaRouche folks were allowed to chant outside of the demonstration zone.  How many times are they going to be able to say “Physiocrat” at passersby before someone is willing to throw down?

All in all, the security situation seemed to be under control.  People are staying away from downtown and, with any luck, the big story next week will be how all the media predictions of catastrophe were vastly overblown.  Only two days to go.

[BTW, I’m not going to comment on those Kerry NASA pictures, except to say that if I were given the opportunity to crawl around a NASA rocket in a bunnysuit, I would look just as happy and a whole lot less dignified.]