“From Selma to Stonewall to Seattle, we who believe in freedom will not rest until every battle is won,” the transgender communist revolutionary Leslie Feinberg wrote in a 2003 afterword to hir classic novel, Stone Butch Blues. A decade later, newly re-elected President Barack Obama said nearly the same thing in his inaugural address, with one conspicuous switch. “That all of us are equal,” he intoned, “is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”
Most of us easily recognize that alliterative run as crucial sites in the movements for women’s suffrage, Black freedom, and queer liberation. But where did Seattle go? It’s no surprise that Obama elided it—the November/December 1999 Battle of Seattle was the last great mobilization of the 20th Century left in the United States, and it was directed against precisely the tepid neoliberalism to which Obama’s own Democratic Party had turned in the 1990s (and of which he proved an avid steward). When the World Trade Organization met to plot its agenda of free-market globalization at the expense of workers and the environment, it was met with robust protest from labor unions, student activists, and an ecumenical cross-section of leftist tendencies. The city, in turn, became a militarized police state for nearly a week.
All of this was tremendously important for understanding the historical forces that would shape the 21st Century, yet it has not entered collective memory with the recurring commemorations that mark Obama’s preferred trifecta. WTO/99 offers a bracing corrective to this engineered forgetting. Sculpted almost entirely from an enormous archive of footage from the four days of intense protest, it offers both a visceral street-level immediacy and cool analytical clarity on media, power, and ideology.
We see protestors amassing for day 1, joking about how they probably won’t need their protective gas masks; Seattle is a nice liberal city whose mayor muses about members of his administration having participated in ‘60s movement actions. But the mobilization in the streets quickly reaches a critical mass that obstructs some WTO delegates from reaching meetings, and by 10 a.m. the police are deploying tear gas on the raucous but overwhelmingly peaceful protestors. Things only escalate from there and we witness beatings with batons, close-range firings of plastic pellets, and more chemical weapons—a wild overreaction to a small amount of property damage.
Anyone who was alive in 1999 will remember television news incessantly replaying scenes of broken Starbucks windows. WTO/99 shows the frustration of protestors in real-time as they recognize the political messaging of labor and environmental rights and opposition to anti-democratic privatized economic governance being deliberately drowned out by media sensationalism. A typical news chyron reads “protest turns violent,” obscuring the fact that the vast preponderance of violence came from the police; CNN reporters coach and cheer their corporate talking-heads; and President Bill Clinton, in full Slick Willie mode, arrives to dismiss the protests as “interesting hoopla.”
Director Ian Bell and producer/editor Alex Megaro play camcorder-shot activist video against hegemonic mass media very effectively, giving us a careful anatomy of each day of the protest, the raw affective intensity of solidarity and undeniable fact of police brutality contrasted to the elisions and obfuscations of the press. They show the seeds of the political future, with brief appearances by Bernie Sanders and also Roger Stone, from Donald Trump’s exploratory presidential campaign for 2000, reminding us, without being heavy-handed about it, that Trump was already hailing those left behind by the ravages of globalization—and that the Democrats eagerly assisted him by abandoning their own working-class base. Without a single talking head and only brief introductory and concluding contextualization, WTO/99 offers a damning appraisal of how we found ourselves in our current predicament a quarter-century after this diverse coalition of dissidents at the Battle of Seattle tried to warn us. If Obama has any sense of irony, he’ll put it on his annual movie list.
WTO/99 screens December 5-11 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema. Director Ian Bell, producers Laura Tatham and Alex Megaro, and archival producer Debra McClutchy will be in attendance for a series of Q&As.
