So I'm reading the New York Times story on yesterday's demonstrations in New York, and I'm listening to the local NPR story, and I'm noticing that both of the stories are about the demonstrations. They're about arrests and about things the demonstrators did more than about the reasons for the demonstrations. The stories are primarily about form and only incidentally about content.

If you say that that's just the biased corporatist media, and that people in "the streets" know what's really happening, I have to tell you that I work a mile north of Madison Square Garden and I live a little further uptown, and all I know is what I read in the papers. It's a huge country -- if I didn't experience your demo live, they sure as hell didn't experience it in Kansas. All they know is what they can glean from news reports. And if the news reports are a murk, well, apart from reminding people in Kansas that some people don't like Bush very much (which they already knew), did your demo really get any kind of concrete political message across?

Look, I know, it sucks -- getting heard as an ordinary citizen in this society is very, very difficult. But squeezing a thousand separate "actions" into a four-day period makes it worse. It's like playing a thousand songs at once and expecting people to sing along with each one.