“Well, I know how to get a permit,” Cagan adds flatly, if not quite proudly. “I know how to deal with the police . . . I know how to rent the Porta Pottis. That stuff, I can do.”

Yet, after three meetings at police headquarters, Cagan has come away empty-handed. Her proposed march would move within what First Amendment lawyers call “sight and sound” of Madison Square Garden, proceeding uptown past the Garden on Eighth Avenue to Central Park West. But the NYPD has counteroffered a loop that would allow “sight and sound” a full block away from the Garden, before circling back down Eleventh Avenue—a far cry from photogenic Central Park.

“Eleventh Avenue!” Cagan cries, convinced that few New Yorkers could even see the protest there. “At the first meeting, one person even said, ‘What about out in Queens?’ ”

There is some internal pressure on Cagan. Not everyone in the activist world was happy about her previous marches, which were thought to be too compliant to the wishes of the police. People will be watching how much better she can do this time.

If the RNC were booked for Anchorage, you could predict Alaskan liberals to throw snowballs at Republicans; here, in media-crazy Manhattan, New York’s full array of countercultural micro-celebrities, musicians, and pranksters will throw street parties, arts festivals, poetry slams, and comedy and fashion shows—a telegenic twist on the “Festival of Life” Abbie Hoffman proposed for Chicago in 1968 (the Yippies have even proposed their own geriatric jamboree in Tompkins Square Park).

“There’s a whole gallery of Republican characters coming here to make their theater with 9/11, to use a kind of conquered New York as the backdrop,” says Bill Talen, a patron saint of downtown theater who slips easily into the evangelical cadence of his alter ego, the Reverend Billy. “We have to match that theater, to supplant it, and the RNC is going to be our Ninth Symphony.”

“I want the RNC to be like spring break,” says one activist. “You’ll see me on Hannity & Colmes.”

Talen, a zealous performer with an Elvis-like pompadour, is among those who are frustrated with Cagan’s UFPJ marches. “It was practically collegial—like us and the police were checking in with each other!” he says. “I mean, I like UFPJ. But if I’m going out to protest, I don’t want to get penned in by some sky-blue sawhorses and a bunch of policemen.”

Talen has been been busy organizing weekly “First Amendment Out Loud” sessions with his “Church of Stop Shopping” vol-unteers who mysteriously assemble in the World Trade Center path station every Tuesday to recite the First Amendment into their cell phones. The young group Greene Dragon—named after the pub where John Hancock and Paul Revere used to drink—promises a Paul Revere’s ride, for which the group’s impresario, Jonny America, will suit up in Colonial garb and charge down Lexington Avenue on horseback, shouting, “The Republicans are coming! The Republicans are coming!” And Parsons M.F.A. student Joshua Kinberg is launching a Girls Gone Wild–inspired Boobs Against Bush Website, which will collect photos of women with messages LIKE MORE CLEAVAGE, LESS TAX CUTS on their breasts. “I want the RNC to be like spring break,” he says. “You’ll see me on Hannity & Colmes.”

While The Daily Show and Al Franken have successfully mixed critique with comedy, a debate’s brewing about whether many of these “absurd responses to an absurd war” actions will do more harm than good. Local activist Ben Shepard, editor of the anthology From act up to the WTO, recently published a call for a “post-camp activist moment”: “If we are going to suggest that another world is possible,” he wrote, “we’d better be able to suggest that this world is more than simply ridiculous.” It’s not hard to imagine that flag-waving Republicans will look high-minded compared with, say, the Missile Dick Chicks, who wear leotards and tin-foil phalluses and sing songs like “Shop! in the Name of War.”

Protesters fully expect the “corporate media” they distrust will reduce their politics to the kind of stereotypical images the conservative Freepers (the influential bloggers at freerepublic.com) are salivating over. “The GOP convention will bring national attention to the sharp contrast between GOP seriousness and Democrat virulence,” writes one Freeper hopefully. “The images of topless lesbian answer communists railing against capitalism and rioting outside the staid GOP convention will seal the doom of whoever gets the Dem nomination.”

To provide ballast, other local activists are planning serious, targeted protests, including “reality tours” of poor outer-borough neighborhoods, environmental protests related to ground zero, and events involving September 11 families, clergy, and veterans. Some are developing sophisticated media campaigns that capitalize on New York’s peculiar natural resources. Kevin Slavin, a vice-president at a downtown ad agency, who only half-ironically wears a NASCAR jacket slathered in corporate logos, has designed his first protest campaign, called Signal Orange. It utilizes skills he honed working on ads for military products like the F-22 fighter-bomber.

“I’ve picked the one message that I think will have the most impact,” Slavin says, cuing a PowerPoint presentation on a beat-up Dell laptop. On the screen is the image of a bright T-shirt bearing the message KILLED IN AN RPG ATTACK ON HIS CONVOY. The next slide shows the back: CPL. EVAN ASHCRAFT CAN’T VOTE. Hundreds of the T-shirts—one for each lost soldier—will be sold, at cost, through the site signalorange.net, complete with instructions to gather at the RNC to represent the extent of American military casualties. This spectacle, Slavin believes, could make a difference. “If there’s anything we learned from 2000,” he argues, “it’s that a few votes can win an election.”

Between the permit–and– Porta Potti pragmatists like Cagan and the romantic fabulists like Jonny America, there are the activists who have embraced direct action as the engine of the newest New Left. Direct-action tactics take inspiration from civil-rights sit-ins, act up’s die-ins, the destruction of logging equipment, and the blockades (and famous brick thrown through a Starbucks window) that disrupted the WTO talks in Seattle.

New York presents direct-action advocates with particular difficulties. The milder tactics, such as “banner drops” from office windows, would go unnoticed here. And the more interventionist forms, like closing a street with a lockdown, would be easily defused by the well-trained NYPD. Partly because of that, in fact, there won’t likely be a push for a coordinated shutdown. Instead, the idea is to go for many pinpricks, like unpermitted street parties, cream pies thrown in the faces of delegates, mass sit-ins, and smaller blockades of hotels and convention sites. RNCNotWelcome.org links to a “war profiteers” map of Manhattan companies (if a brick gets thrown through a window, let’s just say it won’t be Starbucks) and has been distributing lists of delegates’ itineraries and hotel accommodations, so that activists can harass and “bird-dog” them.