At the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, Ruckus Society founder and Seattle-protest architect John Sellers was controversially charged with several misdemeanors (since dismissed), including possession of an implement of crime: his cell phone. Speaking by another cell phone from the West Coast, a sobered Sellers now says there’s no way New York activists can “tactically outmaneuver the most powerful police force on the planet.” So he outlines a plan that’s surprisingly tame, borrowing more from Habitat for Humanity than from anarchists in black masks: “We’re talking about giant river cleanups where we can talk about the environment, big read-ins where we can talk about what Bush has done to education.” He’s eager to show that activists aren’t “looking for some shit-fight between protesters and cops.” But he says he hasn’t ruled out aggressive actions to “prevent anyone from pimping ground zero for their political objectives.”

Organizers say over and over, in a well-rehearsed mantra, that they expect protests to be peaceful. But there are no guarantees that violence won’t taint all their work. “We’re only ever as nonviolent as the most violent and provocative thing that happens in the streets,” he says. “Even if it’s just a couple out of 50,000 people.”

That is the fear, widely felt but rarely voiced: that the long months of permit-wrangling and consensus-building will be undone by the actions of a few people bent on provoking a response from the NYPD and reveling in the chaos that would follow. This is a movement that prides itself on never telling any of its constituencies what to do, on explicitly not policing itself, which could leave many peace-minded protesters unprepared to deal with an ugly turn of events.

Neubauer has vivid memories of what happened last year at the trade protests in Miami when a peaceful demonstration, inside police barricades, erupted into mayhem. “It was just such a chill moment, everything was winding down,” Neubauer says. “Then something happened—I don’t know who started it—the cops just started firing”—with rubber bullets—“and it got more and more insane and arbitrary. It was the first time I’d ever traveled to a major protest and I was on the front lines of what ended up being this kind of hidden catastrophic event.”

Because of recent experiences like this, activists worry that many interested people will steer clear of RNC protests, leaving, in Neubauer’s words, “just the young punks”—a distorted sample of the movement, priming the event to become a kind Chicago ’68 redux. A nightmare scenario that, no matter who started it, would inevitably contrast a law-and-order president with a chaotic crowd.

On April 28, the same day photos of Iraqi prison abuse surfaced, UFPJ’s permit for a 250,000-strong rally on Central Park’s Great Lawn was rejected. The Parks Department ruled that 250,000 protesters would damage the sod—despite a recent concert by Dave Matthews that drew about 85,000, and the precedent set by the 800,000-strong anti-nuke rally that Cagan co-organized in 1982. Even the New York Post rallied to UFPJ’s defense, editorializing, “ ‘Keep Off the Grass’ appears nowhere in the First Amendment.”

“We’re only ever as nonviolent as the most violent and provocative thing that happens in the streets.”

“I’m outraged—it’s absolutely outrageous,” sputtered the normally imperturbable Cagan. She is convinced that the city has been not only negligent but “actively adversarial” to protesters. “The Police Department says they’re in charge, but we don’t believe it,” she says, alluding to the involvement of the Secret Service and the GOP itself. She adds that District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s forecast of 1,000 arrests per day at the RNC has had “the effect of intimidating our work.”

Pushed to the brink of disorderly behavior, Cagan has issued a call to march on August 29, regardless, while launching a new campaign for access to Central Park.

So the show will go on, but to what end? All the protesters have different answers. Dobbs hopes the protests at the RNC will be viewed as a referendum on the Bush presidency and the Iraq war. Cagan believes that successful demonstrations—peaceful and massive—will bring in new activists to “help build a broader global-peace and social-justice movement.” The Reverend Billy romantically dreams that his Ninth Symphony will, in some miraculous fashion, reveal to “all consumers how 9/11 has been used to sell the war.” Sellers hopes that “disciplined, well-organized protests” will improve the public image of progressive movements, while other direct-action advocates like Jamie Moran merely aim to “annoy the living crap out of delegates,” with little regard for what happens next.

But perhaps all this discussion of what the activists will accomplish misses the point. If nothing else, protesters hunger for the chance to vent. After three and a half years of grimacing at headlines, chuckling at Jon Stewart, or forwarding “Boondocks” comics and online petitions, they will have five days to step out into the streets, stare GOP reps directly in the face (as close to one as they can get, anyway), and yell—or march, or bike, or dance, or do whatever it is they need to do. Unlike past convention protests, this one could be a kind of collective catharsis—as much a primal yawp as a political act. The mania is the message.

Neubauer says activists like himself are less interested in “trying to sway an unconvinced Middle America–type audience” and instead are “trying to create these temporary autonomous zones where we can experience a little piece of a world that we’d like to be our everyday reality. We’re doing it for ourselves. That’s a revolutionary switch.”

To which his fellow activists might raise their hands—and twinkle.

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