The G20

Sensitive content: Drug reference and violence

The G20

Helicopters crisscross the sky, and a small prop airplane orbits above them. Within three concentric security fences, in the Pittsburgh convention center, finance ministers and trade secretaries of the world’s most powerful countries and trade blocs collude to manage the world’s economic affairs. The negotiated outcome of the meeting will, they intend, keep the system from changing too fast, because the system works spectacularly well for them. 

Young Pennsylvania national guardsmen file off yellow school buses and find their formations around a city park where protestors are gathering to kick off a march. The guardsmen swing their long batons playfully and inspect each other’s new equipment. The empty school buses are then parked on the streets along the known route of the protest march, and left unguarded, in hopes that the evening news will show pictures of damaged public school property. 

Protestors – flanked by journalists with press badges, and legal observers identifying themselves with bright green hats, and suspicious-looking plain-clothed cops – hype themselves up, and march. The marchers encounter the buses, and walk around the buses and do not touch them. Many would like to disable the buses, but all know that doing so would discredit the protest in the media. The crowd moves past the buses and none have taken the bait.

A man in a bejeweled headscarf slaps a table ten blocks away. “You owe me a million dinars!”

A man in a nice, regular looking suit, that was tailored from (he was promised) a well-preserved toga of a famous Roman senator, watches the big tv screen intently, “look – double or nothing – those three with bookbags around the corner, they’ll damage the bus.”

The three black-clad, bookbagged figures stay huddled around the corner for a moment, then begin walking left down an intersecting street.

“Ha! Two million dinars,” exclaims the man with the headscarf.

The toga suit man is not lighthearted. “I’ll take it off your reparations tab for nationalizing my oil concessions.”

“In 1963? My father stole your father’s stolen oil rights fair and square. 1963 – what were you, 7 years old?”

“Yeah, and his birthday sucked that year, thanks to you,” chimes in another man, holding a bottle of beer with an unfamiliar label, and wearing a leopard-skin hat. The man is not the Congolese tyrant Mbutu, but somehow has possession of Mbutu’s signature hat.

Several other men present in the room have a laugh. “As long as the oil keeps flowing and the children remain hungry enough to dig lithium,” begins another man who wears several gold rings made from melted antiquities. Others hum their assent, obviating the need for the beringed man to finish his thought aloud.  

This is the real global elite cabal. They pull the strings of the heads of state who dispatched those ministers to the Pittsburgh convention center. And they are meeting in a very exclusive club to collude to manage the affairs of those conspirators who are down the street managing the affairs of the global economy.

On another big screen in the club, the G20 meeting itself is televised. A man watching the big screen, and wearing boat shoes made of leather from the last Stellar’s Sea Cow and lined with the down of the last Great Auk, finishes the last glass of a fine, rare, colonial-era whiskey that he cut with a can of Pepsi, and gets up to go to the bathroom. Someone teases, “Where are you going? Argentina is about to speak.” All snicker. “Who invited Argentia anyway,” another jokes. The man in unlikely shoes sighs, “can we drop it? It was a favor.”

Meanwhile, spirited protestors, agitating for various and sometimes contradictory changes to the global economic order but united in their criticism of the present order, walk along and chant their discontent. They are unconvinced that their individual prior measures to promote reform have had sufficient effect. All have voted, most have written their representatives, and many have written letters to the editor. Still children starve, and the protestors’ individual, paltry contributions to charities seem useless against a system that appears at every point to reinforce starvation.

They walk and chant. Here and there, the cops have prepared and manned a roadblock along the march route, and the protestors go left, or right, or down an alley, thinking themselves clever for circumnavigating the roadblocks. They would soon learn that they were being herded by the cops, along alternative routes of the cops’ choosing, to a battleground of the cops’ choosing. And the protestors find themselves now facing a line of police, in a working class residential neighborhood, away from the commercial districts and no longer on their way towards the convention center. 

Chanting and noise-making die down. A nervous tension quiets the crowd, and the quiet compounds the tension.  Residents stand on their stoops or look out their windows and worry. Over loudspeakers, an officer informs the crowd that each person present is unlawfully assembled and subject to violence. “To hell with this,” or some similar incantation, is muttered by more than half of the marchers, and the crowd thins considerably.

Now the black-clad, masked, bookbagged, excited and scared youth, behind a bold banner, close some distance between their ranks and the police line. A piercing noise is emitted towards them, from a sound cannon mounted on an armored military vehicle. The police skip flashbang grenades along the asphalt, and toss tear gas cannisters.

An odd stone, a half-empty aluminum water bottle, a random firework that flashes and emits pink smoke, and obscenities are thrown from the protest side but most fall short of the police barricade. A cop yells and brandishes a shotgun. Residents close their windows to protect their children from gas and the alarming scene. The crowd parts and a dumpster, pushed along by six protestors like a bobsled to pick up momentum, is rolled toward the police line. Protestors run in and out of the gas cloud. Some residents hold bottled water out from their stoops to passing protestors, in an incredible display of solidarity.

Elsewhere in the city, a self-described anarchist is surprised how difficult it is to break the glass door of a bank branch. Closer to campus, a young and excitable policeman clubs a foul-mouthed agitator, pushes him down, curses at him and threatens him, and then looks sheepishly at the news photographers.

Through the cigar smoke and over the din of merrymaking, there is an uproar among the global elites in their exclusive club, as they are watching the violence live from helicopter-perspective. “Whoa ho ho, THAT guy’s in trouble,” one says.“Good thing John underwrote the city’s police brutality insurance policy,” another notes. “Hopefully not in Argentinian pesos,” someone jibes. “Yeah, that cop’s busted – might as well keep beating the kid now.” 

Meanwhile, the real G20 – the Galactic ministerial of the twenty solar systems – watches the global elite’s Pittsburgh party from the extravagant comfort of the dining room of the executive interstellar ship. “Five zarkles says the fat one is the first to pull out the cocaine,” offers a many-tentacled space alien. “I’ll take that,” responds a well-dressed space blob.“The one with the cowboy hat looks like he’s crashing.”

A disembodied voice gargles: “As long as they keep warming the planet for us …. hey, there’s like 10 Earth cops on that one Earth kid! Turn that back I wanna see.”