There's six months left until George Bush's big New York convention party, but already the "Hail to the Thief" buttons are being pressed, writes Colum McCann.
The district attorney for the city, Robert Morgenthau, has ordered that 12 arraignment courts will be in operation instead of four - he expects 1,000 arrests a day. Crack anti-riot squads have worked out battle plans for the midtown streets. Names on hotel room reservations are being examined by investigators. Flight patterns across the city are being re-jigged. There's even a suggestion that all wireless signals will be purposefully jammed for four days so that protesters will not be able to communicate.
It is, in New York parlance, gonna be a alluvia party.
The Republican National Convention will take place from August 30th to September 2nd, but already the repercussions are rippling across the city. Bush has never been liked in New York, even when he stood at Ground Zero and flagrantly waved the 9/11 flag. He was recently vilified for exploiting the emotional impact of the World Trade Centre bombings in a series of campaign ads: actors dressed as firefighters moved through the rubble as Uncle Saccharine himself droned on about peace, love, and understanding.
But the Republican convention may in fact be the most ill-advised shindig of Bush's increasingly disastrous public portfolio.
The sky probably won't go red with arson, but the enormous rage amongst New Yorkers over the sheer chutzpah that Bush has to throw a party on sacred ground, on their tax dollars (it will cost $70 million in an almost bankrupt city) may in fact turn out to be pivotal in his re-election campaign. In general, nobody in the rest of the US really cares about what New Yorkers have to say - they're a loud-mouthed liberal bunch, after all. And so it's not so much what New Yorkers will say as how George Bush will react to them. Those outside the pale will be watching. And listening.
If Bush survives the onslaught with dignity, he may well glide safely back into the Oval Office. But the pitfalls are huge. If, as is expected, he tries to play on the emotions of 9/11 he runs the risk of being trounced. The cynicism and cold calculation of choosing the city may well backfire. Nobody likes their grief to be played with, least of all by a president who increasingly seems like a jumped-up cowboy who just lost his stirrups. If he insists on exploiting the tragedy, he cheapens it further. If he cheapens it, he cheapens his own justifications for his ongoing policies. Nobody ever called George Bush a genius, and nobody surely ever will, but the thought must have crossed his mind that he is playing with the tissue of a still provocative scar.
"He's just not welcome here," says 29-year-old Jamie Moran who manages a website specifically devoted to the convention (www.rncnotwelcome.org). The website has been getting up to 4,000 hits a day and contains links to other sites that suggest methods of protest for the convention. "People will have to defend themselves. We've been encouraging people to get together in small groups and not let the police lock them into pens and behind barricades. There's going to be 38,000 cops on the streets but we're not going to let them turn it into a police state."
One of the most startling facets of the anti-war marches is that they have attracted a whole range of people - from the Upper East Side ladies to the Williamsburg anarchists. There has not been much trouble at the marches - the New York Police Department is a daunting prospect at the best of times: if militarised it would be the sixth largest standing army in the world. But there is a sense - even amongst the cops - that things could turn ugly come September.
"We've seen it before," says one veteran protester. "They vilify us, they harass us, they infiltrate us. They have mass arrests, prolonged detention and excessive bail. But we're cute to that now. Sometimes there is an honest need for decent protest and sometimes there's a need for fire in a bottle."
The cops, for their part, are readying themselves for that fire.
"Political conventions have always been hairy occasions," says a detective from the Bronx. "I don't think it's going to be like the Detroit riots in 1968, but I'm not leaving home without making sure that I've got my tear gas cannisters. I hate Bush too, but I'm here to serve and protect after all. And there's going to be a lot of yahoos around."
The yahoos always come in different forms, of course - those in suits will be dining courtesy of multinational corporations at the Metropolitan Museum. The yahoos in uniform will be counting up their overtime pay. The yahoos in balaclavas will more likely be sleeping under park benches, not unlike the homeless man spotted in Central Park last week, sprawled out under a bench near the 72nd Street entrance, wearing a T-shirt, coffee-stained, dirty, with the insignia emblazoned across his chest: "I voted for Bush and all I got was this lousy recession."