I was in the city Friday night and, walking through Union Square, happened to stumble into a medium-sized anti-Patriot Act protest/"street party." Aged hippies and NYU freshmen alike went through the motions of The War on The War on Terror, bashing Bush, chanting slogans, reading Allen Ginsburg poems through a megaphone (which one girl wasn't able to do without giggling, incidentally), and giving rambling speeches that I sort of found myself fisking in real time, in my head.

Most ubiquitously, several demonstrators held signs and wore T-shirts that said "Stop the Police State!" Now Lord knows I'm no fan of John Ashcroft- I find it hard to have any respect for anyone who feels the need to cover up a nude statue, or considers dancing to be "Satan's palsy." And there are certainly parts of the Patriot Act and other Ashcroft initiatives that I find not-quite kosher, most notably that whole holding-citizens-as-enemy-combatants thing. I generally consider Ashcroft and those like him as Exhibit A for Why I'm Not A Republican.

Yet at the same time, the whole rally sort of took on an air of absurdity once people starting throwing around words like "police state" and "fascist" to describe our government. Even moreso because, the entire 45 minutes or so I was standing there, I don't remember seeing a single cop, anywhere, despite about 250 people assembling in the not-very-big park. In real fascist countries (like, oh I don't know, Saddam's Iraq), you can't have an anti-government, anti-president rally in the center of the largest city in the country without the authorities coming down hard on you- usually with guns and/or tanks.

If you hold a "stop the police state" rally and the police don't even bother to show up, that might be indication #1 that maybe you're not living in a police state after all.