On September 24, 2005 two of us from Irregular Times journeyed to Washington, DC to attend an anti-war rally — not in our usual capacity as participants, but rather as careful observers. One of us stood near the rally stage on the Washington Mall south of the White House and recorded a whopping three and a half hours of audio — two and a half hours more than was promised. As you can read for yourself, speakers from the more radical ANSWER Coalition took up the bulk of the time and kept telling the crowd that really, no really, the march would start soon but everybody had to wait. The transcript below is a complete record of speakers’ remarks.
At the same time, another one of us stood at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania, outside the Northwest corner of the White House, on the march route. Beginning at 12:30, a picture was taken every two minutes, no matter what was in front of the lens. The idea here, called systematic visual sampling, is to avoid the bias of observing only the “interesting†and instead take a ruthlessly representative set of pictures so that someone can see the mundane and exciting aspects of a protest march.
In the eight months since the march and rally, no one has stepped forward to offer a complete public record of the events of September 24, 2005. We are happy to fill in the gap. Without further comment, we offer our transcript and visual record of the anti-war march and rally that took place that day.
