Hands Off/ Face Off

Report from a Rally in NYC April 5th, 2025

Before I left for the rally, I was drawn into an agitated conversation with my mother about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was outspoken against Hitler in 1933. But he was not outspoken enough, and would later write about how he should have done more. He was executed by the Nazis on April 9th,1945.

My mother had written an op-ed about him to mark the occasion of the 80th Anniversary of his death, and she wanted my help with the ending of her piece. She had made a film about German resistance to Hitler, and writing the piece had been the occasion to revisit the script of the film, and the grant proposal to the NEH whose success, ultimately, was the reason she was able to finish it.

I say proposal, singular, but she tried four times, each with a revised proposal. Each try required the assembling of a script, a budget, and a lot of text explaining the intentions of the film into a single document with the heft of a book manuscript. And then the copying of this document 20 times. Basically, a box full of bound mauscripts had to be delivered to the NEH offices in Washington DC. She did this for her second film as well. (By the time she made her third, everything was online.)

I delivered the box personally one of the years she applied - there must have been a total of six or eight attempts between the two films. I drove the box down to Washington, dropped it off, and then I went and saw the Vermeer exhibit at the National Gallery. I mention this because a box of those binders with the proposals was at the foot of her desk when I talked to her, and because that chilly beautiful light in the Vermeers had an echo in the light of the sky when I finally set off on my bike to go to the Hands Off rally in Bryant Park.

A neighbor was on the elevator on the way down. Like me, she was wearing rain gear.

“Where are you going?” I ventured. An unusual question. But I was also wearing rain gear. I had talked to her once, just after the election. A similarly brief elevator exchange. I recalled that when I had said, ‘how are you holding up?’ she had responded, “I can’t sleep.” Now she said, “To the rally! You?”

“Me too,” I said. “What’s that around your neck?”

“This?” she touched the panyard and the ID card. “My Whitney I.D.”

I didn’t say anything about this. But it spoke to a discussion I had had with myself on that very topic: I had decided to leave my phone and my wallet behind. The rationale for this was, for me, unclear. Or rather it was illogical. Who did I think would care that I was at this rally? Who would be triangulating my phone’s location and the rally? What advantage would it be if I was arrested or caught up in some trouble to not have any identification on me? It made no sense, I knew, but I decided to embrace the illogic. I was going to show up to a rally against the Trump administration and, in particular, from my point of view, against the role of DOGE and Elon Musk, and all the extra-legal, anti-constitutional nonsense that went with it. And part of what went with it was AI, and all the ways that automation and surveillance were converging. “The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts,” wrote Czeslaw Milosz in his book Captive Minds.

In leaving the phone, I would be sacrificing the opportunity to take pictures, but I for some reason wanted to remain anonymous. Leaving the wallet was a last second decision. It felt like a form of identity nudism. The wallet was just removing the last garment.

She was taking the bus. I was riding my bike. We said goodbye. Shortly thereafter I was cruising down Broadway. A cool, almost cold spring day, the ground wet. At the bus stop I thought I recognized some classmates of one of my kids, but I wasn’t sure. They were goofing around. Nothing unusual about the scene. I was waiting for some sign of the city in distress, or a sense of the unusual. A helicopter had been buzzing loudly overhead. Not unusual. But it is also the sound of a gathering crisis. I made it to Columbus Circle, and rolled down 7th Avenue, which is always a strange experience, as it tapers off towards the point at where it now ends in a pedestrian mall. I turned left at 50th Street and it started to rain. They had Sixth Avenue closed off. The first sign of drama. I crossed the police barricades, went past Radio City Music Hall and its glorious neon, and pulled over under the awning to put on my hood and my ski mask.

The mask was a source of further ambivalence for me. Throughout the freezing cold winter of 2025 I had enjoyed biking around town in the ski mask. But I also realized it created an ominous sort of impression. I had pulled up on my bike to the Heschel School where my son’s basketball team was playing a game. A giant, sculptural metal gate is at the school’s entrance, and a man, a security guard, turned to face me as I approached. He actually smiled as if to say, “Dude, you look like a terrorist.”

I had pulled the mask down, explained where I was going and why, and then asked if they had a bike rack. A non-event, but I thought of it as I pulled the ski mask over my head. Why this desire for anonymity at the protest? As if to answer the question, I saw a large poster saying that Radio City Music Hall uses biometric data, by which they mean facial recognition. This, in turn, reminded me of the whole drama of James Dolan and The Knicks, and Madison Square Garden; they had made a rule that anyone who worked for a law firm that was suing one of Dolan’s companies would be banned from all the venues he controls. This came to light when a mother who had shown up with her kids to see the Rockettes was told she could not enter. There were some other events at the Garden involving Knicks fans who worked at law firms that were suing the Garden or some other Dolan related property, which includes the Beacon Theater.

To say that I hate James Dolan would not be accurate, but do I find him slightly disgusting. If he has made a mess of the Knicks for a quarter century, whatever, there are bigger fish to fry. Such as our current political moment and the Hands Off Demonstration. Still, it reminded me that the totalitarian state Milosz spoke of manifested in ways that went beyond obvious political affiliation. It applied to all Knicks fans, for example, and all Rockettes fans, too. I continued to the Hands Off rally.

Whose hands? The Short Fingered Vulgarian’s hands.

I had heard about the event via a post from Kurt Anderson. Anderson is now a clear eyed author of novels and nonfiction books, who speaks (and by speaks I include his social media posts) with the mellifluous air of an NPR host, which he was for many years. He was once one half of the team that gave us Spy Magazine, and Donald Trump as a “short fingered vulgarian.” I had gazed at the a party picture from Graydon Carter’s book party that included Anderson just the other day—a group photo of the old Spy Magazine team— and again wondered who in that pair had gotten off all the nasty jokes. Kurt had said he was going to Bryant Park. I thought why not have a look.

Fifth Avenue was a parking lot. I weaved in between the cars and busses. At some point I glanced West on a side street, and saw what looked like a battalion of revolutionary war reenactors, complete with drums. It was an odd sight. The sort of thing you saw before a parade.

When I arrived at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, I saw a huge throng of people marching East on 42nd Street and turning south. The veranda - the balcony? - in front of the New York Public Library was packed, as well. Signs were everywhere. I climbed up on some scaffolding, and had a magnificent view of the passing parade, all the signs, the many faces. I also had a view of the traffic backed up on Fifth Avenue as far as the eye could see. It was a lovely spot. Also very exposed. At some point I had the desire to pull the ski mask off my face. I pulled it down part way, exposing my nose.

How much of a face does the camera need to see in order to recognize the face? To go from the sign on Radio City Music Hall about “Biometric data,” all they needed was the eyes. But what about the nose? Could you do facial recognition with a nose? I had exposed my nose.

It occured to me that it was just 13 blocks away, on 54th and Sixth Avenue, that one of the great, weird experiments in the era of facial recognition and surveillance had taken place— Luigi Mangion shooting the United Healthcare executive in front of the Hilton Hotel.

About the rally itself, I have the following observations: the spirit was wonderful, especially the age range - oldsters to very young kids - and the signs were fantastic. They were fantastic because they were witty (“Ikea has better Cabinets!”) and to the point (“Hands of Social Security!”) but also because they avoided, for the most part, the many issues that would have been divisive even in such a Manhattan-centric display.

The numbers were impressive, a sea of people, more than ten of thousand it seemed. I lamented not having my phone so that I could take pictures of the signs. One sign had a photo of Elon Musk doing his quasi-Nazi salute. The text of that sign eludes me now, except that the S’s were written out in the Nazi SS font.

A couple of guys showed up with a drum and a Trump banner. They beat the drum with great passion chanted “USA! USA!” The drum was very loud. They walked down Fifth Avenue and then stopped in front of a parked police van. They chanted and made noise and laughed. They were overjoyed. But there were on the sidewalk. Out in the avenue, amidst the throng, saw one Trump sign in the crowd. Standing beside the guy holding it was another guy with a big yellow arrow pointed at him. On the arrow were the words, “Right Wing Troll.”

This struck me as witty and effective. But the guys banging the drum and chanting USA with their Trump “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” flag were effective, too. They were a bummer. I looked at the sea of people and thought how easy it would be to make it messy. You wouldn’t even have to resort to overt disruptive violence. There are all sorts of ways to ugly things up.

I stood there for a while, up on the scaffold, joined by a guy in a pink wool hat on my right and an older lady to my left. Someone came up to me, handed me their phone, and asked me to take pictures. I had by then pulled my ski mask down. I was hoping to see someone I knew. I didn’t, but in a sense I did, the whole crowd felt familiar and friendly. But the beating drums. Those guy with the Trump sign were literally ugly. Also rather dark skinned in a way that made me curious about their ethnicity, which in turn made me upset, because the big lesson of the politics of this moment seems to be that the emphasis should be on economics and not on identity. And yet here I was with this atavistic curiosity—who are you?

It reminded me of a passing moment in that compelling show, Adolescence, when one of the cops, the woman, laments that all the energy and attention is on the boy who may have killed the girl, and no one is talking about the girl. The exact opposite of the Kendrick Lamar lyric, ‘but the one at the end of the gun lives forever,’ whose meaning was explained to me by my own adolescent—the victim of the shooting becomes immortal.

I got down from the scaffold, got on my bike and was soon riding west on an empty street towards Sixth Avenue. There, I looked left to see how many more people were coming up 42nd Street. I didn’t seem much. Instead I saw the striking vista of an empty Sixth Avenue. Not just empty, but barricaded by heavy trucks and police barricades. I rolled uptown for a block, and then headed West, but not before asking a couple of police officers about what was going on.

“A Tartan parade,” one of them said.

“Very brief,” said the other.

I looked past them, across the avenue, up 44th street, to see a gathering of bagpipes and men in kilts. What I had thought was some sort of fortification in advance of Hands Off was a fortification in advance of a parade. A Tartan parade.

“A lot going on at once,” I said. They laughed.

It wasn’t over—on West 44th street, I was again confronted with barricades, this time in front of several Broadway theaters whose matinees were about to start. It had begun to rain again. Steam poured up from the street. Eighth Avenue was a mess, at least at first, and I had a moment of understanding about why someone visiting New York, who just stayed in midtown, would declare the place to be a kind of hell. But the avenue cleared up. By Columbus circle the sense of a partly vacant city on a rainy spring day asserted itself, and there was no sign that anything at all had happened anywhere nearby. The city is a place where one can go from engagement to oblivion in the space of a few blocks. The feeling came over me, a satisfaction that I was the best place in the world in which to hide.