As police pressure is ratcheted up, the lines between Dobbs' approach and Moran's are starting to blur. On the evening of June 11, over 100 people gathered at Saint Marks Church for one of the monthly No RNC Clearinghouse meetings, in which organizers plot strategy and apprise each other of their progress. The room was stifling and the meeting tedious until a strikingly pretty dark-haired woman stood up and electrified the crowd with her call to civil disobedience.

"The Republicans are coming," she began. "In a shameless effort to exploit the tragedy of 9/11, they will craft an agenda that erodes the very freedoms they claim to fight for.

"This is where we step in," she continued. "On Tuesday, Aug. 31, a day of nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action will commence." It will start, she says, with a shout. "As clocks strike 11 a.m., two days before the renomination of George W. Bush, the people of the world will shout 'no' with one voice. From Brooklyn to Baghdad to London to Lisbon, from Selma to Sao Paulo, we'll raise our voices in this global expression of outrage ... Here in New York we will converge on Madison Square Garden. We will sit down in the streets and refuse to move ... We want more than speeches and protest pens. We want change!"

The crowd erupted in cheers, whistles and applause.

It's telling that this woman was frustrated with protests as usual because she's a colleague of Dobbs' at United for Peace and Justice, a group whose raison d'etre is big, traditional marches. UFPJ has nothing to do with the call to action issued at the meeting. Indeed, it's premised on the notion that old-school demonstrations are increasingly insufficient.

Few blame this on United for Peace and Justice, a group headed by veteran organizer Leslie Cagan, a squat woman with short silver hair who helped bring more than half a million people to Central Park in 1982 for a record-setting disarmament rally. Cagan is a radical, but she's also a professional, the kind of person who knows her way around the permitting process and is willing to work with police and city officials. Over the past year, though, the NYPD has done much to undermine her and UFPJ.

United for Peace and Justice is planning another huge march on Aug. 29, the day before the convention begins. Cagan wanted to have the protest culminate at Central Park's Great Lawn, but the Parks Department refused to allow it on the grounds that attendees might destroy the lawn's newly planted grass. UFPJ offered to put up a bond to pay for potential damages, but the city hasn't relented. At one point, a city official suggested that UFPJ hold the rally in Queens instead. "The Parks Department slammed the door in our face," she says.

In June, Cagan told a City Hall hearing that the NYPD was "creating the potential for chaos" by refusing to let demonstrators use the park. Bill Perkins, the Cty Council's deputy majority leader, had convened the hearing to investigate the city's response to convention protest plans. He was worried, he said, that "overzealous antiterrorism policing is creating an unnecessary burden on New Yorkers' rights to assemble." The city's refusal to let protesters use the Great Lawn left him angry and incredulous. "I am very concerned," he said at the hearing, "that we have such high regard for the rights of grass."

So far, the rights of grass have prevailed. On July 21, UFPJ reluctantly accepted the city's offer to allow a rally on the West Side Highway, far from shops and foot traffic. UFPJ was told that it had no other choice -- the city wouldn't negotiate. "This was not a happy decision to make," says UFPJ spokesman Dobbs. "It reflects the bullying of Republican Mayor Bloomberg."

Among other problems, the West Side Highway site lacks shade and access to places to buy drinking water. Because the site is so long and narrow, the rally would have stretched along dozens of city blocks, making projecting sound a challenge.

UFPJ's compromise enraged many activists. Posters on anarchist sites like Indymedia.org condemned the group and promised to rally in Central Park regardless. "Who asked UFP&J to play hall monitor?" an activist from Philadelphia wrote.

"I'm almost glad the City has decided to deny us a permit for Central Park and that UFPJ caved," wrote another. "Now, we will take the Park in defiance of both the capitalist bosses and the self-appointed leaders of the 'movement.'"

The reaction was so negative, in fact, that Tuesday UFPJ abandoned its agreement with the city and announced that it will continue to fight for the use of the park. "Part of organizing is listening to what people are saying," says Dobbs. "We are indeed marching by Madison Square Garden, and we are not, not going to that dreadful West Side Highway."

UFPJ has reapplied for a permit to use the park but it seems unlikely that the city will grant it. If denied, Dobbs says his group might sue. And after that? "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

Some are urging UFPJ to schedule the rally in the park without waiting for a permit. "Note to UFPJ," said one Indymedia poster. "If you abandon West Side Highway, and declare your intention to rally in Central Park with or without a permit, you will regain much of your credibility with the rank and file."

Right now, though, UFPJ isn't going that far, though Dobbs acknowledges that many people will try to take the park regardless. "The mayor has set up this volatility," he says.

Such volatility is good news for people like Flores-Williams, who are eager to see widespread confrontations with police. "There comes a time when you have to have an appropriate response," he says. "If nothing happens and it's a gentle response, that's going to be used as a sign of complicity and acceptance of the Republicans' presence here."

Flores-Williams seems like he's been waiting for this moment all his life. He was an expat in Prague in the early '90s, and after that a writer of polymorphously perverse, William Vollmann-style fiction in San Francisco. Now he talks as if he's standing on the precipice of a new era. "I like what happened in Seattle. But the real vision I have is what happened in Paris in 1968," he says, referring to the student uprising and general strike that convulsed the city. "In my opinion, chaos serves to energize the human spirit. I've seen it. I lived in Eastern Europe when the walls were coming down. It was a beautiful period when art flourished. It was like the blinders came off."

Yes, the cops will be out in force. "But there will be so many protests," he says, snapping his fingers. "Here 5,000, here 500. Popping off in all these different places. The cops will be stretched thin. Tempers will rise. All hell will break loose. That's what everybody wants -- they just won't admit it."

That's not entirely true. Plenty of Bush opponents worry about what this grand carnival of rejection, while cathartic for some, will actually mean. There was nothing liberating, after all, about the welts and bruises protesters sustained in Miami last fall. "Stark brutality can paralyze people with fear," says Moran. "Miami hangs like a black cloud."

So does the Chicago Democratic National Convention of 1968, where Mayor Richard Daley took a hard line against demonstrations and the cops clashed with protesters on the streets around the convention center. Few doubt that the police, if provoked enough, will respond with equal force this year.

This terrifies Bush opponents, who worry that violence on the streets of New York will help the Republicans by making them look like Middle American moderates besieged by nutty radicals. They note that the Chicago '68 debacle helped cement Richard Nixon's reputation as the law-and-order candidate.

"The wilder and more disreputable the demonstrators look, the better for the Republicans," says Paul Berman, a former student organizer and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. "At the height of the antiwar movement, Nixon specifically directed his motorcade to go through the middle of an antiwar riot in California in order to have people throw rocks at him or shout obscenities so that the TV would pose the question that night to the American public: 'Whom do you prefer, President Nixon, or a dope-smoking hippie communist rock thrower?' And the country had no doubt. This was just genius on his part. If Bush ends up winning the election, it will be because of this kind of tactic."

Thirty-five years ago, Berman's generation was notorious for its scornful dismissal of older, cautious liberals. Today, Moran sounds like their rightful descendant, insisting that Berman's lesson doesn't apply. Rather than being alienated by upheavals in Manhattan's streets, he believes ordinary people will join in.

"I've heard some old-timers say, 'If you people riot it will hand Bush the presidency,'" he says. "I think that's just lazy thinking. Any situation where we are joined by regular New Yorkers in the streets is a positive thing."

Besides, it's too late to hold back the protests now. "The last four years definitely created a lot of rage in people," Moran says. "People may decide to unleash that rage on war profiteers. Our collective isn't going to condemn that. It's not our objective."

What is their objective? The Republicans should leave New York, he says. "It was a really bad mistake to come here."

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