Revealer publisher Jay Rosen at the DNC: “On Tuesday morning I encountered one of the most effective acts of political protest I have seen in a while. It took imagination. Organizers — the American Friends Service Committee–laid out upon the grass in Copley Square 907 pairs of black boots, arranged in rank and file like a missing army at attention. Earlier in the week it was done at Boston Common. (Newsweek: “A Grid of Empty Boots.”) They were protesting the American deaths in Iraq, and so their statement was anti-war. It was also about beauty, loss, the unsayable and the ineffable; and it made an implicit comment on the ugliness–the brutality–of the Free Speech Zone near the Fleet Center, which is so unlike the free spaces of a healthy democracy that protesters have declined even to enter it.”