Berkeley Politics

My home town, the city of Berkeley, California is in the public eye for objecting to a US Marine Corps recruiting station downtown, near both the university and the high school. The right wing blogosphere went kind of nuts at this and you can read more about it here, at the Berkeley Daily Planet.

I went today to see the protests. The anti-war group, Code Pink was set up in front of the City Hall. They had camped over night. This is a women's group and most, but not all, of the women seemed to be retirement age. There were also a lot of very energetic young people running around, most ly on the other side of the street.

Also across the street were a bunch of right wing pro-war types. Even in Berkeley, alas. They had a very loud sound system set up playing Sousa marches and country songs. While I was mingling with the Code Pink types, somebody I knew from Mills came up to me. She said that when the pro-war folks showed up at 5AM, they started chanting "Burn! Burn! Burn!" at Code Pink. "They just seemed very angry." She said.

Parked behind all the action were a bunch of news vans. Whenever the police started herding people around, something they were fairly aggressive about, the news cameras sprung into action.

I didn't stay at the demo long. I was enlisted to help distribute water to the Berkeley High students. Many of them had cut class to go protest. I heard one girl telling her friends that her "mommy" had given her permission to skip school and protest. The kids involved seemed to be very diverse - girls and boys, many races, many teen sub groups. Skaters, goths, and jocks were all out there, all having a good time.

I quit distributing water when the kids started throwing it on each other. I'm not going to carry several liters of water around on my shoulder so they can play with it. As I got on my bike to leave, I went very near one of the news vans. Inside, I heard the anchor ranting about how this sort of thing has been going on for 40 years. The unbiased media was full of scorn for the peace movement. Isn't it tired to spend the last 40 years advocating for social justice and non-violent conflict resolution?

Even if some individuals have been advocating the same thing in the same way for almost half a century, that doesn't make their cause less right.

It's alllllliiiiive!!!!!!

Caravia asks, rhetorically, I hope, "Is feminism dead?" There's nothing as fun as answering a rhetorical questions, so therefore, my answer is "if it was, you wouldn't be asking that question."

She goes on to point out that the key players in the Iraq war boondoggle have been almost all men. That's true, but I would caution against the drawing of certain conclusions based on that. Lest anyone think that women are automatically better, more peaceful leaders, may I draw your attention to Marget Thatcher. I think it's an error to assert the automatic superiority of women in any matter. Women suck just as much as men. We already have equality in stupidity.

The reason fewer women were in war planning has to do with the spectacular level of sexism in the US. However, it may also be the case that the war itself is a result of the same sexism. The US seems to be going through a certain crisis of masculinity. There's a desire afoot to assert a masculine presence. Columnists fret about a metaphorical castration of the armed services. Voter's positive evaluations of Bush before his re-election also seem to be mostly based on the perception of him as the more manly candidate. Therefore, I would say that the lack of women in high levels of the Pentagon did not cause this disastrous foreign adventure, but instead, is also an effect of the same social forces that caused the war. What better way to assert a hyper-masculine presence than kicking some ass.

Note that the war was marketed as "ass kicking." Toby Kieth sang, in the widely played song Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue, "An' you'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A. / 'Cos we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." Of course, it was not Iraq that "messed with" the United States, it was Al Quaeda, but an extensive misinformation campaign caused the majority of Americans to believe that Iraq was at fault. Kieth sang, "A mighty sucker-punch came flying in from somewhere in the back." obviously alluding to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York. A sucker-punch is an unexpected hit: a tap on the shoulder from behind followed by a fist to the face. He felt this was a damage to the dignity of the US, singing metaphorically about a "big black eye," which is used, typically, not to just refer to an physical injury, but also a humiliation. In the barroom brawl in which he imagines foreign policy occurring, the US' masculinity has been compromised.

Alas, the "boot in ass" did not go as well as some might have hoped. Osama bin Laden was at large. There was no catharsis in extending the suffering of Afghanis and the already-destroyed infrastructure in Afghanistan. By contrast, there were plenty of things to blow up in Iraq.

The recipient of a sucker punch must retaliate to the punch or risk being labeled a "pussy." "Pussy," of course, is a crude word for a vagina as well as a descriptor for an insufficiently masculine man. The symbolism of the toppelling towers was not lost on the American subconscious. We were castrated, a hole left where once a tower stood.

The presence of more women in the Pentagon, then, wouldn't mean the women there would be any smarter or less loyal Bushie than their male colleagues, but it would imply that the crisis of masculinity was lessened or passed, thus causing a decrease in sexism and an increase in female participation.

Caravia goes on to note:

The idea with . . . peace movements driven by women is to raise awarness about the consequences of the war, the millions of civilian casualties. Not only the killed, but . . . the raped women, carrying the children of their rapists, the people killed in genocides around the world.

Her implication is, then, that male-driven peace movements focus on something other than civilian casualties. Perhaps they focus more on the (not inconsiderable) harm suffered by American soldiers? This is an interesting assertion and one that bears further analysis. It's certainly the case that woman are more able to have an immediate empathy with foreign victims of rape. American women are taught rape fear from an early age. Outside areas at night, mall parking garages, even the homes of friends are all fraught with danger. This ever-present rape awareness creates a connection between American women activists and their sisters in war zones. (I can't speak for European women's experiences.)

Others seem to have a harder time empathizing with women. In his song, Keith clearly imagines his metaphorical protagonist as male. What happens when somebody "sucker punches" a woman? Firstly, I doubt many would refer to it as a sucker-punch, but rather as an assault. And the response to an assault isn't to get into a brawl, but rather a more legalistic approach of calling the police, pressing charges, etc: a due process where, ideally, everyone involved is treated fairly and justly. This kind of response is one that might not work as well in a song ("Whip out my cell, before you can run / dial the operator at 9-1-1. / The police will come and put you in jail. / It takes 72 hours to set bail"), but is one that doesn't harm innocent bystanders or set off a larger, regional bar-brawl.

That Keith and others couldn't imagine themselves as acting as anything other than a humiliated man may stem from a horror at their tower being replaced by a hole but more likely shows that the crisis of masculinity was already present, probably brought about by other social factors, probably including economic insecurity. This shows that a thriving feminist movement could result in peace and also that it's tied to other struggles, like class inequality and the healthcare crisis.

Xtain Pacifists

So right before fall break, I happened upon a very small peace vigil in "downtown" Middletown. It was a few old guys with peace signs standing in front of the episcopal church. So I stood with them for a while, holding a sign with a pro-peace message on it and decided to come back the next monday after fall break. Being active is important. Maybe more so in tiny towns than in big cities where everyone expects you to be.

today I came back and it was raining, not hard but apparently enough to make the ink run on their signs, so they were standing in the church door, instead of down on the sidewalk. They were all fired up about the march on Washington, which they had gone to, but I did not. I stuck my bike in the vestibule and went to stand with them. Only one guy was holding a sign and it said "Jesus is the Prince of Peace." I picked up some sign about the administration lying and we stood in the church door while they stood around and dissed the Green party. The Greens in CT are apparently less together than they are in CA and are apparently looking to get some of the peace crowd to join the party. These guys were tired of the Greens trying to convert them, especially since they're so inneffective (because they have so few members) blah blah blah. Uh, yeah. I'm a Green. they've been tremendously successful in Germany. then the subject switched to SUVs. A woman there was talking about how tiny women drive SUVs. tiny women! They have no buisiness driving that kind of car! they get in accidents!

I switched the subject to SUVs as a symptom of class warfare, lest I start defending the right of tiny women to drive any car they damn well please. and it went around for a while until the Quaker woman standing next to me said that she was uncomfortable with the Jesus sign. I pointed out that it was impossible to tell whether the guy holding it was a pacifist or a bible thumper. He got adamant about how this was a religious peace group and he was not taking Jesus out of it. It was bad enough that they had to quit carrying the pro-Palestine signs because the local Rabbi had complained. and then the subject wended around to Jews.

It's a small town. folks in a small town might not know the difference between Zionists and Jewish people as a group. The problem with Jews . . .. Oh but that one guy that spoke at the march was Jewish . . . blah blah blah. yikes. So I ran away.

As I was retrieving my bike, they seem to have come back to their religious (Christian) identity. "We're a religious group!" the guy with the Jesus sign was saying. Quakers. Catholics. etc. "Actually, I'm an atheist." I said as I snapped on my helmet. yes really. maybe, indeed I would turn to God on my deathbed, who can know the future?

they want me to come back next week, maybe so they can convert me back to being catholic, or maybe so I can convert them all to being Green.

I reported all of this to Aaron, my housemate, and he said, "wow. Greens. Women. Athesists. you're lucky they didn't start talking about gay people."

indeed. I need a new peace group.

Day of Homeland Resistance

so after staying up too late last night wasting my time and money and hours of my life, which I will never have back by watching something on a par with Bulletproof Monk, I got up early this morning to go to a protest outside of San Francisco City Hall. I showed up 15 minutes late and there was no one there. the date on my watch is mis-set, so I became convinced I had the wrong day. I started to leave when someone approached me and asked me where the protest was. so we went looking for it and found some other members of the band. We played one song and the sherrifs said that we had to stop since the protest did not have a permit to be near city hall yet. So we marched and played over to where the rest of the protesters were (by the bart station) and then listened to some stock speeches covering all leftist issues in one breath. We need jstice, housing, healthcare, peace equality, and end to evil and more good. Yes.

then we marched back to city hall, but the band did not play, because the protesters wanted to chant. then we listened to more speaches for good and against evil. then we did not play because the protesters wanted to chant. Then everyone was assembling into a freedom for Palestine march to the Isreal consulate. It was a funeral procession. so we figured out some funeral songs to play. But the protesters started chanting again and I decided that I didn't want to carry a tuba over to a consulate and not play it. And i don't know as much as I should about the Isreal/Palestine conflict as I should anyway. I bought a Chomsky book on it, but haven't read it yet. so I took bart over to Christi's office

I have recordings of all the speeches and one of the two songs that we played. I also have recordings of comments people made to me about the tuba on bart. the best/wort one, "wow, that's kind of sexual." thank you. goodbye.

Sousaphone Protesting

I meant to post first about Tennis Roberts and then talk about the protest that I went to today, but I ended up digressing so much into tuning that I feared Tiffany would just stop reading the post, since she has no patience for rambling about tuning. So I've broken it into two posts.

Christi's uncle came over today to pick up our old imac. Late last night, I reofrmatted the purple imac's hard drive and put OS9 on it and a few applications. It's really much happier as an os9 machine. It runs fast and has a ton of hard drive space. But there's something very sad about about reformatting a computer and not restoring it. It's soul is gone. even if azll your data is moved over and you finally figured out how to move your bookmarks, it's still... No two computers are exactly the same. They all have bit rot. But they all have it in different ways. I should light a candle or something for the repose of the soul of the purple imac.

Um, anyway, Christi's uncle came over and we chatted for a while and then got lunch and then Christi started showing him how to use word. Christi's uncle, Forrest, works in a dump. He drives the forklift around. Maybe he runs the whole place. Apparently he sees imacs at the dump all the time, but he didn't know what they were until now. He just fished a plasma cutter out and now has a very nice welding rig. He says that he's seen every item in our house at the dump. He didn't know people were like that. What are they thinking about, throwing away their imacs?? Anyway, Christi asked him to fish them out. We could do some cool super-array of imacs runnign supercollider or something. It would be awesome.

So I left them to go play at the Okalnd docks protest. Last month, protesters formed a picket line across the entrance to the docks for APL, a military contracter that ships war materials around. The Oakland police shot at the protesters with "non-leathal" weapons and ended up also hitting some longshoremen and others. This was roundly condemned. I was in Seattle for the first one and missed it (which is ok, since I don't really want to be shot at). But the BLO was playing this time, so I lugged my sousaphone on to BART. My poor horn is covered with duct tape, which is sealing off several leaks. Many people felt obligated to make duct tape jokes about it. Yes, it is ready for biochemical attack. I just used the tape cuz I like John Ridge. Anyway.

A large croud of people was assembled outside of the West Oakland Bart at 5:00. At the same time, a group of people was protesting outside of the APL building in Seattle. Cool cross-costal actavism. People were handing out flyers and maps and stuff. Other folks were addressing the croud about non-violence and strategy and various important annoucements, whcih I ignored in favor of adding duct tape to the horn. You can't have too much duct tape.

some body gave a me a free newspaper that had in the mast head linked female signs with fists in them an a hammer and sickle. I was very excited to get the radical, communist, anarchist lesbian newspaper, but I can't find the queer content in it. Anyway, One of the organizers, named Gopal, decided that the band should lead off the march to the docks. I was darn hot and it's a long way to the end of the docks. I had to stop and pant several time during songs, none of which I had ever played before. The sax player who was being drum major would give me a quick run-down of the notes in the bass line, which I would promptly forget. But I was getting the hang of it the more we marched. and it was very nice to get a break at the last dock. I laid on the ground next to my horn and was then surrounded by press taking my picture. I guess exhausted sousaphone pkayers are picture-esque. Also, the horn is quite a bit bigger than me. I can see the captions now, "tiny sousaphone player can't actually play horn." Anyway, I might be in the Oakland Tribune tomorrow and the Daily Cal.

The rest of the band was coming in a 6:30 shift and was marching up from the bart station, so we decided to march back to gate 3 and meet up with them. The BLO is cool, because it has a strong emphasis on improvisation. We'll play the head of the song and them maybe a verse or something and then the drum major will point at somebody and they'll solo over the chord changes of the head. This goes on for a long time. Some of the folks a great solosists. Then we'll play the bridge section, then maybe the head again and then maybe end the song. Some times we'll sing the words instead of playing. So we played several songs on the way back to the gate and then played a bunch of songs there. We had just finished playing a very upbeat rendidtion of "We Shall Overcome," when Gopal announced that we had oversome and had sucessfully stopped work at the docks for the shift.

So we all marched very triumphantly back to the BART station. It was a huge, jubulant crowd. when you see pictures in the news papers of giant crowds of leftist europeans carrying signs and celebrating because they won some thing. It was like that. We played and sang "Le Internationale," but I only know the Billy Brag words and so couldn't sing along. During the entire evening, the cops just sat and watched. Some of them bobbed their head a long with the music. They were completely hands-off. A definite improvement.

During the triumphant march back, my back was having no more of it. I had already been playing and carrying the horn non-stop for more than three hours. It's a heavy horn. So I staggered back to the BART station, without playing anything. I felt vaguely guilty, but it hurt more than I wanted to deal with. Pain while playing music is not a good thing. It doesn't make you better, it just makes you hurt. Anyway, I'm sure I'll have a reputatiuon for being the whiny new tuba player or something. I'm very embarassed that I couldn't keep it up the whole time. I ought to be able to handle my horn. I expect that taking the sousaphone back up will get me back into shape though. And I expect that my shoulder is going to be screwed up for several days. All the weight goes on the left shoulder, high up, on the neck paert, right where I gave myself a nastly sunburn on saturday. But it wasn't bad until the bitter end.

We got back to the bart station and I laid on the ground again. I think more news types may have taken my picture, but I'm not sure. After a while, my shoulder no longer felt like it was on fire and played a couple more songs with the band. Then I staggered towards the BART platform while they were still playing.

So we won! It was awesome! ("awesome" is the word of the day.) And very high energy the whole time. I couldn't beleive it when I realized it was past 9:00 and I had been marching around for almost 4.5 hours. It's also great because I don't like going to things by myself and can't always find anyone to protest with me. I can't wait until next time. Maybe I'll do some pushups between now and then to build some strength.

the BLO

I have an mp3 of the BLO playing the commie anthem. I coudl tell you why I haver just this exerpt, but I would have to kill you. Disk 3 exerpt. It's short, low-fi and loud. It's also a recording of what tuba players hear in disorganized marching bands. You could use this for a paper, if you had to.

Highlights

Yes, it's highlights from the mp3s below. this is shorter and smaller, but you miss out on the general chaos. Highlights. It's also longer than the song i edditted it for. what to cut?

Field Recordings

Sounds of the peace protest on March 20th. Use a client that plays as it downloads. some of these files are large.

• Disc1 Track1 (13456 KB)
• Disc1 Track2 (17127 KB)
• Disc1 Track3 (3829 KB)
• Disc1 Track4 (25374 KB)
• Disc1 Track5 (10472 KB)

Total time is approx 74 minutes. There is some overlap. This is a very rough set of cuts, with mistakes and low-fi sounds, but it's cool cuz it's recorded with binaural mics, which means that if you listen with headphones, the stereo is awesome.

disrupting san francisco

Morning

So my housemate, Tiffany, and I met up in dowtown San Francisco this morning around 10:00 or so. Protestors were chained to large cement garbage cans in Market Street near 2nd. People were banging on drums and dancing around. Then the police got into formation and started marching around. They told everyone to get out of the street or face arrest. Most folks got out of the street and then the cops started very calmly arresting people one at a time. It all seemed very civil. The people waiting to be handcuffed seemed to be having amikable conversations with the cops. They were sat down, cuffed, then one by one phtographed and put onto a bus.

Then the fire department showed up and started cutting through the pipe and chain binding the chained-up protesters together. the police were getting frustrated and treating non-cooperative protesters roughly. they dropped one woman to the ground and twisted her arms back painfully. When she said she was in pain, the guy supervising said her pain was nothing compared to what she had caused commuters that morning.

The bus filled up. People on it were singing "We all Live in a Yellow Submarine." they drove away to cheers from the crowd. The crowd was non-confrontational. They were shouting things like, "SFPD, 99% of the time, you're the greatest!" And there were hundreds of cops. We outnumbered them, but there sure were a lot of them.

The problem for them was like the story of the person trying to move the ocean with an eyedropped. When they got an intersection cleared, we just moved down a block and stopped traffic there. People in office buildings stared down at us. work was stopping.

Noon

Tiffany and I walked to the Civic Center for the noon rally. There were hardly any cops around. The mood was more stressed, but still carnival like. Some speakers shouted. I purchased some sketchy food that will probably result in food poisoning.

All of us marched over to the federal building and surrounded it. People handed out flyers on upcoming protests, other political campaigns and how to be and stay a non-violent protestor.

We blocked traffic around the federal building. People sat in front of the parking garage exits. There were a few more cops, but not many. A reporter asked a cop behind me how they were planning on getting people out of the building. the cop said he didn't know. My father-in-law used to work in that building, I'm pretty sure. Stopping the Forrest Service doesn't seem super-productive. Anyway, it seemed like that if folks wanted out, the protesters would not only have let them out, but would have cheered them for leaving work. going back might have been a problem, it seemed, but then later I heard folks verbally discouraging a court reporter from going to work, and he got in anyway.

Some guy was holding a sign that said "Puke for Peace." I just read a news report that said that 300 people actually did vomit as protest. goodness.

I walked up the street and saw a marching band and asked them about joining, explaining that I want to get a marching harness for my lap tuba. The suosaphone player was exhausted. It was 2:00-something and he'd been playing since 7:00 AM and the wind was very gusty, which is hell for sousaphones with their big bell facing forward. So I marched and played a couple of songs. There was no printed music. He told me the songs were in d and F mostly, so I faked it.

Afternoon

The crowd at the federal building was thinning out, so we called Christi, my wifey, to find out what was going on. She had a tough call to make this morning, since she works for a struggling non-profit. After seeing the CHP looking grim in riot gear on the way in to the city, she decided to go to work rather than risk a scary encounter with one of them. Anyway, she told us that there was rubber bullets and tear gas being used over at 7th and Market and that there was an officer down.

Tiffany and I walked over to see what was going on and so I could get field recordings of it. I wore a pair of binaural mics in my ear all day, recording to a sony minidisk. the minidisk is the bomb. I never have brought my DAT recorder to a protest, even with the ghigher quality. I don't yet have a didigtal out for the disks yet, but anyway, we walked over there.

there was some spray paint and a group of what looked like black-block protesters. Thos are anarchists who wear black, spray paint and break windows of war profiteers. they want to end capitalism. there were a couple of folks sitting in the street, handcuffed, a lot of people milling around and a whole lot of cops. chanting was sparse all day and the afternoon crowd there at Market was nearly silent. Watching, waiting. the cops outnumbered the crowd. while i was there, a whole bunch of CHP showed up. The cops standing next to the sidewalk were the same cops I saw that morning, only they looked tired, more grim and angry. A few meters from me, they started arguing with some woman standing on the sidewalk. they threw her to the ground and cuffed her. She was screaming, that she wasn't a protester, she was just standing there, she didn't do anything. As far as I could tell, they did pick her at random. she was on the sidewalk, not blocking traffic. And they seemed to be using a lot of force. She was yelling that them, but dropping her to the pavement face first seemed to be excessive

Everyone was angry and the cops outnumbered us and seemed very determined. At the noon rally, the protest organizers told us to go to the financial district at 4:00 to block evening commute traffic. I think the cops were going to open the street, damnit.

No sign of what we'd been told over the phone happening... yet. So we went for a walk the other way. There was a crane picking up all the cement grabage cans and putting them on a truck so that nobody could drag them into the street and be chained to them anymore.

Later

after sleeping less than an hour last night, I'mm too dern tired to block commute traffic this evening. think I'll do more stuff tomorrow instead, after I write the music I need to write (deadlines....)

if you had an orange vest and some safety cones, you could cause traffic havok, just going from intersection to intersection, coning it off. The salvage yard in berkeley at 7th and ashby sells cones for like $1 each. fyi. there's also a movement to drive really slow. Drive slow, walk slow, hold up traffic. the slow-moving protest actually was instrumental in driving a dictator out of power, but i'm too tired to remember where. Tiffany knows all about it though. Ask her.

anyway, i have 4 or 5 minidisks full of field recordings, but no digital out anywhere on my recorder. la la la. need to get the recorder to dump to my puter.

stop work to stop the war!

Anti-war protest

Wish I could give a more in depth review. We showed up. Watched people march for a while. Listen to a speech by somebody who plays a hippy on the TV show Dharma and Greg, waited in a hella long line for the bathroom, picked up flyers from almost every socialist group there (the Spartacus folks are pushy) and then decided to go get food. I suck at protesting. Anyway, I got on some email lists and talked to some of the biodiesel people. I wish they'd had a stronger presence. I think biodiesel is definitely a solution to many environmental, social, and politcal problems.

Anyway, we walked from the Civic Center to a restaurant at 22nd & Mission that Christi likes. It's a tapas place called Esperento. None of the esperanto people were there. (yet another under publicized idea that can solve many problems. Did you know that more than 10% of the UN budjet is spent on translators?) The food was really good, but the background music was that song where the refrain says, "If you love me, say yes. If you don't then confess. Just please don't tell me Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps." Over and over and over again. The song played in a sort of a flamenco style the entire time we were there. I used to like that song.

I feel like yuppy scum, I show up at a protest as an excuse to try fine dining. Anyway, there wasn't any chanting. I'm good at chanting. There were just a whole lot of people milling around. I felt kind of like a spectator, since I didn't have a sign or anything marking me as a protester. So I picked up flyers instead. I also have a copy now of every socialist newspaper that was there. I also nabbed a copy of the The Little Red Song Book. So it wasn't just fine dining, it was also shopping.

Anyway, I think the bad that I'm in should play a cover of the socialist anthem. The songs in the songbook are designed to be sung on picket lines, so many of them are set to familiar tunes. They're wayyy too catchy. My factory lies over the ocean. My factory lies over the sea. My factory lies over the border. Bring back my factory to me. Bring back, bring back, bring back my factory to me to me. Bring back, bring back, bring back my factory to me. (it's been stuck in my head since saturday.) Other songs are folk tunes. The ones by Judi Bari are very interesting, but I can't talk too much about this because Christi hates Judi Bari. This stems from a summer job where Christi opened mail sent to the team working on the Spotted Owl Environmental Impact Statement. Christi's dad was on the team. Apperently, Bari sent death-threats to Christi's dad and Christi read them as a young teenager. When radicals threaten your family, it has a way of turning you against them, I guess. Renee hates Angela Davis, because Renee's uncle was a prison gaurd and was killed by an inmate whom Davis successfully defended. Or participated in the defense or something. Anyway . . .

The next protest is in February, and I might be in Portland or Seattle when it happens. Wherever I protest, I'm going to show up earlier and bring a sign. Maybe it can say "Peace" in Esperanto or something about biodiesel. I should join or found a radical biodiesel group that can hand out flyers about liquid solar power and the existing diesel fleet. I think that there's some good possibilities on this. Maybe we could grow algae in waste water (read: sewage) and harvest the oil out of it in a centerfuge kind of thing. Algae is about 50% oil. That oil could be used for fuel. Perhaps it could be heat-treated to kill germs. Tammy just got a job designing waste water treatment plants. I should talk to her about this.

Matthew reported that most of the Portland protesters were Baby Boomers. There were almost no folks his age. That's confuding to me because Matthew is draft age. Why aren't the folks with the most to lose out there? The San Francisco crowd had a ton of young people. It really was a huge crowd. Bigger than other thigns, I think. Ususally, when I go to gay pride, I see tons of people I know and we chat for a few minutes. At this event, pretty much all of my friends, queer and het were there and I didn't bump into anyone that I didn't arrive with.

The newspaper reported that a small group of black-clad protestors broke off from the march and broke some windows in the financial district. It was very targetted, apparently. They broke windows of banks that are war profiteers and Starbucks. Anyway, it occurred to me that if we were protesting an acual war in February, there were enough people there to shut down the entire city. Groups could fan out and stop all car traffic. We could block the Bay Bridge. Blocking BART would be harder, but it's part of the solution to oil wars, not the problem, so that's ok. If everyone decided that there was going to be a city-wide shut down, it would be impossible for the cops to clear it. They'd have to arrest thousands of people. More than they have jail space for. There's not enough cops. How could you arrest 50,000 people who have fanne dout across the city with the goal of sitting down in every interesection? You couldn't. They'd have to use other (bad) crowd control tactics, but honestly, I don't think they want to. (I saw somebody carrying a sign that said, "cops for peace.") First of all, a lot of them are probably anti-war. Secondly, anti-war protests are great for city tourism. People came from all over the west to protest in SF. Every restaurant for miles around the city center was packed with protesters. I hate to be so shallowly capitalistic and crass, but the hotel and restaurant business are probably overwhelmingly pro-protest, at least, unless they're Starbucks or the cops starting shooting out all the windows. And the protest was on a Saturday, so most non-tourist businesses are not affected. So if we did shut down the city, as long as we kept going into restaurants, staying in hotels and buying tourist trinkets (some from the protests, stay for Fisherman's Warf), and it was on a weekend, would the city really care? It would certainly be a great symbolic gesture to halt automobile traffic, if only for a few hours.

I bet it's illegal to talk about the pros and cons of blocking traffic. Maybe the FBI reads my blog!! Total Informatin Awareness is out to get us. I miss civil liberties. I hope that in the next presidential election, the votes actually get counted.

A while back, I emailed Senator Dianne Feinstein to ask her to vote against the war resoltuion that Bush was asking for. She voted for it and it passed. So perhaps soon, a bunch of young folks, perhaps some friends of mine, will march off to kill and get killed so that the stockholders of chevron can make an extra fifty cents a share. Biodiesel is the future, people. Carpool and ride busses or people will die horrible deaths to feed the plutocratic industrialist criminal swine!

I seem to be off on a tangent, like one might find at Pancakes for Pinkos. But my coming point is important and I don't want to trvialize it, so listen up:

Today, I received email back from Feinstein telling me that she had to disagree with me. At the bottom was the statement she made on the senate floor. Part of it is very intestesting. She says, "I serve as the Senior Senator from California, representing 35 million people. That is a formidable task. People have weighed in by the tens of thousands. If I were just to cast a representative vote based on those who have voiced their opinions with my office and with no other factors I would have to vote against this resolution." Then she goes on to explain that she voted in favor of war anyway, despite the wishes of her constituents. So, in effect, our congress people are knowling going against the will of the people. Our "elected" representatives hide behind "secret data" and "intelligence reports" which are invariably revelaed to be either utterly lacking or a pack of lies. The truth of the matter is that we've launched the cruelest embargo in history against iraq with sanctions that cause thousands of people to die and Bush Sr, Clinton and Bush Jr shuold be tried as war criminals for their rolse in it. No wonder we're opposed to the world court tribunal in The Hauge.

Feinstein is a tool of corporate criminals and war profiteers. I use the word "elected" in quotes, because most peope realize that a vote for either major party is futile and stay home. When the people try to weigh in directly on issues of dire importance, they are ignored. The only hope for change is direct action. Howard Zinn notes in A People's History of the United States that every political movement that as sought to create change through the ballot box has fizzled out, while direct action in the frm of wildcat strikes and civil disobediance has been tremendously successful. We need to be out in the street. Write the letters to the "representatives," but back it up with action. The mass protest is mightier than the pen.

Call up monday and tell folks you're opposed to war:

In California, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer can be reached at:
 
Feinstein
Tel: 415-393-0707 or 202-224-3841 (in Washington DC)
Fax: 415-393-0710
Email: senator@feinstein.senate.gov
 
Boxer
Tel: 415-403-0100 or 202-224-3841 (in Washington DC)
Fax: 415-956-6901
Email: senator@boxer.senate.gov
 
President Bush's office can be reached at:
Tel: 202-456-1414
Fax: 202-456-2461
Email: president@whitehouse.gov
 
Note the local numbers. The local voicemailbox is full right now.