OK folks, it’s definition time. Who would like to posit a definition for "wingnut" as it applies to a certain type of politico?

Here’s mine:

Wingnut: A person who has their mental health issues so intertwined with their "politics" that to them there is no difference. Paranoia, conspiracy theory, and poor social skills are necessary traits. In addition, ineffectiveness and failure are usually treated as signs that the Revolution is somehow coming closer to happening. The term originated in People’s Park, Berkeley, California and is usually used by slightly embarrassed anarchists and anti-authoritarians to distance themselves from "wingnut’ politics and activists who may also identify with those terms.

Sample sentence: Did you see the wingnuts protesting the "execution" of Rosebud Denovo when the cops shot her for breaking into the chancellor’s home with a machete?

Please feel free to add your own definitions or ask if someone you know fits the definition.

My favorite line on Ronald Reagan: Goodbye Ronnie, you touched us all, even though we asked you not to. I'm so glad I know anarqueso in real life.

Also, who's going to the jactitation organized protest on Friday? Don't let them put Ronnie into the ground without one last goodbye!

Next Friday, when the other memorials are happening
Assemble around 5 until we can't stand still
Dolores Park and then march down Market

We remember!
PATCO
ketchup as nutrition
Afghanistan armaments
El Salvador death squads
CIA attacks on Nicaragua
Iran/Contra
Rust Belt
trees cause pollution
AIDS
(etc etc)

Who can be there in a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie?

Every political group I’ve ever been part of has always had at least one know-it-all. Someone who just can’t be silent. Someone who needs to add just one more thing to an otherwise agreed upon proposal or plan. Maybe all social groups are like that and maybe it’s a fact of human interaction but this social dynamic isn’t always just annoying. This is the story of how this dynamic sent me to jail.

It was 1987 or so. Reagan was still president and South Africa still had apartheid rule. My college political friends and I had been planning a symbolic action for weeks to coincide with a series of speakers, teach-ins, and demonstrations to get our university to divest itself from South Africa. As with any large institution of higher learning, most of the Board of Trustees of our college had substantial business interests in South Africa themselves. Actually, that was the most important lesson that I learned in college

An obvious target for our wrath were the university bathrooms. One of the more notorious college Trustees was one of the Johnsons of Johnson Wax, an unapologetic supporter of "constructive engagement" if not the apartheid regime. Both the Art Museum and Business School on campus carry his name. Also, in every bathroom in every school building there were soap dispensers which proudly displayed the Johnson Wax logo. As a crackdown on campus protest intensified and divestment got voted down over and over again, washing our hands became a slap in the face for anti-apartheid activists.

We had it all planned. We had cases of blood red spray paint. We obtained keys to as many campus buildings as possible. We had about 15 teams of men and women ready to gender-appropriately* hit every bathroom soap dispenser, make it look like it was dripping blood, and affix a sticker with the slogan of the moment: "Johnson Wax Puts the Shine on Apartheid". After all, that’s what we saw every time we wanted to pee.

As we gathered at our anarchist collective house and divided up the campus, one of our know-it-alls had a great idea. He had just returned to town as an anarcho-tourist and hadn’t been involved in the planning, though he had previously lived in town for a number of years. "Let’s meet up at the Business School after we’re done and spray paint there." There was no real discussion that I remember. We were preoccupied with the final details for the action we had spent the previous weeks planning. Though a couple of people objected, the know-it-all insisted in that loud, forceful way that no one really wanted to fight against at that moment with so many other details on our minds. A Left mistake that seemingly has to be made over and over again, he was also older, butcher and "more dedicate to the struggle", therefore easy to defer to. Stupidly, The Business School Graffiti Fest was left open-ended, an optional part of our plan.

Since I had a car, a 1976 Buick LeSabre, I ferried a bunch of people to the farthest reaches of the school. It went beautifully. We all split up and spread our message throughout the miles of campus buildings. My group had no problems at all except for one spray paint can that blew up in my hand and left paint above the glove I was wearing. An hour later we were done and on our way to the rendezvous at the Business School.

Unfortunately, since none of us went to the Business School, our intelligence as faulty as our lack of planning was. When my carload of people arrived, others in our group** were already spray painting. In direct contrast to the earlier, well-planned and subtle action, more of us were arriving from every direction and it looked like a siege. Uh oh. My carload began discussing getting out of there when a business student came out of the building. Oops, the Business School was open late that week for midterms. The Business Student heroically ran to the Emergency Rape Phone and called the cops.

Unfortunately, my car wasn’t parked so I had to get back in and try to drive away from the scene instead of run. To make a short story shorter, we got pulled over seconds later. The campus cops all knew who we were so there was no talking our way out of it. Especially with my red arm and a couple of empty spray paint cans in the trunk. It didn’t seem like a good idea to try explaining that they were from a different spray painting excursion a few weeks before.

When we got taken to the campus police station, the first thing I noticed was that they had a copy of the poster from my campaign for Student Trustee*** on the wall that made fun of the University President. Because they hated him too? Because they hated me? Probably both.

The second thing we all noticed was that the police radio was reporting vandalism with alarming frequency. "Dispatch, I have a report of spray paint in the Ag school bathrooms. . ." "Hey, I’m in the engineering building and there’s red paint on the walls …." Even the cops were a little awed, not aware of how many others were involved. One said, "Wow. How many buildings did you people hit tonight?" I think he was only half playing Good Cop and despite himself, he was honestly impressed. We said nothing.

Unfortunately, our affinity group efficiency made the damages add up enough so that they could charge us with felonies. Hello Scared Straight program!

(To be continued)



* Though bathrooms are more politicized now, we figured an article in the campus paper headlined "Anti-Apartheid Activist Held on Morals Charge" was probably a bad idea.
**I believe at that time we were the Samora Machel Affinity Group (The Smaggots). This was before EGAG, the Emma Goldman Affinity Group.
***Which is a whole nother story . . .

As if further proof was needed of the sectarian left being out of touch with The People, ANSWER organized a "troops out!" demo on Sunday on the same day as the Folsom St Fair Predictably, only about 5000 people showed up to the demo which is a pretty dismal showing in SF for a "mass" Sunday afternoon protest. I think there were that many people a few years ago for the joke "Legalize PCP!"* rally someone called to make fun of the NORML folks.

Emma Goldman might not have agreed in her historical time period, but this definitely fell in the frame of that fake "If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution" quote attributed to her every five minutes or so.* Folsom St. is one of SF’s big weekends, smaller in size than Pride and Halloween, but equal in prep time and looking-forwardism.

If the Leftoids ever got out of the house and had fun they might have realized that it was a bad idea to "restart" the anti-war movement on a day where they were competing with SF’s pervy population, truly the soul of the city, as well as the SF Blues Fest. We’ll leave out the Niners game ‘cuz they’re sucking so badly this year. Here’s a pic from the demo *** and here are two crowd shots of Folsom St. last year. Good or bad organizing? You be the judge.

Even though I was deathly ill all week, I knew I had to roll out of bed for Folsom. First off, vestalvixen had come all the way from Boston for it and I was already being a whiney and terrible host, second, I was scheduled to work a booth for my workplace and third, I always have fun at Folsom even though I’m not usually a dress-up kinda boy.

Thankfully, I woke up feeling good so I dressed to show off my cheese tattoo and headed down to our booth to hand out licorice whips and fruit leather. Everything was free, we consider it community outreach**** since our store is a block away from the fair, but people were wary and skeptical. "Do I have to give my e-mail address?", "Is the prize free after my free spin?", "What if I don’t like my prize?" Sheeesh. Of course, every time I guaranteed someone there was "no catch", they’d spin the wheel and land on the tiny little square that read, "We whip you with a licorice whip!" But it was just one smack and then they got to eat the licorice, so no one seemed upset. My RSI arm is my smacking arm so I just handed stuff out.

I know you all were giving me sympathy yesterday, but I felt good enough on Sunday to drink the beer that we smuggled in, check out The Shocker (with Jennifer Finch from L7), and make out a little with a hott LJ babe***** (not my houseguest). My favorite line of the day was one I ran into an acquaintance who was complaining that none of her freak friends wanted to go this year. She continued, "I told ‘em, if you’re not gonna go to Folsom, you might as well just move somewhere with cheap rent. It’s why we’re here."

vestalvixen seemed impressed by the whole thing. I’d run into someone, say hi, then someone else would come up from behind and my friend and they would start fooling around or go underneath the stage together. VV kept saying, "I love your city!". Yep, VV, it’s like this every weekend here.

I only have one question and I need to ask one of my bear friends but I’ll post it here anyway. Do bears roll around on the carpet, building up static electricity to get their body hair to stand that far off their bodies? Do they have to recharge after awhile? Do they have little pieces of carpet tucked away along the route for this purpose? Are their bear fashion mags that teach their tricks?



*"New studies show that PCP is as safe and beneficial as blue-green algae."

**The Chron had an exceptional recent butchering of this fake quote (can you butcher a fake quote?) but the search feature on their archive is so bad that I gave up trying to find it. It was something like, "If I can’t have fun, I won’t join your social movement".

***There was an overhead shot on the SF Indymedia website, but since it seems to be down again I subbed the Chron one.

****There is some irony to our (almost) vegetarian store hanging out at the leather event, but NOT ONE person pointed that out.

*****Name not mentioned because it was a bit of a pity makeout on her part. I was still a little exhausted from all the not-eating last week. It was like I was a little birdy who wasn’t strong enough to go gather my own food.

******If you can’t get enough Folsom, here’s last year’s entry.

(I haven’t had much time to write so the night described is from a couple of weeks ago.)

The week that the war started I made a bad movie choice. My friend Southbay* and I are good movie companions because we both have pink sparkly wallets and enjoy seeing movies like "8 Mile" that our pretentious friends are too good to see. We had a movie date scheduled way in advance, but current events intervened and we decided to go to the anti-war demo instead.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the anti-war demo. There we were on Market and Powell a little after 5 PM and almost no one was there. Sure, there were the requisite hippies with drums, the sectarian paper sellers, the t-shirt guy selling "No War on Iraq" and "We Support our Troops" shirts, but only about 10 other people milling about. There weren’t even any more than a couple of cops. No sign of Officer Powder. Something was wrong here.**

Of course, my new wingnut nemesis, Anti-Semite Sam*** was there. He attracts photographers and somehow he kept walking around so that we’d be in the same general area. Local folks will probably understand**** that the last thing I need, as a legal officer of my workplace, is to get photographed with an avowed anti-Semite, so Southbay and I wandered away from the not-really-a-crowd.

After another 15 minutes of people (not us) making pathetic attempts to chant, we said fuck it. Back to plan A. Let’s go see a movie. Checking the times and an actual newspaper, we determined that the only movie we both were interested in seeing, and that was playing soon, was Gangs of New York.

OK. In retrospect, it might be easy to say, "You know, it’s not a good idea to see an extremely violent movie less than a week after war starts". For some reason, that wasn’t clear to us at the time.

The opening scene was extremely bloody. Fountains of blood. Flying teeth. Gushing blood. Lots of thwacking of hard, sharp objects on bone and flesh. Bloodsicles in the snow. I kept flashing back on the pictures of dead Iraqis I’d seen earlier in the day and I’ll admit, it was upsetting in a way that I don’t usually feel at the movies.

Having said that, I enjoyed most of the movie. I mean, it’s a typical revenge story/costume drama, but it tells the history of a time in America that is relatively not discussed very often. I though Daniel Day Lewis was really good as the Butcher. It shows the Irish in their non-assimilated period, which is always worth looking at.

There is one part, however, that totally cops out. While Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day Lewis are preparing their showdown, the NY draft riots begin. Because they are isolated and preparing for battle, they get left out of the lynchings and anti-Black violence that historically-speaking, both would have supported and/or participated in. To further absolve the main characters, who we are supposed to like to varying degrees, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Irish gang even has a Black member, presented matter-of-factly and without drama. Or historical context.

While the Irish might not have been accepted as equals to the ruling class at the time, does anyone really argue that their interactions with Black people in the 1860s were uncomplicated? I would say that there were undoubtedly exceptions and incidents of cooperation and/or involvement by some Irish-Americans in the abolitionist movement, but in a movie telling an "untold story", the Black gang member (who gets lynched by other poor, probably-Irish, ghetto dwellers) seems to be able to join the Dead Rabbits simply because he chooses to.

This is a relatively minor part of the movie, but it makes to story less intelligible. If some poor Irish so easily accept Black people into their social organizations, why is much of the rest of the Black population of Manhattan being attacked, lynched, burned out of their homes and fleeing for their safety? While, truth be told, I didn’t really expect the suffering of Black people to be more than an ornament and plot device for "Gangs of New York", I think it even trivializes the position of the Irish. True, it does show Irish immigrants getting fresh off of boats and being sent, instead of the rich, to die in a war for their new country which promises them nothing but squalor. That they take their anger out on those even further down the political food chain is foreshadowed and seen as an inevitable consequence of political moves made beyond their control.

Leonardo has the Great Man thing going so somehow he is above racism. The rest of the Irish have Mob Mentality so they are racist. White people (We) can identify with the Great Man, of course, and tsk tsk about the Mob, even if we understand the bigger powers in play. All I’m saying is, picture a movie where the sympathetic, heartthrob hero, who we’ve learned to love, participates in his community’s racist violence at the climax of a 3 hour movie. Would that be seen as perpetuating racism? Or as a truer picture of how rooted racism is in American history?

Or how about showing Irish Americans who took a principled abolitionist position? Leonardo’s position is a "colorblind" one hard to differentiate from popular present day conceptions of how to view race. That is: not to see it at all. True, there are always anachronisms in these types of movies, but I would argue that this one is there to make race issues stay firmly in the past.

Believe it or not, I actually did enjoyed the movie. Longtime readers should know by now that I dwell on the negative. It makes me happy.



*I need an LJ nickname for her because I have mentioned her a few times. I hope she likes this one.
**As it turns out, contrary to traditional Left culture, the march left promptly at 5 PM. We had missed it.
***whythingsburn does a good job describing him here, so I don’t have to.
****Sorry, I am not going to explain it if you don’t. Don’t hate me.

-- Did anyone else find it ironic that Willie Brown absurdly described the protestors as 75-80% out-of-towners to discredit them when he was defending the rights of commuters to enter SF on the way from their non-San Francisco homes?

-- Someone was at the demo Saturday with the 1984 "P.E.A.C.E." punk compilation album cover on a stick. It was their protest sign. I was so happy to have been with a group of old punk rockers when I saw it. I listened to it today. "Here come the cops! / Here come the cops! / This is where the party stops." indeed.

-- That "No Blood for Israel" wingnut is really starting to bug me.

We shut down much of downtown SF today. I'm tired and going to bed. The acting police chief (father of the fajita-craving cop with anger management issues) called it the most disruptive protest in his 30 years on the job.

I woke up to helicopters and it seems like I'll be going to sleep to them also.

Rainbow Grocery Cooperative has just voted to close on the business day (m-f)* following the start of war on Iraq. Please spread the word so that no one tries to go shopping that day. It will not be a day for shopping or working.

Don’t know if people heard about yesterday’s attempt to shut down the Pacific Stock Exchange which included the former President of the Pacific Exchange. It’s promised as a small taste of what will happen the business day after a new war on Iraq starts. More info for those plans can be found here



*yes, Rainbow is open 7 days a week. But the business day after is when the protests are scheduled. See actagainstwar.org link above.

There are certain mid -80s styles that people don’t remember. For example, almost all punk rockers wrote on the white space of their Chuck Taylor’s. I can still remember that R had, among other lyrics and slogans, "I hate children" (from the Adolescents) on one shoe and "Mommy’s little monster" (from Social Distortion on the other). I write that and think, "Awwwww, how cute", but, without trying to claim some kind of title to oppression, the Reagan ‘80s were a time when even in the Bay Area just having short hair earned you bottles thrown from car windows and shouts of "Faggot!". R’s dyed-black, fucked up, unevenly chopped, hair and her anti-social shoe slogans didn’t exactly help her blend.

Starting high school the year Reagan was elected president definitely plunged us into a cultural war that we couldn’t fully understand. I remember vividly going to the friend’s apartment with R and our friend’s mother breaking into German to ask her how dare she bring such a girl into her home, with "schwartz hair" and obviously loose morals.* We could feel ourselves being pushed from the "Moral Majority" Christians, school administrators, and the wanna-be yuppies (a new term at the time) but, like the dot-com boom of recent years there was no clear end in sight, no way we could see how bad it would get.

Unlike the relatively recent WTO protests in Seattle**, the politics of ‘Rock Against Reagan" were more counter-cultural and less well developed. But I can say, without inflating the memory, that it was a turning point in my life. Being younger makes it easier to look at things as US vs. THEM, but at a time of a cultural mandate for neo-conservatism, being leftist/anarchist, punk and in the streets seemed to be the obvious choice. R and I were arrested together at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in SF where, after a huge outdoor concert by Dead Kennedys, MDC, The Dicks and many others. We took the streets to protest arrests earlier in the day at a "War Chest Tour", the ‘80s version of anti-corporate demonstrations where a bunch of punks would rush into some multi-national’s office and start screaming about their capitalist evils and their financial ties to both the Republicans and Democrats.

At the time, our protest became the biggest mass arrest in the Bay Area since the late ‘60s. As we rallied outside the Hall of Justice, the police moved in without warning from all sides. My weasely brother, six years older than I, made it through the police line at the last minute but I got stopped by a cop pushing me back with a riot baton in my chest. My best friend at the time and R were right behind me. I spent all night in jail before being sent to juvenile hall the next morning, being 16 at the time. R spent the night outside in a makeshift holding facility before she got shipped to juvey. My best friend lucked out with a typo on his arrest form listing him as 18 so he was released later that evening.

Going through R’s letters, I found her account of her arrest which we ran in the student paper*** I’m struck by how much better her writing was than mine. I wrote the straight-forward, newsy account and she basically did an arrest diary which she wrote while on the horrible family vacation mentioned in my last entry. Below are excerpts:

"Ahhhh, the swinefest of the Democratic convention of 1984. Let’s see, I was arrested about an hour after Gordon was. I just kept scooting back and scooting back in the dwindling crowd that was seated on Bryant Street in front of the Hall of Justice. People were getting nervous all around me. I watched the piles of various paraphernalia, switchblades, and fire crackers get larger and larger around the edge of the crowd. Last cigarettes were being passed around by everyone who had them. The cops stood lined up in front of us, glaring down, not speaking and occasionally stooping to pick up a switchblade and pocket it."

What I find interesting about this paragraph is that it shows that the forms of symbolic arrest hadn’t been codified yet. By the late ‘80s, people knew how to be arrested like sheep and not to bring weapons to demonstrations.

"After sitting and freezing for hours (R’s group was being held outside at Potrero Hill Middle School) we became bored and invented songs with lyrics like "We all live in a Fascist USA, a Fascist USA, A Fascist USA" (sung to the tune of "Yellow Submarine"). . .I talked to a girl from LA with a purple mohawk and she said she had just come up to SF that morning. She said that a lot of punks were coming up to SF because the cops were really sweeping the streets in LA for the Olympics.**** They had all heard how cool the SF cops were. I think she had changed her mind."

The rest of R’s account includes numerous and humorous anecdotes about the cops not being able to tell the boys from the girls, spotting punk "stars" in the police vans and being processed in the school cafeteria that was identical to our public school cafeteria. R’s account ends with:

"It was 3:30 (AM) when they put me in a 5 by 10 ft. cell with nothing in it but a rock hard cot and a window covered in wire with glass about three inches thick. The doors were heavy, they really clanked when you shut them. I lay down on the cot and wondered what it would be like to be claustrophobic. Suddenly, I heard the clanking of the door being unlocked and a woman led me down the hall, saying they had my father on the phone. . ."

(later, when being released) "The man told me I was being charged with unlawful assembly, failure to disperse and intent to riot. He said he hoped I had learned my lesson. Foul beast. I liked my father’s version better. He said to me on the way back, ‘I hope you learned your lesson. Don’t get caught.’"

After this was printed in the school newspaper, the howls of outrage at these words of fatherly advice were arguably the loudest.

*I’ll ask my two high school friends who read this journal to share the irony of this for a moment.

**Some of the same people were main organizers for both events actually.

***When I look back, I can see how great our student paper was. The faculty advisors saw one of their roles as defending and supporting students being critical of the school administration. They also took a lot of heat for not only the articles mentioned above, but others including one by R reviewing "pregnancy counselors", including Christian, fake, women’s-counseling services that were anti-abortion. Armed with the pregnant urine of a neighbor, R wrote a great description of the local "Birthright" clinic people telling her she’d burn in hell if she got an abortion.

****Evidently she didn’t know the SF cops had done the same thing before the Democratic Convention got underway. Even the Chronicle detailed the police dropping homeless people off at bus stations and the Nevada border


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