Fighting Spectacle with Spectacle: Pushing Peace

David Holler

        Hey, baby, what’s your sign?

       No, I did not actually say this to anyone…of course! Though perhaps the people wearing Bush masks, the stilted ones, the unicycle crowd -- the people who dressed up (or wore nothing) to yesterday’s protest could have delivered such a line and gotten away with it…. Their mood I confess was better than mine…

       Around noon I bicycled down to Civic Center, vaguely worried about the rain. Of course I thought the weather would scare people off. My umbrella was thrashed from Ljubljana and London so I left it at home and got on the bike. I thought I might be in for a soaking but I also thought it was especially important that I go to this demonstration, probably the last such rally before the True Ugliness hits. I had vague hopes that we could bring the city -- and somehow by extension the war -- to a halt. (Not in an angry critical-mass kinda way, but in an MLK civil rights march kinda way.) Of course with such expectations I was immediately disappointed. When I saw traffic moving on Market St. I knew we would not get the unignorable sums we needed. (If I were a true disciple of Hunter S. Thompson I might say: It was then that I knew we were Doomed.)

       For a while I camped by Symphony Hall at Van Ness and Grove and just took notes and photos. (Of everyone I know who attended the rally, my roommates were the only ones I ran into!) I sat on the curb and noted the nervousness of quite a few well-dressed people who came loping through, almost tip-toeing to the symphony’s matinee. How out of place the cultural elite seemed, the confidence and unction of the old money people, who, after valet parking, were forced to intersect with the sign-toting rabble for a couple of blocks. Oh yesss, I saw the rich Republicans frown into their cell phones in front of Citizen Cake and complain. Most of the well-to-do actually seemed sympathetic to the whole thing, but some wore silent gestures of disgust at the sight of thousands of marchers rounding the corner up to Hayes Valley where the route snaked up to a makeshift stage set up in that unappealing park next to Gough’s slipstreet traffic (across from where that beautiful church burned down not long ago).

       By Civic Center I snapped a shot of a woman with a sign with a snippet of Picasso’s Guernica. And nearby, in the shadow of the filigreed dome, marginalized men were passed out along the route, tempting the international photographers with the giant lenses (and an unjaded sense of capitalism’s ironies) to take shots of homeless people slumped in the trashy gutters of one of America’s most prosperous cities. I was tempted too.

       Out of money, I snuck around the backs of the street kiosks, watched the bumper-sticker/ button-sellers counting their ones, saw the falafel slingers wipe the sweat from their aprons. And the short Salvadoran shaved-ice cartpushers went like ghosts up the steep streets. Piles of discarded signs were stacked up under a table, the same forlorn Iraqi poster child in the hundreds. I saw the opportunists selling peace beads for $2. I saw the contradictions and wanted to be Whitmanic enough to ignore them. (Didn’t work.)

       A twitching folk singer wanted “donations for peace.” A fuzzy-jowled sophomore read from a manifesto to a bored stoned girl on the curb whose ample arms were painted with the word NO. He read his agenda mechanically to her nods of indifference: “Item 14: Free food for all; 15: free education; 16: free health care…”

       At least half the people present carried placards of some kind. They ranged from the mundane to the profane, plenty of platitude and attitude. Here we find the usual puns, the angry epithets, the arty release, the snippet of Gibbon or Chomsky or Bakunin -- insert anti-hero or assassinated patriot here. (Adrian Chan, I would be curious what snippet you might have brought. Lyotard’s best one-liner: “Terror in the Name of Freedom” is what I might have scrawled if I were the type to carry a sign of any kind.)

       Sententiousness ranged from silly to simple to brilliant.

       Some samples:

Read Between the Pipelines
Defoliate Bush
Bush Sr. should have pulled out sooner
Where’s the proof?
Disarm Bush
Bush Knew
“O my God, war is like hella bad.” (held up by a teen with a developed sense of irony)
This is my patriotic duty (held up by a man in his 80s)
Peace is patriotic (held up by a man in his 70s)
Paranoia will destroy ya
Impeach the Usurpers
A Republic not an Empire
Pre-emptive attack is un-American
Mad Cowboy Disease
Quench tyranny with revolutionary thought
Regime change for Washington
Fight truth decay
Coalition of the Killing
Your Name Here (on a bomb)
Not in our Name

       Some signs were head-turningly crass:
Bush Gives Pussy a Bad Name (corollary: Dick Gives Cock a Bad Name)
Laura, Trim Your Unruly Bush

       Some were Biblical:
that famous Exodus bit, something about “thou shalt not…”;
and my favorite, a riff from Ecclesiastes: “Nothing new under the son.”

       And some were just plain weird: “Ryan Suzuki lacks moral compass,” for instance.

       There were jokes rhyming depleted uranium and depleted cranium.

       And of course the famous faces were invoked: Che, Mahatma, Malcom (more of M/X than MLK, which I did not take as a good sign).

       There were a few French flags, and some Vive la France stuff, and several brilliant jabs, including: Free Dumb Fries (featuring McDonalds fries box with fries that had faces resembling Bush, Cheney, et al). Another said: I’d rather be French than freedom toast. There were annoying bells and off-kilter drum circles and Capoeira kids and gasmasked dandies. There were Crass anarchists and frumpy Volvo Democrats and Berkeley moms and devoted followers of the wicca with their purple and black robes and their incense. There were plenty of conch shells and pungent sage sticks and flowy garb. A brass band played the Internationale maybe a little *too* enthusiastically -- without missing a note -- as though they were marching to Brezhnev’s funeral or stomping through the Kremlin on May Day or something. Clearly they have practiced this former Russian national anthem -- but you can’t tell if they are sincere communists (are there any left?) or if they are merely referencing Stalinism…

       One guy affixed a timbale to his bike’s handle bars and offered syncopation for drum circles a few yards away…

       Someone’s well-worn shirt said: Ghetto Bourgeois. Behind her: the Sparticist League had a booth (comfortably close to the Socialist Action bookstall -- aha, so there *are* communists left).

       Someone’s scrawled sign might have revealed more about its carrier than its target: Is Bush bipolar? (This written in an unsteady hand on notebook paper, carried by a man with a tentative gait….)

       A hurried guy in a kilt tests his flute with one blast as he runs to catch up with friends.

       A dijeridu guy sits and works that circular breath thang into a steady bassy wail that sounds like C# to me. (Think of that Woody Allen movie where he tries to play the cello in a marching band…moving his chair to keep up, now imagine a hippie kid with a dijeridu trying to do the same…)

       Yes, there were freaks of every stripe (I am one too of course though I don’t dress it). And I wondered who is this for? Are we parading for the cameras? Is there too much Hollywood in our form of dissent? Did we blow it last time? Are we doing this all wrong?

       Let’s consider the true cost of the vandalism on Market St. last time: permits were issued only for a three-hour protest, and not on the city’s arterial street. The new route accommodated fewer people of course and it was less visible. My estimate (and I am not qualified to do so) put the crowd at about 20,000. Who knows or cares what the AP wires say. We know the undiluted truth rarely makes it to print. This event shouldn’t have been about a number, but it to me it was. It was the usual mess of contradictions: a success and a failure, it was beautiful and sad.

       Sure you can judge the success of the turnout by the numbers in the NY Times blurb, or by the pictures from the news helicopters, or … or … you can judge it by the horrible depth of piss in the only men’s room on the route at the Hayes Valley playground…the piss index…Why not? A guy next to me pissed uneasily, with his downloaded placard leaning against his shoulder…These are the things we pretend not to notice, the telling details that always end up on the cutting room floor…

       And it was good to see that Hayes Valley hasn’t completely given in to gentrification: hip-hop played to distortion decibels blared from more than a few windows. Some layabouts by the Don’t Call it Frisco laundrymat scoffed at the whole thing, indeed the whole idea of social change (or were they just incapacitated beyond all reason?)

       Helicopters kept sharking above us along the whole route (yes, the LA-ification here is complete of course). A little Cesna or Piper Cub up there in the grey kept buzzing around the park where people dug in their heels and listened to the speeches. The wind kept knocking signs out of people’s hands. (NOT an omen. NOT an omen.)

       The official news vans with their periscopes of satellites all bore the additional permanent marker word LIES next to their logos or slogans. No one was in them. They were out filming. (Filming *what* you wonder. Something that will be edited to 10 seconds on the 11:00 news?) You needed to sign in with your press pass to get near the stage. Julia Vinograd was back there, limping, her Berkeley earth-mother aura totally intact. (I will buy a book from her next time I see her in the Mediterraneum on Telegraph next time, I swear.)

       I settled in on the crowded mangy park grass near a fake tank.

       I listened to the speeches and found in them a lack of vision.

       The rhetoric reeked of slogans and crowd-pandering weak syllogisms

       I wanted Marc Fucking Antony to get up there and say something brilliant to quell the raging masses on the steps.

       I wanted the Dalai Lama, the exiled Karmapa, Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, some as yet unknown heir of Ghandi or King, even an actor who plays the president -- *anyone* eloquent and articulate to get up there and calmly say without polemics, we here assembled represent “a tide in the affairs of men.” A high tide that will wash clear the paradigms of the millennia, a mighty tidal wave of a force akin to Prague’s Velvet Revolution that overturned a government without a shot. We here assembled are the answer! We here assembled reject the syllogisms of blood.

       But there was nothing soothing from the “poets” and speakers who for instance, denounced Israel’s right to exist and vowed its destruction, speakers who called for the release of 2 million American prisoners, poets who brought more anger than wisdom to the discussion.
I am down with a Palestinian state!
I want Mumia Jamal freed (or at least given a fair trial)!
I want our money to go to education and not prisons, but I think these discussions belong in another forum.
The issue at hand was slighted, buried under ancillary agendas, cause-activist piggybacking. (OK, the Palestinian issue is very relevant but still….)

       I wanted to be soothed.

       I wanted intelligent Thoreauvian reassurance.

       But the anger of the speakers was a kind of affront, a slap, a concession to the paradigms of the Man.

       The true message was:

       We here assembled are no better!
We have not overcome our anger, our fucked up childhoods, our command of situational ethics.
We here assembled would only bring a different trouble to Washington.
We here assembled are lazy and corrupt and naïve in our notions of a world without conflict.
We here assembled have turned in our badges.
We here assembled take ethical shortcuts, we have signed our truces with the traps of convenience and hypocrisy.
(We came in our cars to complain of the oil cartels!)

       The whole thing made me sad. As in tears-welling-up sad.

       Who wouldn’t suffer a Joycean ambivalence to see that we are fighting the spectacle with another spectacle…(Guy deBord, you brilliant bastard, I am now carrying Society of the Spectacle with me everywhere.)

       I felt our dissent was trivialized, marginalized, watered down, prey to solipsistic slogans rather than simple sober profound disagreement.

       And though I finally loosened up and let go all that philosophical mumbo-jumbo, and enjoyed the dancing in the streets (and actually did some myself, so there Kathleen!), I had fantasies of a different mode of demonstration.

       I indulge in a fantasy of a different method (an adaptation perhaps from a ritual of the Quakers):
Pure silence.

       Imagine the impact of a calm group of rational people simply being silent.

       Standing for an hour in a civic place without words.

       Imagine it:
No signs.
No flags.
No extravagant costumes.
No one on stilts.
No one who could clearly be mistaken for a Burning Man disciple.
No feral freaks.
No Telegraph Avenue Theater.
No talismans of Berkeley liberalism diluted with decades of compromise.

       (Like I say I have nothing against all that! I am a freak too -- you all know that! But the internal fascist in me -- the true enemy perhaps -- craves a gravitas befitting the cause -- which perhaps speaks more to my own repressive shortcomings than to my love of freedom.)

       In my fantasy protest there would be no straw hats adorned with pot leaves.
No ganja, no alcohol, no X, no acid, no rainbows, no fringe insignia.
No silly call and response.
No bullhorns or bands or raised voices.
No piggybacking of other issues.
It would simply consist of as many like-minded individuals as we could muster.
Just people, regularly dressed, sober, aware, standing, completely silent.
For an hour.

       Imagine it --
in the plaza of the Civic Center among the stunted sycamores,
the fists of the incomplete oaks, the new museums,
the faux gold of the City Hall dome:
A thousand vigilant people.
Ten thousand.
Fifty thousand.
A hundred thousand.
Half a million, spilling onto Market St.,
all saying their peace without a word.

       If we can squeeze half a million people into the Castro on Halloween I think we could get a million into the canyons of the Market corridor. Seriously.

       Now imagine it on the Mall in Washington.

       Imagine it in New York, a million people facing Staten Island.

       Am I a creep for even suggesting that the levity of our mode of demonstration undermined the credibility of not just yesterday’s gathering but all such gatherings?

       Am I the real freak here, suggesting that the gravity of the world situation -- and our role as conscientious dissenters -- was not addressed in an appropriate manner yesterday?

       Am I a traitor to the San Francisco tradition of anything goes?

       Should I move to fucking Fresno?

       Am I some sour-faced heir of Cioran?

       No -- I don’t think so. I am just another (mostly silent) voice against a travesty of justice, against a cowboy Caligula, against a mode of thought that has imprisoned our world too long.

       The most powerful protest I’ve seen so far was in October in Austria: two monks in robes meditating in the shadow of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s cathedral, there among the tourist troughs. They sat with amazing concentration among the silliness of the Americans taking snapshots, while all around them the plaza filled with thousands of loping visitors gawking at the Gothic spire. Every once in a while someone would stop looking at the church and stand silently near the monks. Not asking anything. These monks sat perfectly still -- in such a way that communicated a conviction and a commitment to peace that made you question yours.

       **

       Yesterday the Levity and Goodwill that was present at previous SF protests had clearly given way to an anxiety and resignation that was salted with more than a dash of latent outrage.

       There was a time, after the marching permit had expired, when I thought things could get violent. But in the several hours I was there, even after the official time was up, people on both sides, cops and demonstrators, for the most part, kept their cool.

       Seven motorcycled cops drew jeers as they nipped at the heels of the stragglers. One ballsy guy on a bicycle impeded their way, coming within molecules of the motorcycles, even as they beeped and squonked for people to move along. When one of the cops got impatient and sped ahead, the kid said: HEY OFFICER, I ADVISE YOU TO STAY WITH YOUR BRETHREN! This kid taunted the league of cops with their cheesy Ashbery-in-1976 mustaches with some amazingly vitriolic comedy. But the cops kept a lid on it, never engaging. You could see them stewing, hating their jobs, as they waved people along.

       But many people didn’t need a push. They were tired. The anxiety on their faces spoke volumes. I biked around the whole route again. Next to me the sidewalks filled with bone-tired demonstrators, signs facing down, making their way in a kind of stunned silence down to the BART tunnels, or walking back to their cars parked way on the other side of Market….

       And who was behind them?

       The cleanup crew in a white municipal flag-adorned truck.

       You could feel their weariness too, two guys being silent in Tagalog, each with an unlit cigarette, the driver inching the truck along behind the last of the cops.

       Every so often they get out to scoop up the detritus, the flattened Odwalla bottles and the falafel foil and the abandoned slogans.

       How can you be mad at these guys?

       Slaves of The System who pick up trash five days a week, content to have their full bennies and holiday double-OT, their leaky fixer houses in South City; used up men who just want their two weeks off to take the kids to Disneyland?