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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com
Monday, May 08, 2006
The Jacksons' Victory album came out in 1984, the same year as their Victory Tour and the same year that President Reagan feted Michael. I remember being disappointed at the time that more wasn't made of the Orwell connection.
* * * *
My beloved spouse and I are putting together paperwork to adopt Child Number 2. We have to get police records and court records from any arrests. My wife has gone to the clink four times for civil disobedience; once was enough for me, with the added bonus that it was an unplanned mass demonstration. I remembered the event and the general time --
summer 1984, San Francisco, during the Democratic National Convention -- but I googled to get closer to the date. I only found one article, from 2 years ago, at the web-mag Alexander Cockburn edits with Jeffrey St. Clair. Interesting to read, but I remember things quite differently!
Writer Ron Jacobs -- who was also there -- remembers the the events starting with a massive arrest of a civilly disobedient demonstration -- close to 400 arrests at guerrilla theater events and sit-ins. I wasn't at the original arrests (and neither was Jacobs), but I'm pretty sure that's not how it happened.
Every day during Convention Week an anarchist group gave a guided tour of the financial district that went something like this, repeated over and over:
"This is Building A, Corporation B has offices here, they build Weapon System C and give D amount of money to the Republican Party and E amount of money to the Democratic Party."
I went on the tour the day before the mass arrests. Other than a few "tourists" banging on windows, that was all there was to it -- a purely informational walk. Well, that's not how the police saw it. As the few dozen of us walked around, we had serious accompaniment. First, the foot cops. Then, a while later, the motorcycle cops joined us. Then, ominously, the horse cops. But nothing happened.
A day or 2 later, someone organized a free concert of punk bands in a parking lot near the convention. I don't remember most of the bands, but Millions of Dead Cops (or MDC, as they preferred to be called at that time) had the sweetest, friendliest demeanor of any band I have ever seen*, and the Dead Kennedys, who headlined, were magnificent. A bunch of other bands played, which I don't remember. What I do remember was being 21 years old and feeling too old to slam dance! (I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.)
And, I remember, between bands, a stentorian male leftist taking the microphone between bands and shouting. " THE SAN FRANCISCO POLICE HAS ILLEGALLY ARRESTED THE ANARCHIST TOUR OF THE FINANCIAL DISTRICT. AFTER THE DEAD KENNEDYS GET DONE PLAYING, WE'RE GOING TO MARCH DOWN TO THE HALL OF JUSTICE AND DEMAND THAT THEY BE SET FREE!"
That sounded like fun, so after the Dead Kennedys played my pals and I joined a few thousand people and sat in the street outside the Hall of Justice. The cops came and divided the group in two; my friends and I were among those that got arrested. We were sitting, and cops came and handcuffed us and took us into buses one by one. I was nervous! While we were waiting, to lighten the mood, I started chanting, "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my," and when my cop came to take me away, I sang to him, "It had to be you / It had to be you." He didn't laugh.
They let everyone go in the middle of the night who wanted to be let go, but my friend and I had no place to go and I was catching a cold and didn't want to sleep in the park, so we spent the night in a jail cell with a bunch of other guys from the latter mass arrest. The first mass arrest had busted 89 people, I think, and the 2nd one brought in 250 or so more.
Only one man from the first arrest was in our cell, a vacationing high school teacher from New York who hadn't even been part of the anarchist tour but just happened to be standing next to them when the arrests happened. "They would have let us all go by now if you ass-holes hadn't come and demanded that they let us go," he said to us. Bitterly. They let us all go in the morning.
I got back to Michigan a week or so later, and I remember being utterly flabbergasted that nobody had heard about 330-some people being arrested in peaceful protests in one day in San Francisco. "Slicker and much more effective than Pravda," I thought to myself, "simply not to report the news you don't want reported."* *
* What made MDC so sweet: at one point, a skinny mohawked fan grabbed the mic from the lead singer so he could sing the song. The singer, like the coolest big brother in the world (not like Orwell's) put one arm around the kid and acted out the song with his free hand while he mouthed the words off-mic -- he was so happy. Later in the set, an African American man got on stage and started improvising a blues. The band fell in behind him and the lead singer got a bunch of fans onstage and they all danced around in a circle as this complete stranger stole their show -- except you can't steal something that someone lets you have.
* * A couple years after the WTO protests of 1999 I met one of the King County Labor Council honchos who helped organize it. He estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people on the big day. The Labor Council had hired an aerial photographer to document that massiveness of the gathering, but the Federal Aviation Administration had banned all flights above Seattle on the day. Visual documentation would only be fragmentary and piecemeal.
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