Blast From Yer Past: Washington DC 09.27.02

Are you ready for some football?

 
September 27, 2002: the first day of "Peoples' Strike" weekend, three days of mobilizations against the policies of the IMF and World Bank, and George W. Bush's war in Afghanistan. It was 7am when I showed up at Franklin Square in downtown DC -- way too early for a guy my age to be up, even back then. A loose confederation of anarchists and affinity groups was gathering at the Square, planning to stage an unpermitted "wildcat" march downtown to the IMF.

As it turned out, the march got as far as Vermont Avenue and L Streets NW before being trapped by police and scooped up. At least 400 protesters and bystanders were arrested en masse that day downtown, at Franklin Square and Pershing Park. I somehow managed to avoid being nabbed by noticing the police line forming up early at Vermont and K, seizing a moment of opportunity and slipping through before more police arrived there. It was all over by about 8am -- and I still had a whole fun-filled day ahead.

   
Good morning, boys'n'girls! Hanging out and drumming at Franklin Square while waiting for folks to show up for the ill-fated wildcat march.

   
Whose streets? The march heads out of Franklin Square, taking the street at 14th and K Streets NW. After turning north on Vermont Avenue, they encountered a police motorcycle blockade at L Street. Anyone who didn't notice the first cops appearing back at the other end of the block quickly enough would find themselves in a world o'trouble.

   
Are you ready for some football? While it probably seems dull to most of you, to me this is a memorable and iconic image -- the moment I realized the cop at my left was distracted by some action to his right (out of the frame), stepped away and left a huge gap for me to dash through. Up until this moment, I was worried that I was nabbed for sure -- and suddenly, daylight! He who hesitates is lost, as the old poet wrote.

   
All she wrote... Some moments later, more cops arrived, the line firmed up, and people trying to sneak through the gaps were being collared and shoved back into the crowd.

 
It's a gas! Yep, that's tear gas drifting through the foreground, there. By this time, there was nothing left for the people trapped on that block to do but wait around for the buses to arrive to haul them to the lockup.

Obama's Syrian "Red Line"

Now, I didn’t actually watch Obama’s Syria speech last Tuesday — the very sound of his soulless, pompous, officious delivery gives me a Hot Dog Burp Of Disgust — but from all accounts, the whole thing basically boiled down to “Aww, FUUUUUUUUU–”

What really gives me a giggle, though, is all the talk from Obummer and his mob about a “red line”. After all, how long has that whole brouhaha been going on over there — two years or so? Then, after sitting around and pretty much ignoring it, President Sparkle Pony gets a bug up his ass and decides we — “we” being the US State and corporate elites — need to “do something”? Christ, that’s rich.

And whose idea was it to start slinging around the expression “red line”, anyway? That’s got to be one of the stupidest expressions to come from inside the Beltway since “reset button”. You know the Washington insiders and punditocracy are really scraping the bottom of the barrel when they start picking up on a phrase coined by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in that third-grade show’n'tell he put on at the UN last year.

For me, that’s a sure sign that the elites have completely jumped the shark.

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The U.S. "Antiwar Left" Mobilizes!

I caught this item on Buzzfeed last week, about the near-total silence from the antiwar “movement” about President Sparkle Pony’s desire to intervene militarily in Syria. Almost all the quotes from organizers and activists are full of weak rationalizing about fundraising and contorted tap-dancing around the fact that most of the people who filled the streets in the early ’00s were just pissed-off Democrats who promptly put away their signs and banners and went home when the ‘08 Presidential freak circus kicked off, leaving those of us who really cared about ending militarism — no matter which wing of the Party was doing the bombing, murdering and torturing — high and dry.

The most gobsmacking quote in the whole article — the quote which inspired this cartoon — comes from our old pal, Code Pink founder Medea “Media” Benjamin:

“Those of us still working on this have been mobilizing. The online protests are proliferating. There’s petitions to Obama, there’s calls for Congress to get involved — so many groups from Code Pink to Win Without War to Just Foreign Policy — all have put out calls saying no war in Syria.”

Dear god, what a great, steamy slab of thumbsucking. This makes me want to just bang my head on the desk. Medea Benjamin thinks we’re going to have an effect on policy by “protesting” on the Internet, sending petitions (which will be promptly ignored) to President Sparkle Pony, and beseeching a bunch of greedy-assed sociopathic politicians to act against their own interests. You’d think Medea Benjamin, of all people, would understand that real movements are built — and real change brought about — by real, live, honest-to-god, in-person “street heat”, not by sitting on one’s pasty ass in front of a computer, signing useless Internet petitions, bitching on Farcebook, and remaining essentially invisible to the public and the media.

Christ, I need a drink… or perhaps several drinks. Actually, on second thought — screw the drinks, just give me some friggin’ heroin.

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