Stalking the Streets




So the amazing spectacle of Thursday the 27th with its mass protests around San Francisco gave way to Friday, with its extremely overpaid on overtime and overexcited police force complete with rubber bullets and riot shields. I was a sideline witness to the 'Franklin Street Sweep' but didn't learn about what happened to my friends in the 'Sweep' until Monday. I was on my merry way to a queer affinity group gathering in the Castro, and since I was late I didn't linger to find out what the hell was going on with the police influx around the intersection of Hayes and Franklin. Turns out everyone was rounded up, even people on the sidewalk trying to comply with police directives, and arrested for failing to disperse. They were held for six hours and released with a warning to stay off the streets for 48 hours, or risk jail time if they again fail to disperse (i.e. stand on the sidewalk near a police officer).



Here is an account of the 'Franklin Street Sweep' by a SlackerStalker correspondent in the field:

The group we were in was walking peacefully on Franklin Street when the cops surrounded us on all sides. They did this by forming a phallanx and running at us from behind so that we were trapped in the interior of a block where we couldn't leave. There were cops on all sides of us then. We were then squeezed in from all sides by at least 200 cops in a circle around us, not unlike how fish are caught by pulling the nets in from all sides at once.



The cops charged at us with their billy clubs braced in both arms while screaming at us to "MOVE! Get out of the way!". One cop shoved an older disabled man with a cane down so hard that he was bleeding from his head and knee. He needed to be taken to the hospital for treatment by ambulance. Linda saw another cop repeatedly shove a man on a bike, even though the man had complied immediately with his orders. Two very over-the-top reactions that just the two of us witnessed. Who knows how many other acts of police misconduct were observed by other people?



I also watched as press people were denied access to the area that we had been corralled into (a city block). One cop stood directly in front of a camera crew so that they couldn't film the scene. I also noticed that the highway patrol helicopters cricling above kept news helicopters from entering the airspace above our block. It was a news blackout. Freedoms of the press are also going out the window as well, it seems...

Meanwhile, late to the gathering in the Castro, I heard that the protestors who had been starting to try to block Van Ness and Market (apparently an anarchist affinity group that ran away from the 'Sweep' just in time) had been dispersed with rubber bullets as soon as they occupied the intersection. So, when our little fringe protest hit an intersection, we were careful to stay to the side of the road or on the sidewalk, and cross with the lights. We were trailed by an entourage of about eight cop cars and caught glimpses of a few city buses full of cops in riot gear circling the neighborhood. They tried to anticipate our route and we just randomly chose a direction at every intersection.



I marched and chanted and sung for four hours over at least as many miles. The police effectively blocked every intersection we encountered and almost every street we flanked, so nobody had to leave the sidewalk and get arrested-- the cops did our work for us! As we neared downtown the eight squad cars were joined by about a dozen motorcycles, and still later about fifteen cops in riot gear jogging alongside us. By the end of the night they looked neither aggro nor scared, just bored and exhausted.



Meantime our mood was both conscientious and bouyant. It was such a relief to do something besides watch the news. My friends and I walked with a woman with an enormous white shaggy sweet boydog named August who was wearing a pink sign "Puppies for Peace." Nearby was a mom with a gaggle of six or seven young (10 or 11 year old) kids, who we had picked up as we passed Mission High School. They led us in the Spanish language version of "The People United Will Never Be Defeated." One of the kids looked JUST like Harry Potter, so we nicknamed their crew the Harry Potter For Peace contingent. You get the picture-- we were pretty upbeat. The whole thing was very therapeutic-- especially having the citybus drivers and ambulance crews honking and waving the peace sign gesture at us as we passed them. My favorite chant was what I think is a modified soccer/football singing chant: "no war, no war, o-way owayowayowaaaaay." That was what we were singing as we hit the high point of the night, turning from Market onto Castro and picking up a whole new crew of marchers and getting a great welcome from the sidewalk passersby.



Now it is time for...

The SlackerStalker Guide to Late Night Urban Unpermitted Protest Marches

A supplement to The Slacker Stalker's Rules for Marching in a Mob Against Something (click and scroll down past the list of sign slogans).


1. Remember that at night everything is gray-scale and reduced to shapes and movement. Your pretty signage on sticks is wasted. Costumes, sandwichboard signs (for up-close reading), and flags are good. Flags give shape, movement, and drama to the movement of people through the street at night. It almost doesn't matter what is on the flag, if anything. If you are stuck marching with a sign on a stick, look for the police searchlights and TV cameras with their nuclear-powered gazillion-watt floodlights: they will pick up your message. ESPECIALLY if it is a TV helicopter-- turn your sign facing the sky and I guarantee they will try to focus in on you. Soundmakers are good too-- a little boombox with a CD of Mumia's statements against war is a nice choice.



2. BYO lighting. Flashlights, yes. Torches, no.



3. BYO entourage. Dogs and kids, yes, but keep an eye on them even if they aren't yours.



4. Get more mileage out of yourself with a little personal care and vocal chord maintenance. Chapstick, gum, bottled water, and the multipurpose cloth bandana or a handful of tissues, yes. Excess baggage, or even ANY baggage-- no.



5. Communicating with non-marchers is a must. Flashing the "peace" sign at passing motorists-- the minimum. Light-hearted taunting of people in restaurants (i.e. the particularly enjoyable friendly chanting of "Americans Out of Baghdad" to the customers at the Bagdad Cafe on Market Street)-- good. Beckoning seductively and chanting "join us"-- better. Cheering and blowing kisses to the people being arrested or standing in detention areas-- an absolute must. If you have propoganda promoting your cause then handing it out to passers-by is usually more effective at night. People on the streets are more likely to take propoganda handed to them by strangers at night than in broad daylight. Go figure.



6. So you have a bullhorn. Point that thing as high as you can away from eardrums that may be at your usual screaming height. Thank you.



7. So you don't want to get arrested. Either way, carry some form of ID, and a good pen. If it looks like you're falling into a police trap, find someone (try the guy with the bullhorn) with the number for your local Legal Aid firm and write it on your arm. Hook arms with the people near you and go limp as the police try to arrest you. This is the only way to try to guarantee they won't charge you with resisting arrest. Standing up too quickly can be construed by a nervous cop as a pretext for a good billyclubbing. And remember: smile in your mugshots. You don't need to look guilty. You never know when you'll be running for public office!



8. So you want to get arrested. Don't have enough activist cred doing the legal thing? Then follow the advice in #7 but, since you are planning ahead to get arrested, wear wristwarmers. 80's fashion rebound to the rescue! The plastic handcuffs will be loosened by any wrist apparatus you can manage to keep on. Then, when you have gotten a little leeway, retrieve the toenail clippers you stashed in your front pocket and snip yourself and your friends free.



9. Have sex. I heard this story from a credible source and an eyewitness to the San Francisco protests of the 1991 Gulf War One. A pier the cops were using as temporary holding for protestors was full of young gay men. They all had their fancy plastic wrist ties on, but that didn't stop them. They decided to start trying to have sex. It was turning into a full-fledged orgy (I guess the wrist ties were working for them). The cops were so weirded out they decided to let them go.



10. Eat fire. It is really a bummer to know how to eat fire but mostly end up protesting things in the daylight, when fire-eating is a lost cause. Here you are sticking hot stuff in your mouth and all you get for it is a fume high. So, when you know you'll be taking to the streets after dark, take:

• a lighter
  
  
• a small coffee can (with lid) with at least a cup of rubbing alcohol or lighter fluid
  
  
• a metal coat hanger
  
  
• and a 10" strip of old cotton t-shirt fabric
  
  

     Tie the fabric into a tight little swab on the end of the straightened hanger wire, soak it in the fluid, light it, STAND FACING DOWNWIND, tip your head as far back as possible, hold the wire swab-down perpendicular (i.e. at a 90 degree angle) to your face, open wide, dip it in, lightly close your lips on it (not all the way) and exhale through your mouth. Voila. Impresses the ladies. It is especially impressive if you wear some kind of message on your body (may I suggest painting slogans on naked torsos? Is that too Lesbian Avengerish of me?).

Wishing For Ignorance


An interview with a journalist on the radio just now-- not KPFA (I had to take a break, they were listing the military affinities of my city's mayor Jerry Brown- letting the military conduct urban combat training in Oakland- it was too painful to remember)-- on NPR-- the journalist was talking about the reality of the civilian casualties, and the furious reactions of soldiers' families who have lost their children to Bush's war. He said that one US pilot pointed out that in Gulf War One not all pilots had been wearing night vision goggles. Now they are all wearing them. He's not sure it is better for them to wear them, because it allows them to see what they are doing perfectly.



I was a teenage firebrand in Northern New York on a science field trip to Fort Drum (the division that invaded Afghanistan first, and the largest land training grounds on the East Coast, and when I lived there also the base with the highest DWI, suicide, and domestic abuse rates). They handed me the new fangled night vision goggles, a toy we could play with for a few minutes as they got our MRE's together for our picnic lunch. It was spring of 1990, about seven months before we attacked Iraq the first time. The whole world turned eerie green. I imagined stealing the goggles... I didn't. Who is holding them, who is watching the streets of Baghdad through such goggles, who is looking into the other end of them, I don't want to know. I just don't want to know.

An Interesting Arrest Tally



If you want to catch up on how many protestors shutting down San Francisco have been arrested so far, and what intersections have just been shut down (they are still shutting them down), check out the ongoing updated coverage at the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center.



Tonight (home sick) I saw the coolest and most inspiring local TV coverage I've ever seen. Not the TV commentators, scared and looking terribly confused about why people would be grieving and angry and acting out. The people, people, people in the streets.

A Fascinating Raed



An Iraqi engineer's blog. A friend's name (or pseudonym) is Raed, and the title of the blog right now is "Where is Raed?" Our blogger, his friend Raed, and his family are still in Baghdad. It's Friday there now but he has no Friday blog yet. He has a great quote up on one of his side banners right now:

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.


-- Samuel P. Huntington

Hippie Crap Saves the World aka The Earth is Crammed with Heaven



Today some of my witch friends have been quoting the wisdom our local Bay Area astro-guru Rob Brezsny, the only biological man I've ever seen effectively (and stunningly so) lead a Pagan ritual prayer entirely by himself. He's also a Cancer like me, so his insight on the stars is tailor-made for me. Click on his name above to read Painful Blessings -- his very eloquent statement on the state of the world and the nearness of war and the necessity of inner fire. He is determined to recenter us on desire.



Also, scroll down, look on the right, and you'll find a letter from a Brezsny fan about another Brezsny fan-- Rachel Corrie, the woman who died this past Sunday trying to save the home of a Palestinian doctor. The tank driver claimed he didn't see her. She died with a bull horn in hand screaming Desist!



Rachel's Brezsny horoscope for this week:

"It's a perfect moment to overcome your fear of revealing your raw beauty to the world..."

There is a lot of raw beauty left to be revealed to the Israeli government. And ours.

A Pause From Your Busy Schedule Stressing About the War to Appreciate Terry Jones of Monty Python



Some worthwhile anti-war fluff.



Links to an Observer article about Terry's justification for blowing up his block, and a new Observer article by Terry about poor Mr. Blair not getting any of the lucrative development contracts for rebuilding Iraq:



I'm losing patience with my neighbours, Mr Bush





Poor Tony Blair Wakes Up

On Top of Being Alarmed About the Impending War...


...and the resemblance of the pro-war demonstrators to facist nationalist/ Nazi types marching past me at the bus stop this morning, waving a torch and a flag and chanting "we support our troops" ...


I have just now run across THIS depressing dinosaur bone on the internet. Actually it's more like a broken clay tablet in cuneiform-- with the story of a once-rich queer cafe culture that has all but disappeared in the SF Bay Area.



Seven out of twelve are gone, as far as I know. Here are some of the casualties:



Mad Magda's -- a personal favorite with a nice blend of Russian, Jewish, Pagan and queer culture. I miss most the hammer and sickle inside the Star of David painted on the floor where you ordered, and the little magic garden where they had acoustic music, did aura readings and served tea under the only birch tree I've ever seen in San Francisco. Mismanaged by the diva / performer who owned it, sold, reopened as some other cafe. RIP.



The Patio Cafe -- closed for remodeling for like ten years now. I miss the adorable gay boy waiters in their super tight short shorts, their eggs Florentine (one of my few sins when I was still vegan), and the outdoor heaters with the wonderful cascading ferns and ivy in the back.



Josie's Cabaret and Juice Joint -- the comedy venue where I first saw Marga Gomez, after she left SF and before she moved to NY. She had a lot to say about LA lezzies, convincing me to not rush to go south of Salinas. I still have never been. Josie's was also the headquarters for the Tom Ammiano write-in campaign for mayor, and as a volunteer there I was reminded that Josie's was not only vegetarian in terms of the (delicious) food they served, but volunteers were not allowed to bring in non-vegetarian food to eat on the premises. A place friendly to dogs, and friendly to dykes, and sorely missed. Now it is a Zao noodle house. I loved the bash they threw for the Survivor's Guide to Sex book release party, where Annie Sprinkle (pre-house-boat fire, wearing one of her awesome costumes) led us all in a guided meditation to bring the entire 200 person audience to orgasm, Tina D'Elia wore one of her slit all the way up the thigh tight red dresses and read a dripping, hot, wet poem or two, and in finale the Hail Marys played their sparkling all-dyke pop rock for a small remaining audience consisting mostly of the band's lovers and ex-lovers.



Red Dora's Bearded Lady Cafe -- the Bearded Clam, the women's performance art Ground Zero, the home of the smallest bathroom in North America, the place where the china was chipped, the counter help was surly, and the gossip was torrid. Since it changed hands and then sunk into unprofitability (posting hours of business that seemed to relate not at all to when it was actually open) and closed, I have ended up in close relationship with the people who founded and kept alive that steamy Bearded scene. I actually performed at the last show at the Bearded Lady. But I was too depressed to go help dismantle the decor. I miss the horse model/ cowboy toy collection, strange installation art shows, the climbing, flowering vine-filled back quarter, and the 5 zillion different kinds of fliers on the walls, doors, and piled inside the front window. I remember seeing a flier there for someone trying to start a queer youth pirate radio station-- "help start this station or you'll shrivel up and die listening to KFOG!" (Now, I like KFOG for their morning show, but boy there's only so much Chris Isaak and Bruce Hornsby one person can take.) I missed the golden age of the Bearded Lady when my now-dead girlfriend Kris was paying the cafe's rent, cleaning and cooking, and trying to keep the doors open by hosting Friday night performance art shows. She did something like 20 shows there and managed to bring in talent like Dorothy Allison, Kathy Acker, Jewel Gomez, Michelle Tea (pre-Sister-Spit, pre-book{s}), and I think she even had Michael Franti. Or maybe she just tried to get him. She was impressed by his chainsaw act with The Disposable Heroes of HipHopracy when they played the Women's Building for some white lezbo event. So you get the idea. Crazy shit went down there, like someone opening 52 cans of tunafish, dumping it on the (concrete and spongelike-to-fish-oil) floor and stomping around in it, and another performance artist reading a poem while getting fisted. I saw the mysterious cowgirl duo Downriver there, and as part of the DirtyBird young queer punk festival I saw radical movie shorts there (one short that featured knife and blood play managed to nearly empty the place), and lastly, before the final final show, I saw my lover Kris read her novellas there, being recorded for posterity. Nothing has taken the place of the Bearded Lady, and probably nothing ever will.



Radio Valencia had a lot of bad luck. Right after being remodeled a truck drove right through their plate glass window and put them back at square one. When they finally again reopened, I became a regular for their African peanut soup, and of course their great music selection, which you could follow along with playlists at each table. They had the class, kitchy-chic decor and good food that Hamburger Mary's wanted. They had sonorous acoustic jazz ensembles almost every night, it seemed, and yet they were not too hip to have good service. I miss their good soup the most. Now it's either a Chinese or Thai food place with one of the ugliest signs on all of Valencia.



The Brick Hut and Edible Complex are both gone, also. I heard a lot about the former, and not much in comparison about the latter. I was freshly landed in the area when the Brick Hut started having the telltale symptoms of desperate benefit concerts. I am not sure I had even figured out how to use BART to cross the bay when it finally closed. I still hear women lamenting the loss of the Brick Hut- apparently it had really good concerts. I didn't hear anything about why it really closed, but I remember that landlord greed was blamed. I don't believe anything has taken over that building yet. In fact, looking on line a little, I think that it is scheduled to be destroyed in order to build some kind of housing there.



I found another sad gay list of mostly closed venues here-- it lists my beloved and lamented Alfred Schilling and Valentine's.



Alfred Schilling had the best mochas in all of San Francisco, and possibly the gayest waiter I've ever met. They were a little pricey, and had this weird dour Egyptian decor, but their bouncy gay waiter- who I think was French- gave the best waitservice in that whole neck of town, actually earnestly concerned that you had a really good meal, and a really good day. Besides the mocha and the waiter, I miss their whole-building mural of an African/ Egyptian pharoah topless queen seeming to soar like a torpedo out of the wall aimed at the Castro, her eyes rolling up to look at the rainbow flag on top of the building.



Valentine's was my little special occasion place back when I gave a shit about my diet, with its totally vegan but also gourmet menu. The last time I went there was after the Gay Pride Forced March 2000, with someone whose e-mail user name and hence my mental nickname for her is "Veganliz." We were windblown and sunburned, and after being topless half the day we were a little chilled. But still we sat on the sidewalk in the sun to have our coffee with soymilk (served in a porcelain serving pitcher) and organic green salads. I have no idea why it closed, but I especially miss their warm biscuit side dish.



Other casualties of mismanagement and/or the Dot Com Boom/Bust since I moved here include the amazing Old Wives Tales bookstore, Womencrafts West, the Whiptail Lizard Lounge, The Lab (that one went quietly-- unless it is technically still open but just not hosting shows), the CoCo Club, the Chat House, Castlebar, and - although not explicitly gay, an important punk venue - the rowdy smoky velvet-painting-clad Chameleon. Now the building where The Lab was (is?) and where queer arts venues Theatre Rhino and Luna Sea are still chugging along is in danger of being sold. Queer cafe, art, and performance culture has sure taken a beating since I moved here in 1995, not to mention Pagan culture (I think there's only one or two Pagan supply stores left in the city- when I moved here there were six or more).



You can see my measly attempt at queer culture preservation-- San Francisco in Exile -- a project where I work as one of the producers to stage queer performances and audio record them for posterity, an idea spawned by my dead girlfriend (pre-death) and passed on to me.




Tomorrow-- hopefully a morning free of nationalists with torches and flags!

One Month Before My Trip to Yugoslavia the Prime Minister of Serbia Has Been Killed

...high time to return to the land of make-believe!



Last year, soon after I started this blog, I got sucked into rereading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe somehow... I vaguely remember picking it up out of a free box or off of the top of a garbage bin or something. Naturally, it took over my life, and I ended up having a face-off between Aslan and Dumbledore -- check out that entry to see who won. Recently I discovered that I apparently wrote but failed to follow through and post the second half of my insanity, when I threw Voldemort and the White Witch Jadis into the ring. So here we go.



One word aside about these two villains and their creators: I was feeling a little bitter about how The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobewas so brazenly New Testament on my adult re-read, and when I started researching the etymology of the White Witch's name, I was DEEPLY disturbed to find out that Lewis' arch-villain was named after an indigenous Arabian tribe, one of the ancestor tribes of the Hebrews. Rowling's villain's etymology is much less problematic for me... everybody hates the French (her racialization of the house elves and bank goblins are something else, yuk). But anyway. Back to our ringside seats, Aslan and Dumbledore throwing popcorn from up in the cheap seats somewhere...





Voldemort

(French for Flight or Theft of Death)

vs.

Jadis the Jewess I mean White Witch

(name of an indigenous tribe in Arabia)



Supervillain Minimum Requirements Compared:


Mask V. - / J. - neither have a cool mask

Armor V. - / J. - again, both fall short

Cape V. + / J. ++ both have, but J. ensares Edmund with her sexy fur -- rrrrow

Has own country V. - / J. +

Refers to self in third person V. - / J. -

Has a degree V. + / J. -



Subtally: V. 1 / J. 3: Jadis has Voldemort doubled over on the ropes with her magnificent cape around his wimpy throat. Down kitty!



Supervillain Added Bonus Personality & Physical Enhancements Compared:



Adaptability & agility

V. + / J. - he's got that changing bodies and form thing going on

Delusions of grandeur & creates world in own image

V. + / J. ++ both have, but J. makes her world all winter, all the time

Creativity

V. + / J. - I've got to hand it to V., Jadis is just too rigid about laws and rules and tradition

Lack of fallibility

V. + / J. - they are both fallible, but Jadis makes some really bad judgement calls- I would trust Voldemort to do my taxes, but not Jadis

Knowledge of the magical loopholes

V. + / J. - Jadis is just a leeetle more out of the loop, so to say

Woundedness & despair

V. + / J. - J. is just too concerned about day to day details & comes off as a busybody next to Voldemort's tragic glowering raised-in-an-orphanage depression

Genetic giftedness for the part

V. - / J. ++ the daughter of the ancient Hebrew Dark Goddess Lillith! Cha-ching!

Apparent celibacy, probable gayness

V. + / J. + high marks all around here

Panache & overall style

V. - / J. + V. smells bad, J. has cool castle



And staggering to the middle of the ring with a fist raised high...

With a tally of V. 8 / J. 9

... it's Jadis with the cool castle, Goddess lineage and big sexy cape! She's taking a victory lap! The crowd goes wild!



That was a tough match, and I have to say my favorite Jadis sure had a run for her money. She has GOT to go to Hogwarts and learn some of those "Deep Magic" loopholes that Voldepants knows.



Tomorrow... hopefully no assassinations!

Stalking The Patron Saint of Chaos



Lovecraft-- the name almost seems made up, bringing together a warm cuddly word in cognitive dissonance with a word related to unseemly doings, crafty doings, maybe even piratical and witchy doings. I loved Lovecraft after getting some of his short story books from my scholastic book club when I was in fifth grade. I bought and read the Lovecraft-inspired Necronomicon. I date my real involvement with the world of witchcraft from the time a local witchy person sat me down, pointed to that book, and showed me two points on a piece of paper: "here is how I do it:" drawing a straight line between the points, and "here is how that book does it:" drawing a hugely contorted squiggly wandering line between the two points. In other words, at that point I came to understand Lovecraft as art and not a real prescription for energy work, and thereby came to appreciate it as the wonderful baroque excessiveness that it is. I loved it even more for its persevering chaotic weirdness in the face of the bland, albeit more effective, simplicty of REAL energy work.



So I still get a warm place in the coldness of my Northern New York heart when I discover some new way to revisit my haunted-by-beasts-with-no-name childhood. Voila, the Lovecraft Tarot. I discovered it as a newly available choice at my preferred free online tarot reading site, Facade.Com, where they introduce this deck thusly:

It is the deck of choice for explorers of the macabre, and for posing questions that should never be asked.

Now tell me, what ISN'T to like about that?



However, if you search for "Lovecraft Tarot" using the amazing Lovecraftian search engine (just introduced to me by my friend who I will pseudonymously call Al-Al) Cthuugle.Com, you will only get an EldritchDark.Com website with a Selection of Poems by Clark Ashton Smith In Castilian. Disappointing, if the only languages you know are English, German, Russian, Latin, Italian, and Croatian. I thought I had learned all the languages with grotesque, darkly fantastic and vaguely unsettling lyric poetry, but here they throw Castilian in my face.



I won't bore you my dear readers with the fantastic tale I was told about Howard Phillips Lovecraft by a childhood friend whose father worked on an expedition in South America to find the freak's body, except to say that Lovecraft may yet be alive. His body was never recovered. (I prefer not to believe the credible and popular tale of him dying in bed as a shut-in.) I will end with one of my favorite ever Lovecraft quotes which I never have enough opportunity to use:

That is not dead which may eternal lie, and within strange eaons even Death may die.

"In case of emergency, the parking brake may be used as an adult novelty item."



Let's read the government's lips... and do a little ventriloquism.


Stressed out by government announcements about biological weapons attacks? Read these captions to scare-tactic illustrations from the US government's ready.gov site.



The parking brake one gets the prize for Warning Sign Most Likely To Be Taken Seriously in San Francisco.



Meanwhile, I was waiting in my chiropractor's office this morning and heaved her enormous Vanity Fair onto my lap to bide the time. Flipping through the scary skinny people pages (looking for the article on the Miss World Pageant) I found a gritty article detailing how the US government is using time-honored scare tactics (i.e. a la Stalin) to preempt a strong anti-war movement. I was astonished that such a commercial magazine had tackled such a charged subject -- how US Americans are "sleep-walking" into war. It was too bad the chiropractor was running on time-- I didn't get to read very much. But I did catch the bit about how Sean Penn is playing the part of the "useful idiot" (a Leninism) by the Bush regime, since his three day fact-finding trip to Baghdad. All they have to do is make his life miserable, and his cause laughable, and in the future celebrities will leave the anti-war protesting to the relatively invisible college students in order to keep their day jobs. No messy blacklist. The author (whose name I don't remember) also talks about how the government has neatly tied the hands of academics to keep them from speaking out against the war effort.



I thought it was pretty brave to do such an expose in the current climate. Well, looking for Vanity Fair online, I find that they are not based in the US. Thus their bravery in truth-telling.



It brings to mind that adage "The first casualty of war is truth." I guess the first English source of that quote dates back to the brilliant Dr. Samuel Johnson:


Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

(The Idler, 1758)




What for a truth-lover to do? Read your news about world-wide pro-war media bias at the UK-based Media Workers Against the War website.

...ah Bernadette...



One of my links in today's blog made the portal go wonky and uneditable so here is the end of today's blog at the beginning:

Bernadette Devlin has survived assassination attempts and unspeakable police abuse in the UK and US, and still she travels and rallies attention on human rights abuses. Her January 1992 speech in that cold Vassar chapel, filled with Ulster expats and maybe three other students, was part of the first speaking tour she had been allowed to do in the US in decades, or maybe ever. That day she instilled in me the lesson that armed rebellion is sometimes the only option when your oppressors know no other language.


So, if you all notice a big dearth in Slacker Stalking in the next few weeks, you'll know that there is a cat somewhere that needs feeding and a SlackerStalker somewhere that needs bail bonds.


Or, if I get out safely as I plan, tell my friends to send me a telegram in Slovenia when the police state has fallen.

Time to Renew My Passport, and Good Timing Too...



Because I need a break in this abusive relationship with my country. I just keep trying to love it and it just keeps getting scarier. You've all heard about the guy arrested for wearing a peace t-shirt at Crossgates Mall in Albany by now, right? Well I just read that a man was arrested in New Mexico a month ago for saying that George W. Bush is out of control in a goddamn chatroom. This same article tells me that Bernadette Devlin is no longer welcome here in the US.


I helped with publicity for the group that brought Bernadette Devlin to speak at my college in January 1992. I skipped the annual Pro-Choice Roe V. Wade demonstration in Washington just to stay home and hear her speak. That year it was a pretty historical humungous dykey feminist demo I passed up, too. But I was appalled that more students didn't stay to hear Bernadette. After hearing her speech I was ready to move to North Ireland and join the struggle for independence. To me, she's right up there with Marilyn Waring. They both responded to conservative repression by running for a government seat and winning- Marilyn as a teenager, and Bernadette as a 21 year old. But Bernadette edges out Marilyn in the category of sheer strength by - as a young wife and mother - winning a seat as an MP and then becoming a political prisoner - while still retaining her seat in British Parliament.



Here is a short bio of Bernadette from the History Channel:

Bernadette Devlin was one of the most electrifying figures in the movement for Irish unification in the late 20th century. Elected to the British Parliament from Northern Ireland in 1969, she was at age 21 the youngest-ever British MP. She was a stirring speaker, winning respect in Westminster despite her age and controversial politics. In August 1969, she was arrested during the ''Battle of the Bogside,'' a riot in Londonderry that marked the beginning of 30 years of armed resistance to the British occupation of Northern Ireland. Convicted of inciting a riot in 1970, she spent four months in prison while still an MP. After "Bloody Sunday" in 1972, in which 13 Catholic demonstrators in Londonderry were killed by British soldiers, she assaulted Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, in Parliament, calling him a "murdering hypocrite." In 1973, she took her husband's last name, becoming Bernadette McAliskey. She left Parliament the following year but continued to be politically active in Northern Ireland. In 1981, she and her husband were shot by members of a Protestant paramilitary group at their farmhouse near Belfast. Bernadette was struck by nine bullets but eventually recovered and returned to her activism. An unabashed Irish Republican, she said of the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) cease-fire, "The war is over and the good guys lost."