I awoke at 4:30am. Twain was snoring in the back of the van. I was exhausted but uncramped. I silently growled at Twain for fifteen minutes or so, until light began to gather. Off at the edge of the parking lot, there was a chickenwire fence between us and the desert. I wondered if Americans were the only people who build fences around their desert, or if this was common behavior. On the fence were three ravens. I like ravens. Actually, I could care less about ravens, I just like the fact that a group of ravens is called an unkindness. Orthographers come up with the coolest expressions.
I pulled on my black cowboy boots, still new and unmarked. I put on my black cowboy hat. Somewhere in the back of my head, it occurred to me that it would be inappropriate to wear any of those three objects in coordination with sackcloth. Mostly, I was focused on finding coffee.
I wandered into the activities building and began a search. Ruby was sleeping in the front room, along with two other people I didn’t know. I attempted silence, but it’s hard for a 6’2” caffeine addict in cowboy boots to be silent before 5am, and they stirred. I wandered up and down the halls trying to find anything resembling coffee or the makings thereof. Nothing, but I eventually relocated the soda machine with 12 oz. cans of that syrupy substitute, Mountain Dew. I had no quarters. There was a bill changer. It wasn’t working. Ruby was now walking down the hall. I apologized for waking her and asked if she had any quarters; she did. I fed the soda machine. It was empty of all soda.
I decided to take a piss and a shower. I remembered something about showers. I walked into the bathroom past a middle-aged woman applying eyeliner. That didn’t concern me, until I realized there were no urinals. I muttered apologies and backed out. I found the correct bathroom, showered, and pulled my clothes back on over my wet body. I ran into an 81-year-old Mexicana who nicknamed me Juanito. I wondered, briefly, where all the protesting New Mexicans were, then realized that they were all at home still, sipping their favorite coffees out of their favorite mugs.
I went back out to the van and started to switch t-shirts, but stopped. On Friday, I had worn my City Lights Books souvenir t-shirt. I had picked out one of my less offensive UnlikelyStories.org t-shirts for Saturday, but now, as I looked at the t-shirt, I realized that I only considered it inoffensive because it didn’t specifically mention sex, and that I really couldn’t wear "W.W.ID" to a Pax Christi protest. I left on yesterday’s shirt, and walked in tight little circles around the parking lot for a bit. A young man came out of the church building. He was wearing, over a sort of red neo-punk jumpsuit, sackcloth that he had spraypainted green. I looked at him. As far as I know, I wore no expression, but he became acutely embarrassed anyway. He went back inside, and when I saw him at the actual protest, he was wearing regular, unpainted sackcloth over his red neo-punk jumpsuit.
I woke Twain up. We went to the closest convenience store, and purchased two large coffees and a pack of Pall Malls. They charged us $9. We returned to the church parking lot, and coughed up phlegm for a few minutes before Herbie and Marvin joined us, signifying it was time to drive to Los Alamos.
I didn't notice much of the drive, except that it was steep and winding. There are only two roads leading in and out of Los Alamos, both of them well-paved state highways, two lanes at their narrowest points. My more alert comrades commented on the mixed message of a nearly inaccessible town with two neatly-paved, clearly-marked roads. No one commented on the fire hazard sign at the entrance to the town. It was a metal sign, a sort of wheel with a sort of needle, that anyone either authorized or psychotic could freely turn. The wheel had color-coded sections that signified the level of fire danger on that particular day. The colors matched the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's terrorist-threat colors. It was rather like a wheel of fortune, one that signifies victory by creating a nuclear winter and ending all sentient life on earth. I don't know if anyone else saw it. Perhaps they saw it and were frozen-bowel silent as I was.
The protestors were gathering at Ashley Pond Park, which is a lovely little spread more-or-less in the center of the city of Los Alamos. It radiates from a charming fountain and large man-made pond, complete with ducks, geese, and the souls of a nation. There’s a vast grassy courtyard, which is bordered by various community centers and buildings for public lectures, meetings, and what not. The wealthy of Los Alamos, one imagines, must spend a great deal more time courting the rest of the community than the wealthy throughout the rest of America. One imagines other weekends at the Park, dominated by pro-nuclear speeches, job fairs, and exhortations to trust in the University of California1 and New Mexico Taxation and Revenue. The park was rapidly filling up with protestors. Most of them were probably from Santa Fe or Albuquerque, by which I mean they were too tanned to be from Colorado and showed no evidence of being hard laborers. My guess was that about two-thirds of them were Catholics; the rest seemed like Santa Fe hipsters of varying degrees of hip.
Marvin assured us we had time, so Twain and I ran across the street for more coffees before the protest. When we returned, protestors were gathering around Friar John Dear, an antiwar activist much loved throughout Pax Christi for his work, books, and speeches. He pointed us towards a massive pile of gunny sacks with head holes, which would serve as sackcloth. Next to them were boxes filled with little paper lunch bags, which we were told contained ashes. I acquired the necessary materials and returned to a spot where I could see Fr. Dear. Fr. Dear said some encouraging words about the work we were doing. His speech meant nothing to me, but the Catholics seemed to be digging him, so great. He then told us that we would walk down Trinity Drive (seriously) to the entrance to the Los Alamos Labs. He said that the Lab entrances had a bridge in front of them, and that we'd be arrested if we crossed the bridge, and we weren't going to do that. He said that we would instead line both sidewalks, and that at precisely 9am, we would all sit down in our sackcloth and ashes and spend half an hour in silent prayer, asking God for penance for our sins and the sins of our culture, specifically the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the continuing nuclear work being done in Los Alamos. He said that at 9:30, we would stand up and walk back, and that we should therefore all be back at the park by 10am, when the Los Alamos Study Group would begin their presentations.
So, at 8:30am in Los Alamos, Catholics to the left of me, lesbians to the right, and stuck in the middle with Twain, I walked on up the road.
Since we were walking at the speed of the slowest among us, I don't really know how far we traveled, but Twain and I went almost to the bridge, and it took us roughly the predicted half-hour. Shortly into our journey, Herbie joined us. I didn't see Marvin. Herbie was carrying neither sackcloth nor ashes, so I inquired. He said he wasn't really into the symbolism of penance, just the protest. There was a small group of Zen Buddhists in the crowd. I would later receive confirmation that they weren't really into the symbolism of silent prayer. Herbie asked me what I thought of the symbols; I told him they seemed like valid street theatre to me, whyever the Catholics did them. He nodded. I looked at the glances I was receiving. I told Herbie that I was glad that people thought I was a cop, since it meant they were thinking about security, at least on some level. He chuckled nervously and sped up, leaving us behind.
Twain and I picked a spot across the street from the Los Alamos Medical Center, a small hospital just outside the labs. I scattered about half of my lunch bag filled with ashes on the ground. I sat down, removed my boots, socks, and shirt (my hat was still in the van) and placed them neatly nearby. I pulled the gunny sack over my torso, then poured the rest of the ashes over my head. At this point I looked up, and noticed that no one else within my range of vision had removed their shirts. They were all serving penance by wearing sackcloth over their clothes.
At the bridge itself were four private security guards, standing in a line looking tough. How they thought tough expressions would help if 300 people rushed them was beyond me, but there was no reason for us to do so. The Los Alamos Police Department was also there, and it was clear that there was a longstanding, efficient relationship between them and the Los Alamos Study Group. The whole thing was executed with the precision a protestor finds only in regularly scheduled protests (such as this annual one), and in towns with a degree of notoriety and at least some sympathy for the protestors. In short, the cops clearly felt that we had the right to protest and weren't going to sweat any small breaches of the criminal code, provided we didn't riot or otherwise make asses of ourselves. Having been raised in Atlanta, I wondered if these guys felt about us the same way that many Georgian police departments feel about the Klan.
There was one cop assigned to our stretch of our side of the road, perhaps twenty-five protestors. There were protestor photographers, still and video, walking up and down the street. I know we also made it onto television networks, but I did not see anyone who looked like a television cameraperson. Every time a cameraperson approached us, I lowered my head. The people on either side of me kept their eyes closed throughout, and we were often snapped. This didn't surprise me. I'm taller than most New Mexicans and accustomed to looking miserable, the person on my right had my clothing between us and no identifiable gender, and Twain deliberately looks like a vagrant at almost all times. I reckon we were pretty photogenic, after a fashion.
When we weren't being, or about to be, photographed, I looked up; as I say, I considered this valid street theatre, though the penance bit bored me. Occasionally, the cop working our stretch would bark at a cameraman to stay out of the street. At other points, the cop would sidle up to a camerawoman, smile winningly, and ask her to please step out of the street, then flirt to the degree she allowed.
There was a man driving a Harley up and down the street. He had a windshield attached, and a sheet wrapped around it, with words painted on the sheet. It took me a little while, but I finally made out that the words said "REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR."
I have to admit that surprised me, not least because that guy didn't remember Pearl Harbor any more than I did; he might remember seeing the Tet Offensive on American television. Because it surprised me, I thought about it for far too long, trying to convince myself that the sign meant something other than "because of Pearl Harbor, we have a right and obligation to kill as many brown-skinned subhumans as we can," but of course I could not. The statement "remember Pearl Harbor" in response to Hiroshima Day is a complete non-sequitor. No meaning other than hatred can be derived.
There are four types of neighbors who object to peace protests. The first is the obscene gesturer or shouter, to which I typically flash a peace sign and encourage others to do the same. The second type is the sane objector. The sane objector might or might not want a friendly debate, but is not rude if the peace protestors behave themselves. Many experienced protestors consider friendly debate to be the most important part of a protest. The third type is the "you don't know shit because you've never been in the military" objector. That might or might not be true, but there's little I can do in response to it but wander off. If there are peacenik veterans around, they usually identify themselves at this point, and I wander further away. The fourth type of neighbor is the "all you hippies should burn in hell" debater (and, yes, they really do say hippie, almost every time). This type of person does not flash a bird and drive off; this type of person actually stands around and tries to convince one that one is a hippie and will deservedly burn in hell. Twain dresses like a vagrant; I do not. I have nothing against hippies, but I have nothing against hippies in the same way I have nothing against the Japanese. Anyone who mistakes me for either is a total fucking idiot. Almost all organized counterprotests are staffed entirely by the fourth type of neighbor, doubtless because these imbeciles are even less employable than peace protestors.
Of course, we weren't protesting a war, we were protesting a method of waging war so terrifying that even its strongest advocates trip over themselves explaining how they hope their weapons will never again be used; indeed, they generally claim that the entire point of having these weapons is to avoid using them. And not until the very end of the day did I see counterprotestors, and I encountered no one in the other three classifications of neighbors. So, I reflected as time was called and I began to pick up, I guess it shouldn't surprise me that I encountered a different type of objector. So caught in reflection was I that it wasn't until standing that I saw the turkey vultures circling the Los Alamos Medical Center.
We returned to the park; I went for my hat and more coffee. The Los Alamos Study Group was setting up a podium at one end of the park. Various groups were setting up at the outskirts of the park, advertising their various liberal and/or leftist organizations. The LASG and Pax Christi had tables filled with brochures, of course. HaMakom, a Jewish peace group, was there. As I approached their table, the woman behind it said, with a rather protective tone, "hi, we're HaMakom, a Santa Fe Jewish peace group." No one expects a Jew in a cowboy hat. There was a table for the Center for Action and Contemplation, a ecumenical Christian peace group. I asked the woman at behind that table about her organization, and she became very angry with me for not knowing. Evidently, no one expects a Jew in a cowboy hat. There was a table from Stop the War Machine, and a table with free copies of The Nuclear Resister, which is, to the best of my knowledge, the only national U.S. newspaper to my left, based around the concept of resisting imperialism by refusing to pay taxes. I was given a bundle of the excellent Las Cruces leftist paper, Grassroots Press, to circulate around El Paso. The Santa Fe Upayas and the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice did their respective things.
An enormous American flag before a booth made me wonder if we had extremely well-organized counterprotestors, but it turned out to be the Santa Fe Chapter of Veterans for Peace, with a booth exquisitely decorated with the names and photos of the Americans killed in Bush's wars, staffed by a man who could crush the motorcyclist with his ass cheeks. He was like a bizarre mirror-universe version of the prissy CAC woman. He was raising awareness of The Skull Project, in which the Santa Fe Veterans for Peace work to create thousands of papier-mâché skulls to represent "the tragedy of lives truncated by war."
The last both I visited was charmingly and simply decorated. Twain was standing at it, listening to two arguing women. As I approached, one woman left; the other was staffing the booth.
"Hello," I said to the woman, perhaps more warmly than I remember, as Twain cheerfully told her:
"He's mine."
"Excuse me?" I blurted.
"Um, this is my friend Jonathan," Twain said to the woman.
"Happy birthday, Twain," I said.
The woman, who looked half-recovered from the perpetual dramatics she seemed to attract, told Twain that I hadn't heard her spiel.
"Oh," said Twain, and left.
The woman worked for Merging Left, a small group of graphic designers who made and distributed bumper stickers and billboards in Albuquerque. Their sole purpose was propaganda, although their stuff looked more liberal than leftist, but in any case it looked aesthetically better than anything else there. I took a bumper sticker, donated a dollar, and caught up with Twain.
"Hey, what was that woman arguing about at the Merging Left booth?"
"Did you see that billboard they were working on that said 'I thought we were supposed to be the good guys?'"
"Sure."
"The woman was telling the designer not to use the word 'good,' that good and evil were concepts of the enemy, words that people like Bush used to deceive and control the populace."
"Ah."
"What do you think?"
"Me?" I asked. "I mean, technically she might have a point, but I don't think it's really necessary to keep liberal billboards ideologically pure by Nietzschean standards. Did you see the advert for the billboard, saying that the billboard would soon be placed on I-40 East going to Louisiana?"
"Was that on the billboard itself?"
"No, just on their fundraiser material."
"That's good."
"Maybe there's a Louisiana Street. So what's up? Have you talked to Marvin? Did he still want to get back early?"
"I did talk to him. He said there was something going on with the post office, at two?"
"Oh, yeah, I saw an advert for that. Apparently, the mayor of Nagasaki mailed a letter to the Study Group for the mayor of Los Alamos, and they're going to mail it to the mayor of Los Alamos at two."
"It's Saturday. Won't the post office be closed?"
"I don't know. I guess not. The city government was certainly prepared for us."
"Do you want to leave right away?" he asked.
"Two sounds good. We'll grab some grub first, I guess, have a nice drive, what do you think?"
"Prices?"
"The ones at the convenience store were 'normal.' I suspect the Santa Fe bullshit doesn't reach up here."
By this point, the Study Group's festivities were in full swing. A couple of Zen Buddhists were walking around the pond, in that walking meditation thing they do, super-slowly, heads bowed. They were practiced and graceful, however strange their actions seemed in the context of Western society. People had surrounded the pond with giant sunflowers. An anti-war speaker was at the podium, and Twain wandered up to listen to him. I just kind of walked aimless circles around the park.
An SUV drove by. Someone leaned out the window and screamed "HIPPIES!" When he got no reaction, he screamed, "SATAN!" and flashed Satan's horns in the general direction of the park. I thought about flashing them back, but he was already retreating fast. I did roll my eyes, though. I always find it silly, not that people want to shock, but that they are typically so inept at this very easy task. Protestors and counterprotestors, these are amateurs at the art of controversy. Very few politicians know politics, and very few lovers know the art of war. Satan does not drive an SUV. Satan is a poet.
The concept of a "protest" is one that will never stop being discussed by anti-war activists. On the one hand, we're really good at it, the kinks in the American version having been worked out decades ago. On the other hand, they don't seem to do any good.
They do have one practical purpose. They attract new people to the movement. If one thousand people come to a protest for the first time, ten of them will begin to take deeper action to promote peace. Of those ten, one of them will last more than a month. In the art of getting Americans to volunteer for any sort of altruism, those are great odds. There were about 600 people in the park.
The LASG has the specific goals of stopping, or greatly scaling back, the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and forcing Los Alamos National Laboratory to spend more or all of its budget and manpower (and when we talk about manpower at the LANL, we don't mean janitors, ya know?) on safe disposal of our current weapons. While that seems further out of reach than the end of the Iraq war, it also has a very clear political methodology, ways to reach out to conservatives, and measurable setbacks and successes that the LASG can use to gain manpower, morale, and financial support. Anti-war groups will sometimes hold "teach-ins" rather than protests to gain new converts. The LASG holds "days of action," which are sort of combination protests, teach-ins, and parties. I have no idea if these days accomplish anything, though the LASG has a fairly long list of tangible political accomplishments, so I'm inclined to give their "days of action" the benefit of the doubt.
For me, these days of action are meaningless. First off, with few exceptions, I'm not going to learn anything new from the speakers. I'll pick up the pamphlets from the various groups, but at this point in my life, generally know what they'll say already, too. I heard the current speaker, as Twain listened, and he was rather good, but to what end? I do as much as I can, so a motivational speech was unnecessary. Supposedly, a motivational speech also helps volunteers feel better about themselves and their work. But guilt is my motivator, and I'd be better off, even "happier," without cheerleading, thanks.
It began to rain lightly. I saw Marvin dash to the van, pull out a hat, and dash back into the crowd.
The serious lectures, which I might have found educational, would be conducted immediately after we left. While I would have enjoyed them more than the motivational speakers, I would have preferred a book – twice the knowledge and none of that fellowship crap. Performance art, on the other hand, does fascinate me in ways a book cannot, and while there's not really enough of it in most motivational speeches to make them worth my while, I had reason to hope, as the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, Janice Mirikitani, was taking the stage.
She had stage presence, I'll grant you that, and a reading voice, though she wasn't really a performer. Her first poem was a narrative, told from her mother's viewpoint. Apparently, her mother, an American citizen, was called by Congress to testify on injustices perpetrated on her during her interment in a Japanese-American camp World War II. The piece was formatted as if speaking to Congress, though few would be so demonstrative before a government body. The piece had power behind it, until the first metaphor, which closed the poem, and was something you'd expect from a high school student's journal.
Ms. Mirikitani told a joke, complimented her husband, and read a second poem, which had several metaphors. It sucked. She then left the stage.
A tiny woman who survived the blast at Nagasaki approached the podium, with her translator.
I fled.
Note:
1The University of California, under contract by the U.S. Department of Energy, runs Los Alamos National Laboratory. Because of the huge security breaches in 2005, it is rumored that they will lose the contract at the end of this year.
