Watching City Hall #473

Watching Krissy run for Kongress XV

(9-1-06)

“It’s always the same people.”

(Ross Mirkarimi explains his absence)

Super Green, Barry Hermanson opened a deep Mission (4500 block) staging area for lefty candidates and propositions two days ago.    Hell of a facility.     The energy of the place stops you in your tracks.    Those of you who remember Gonzo’s digs at Walter Wong’s in 2002 should visit Barry’s ‘Progressive Organizing Center’.     Both are like walking into a piece of living sculpture.     Like, huge  …  ‘mood rings’ that change colors depending upon the vibes you bring with you.

Call Barry’s place, the ‘POC’ and Matt’s the ‘MOC’ (Matt’s Organizing Center) and check it out.     I was the only person who actually lived at MOC and it was the premier political experience of my life.     Trust me, this place is better.    It’s hard to put a finger on why but let me try.

POC is small by comparison but, while MOC was dominated by a variety of loaned art that ran the spectrum from a troubling 3’x5’ acrylic of two monkeys (driver and passenger) in a sedan submerged up to bottom window level in a stream  …  watching warily (but without fear – acceptance of their fate?)  …  monkeys  …  one with hands at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock on the steering wheel  …

The monkeys are watching a spotted leopard swim toward them.   The leopard is only a few feet away but there is no panic in the monkeys.   They’ve accepted their fate.   Done all they can do and are only somewhat sadly studying the beast approaching them.    …   Matt’s place at Walter’s was huge and you had to walk a good 50 yards to come to my second favorite piece of art.    A heavy piece of ‘chain mail’ armor vest made entirely of spoons.     It was interactive and I must have watched a thousand people of the 10,000 or more who strolled through MOC in the month before the election (thanks to Paul Hayward for positioning and hanging all of the art there)  …  probably a thousand people put the ‘armor’ on and laughed and had fun.    But, it wasn’t funny.    It was a statement upon the relationship of hunger to war that it’s taken me two years to understand.

Barry’s art is different (thanks to Vicki Leidner who heads Barry’s campaign staff – he’s running against the hyper-funded, Fiona Ma for the State’s 8th Assembly District seat and is kind of like the monkey in the car, but with an attitude – Vicki decorated the place)  …  thing is, I’m saying that Barry’s choice of  art, is more to the point and it fits the time.     Try to picture and feel it.

The POC occupies the bottom two stories of a storefront that is around 50’ wide and, perhaps, 150 feet deep.    The windows are full of posters for candidates and initiatives, but (colorful as they may be) that’s not it.

The interior is wide open on the first floor which is an atrium overlooked by a second story that has a rail all around for visitors to sit and look down upon the tables and desks occupied by staff and volunteers.

It’s not the atrium thing.     It’s the 3 feet or so of vertical wall that run in a long ‘U’ shape to the ceiling atop the first floor space.    This vertical wall is adorned with quilt panels that are around 2’x3’ each (a couple of dozen of them)  …  panels that hold the names and embroidered remembrances of   American soldiers killed in the Iraqi wall  (properly derivative of the AIDS quilt).     Two dozen of the 3,000 dead young Americans who have died for the Texas oil oligarchy.

It might take you a bit to get caught up in the Iraqi War Memorial Quilt, but once you do, you can’t stop reading:  “He was always laughing and playing with his kids.”  …

Enough of that.    It’s moving and it’s moving me now (or, is it the Chandon champagne which is half gone and tastes pretty good?)  …  The panels set a mood and the mood makes you look at the various  campaign stations in a different light and with a different resolve.

Everyone of these candidates are anti-war.    Everyone of these propositions are about weakening the ruling war machine.

Keefer campaign on point

Keefer doesn’t just want to impeach Bush.    She wants to put him and Cheney and Rumsfield on trial for war crimes.     She wants to legislate away the president’s ability to pardon himself, his minions or past presidents.     She wants to take away Israel’s book of blank checks.
And, you know what?    The rest of the world agrees with her.

Other candidates present and represented

Miguel Bustos is Deputy District Director of Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s local office.     Lee needs an ally in Kongress and it sure as hell isn’t Pelosi.   Chris Daly was there with son, Jack (who thank God, looks like momma, Sarah Low).    Medea Benjamin was there with a contingent from Code Pink (one of whom was wearing a pair of skin-tight leotards with an anti-war slogan stenciled across her delightfully full bottom – definitely had half of the room thinking about making love instead of war).     The Sierra Club’s John Rizzo and Howard Strassner were there.     Whoever dresses Strassner is blind but Rizzo was immaculate in a loosely fitting tan suit with pleated trousers over his lean frame.    Kim Knox managed to evade every question I put to her.   Jim Dorenkott made me promise to withdraw my printed hearsay that he thought Rizzo was the only local candidate worth supporting.    He shook Keefer’s hand but was unable to look her in the eye.    Mesha Mongue  of the Idriss-Stelly Institute was there and shadowed by the purple-pompadoured, Kaye Griffith who is most certainly an agent provocateur from da man.

Erica McDonald and John Marc Chardonier arrived together and stopped to talk to Rick Knee.     I yapped with John Radongno (who referred to himself as ‘Mr. Vicki Leidner’ – she is pretty powerful) about the missing Green heavies  (Gonzalez, Mirkarimi, Jane Kim, Chretien, Camejo – essentially, the ISO people – hopefully, they’ll close ranks after Labor Day).

Parting thoughts

The Earth needs you.    This is no time to get conservative and talk about building the Green party at the local school board level.    Like it or not, we are in the ‘Post Gonzalez’ era and we need to unite around the anti-war candidates in the field.    We are bigger than any one candidate.    Of course we should all support our ‘Three Kims for the School Board’.    Naturally we have to back Bruce Wolf and John Rizzo for the Community College Board.    I’ll be there when Barry Hermanson debates Fiona Ma (if Ma has the guts to face a Green face-to-face)    But, the snubbed Greens at Hermanson’s opening have to get behind the ISO candidates just as the Camejo/Gonzalez faction must cease their petty posturing and attend and support the likes of Krissy Keefer and Medea Benjamin.    This all-male ISO front is an insult to all the Green party stands for.

The Gonzalez campaign of 2002 is over.    It is a fond memory, but it is over.    We built him like you’d build a house or a super bowl team
and we can build another.    We must build another such army.    Hell, it could be even better.

Gonzo couldn’t ride into a rally with his arms wrapped around a 200 pound butch lesbian in a 15 member cavalcade of dykes on motorbikes.     This time he can.    Will he?

We need to all join together.    It’s the only way we can win.    If it were only Mirkarimi or Gonzalez boycotting the local Green party, it wouldn’t be so bad.      But, they take their posses with them and that really hurts.    Matt and Ross might shake your hand and smile at you in public but their true feelings are revealed by their staffs and outriders who are vicious and dysfunctional.

That’s the way I see it.     Politics is war.   The first Tuesday in November is Armageddon and the following Wednesday brings the vultures.     More so now than ever.    The ice caps are melting, the world is smoldering with hate for America and every day, Israel and international Zionism (funded by AIPAC) leads us like a Judas goat, closer to the slaughterhouse of nuclear war.    Time to put our personal animosities (and, they are great) aside now, strip naked and put on a common uniform.