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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Seattle, Revisited |
Current rating: 0 |
by Paul Kotheimer
Email: herringb (nospam) prairienet.org (unverified!)
Phone: 217-344-8820
Address: http://urbana.indymedia.org |
20 Feb 2001
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Observations on America, Seattle, and our mission from your homeward-bound songster/journalist, with big love to all back home in Urbana! |
In at least one of the communities I participate in, when one receives a new insight or question to ponder, it\'s common to think of it as an \"assignment.\" Pille, my Vancouver host, showed me a poem of hers just before I left for the Greyhound station on my way to Seattle, then Chicago, then home to Urbana, Illinois; and I\'ve taken it as sort of an assignment. The gist of the poem is this: Think about community as an OUTCOME, rather than as a PRE-REQUISITE.
It\'s this thought which I\'ve been turning and turning over in my mind as I make my way home from my visit to Canada.
THE POLICE AT THE PORT OF ENTRY SAY...
At the Canadian/U.S. border, southbound, there\'s a grey compound where Customs & Immigration batch-process bus travellers. The U.S. customs police dress in black fatigues, high combat boots, bulletproof vests. While the Canadian crew just a kilometer north look like, say, a friendly Coast Guard in their loose-fitting yellow slickers, the Stateside guys (and yes, they\'re all guys) look like the SWAT Team, like the riot squad.
Short, sharp orders echo through the processing room: Luggage in two lines in the center of the area. Passengers against either wall. All of a sudden, it feels like, we\'re prisoners of war.
And, in a way, we are: What with so much marijuana and heroin finding a clandestine way down the West Coast, in from the Pacific by way of Vancouver Bay, the Vancouver-Seattle crossing is a serious flashpoint in Uncle Sam\'s never-ending Drug War.
The Customs Patrol captain walks a big, black labrador--yes, they have DOGS--around the floor for a sniff at our baggage. Every other bag or so, the captain cues the dog with the the command, \"Find it! Find it!\" None of the travellers, no matter how minimal their English skills, needs to be told what \"it\" is the dogs are scenting for.
No announcement is made to reassure us passengers that this is just routine or to explain any motivation for the crackdown tactics at this checkpoint. That would have put us at ease--which, of course, is exactly why it\'s not done.
Aside from the captain\'s commands, no one says a single word, in fact, while the searchdog is at work, except for a fuzzy-faced college kid in line ahead of me, who leans back and whisper-sings a quote from Pink Floyd\'s \"Money.\" He sings the line that goes, \"Keep your hands off of MY stash.\"
The patrol guards also do NOT inform us that one of the bags in the lineup (a dirty-looking Gucci purse) is the \"doggie-treat bag,\" which the patrol dog is trained to use in order to indicate that she is finished sniffing for contraband and is ready for a snack break. So, when the handsome black lab singles out the Gucci purse with loud and agitated barking, and the Captain of the Dogs abruptly tosses the handbag ten yards across the holding area into a pen surrounded by chain-link fence, a good number of passengers are visibly shocked.
In fact, one fellow passenger has to reassure a certain tired-looking Albanian business traveller that, no, it wasn\'t heroin in the handbag--it was dog food--and no, none of our fellow travellers is being arrested for smuggling.
What more accurate way, I thought, to send a clear message to foreigners and U.S. citizens alike?: \"We are in charge here. These are our methods. Welcome to the U.S. of A. You\'re under arrest.\" I haven\'t seen a more telling performance since...well, since N30 in Seattle.
THE TORTOISE AND THE HURRICANE
The last time I was at the Seattle Greyhound station in the middle of the night, there were storm troopers in full riot gear walking two by two beneath the Christmas lights in front of the Westin Hotel and opaque-windowed buses for prisoner transport rolling down Pine Street.
So it feels a little bit creepy to be back.
I get a dose of American youth hostel hopitality from the folks at the Green Tortoise on Second and Pine. Staffers there make it obvious that they\'re in no mood to play nursemaid to any gutter-hippie parasites, and they treat every guest with what appears to be an egalitarianism of disdain.
For a late night snack, I hit the Hurricane cafe on Seventh and Blanchard. After midnight clientele there include a mix of hipsters and street folks, maybe a sex worker or two. The street people who wander in to the coffee counter seem to be in acute need of someone who will listen to them. I bum cigarettes and lend an ear as much as possible.
Sallow looking twenty-ish waitress has a one-year-old at home. She\'s so tired she doesn\'t realize that she\'s snubbing a mixed race couple at the end of the counter so badly that they read it as racism.
Next, up walks some poor fellow, drunk as fuck. Can\'t read the menu, says he\'s dyslexic. Doesn\'t know what he wants to eat. He\'s bragging to me about how he\'s got five thousand bucks in cash on him, in his wallet, in his shoes. He flashes his billfold, and I tell him to please put it away. Hide it! Take care of yourself!
REVISITING THE ZONE
The next morning, I take myself on a walk through what I will always think of as the Zone: Sixth between Pike and Pine, where the shop windows were busted out by the Black Bloc, where clouds of teargas rolled over the sit-in participants, where protesters climbed the lightpoles and turned over the newspaper machines. Where a state of emergency and a suspension of the First Amendment were declared. What I see, of course, is nothing like what I remember from N30.
In November of 1999, I got no sense how upscale this area was. It wants to be the Miracle Mile in Chicago or some part of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Walking past the Nordstrom\'s and Planet Hollywood and Old Navy and NikeTown, I\'m struck by something I had completely forgotten: that, during the N30 direct actions, we not only disrupted the routine of the WTO ministerial summit here in Seattle, but we really gummed up the Christmas shopping season. I mean, REALLY gummed it up. Coming in from out of town during the heat of it, it was difficult to get that sense of things.
I pick up a homelessness support network newspaper from a grizzly, old-west looking character stationed at Pine and Sixth. We chat about the good weather. He explains that he\'s not allowed to take a step toward me to shake hands because he can\'t be selling papers on private property. I ask him \"What around here isn\'t private property?\"
He points out the particular groove in the sidewalk which he\'s not supposed to cross.
I make my way by bus to Capitol Hill to pass the afternoon with my guitar at an outdoor table at Cafe Messiah, just around the corner from what was Direct Action Network headquarters, until my host gets back in from Spokane. But would you believe the nerve of those bastards!: Smack-dab between two local coffeeshops on Olive between Broadway and Denny, they\'ve put up a Starbucks. I make it a point to spit on their sidewalk on my way from the Number 14 down the hill to Olive and Denny.
My Seattle host, Dawn, finds me at the Messiah, and we do a typical city afternoon-and-evening: A big lunch on Broadway, with occasional banter and cigarette bumming with the displaced folks on the street. A pitcher of pale ale at the Hopvine, where a semi-homeless guy who loves to sing and quote Shakespeare and quiz you on movie trivia, latches onto us for a drink and a chat. Monday night pool with some computer-programmer friends at The Garage.
Driving home from that to try and get some sleep before my 6 AM flight out of SeaTac, I ask Dawn to take me for a quick look at the King County Jail, the site of so many nights of sleep-outs in solidarity with the Seattle 600. I did one overnight there, after the release of one friend of ours and waiting for the release of a second, the night of December 5th through the morning of December 6th, 1999.
Dawn drops me off at the jail and says she\'ll circle the block and come back around.
The place where it all happened seems so very small: There\'s the spot where impromptu consensus meetings took place to decide tactics for jail support without further arrests. Here\'s where the whole group erected a makeshift tent city in less than an hour when a cold rain started pissing down. There\'s where they came with the emergency blankets from the shelter. There\'s where the DAN lawyers made announcements for the crowd to repeat so that everyone could hear. There\'s the sidewalk where the free breakfast was served for the hundreds of us that had camped out that night. And there\'s that cloudy green-grey plexiglass door, through which came prisoner after prisoner after prisoner.
And there are prisoners there tonight, I remind myself, still eating the meager bologna sandwiches, still subject to routine violence and intimidation--all those things that the N30 crew got a little taste of that week.
FLYING HOME
I don\'t know exactly what this has to do with my self-assignment based on Pille\'s poem. I don\'t want to sum it up in a neat package. I don\'t want this piece to be about nostaligia for the actions I participated in in such a small way in 1999.
Maybe what I\'m seeing so far is that community, once we begin to think about it as a desirable outcome, is also about process. We see the details of an antithetical outcome all around us: alienation, addiction, poverty, a war on civilians and civil liberties. And we try to invent a way of acting that can reverse those negative outcomes, in spite of the pervasive power that keeps them in place. I see my Seattle mini-tour as a reminder of the big action and a contextualization of its aftermath. And that\'s why I bring it to you here on the website of our local IMC--seeing that the global Indy Media Center movement is a palpable aftermath of the anti-WTO actions of N30, 1999.
We are forming community right here on the indymedia.org sites, using these technologies and these tools, working toward that desirable outcome. I hope that\'s what I\'m supposed to be learning... |
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