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The post 9/11 Tijuana border station is a bit more orderly and vigilent but it still remains the world's slipperiest crossing with millions pinballing back and forth between first and third worlds each year at the rate of 35,000 a day (more on Fridays.).
The lines trying to get into upper California snaked out the back door, inching inevitably towards the dread Migra checkpoint. There are more x-ray machines now and people murmur fretfully to each other in Spanish as they wait on the 'cola' - the crossing over always seemed to be much more of a festive occasion before homeland security became the motif. A small knot fisted up inside my gut as I approached the U.S. Border Patrol window.
"U.S. citizen" I boasted just as in the old days, without producing a shred of evidence to back up my claim.
"I believe you" yawned the agent and waved me on through into Bushwalandia.
My appearance on the Mexico-U.S. border obeyed a necessary evasion of possible prosecution under the U.S.A. Patriots Act. I had just returned from three weeks as a Human Shield in Baghdad, a war crime according to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a war criminal himself. My return route flew me through Amman, Istanbul, London, and Mexico City, a circuitous sojourn that had me in terminal jet lag and running on empty.
At home in the old quarter of Mexico City, I had found a few minutes for cafe con leche with the companeros around the counter at the La Blanca, all of whom had been tracking our star-crossed adventures as Human Shields in Iraq through my dispatches to the left daily, La Jornada. Lalo Miranda, my compadre and barber, trimmed my disheveled beard. He had it all figured. Saddam, who had just booted us out of Iraq, was like the PRI, the party the U.S. had kept in power for seven decades in Mexico in order to safeguard Washington's longtime interests here.
The goal line for my cross-continental travels was a Saturday afternoon anti-war rally in the San Francisco Civic Center. Ever since five organizers of the Human Shield Action, including this poor sinner, were ushered out of Iraq March 7th, I had set my eye on the prize of hooking up the sisters and brothers in Baghdad by the Bay (as moldy old Herb Caen used to slug it) with the Iraqi people and international volunteers we had left behind. Now I was speaking to a sea of homies that some calculate as 50,000 strong and the words roared out of my throat as if my body was just a messenger.
"I bring you greetings and solidarity from the workers and 30 Human Shields on site at the Daura Refinery in West Baghdad! Greetings and solidarity from the dozen Shields on site at the Taje Food Storage and 20 more at the Baghdad South power plant! Greetings from another score at Aldurah Power and ten more down the road at the Water Treatment plant, not to mention the 16 on the April 7th Water Treatment facilities, all U.N.-certified civilian sites bombed by the first Bush! Over a hundred Shields in Baghdad await his son's bombs! The blood will be on his hands!"
The dark facade of the San Francisco Federal Building a block away loomed over the jam-packed Civic Center like a malignant monolith. 39 years ago, I was dragged off those premises in chains and driven south to serve a two year sentence for refusing to report for induction in the U.S. Army, the first 'hell no, we won't go' to the coming genocide in Vietnam from the Bay Area to be packed off to jail. I arrived at Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary, San Pedro California, on August 3rd, 1964.
On August 4th, Lyndon Johnson, then the president, would lie to the American people that two North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked a U.S. battleship in the Gulf of Tonkin, a pretext for bombing the mainland, and for ramming the Gulf of Tonkin resolution up Congress's butt-hole - the resolution would invest Johnson and his successor Richard Nixon with the god-given mandate to incinerate 3,000,000 Vietnamese over the next decade. In the spirit of such pathological spinelessness, Congress long ago bestowed these same instruments of the genocide of the Iraqi people upon George W. Bush.
When I went to jail that long-ago summer, there was no one in the streets to say no to war. This time around, millions have marched even before the bombs began to drop.
On the march through the Fillmore this past luminous March 15th, I stood at the foot of Oak Street hill and watched our numbers swell above, visceral evidence of how strong we are becoming, like one big shoulder.
All over the planet, that shoulder has been gathering tone and muscle for months. What we measure here as the most significant anti-war thrust since the 1960s, is dwarfed by the exponential growth of European numbers, more than 3,000,000 on the streets of Spain alone this past February 15th. 2% of the Spanish people support the Yanqui war yet that nation's Franco-friendly, peewee poodle prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, has reveled in becoming Bush's most ardent acolyte of Iraqi annihilation.
In their astonishing arrogance, Aznar, Bush, and Tony Blair turn a deaf ear to the stentorian clamor of the voices of the world's people. Gathered on an atoll in the eastern Atlantic to escape the peace mobs in the streets, this unholy troika formulated ultimatums that would justify re-conquest of their once-upon-a-time empires.
Bush's ultimatum was shockingly cowboy. He speaks of his 'hold card, an old Texas expression' just like he was playing five card stud in the town saloon, and orders Saddam and his sons to be out of Dodge before sundown as if the contemplated extermination of the Iraqi people were a fucking remake of "High Noon." Why the Bushites would consider cowboy schtick as a communication strategy to damage control the shit storm of world hatred that is about to break over the U.S. ship of state, is a poignant indication of the impossible corner into which the president and his henchmen have painted this country.
I audited the Bush ultimatum during a vigil at the Israeli consulate to commemorate the life of Rachel Corrie, the 23 year-old Evergreen college activist murdered by Israeli army bulldozers while trying to stop a home demolition in Rafah camp, Gaza. The bulldozer, which deliberately rolled over Rachel twice, was paid for by U.S. tax dollars.
While the fraudulently-elected U.S. president bushwhacked the world with his gunslinger palaver, a few hundred disheartened souls hovered around the doorway of the consulate and sought unsuccessfully to keep their candles flickering in the gathering dusk.
Rachel Corrie's face hung from the fence at the 24th Street BART station for two days after that, whipped by the sharp spring wind and accompanied by two bunches of yellowing flowers. Rachel was the best of them, the young and the old and the not-so-old who have come to put their bodies between the barbarian invaders and the people to whom the land belongs - 'peace activists' they are called in Palestine, 'human shields' in Baghdad.
Here are some of their names. Their fates are not yet clear:
Faith Fippinger heard about the Human Shields in a copy shop in north India while on a spiritual trek that had taken her to Tibet. In Baghdad, she smuggled medical supplies to Christian hospitals during the day. At night, she sleeps under Bush's bombs at the Daura oil refinery.Eric Levy, 75, and Karl Dallas, a 72 year-old folksinger, installed under the stacks at Daura and at the Aldurah power plant, respectively. Not surprisingly, it is the grandfathers who understand most keenly what mortality is all about.
Angel O., a slim, tough Norwegian and failed boxer who grew up in power plants all over Scandinavia and has lived for weeks at the Baghdad South electricity distribution unit. Baghdad South was bombed in '91 with nine reported casualties. Now Angel's life hangs by a thread as a George Bush, obsessed by both petroleum products and winning his father's approbation, lobs 3,000 missiles into the heart of Baghdad.
On the night the U.S. president unleashed his his long ballyhooed 'shock and awe' show, Antoinette McCormick, a gray-haired Scottish socialist, mounted the roof of the Taje food storage site and cursed Bush's bullying. "Bastards!" she shouted in her fine angry burr to the exploding heavens.
The movement will change radically in the dark days up ahead. Some will fall away, demoralized because we have not stopped Bush from launching his demonic pyrotechnics, but the commitment of others will deepen and take flight. Now we must fill the streets of the planet and bring down presidents who do not heed the voices of the people. We must take creative, emphatic mass action, so costly to those who wage war that they will calculate an early truce.
The sandstorms are swirling out in the blighted desert and the heat will fry the brains of the invaders, the oil fires will blaze and the toxins rise and resistance will spread from block to block in the cities. The body bags will soon be returning home. In between, you will not hear a lot about the destruction your tax dollars have brought the Iraqi people. The news will be all 'our boys', an invading army with 500 reporters "embedded" amongst the troops to spread the Big Lie and wave a flag that will forever be stained with the blood of the innocents. With Baghdad bereft of reporters on the ground, word of the inevitable and heroic resistance of the Iraqi people will never be written - at least by the living. I shall never know what has happened to my companeros at the refinery.
We cannot allow ourselves to be overwhelmed and demoralized by Bushwa's bombs away. We must keep lighting those candles up on Dolores Park hill no matter how strong the wind whistles (although next time a little less 'America, the Beautiful' would be more appropriate.) We have to keep building the marches and lying down in the street with the likes of Father Looie, the Dominican brother who kept jumping up and down at the Emergency meeting at St. Boniface's the other night, to declare "I'm on fire! I'm on fire!"
On the morning after the Bush death bombs began to rain down upon Baghdad (March 20th), thousands of demonstrators hit the streets of San Francisco, determined to shut this gleaming city down. All day, we threw our bodies into downtown intersections and in front of freeway off-ramps, snarling traffic and impeding commerce. We too were Human Shields in Baghdad.
Hundreds of us descended on the Bechtel Corporation which has billion buck contracts to reconstruct Iraq once Bush's bombers have deconstructed it. Father Looie was one of those arrested at the front door as he performed a Latin Mass. My instant affinity group took the backdoors, our arms locked to stop Bechtel from doing business as usual. By 10 AM, management, frustrated by the blockade, called the million-dollar-a-minute work day off. I tell Father Looie that I am on fire too. I burn with shame at what the country on my passport has just done. I am on fire with rage and mourning for my comrades under Bush's bombs in Baghdad. And with pride too, at the good work we have done. So far.
© 2003, GENERATOR 21.
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