Going to be a short workweek, this. Thursday as you’ll recall I’m going under the knife or whatever oral surgeons wield, and I’ll probably take Friday off too. At least that’s what everyone who’s ever had their wisdoms out is telling me to do.
Tomorrow is the proper 1-year anniversary for Ear but it’s going to be a hell day, faculty meetings all afternoon and then class with that postponed presentation, and I really doubt I’ll have time for a proper observation. So happy early birthday to me. Or just to my creation. Whatever.
My actual birthday, my belly-button birthday as they call it in 12-step meetings, I’ll be spending much of on a plane between Newark and Austin. Just booked the flight today for my end-of-school east coast trip, all the usual stops: college friends in Warwick, brothers in NH and Cambridge. Plus Steph in Boston, and maybe an old college girlfriend too. The Belle wrote me a month ago saying she never heard back from me a year before and what the hell is up? Apparently email is unreliable between her and me so I’m drafting my first envelope-and-stamp letter in many many years just to facilitate us having some face time in May. Maybe.
Meanwhile. Tomorrow is one anniversary, Thursday is another. When I scheduled the extraction for 3/20 the date didn’t immediately ring any bells. Now with it so close I don’t see how it couldn’t have, March 20 2003 being the evening I spent on the Congress Ave. bridge getting pushed by fellow protestors, hustled along by police in riot gear, and occasionally splashed with pepper spray. That was one of the pivotal events for me in Austin, for better or for worse, and somehow it seems perfectly fitting that I’m going to observe its five-year mark by getting my teeth pulled.
And going under anesthesia, don’t forget. Equally fitting. We’ve all had to have some equivalent of anesthesia to get through the last five years.
I never published my account of that night on the bridge because things were moving too fast then. Actually never even finished it. I dug up the handwritten partial draft last week – back then I was still writing everything by hand and I’d say maybe that contributed to my not finishing it but I couldn’t help but notice that the story stopped just after the line of plexiglass shields started moving forward for the final time. I wasn’t scared at the moment it happened – I have my own natural, built-in numbing agents - but re-reading that yellow, thin-lined paper gave me the chills and I realize why I didn’t proceed farther. Just too difficult, too discouraging. Blocking the bridge: what a futile, self-indulgent gesture. Like that was going to make any difference to the Iraqis even then getting the shit bombed out of them in Basra.
I think most there felt that futility and it pissed off a lot of us off, which in turn pissed off the cops (and no doubt delighted a few of them). What happened, excerpted from that partial draft:
Thad grabbed me to be part of the handful that sprinted down to the Riverside Chevron and brought back as much water as we could carry to provision the would-be sit-in-ers. Walking back with a gallon in each hand it seemed absurd that the line of cops blocking the bridge at the Statesman entrance would let us back on but they passed us by with only a business-like instruction: “When you are moved off the bridge, move to the right. Tell everyone.” It was about then that the chanting began in earnest.
[Someone doing a scientific study of King Mob would get a lot of mileage out of observing the dominant chants taken up one after another by the crowd at a demonstration. In some ways it’s like Whisper Down The Lane in that it goes through several stages and the last version bears no resemblance to the first. At the beginning, say, when the civil disobedience has begun but before the cops move in and everybody’s verbally supporting (but still keeping their distance from) the CD-ers and feeling pretty good about the situation, the chant is “This is what democracy looks like!” Next, when the police push the crowd back and isolate the CD-ers and begin hauling them away, limp, one by one – using as much force as necessary to obtain a hold – it becomes “The whole world is watching!” And last, when every last resister is locked away in the paddy wagon (on this night, a Cap Metro bus) and the police line forms again and pushes forward again and the orderly retreat off the bridge – and off its sidewalk, where we’d been told we’d be allowed to stay – threatens to become a rout; when the pepper spray really starts flying and it seems like the batons just might too at any moment; then the chant becomes a simple and guttural, “Shame on you!”
And as a silent coda, afterwards there will be isolated people stopping on the withdrawal-path to chalk slogans of defiance, the most common of them Fuck The Police. Because, whatever the original reason for the demonstration and the civil disobedience, before long it comes to be about the police, about the authority they represent and resistance to it. Normal event-development for a protest/near-riot, sadly.]
... We watched the cops grow in number and made some jokes to combat the feeling of seriousness that was starting to grip the crowd. “Oh my, I’m not wearing clean underwear,” I said. “I’m not wearing any underwear,” Amy said. Laughed.
We were still feeling pretty good then.
We were warned once more, then all of a sudden the police line was fully formed and slowly moving forward, sidewalk and pavement. It didn't matter that all those doing civil disobedience were already in the wagon. The APD had decided they wanted everybody off after all.
I wasn’t pissed myself. People use that bridge to get from one place to another, people who pay the taxes that maintain it and might have no opinion about the war just started, and when you’re told to go you go. I went.I was at the back of the crowd, arm's length from the cops, and when one of them started pushing Rachel’s bike forcefully into the people ahead she turned to scream at him. I told her not to give a reason to bust her: “He’s trying to get you to do just that.” “I know!” she snapped. "But we’re moving as fast as we can and I’m pissed.”
A guy next to me wearing a press badge and carrying a video camera was yammering on and on about the police state, some of it directly to the cops behind us. I turned away, facing off the bridge so I could see where I was going, and a splash of liquid hit my neck and the side of my face. It smelled funny. If I hadn't turned when I did I would have caught it full in the face.People started yelling more loudly, pressing forward. I saw the guy with the press badge clawing at his eyes and stumbling, wailing that it hurt. He should have thought of that a minute earlier. I have no doubt that the spray that got not only him and me but a bunch of others was triggered by his yammering.
[What we saw wasn’t a police state. A police state is when they don’t give you two warnings first, when they just launch the teargas – or bullets – then wade right in with clubs and gun-butts. Why won’t we acknowledge how good we have it in the US?]
The cop line halted, and the crowd moved back; we were almost off the bridge proper now. One officer stood in front of the line, a small man with a bristly mustache and a tight-assed walk, pepper-sprayer in his hand. He glared at us in challenge. He wanted, his glare said, to douse the whole lot of us. He would have been scary if he hadn’t looked so comically absurd in his hatred of anything in his way.
The sight of that little bantam-cop strutting about back and forth in front of the line of riot gear will stay with me forever. I later found his name: James O’Leary (picture here). Somehow it helps to know his name, even if in 2006 he was found not guilty of using excessive force for using that pepper-spray. Those of us who were there know better.
Amy got off the bridge OK and, good feminist that she is, went into Hooters to use the bathroom. (She went back to protest again the next night and ended up - with underwear, I presume - in a cell.) Rachel
didn’t get sprayed or significantly bruised in the retreat, though I ended up yelling at her boyfriend because of
the nasty, personal shit I heard him taunting the cops with. Melissa
and I stuck together and walked back over the First Street bridge to
reclaim our bikes, left behind locked to the railing on Congress when
the cops started pushing. Near the bell-tower a KVUE crew-member sat
half out of the van, rinsing the spray from his eyes. "Stings, doesn't
it?" jibed a nearby cop. "It's not funny, Steve," said the KVUE guy.
On the now-deserted bridge we stopped to watch the T in the Hyatt sign burn; for some reason it had picked that of all nights to short-circuit its wiring. Some guys were on the roof 15 feet above, vainly aiming an underpowered fire extinguisher down at the flames.
I knew just how they felt.
(Short week, long entry. But I really doubt I’ll be writing anything Thursday and maybe Friday.)
Yeah, take Friday off. Even if you're feeling well, you can change that quickly by overdoing it, and especially by talking. My wisdom tooth recovery was very fast, but I still wanted to laze around and watch movies for a couple of days. Plus, for the first 24 hours you really want to be icing it religiously, which precludes any decent napping. (The ice works miracles, though. Set an alarm for every twenty minutes if you have to. Head off the swelling and recovery's a piece of cake.)
Posted by: Judy | March 18, 2008 at 11:46 PM