photo: William Jordan 2004

BACKBLOGUE

December 2005
San Francisco
Women in Black are joined by A Jewish Voice for Peace and International Solidarity Movementin Union Square where we notify shoppers and other celebrants that there is No Peace in Bethlehem This Year. Minimal negative voices are raised against us - maybe they're scared of our numbers. Or maybe it's just so obvious, this one. To some of us. Work cut out, as always, for next year.

San Quentin
We gather at the gates of the death chamber to protest the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams, Crips co-founder and later anti-gang advocate and youth counselor. The Terminator states that Tookie has not reformed from his path of violence and so we must kill him. Deadly hypocrisy aside, the Governor's denial of Tookie's conversion based on the man's admiration for black revolutionaries is such a blatant negation of the struggle for justice that one feels he would have opposed the French and American revolutions, along with of course the South African. The refusal to even glance at the startling 11th-hour testimony of new witnesses tells us what value the Gov and the Supremes put on the lives of those who are in any way unlike their own bad selves. Tookie redeemed did more for oppressed youth than these fossils ever will. First, they have to admit there is oppression. In America, that couldn't be. Until the oppressed write their own histories.

Klamath Falls
Once a union town based in railroads and lumber, it's now a dairy and potato place with weakened workers. But a sizeable crowd comes out to support the Klamath Basin Peace Forum and local artists along with the visiting oddity. A trip to the Lava Beds and caves where Modoc Indians fought the cavalry reminds me that every beautiful nature spot has been expropriated - but at least, as I read on the National Monument sign, there was a good excuse: the settlers were irked by the "persistent presence" of the natives. Even here in the historical and natural parks, budget cuts reveal our government's priorities: curtailing what we can learn from nature and history.

November 2005
New Orleans
I join Common Ground for a week in their effort to empower residents to return, rebuild and resist the opportunistic ethnic going forth full steam in Katrina, Phase II: the human hurricane of land grabs by the powerful. Landlords and city fathers want to turn Dixieland into Disneyland, a tourist mecca sliced from its roots, culture minus its creators. In the '50s they turned fire hoses on civil rights marchers; today they flood the poor with evictions in the wake of broken levees and promises. Join the movement to prevent a permanent homeless Gulf Coast diaspora. (commongroundrelief.org)

School of Assassins - Ft. Benning, Columbus, Georgia
As 20,000 rally at the gates of the US Army's torture school - newly and nicely known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation - over 122 Congressional reps have signed on to a bill to close and investigate the den of evil. Now that being against torture is in vogue, thanks to the brazenness of Dean of Torture Cheney and others, Congress is finding pieces of its spine. Follow HR1217 at soaw.org.

Aiken, South Carolina
Regulars at the weekly peace vigil notice an increase in friendly public response in recent months, since the fanciful cover story for Cheney-Rumsfeld aggression in the Mideast has been falling apart. And over in Columbia 6 of 7 city councilors have signed a statement condemning the Patriot Act Reloaded and supporting civil liberties and the Bill of Rights. Are we not a safe Bush state even here in secesh central? South Carolina's motto: We're not as bad as we used to be. Vigil is always followed by a coffee hour featuring beer and lively conversation, for some reason not filmed for the Lifestyles of the Interesting and Committed reality TV podcast. So much to do...

September 2005
Back on the Wheels of Justice bus...(see also http://www.justicewheels.org)
MONTANA
Helena
Just Don’t Go does counter-recruitment while the Peace Seekers local branch does vigils and education – like Mazin’s tour de force lecture in the Myrna Loy Theater lobby. Mazin and I spar for an hour with Dave Berg of "Berg in the Morning," the force to be reckoned with in Montana talk radio, on 18 stations. He is less combative than some in his field, and 2 of 3 callers favor us. Perhaps we have too many facts or are somehow in some way cogent, but Berg doesn’t put up much of a fight. We do three nights of events including a Shrub concert at the Staggering Ox. Brad passes the gearshift to Bob Abplanalp, and I jump off, headed east, while the bus heads for Pocatello.

Billings landed on the map twelve years ago when thugs overturned headstones in the Jewish cemetery and threw a brick through the menorah-bedecked window of Dr. Brian Schnitzer, whom we meet on the interfaith walk that carries the Torah from the old to new synagogue. The response at the time was to put menorahs in homes, businesses and churches all over town. Today’s successor to this “Not in Our Town” movement is “Now in Our Town,” featuring facilitated interracial meetings for those who had previously stuck to their own kind.

We table in front of the Congregational Church that started the menorah movement and meet numerous homeless veterans and Native Americans adrift. An Apache man tells of his sister, a Marine recently killed in Iraq, and his father, who killed himself after tours in Vietnam.

Shrub reaches out to a curious audience verses primarily in improvisational comedy sketches; they accept his instructions with unseemly warmth.

Bozeman holds a reasonably sized march on the occasional of worldwide antiwar demonstrations; next morning we fan out to churches across town. The Unitarians happen to be sermonizing on the Highlander Center – an important locus of organizing activity during the civil rights movement and after – and they welcome the Highlander-on-Wheels crowd (I flatter us).

At Montana State we meet Punjabi Sikhs, Japanese, Moroccans, even a few Montanans. One Iraq veteran tells us he saw mostly smiling children; another says sure, any child will smile when given candy.

Great Falls – Some citizens take exception to having varied views hosted by the public library, but the librarian prevails. We do a religion class at the Catholic college and an interfaith service at Unity Church. At programs around town we learn from the local Zio-colonialists such interesting factoids as that Israel never planned to take all the land of Palestine, but God did give it to them. We also a learn a new construction term: “concrete security fence.” And we use up a lot of tax dollars by provoking an army helicopter to buzz us four times, trying to ascertain excactly which danger the bus poses to civil order.

The public schools superintendent invites us to absent ourselves from the district schools, so into the beautiful Sun River Valley we go, to the high school in the tiny town of Simms, a majority Mormon/fundamentalist environment with a side order of Catholics and Methodists. Four classes are rapt, even stunned, as will happen with war stories and accusations that our leaders are criminals and should be in the dock, not the White House. By day’s end the parent phone calls are pouring in, protesting diversity or, to be fair to their point of view, treason. Our sponsor has tenure, but we journey back to the valley anyway to reassure the authorities that allowing anti-war views to be expressed could save democracy, maybe. We hear that during Clinton there were school assemblies with Clinton-bashing speakers and there were no calls on that, but we are supposed to steer clear of politics. Impossible – political silence is a political statement. Interestingly, two local soldiers returned from Iraq recently came to speak and told students to watch out for lying recruiters. We hope for the best for Simms, and move on.

Missoula: A day of vibrant tabling – we meet so many interested folks including a very sharp Jewish anti-Zionist and a number of veterans and military family members. Young man: “My dad was in Vietnam, and he’s still angry every day.” A mildly aged woman tells of her son who has just deployed to Iraq, and her brother-in-law who is there with the Montana National Guard – at 58. Talk about your stop-loss. There’s also the requisite bully, who insists each person he harangues is “stuck on stupid.”
Mazin Qumsiyeh rejoins the bus and ramps up the discourse as always. Onward to…

Butte: Montana Tech, the former College of Mines, produces mining engineers including a number of internationals, who are advised to keep their heads down for fear of attacks by xenophobes or monitoring by the gummint. (A local demonstration was observed by guys in suits with a laptop in their SUV – they were finally intimidated away from the demo by mere attention. Oh, and the peace float won for most original.) Swell way to welcome our world neighbors, and to learn from them. We do manage to meet a Kuwaiti student who laments the sad sitch in Palestine, but the intls stay away from our programs in droves. The domestic students apparently have already been domesticated by bread and circuses and lies, and thus need no warnings to stay out of trouble, aka unembedded presentations. Our democracy seems to be locked down tight – we have the freedom to demonstrate and roam the nation speaking to no one – and this in a climate of 63% opposition to the war, according to recent polls. A quick deduction would be that public opinion is not only manipulated, but doesn’t count.

WYOMING
Sheridan’s lively peace community hosts us in the library, then on the talk radio station where Limbaugh-Hannity-Savage are balanced by Cornell-Lippman-Puccio. On to the community college, where a young veteran, soon to return to Iraq, challenges our advocacy of withdrawal and pours out the anguish of seeing Iraqi friends killed. We engage at length and search for solutions to an impossible situation.

Then on to the peace vigil on Main Street, which many have fled for the Wal-Mart that stands in for a mall here. Still plenty of positive honking, including truckers, and a group of tie-dyed teens rampantly peacifying with signs including “Where is Osama?” and “Act like it’s a globe, not an empire,” while blasting classic Dylan on the box. As often happens, the high point is something that doesn’t happen: we were scheduled for two assemblies at the high school, canceled when it was determined that the bus is a front for the armed wing of the PLO. There was a tentative offer to allow us in if we promised not to be anti-war, only pro-peace. Final ruling: too controversial.

SOUTH DAKOTA
We trek to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to hold forth on KILI radio – 100,000 watts of Indian Power – discussing links and parallels between Palestinians and Native Americans – land theft, relocation, Palistans based on Bantustans based on Reservations. Also Camp Casey, conscientious objection, and changing attitudes toward occupation among soldiers both Yankee and Israeli. A staff member of the local school tells of continuing white ownership of most businesses on the reservation, due in part to lack of startup capital for Native businesses. He also comments on various projects to re-introduce buffalo on the plains, sometimes ten by ten, from one family to the next, and calls it a small project that’s important spiritually and historically because of the centrality of buffalo to the traditional way of life here.

MINNESOTA
In Winona we address a charter K-12 school, a Catholic high school, and a Catholic university. People!, get us in your Catholic schools, and Jewish and Muslim too, it’s the law.

At St. Olaf’s College in Northfield, Dave Whitman plays jazz in the Lion’s Lair, next door to Dave Lippman’s show in the Lion’s Pause. The jazz bleeds through into the Lippman lair, giving me paws. I last played here in 1990, says a professor who also claims to use “I Don’t Fight for Conquerors” in his seder.

Dipping down south of the border we meet up with Northwest Iowa Peace Links, who take us to the Clay County Fair for a rib dinner and a quick look at the cows and army recruiters. The military had supplied the schools with arty book covers for the needy students, so Peace Links arted up their own counter-covers, which were such a hit the army ones languished lonesome.

In Mankato, the home of the Jolly Green Giant and the largest mass hanging in US history – 38 Native Americans in 1862, still actively mourned – we discourse in sociology classes including one on Victimology, where we examine cycles of violence and brutalization of occupied people in Palestine, America, and other such places. Despite local guardedness about free speech being endangered by the Patriot Act, there is some faculty flak about us, the bus, coming to speak freely. We are said to be one-sided and perhaps not as non-violent as we claim to be, since we try to explain why suicide bombings happen. To my mind, quashing understanding of rage is a violent act. Likewise the recruiting station blasting nationalist anthems at peace demonstrators. But perhaps I’m overly sensitive.

We’re joined here by Tom Cornell, a Catholic Worker and Deacon who worked with Dorothy Day and went south to Selma in the darkest days. He has a story for every occasion and lends gravitas to the bus – humor too.

WISCONSIN
The Campus Progressives in LaCrosse stay on the move, pushing a living wage ordinance through the city council and provoking a statewide campaign for same in the process. They are now pushing a statewide ballot initiative to withdraw the Wisconsin National Guard from Iraq. Senator Feingold has propounded a plan for overall troop withdrawal. Folks are educating folks on depleted uranium and other un-advertised effects and costs of war.

We speak to a community organizing class; enrollment is conditional on activity in any of five local organizing efforts. Lively tabling, animated by conversations of both types – basic agreement and nearly friendly – is interrupted by torrential and lengthy downpours. All manner of press braves the storm to interview the bus – people!, call the press when we come, they like it (it’s the law).

Meanwhile an investigation is underway into the university’s possible investments in Israel – in days of old the UW was forced to divest from apartheid South Africa.

Minneapolis
The bus starts its fall 2005 season at Macalester College, where we table under a thunderstorm and, to be fair, a tent. A ROTC cadet approaches us with great interest in dialoguing with our Gulf War veteran speaker. Our current lineup features video of Christian Palestinian leaders and the Star of Goliath song-slide cycle along with first-hand testimony from the front lines of war. A friend of one of our speakers is arrested in Haiti, and released under great pressure before we leave town. There is no separating or segmenting the struggles for justice throughout the world – we are all in this together.

End of Wheels of Justice bus blogs..

September 2005
Manhattan and Topeka, Kansas
The Living Wage campaign has hit snags, but stalwarts in the unions and the streets and even the legislature keep their eyes on it. Labor comes out for picnics and festivals and tries to surmount the platitudes of those who want Labor without the Movement. On the capitol steps I stick to my pro-labor script and Shrub to his anti-labor one, while local leaders denounce the wars on the peoples of both Gulfs, and everyone applauds except maybe the Mayor. 

August 2005
San Francisco  
The city has passed sweat-free legislation, declaring that all municipal purchasing must be manufactured ethically - no sweatshops. The law was written by a class at New College taught by visiting prof Tom Hayden. One of many reasons the Bay Area should become a country. The left coast cultural scene continues to thrive, with the San Francisco Mime Troupe's summer offering in the parks being a play based on the book "Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man," and music from the likes of Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeno Band and the Albino Afrobeat Ensemble. Or if you're in the mood for movies you can make it to the historic and beautiful Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, where the marquee is always educational. This week: "America's elections are rigged - computer voting is a fraud!" (See a photo log of these messages.)

July 2005
Burbank, CA  
There are 65 peace vigils in the Southland. These are not all silent standings - many involve leafleting at convenience stores, farmers' markets, and suchlike. Piles of leaflets are accepted for placement by sympathetic merchants, some of them worldies - not Americans.

Neighbors for Peace shows monthly movies in the city park building; I'm the first allegedly live act.  At post-show party, I learn again that activists get depressed, world-weary. Where's the hope? But you never know what's coming next - sudden jolts of awareness can surprise us. People file their knowledge and gut understandings and feelings for unknown others under the mattress or in other places that may be readily accessed in event of turns in history. People do feel for others - homes built on the cliffs here fell down, swimming pools destroyed, days of headlines - what about Fallujah? But you never know, we've seen it before Feb 15 '03 will come again.

Portland, Oregon
Clear Channel wants to put billboards on buildings, so Portland passed a law prohibiting commercial speech on said walls. When the local mural projects were ready to expand, Portland cut a deal by which they leased the paint that comprises the murals, rendering the works Public Art, which is in a separate category from other speech. Clear Channel is now suing the city over this blatant violation of their free speech rights. Incidentally, commercial messages have qualified by law as free speech only since 1968 - which makes it the natural order of things for those under, say, 47 years of age, and for those of us who forget the past and are willing to sign over reality to liars. 

Clear Channel's own record on free speech is interesting: they rejected an anti-war billboard in New York on the grounds that they don't want to put up messages that might cause children to ask difficult questions. Heaven forfend. Would that mean questions like "why should I buy everything I see on a sign?" Or "Why are all the radio stations in the country playing the same song at the same time?"

June 2005
Madison, WI
State employees mark the creeping Dixiefication of Wisconsin with a mock New Orleans-style funeral parade for collective bargaining. The So-Called Brass Band leads the march with a solemn "Just A Closer Walk with Thee;" after a eulogy at the Capitol they step off with a sprightly "When the Saints":

Oh when we win a fair contract
Oh when we win a fair contract
How I want to be in that number
When we win a fair contract

Bystanders, many having grown up without the advantages of knowing what a New Orleans funeral is, nor having grown up in a civilized country - one with political culture and, oh, collective bargaining - stand stunned or look on in idle amusement, a misdemeanor since the International Criminal Court decided that amusement must lead to engagement. OK I lied. To be fair, some are actually intrigued, even moved. Well, if you're not moved by a hot brass band and, well, a movement, you need to switch drugs.  In fact I find it hard to imagine music without a march boppin' along behind the band. Why bother? The organizers' farewell: "Go in peace, to kick the bosses' ass."

Bemidji, MN
Driving along the Mississippi River and up the country roads in a Mustang convertible blasting Buffalo Springfield - hoo boy am I dating myself. Oh well, couldn't get a date in Bemidji - no shame in that eh. Here they have this other Continental Divide I'm not familiar with - between waters that flow south and north. North meaning, as Shrub points out, into Canada and out through the Bay to Syria. American water, going to terrorists. Gig at a bar that's more like a museum, full of folksy artifacts. Sponsored by the county Democratic Farmer Labor Party, which means the house is peppered with city councilors. They should surely be able to stop the war - if the other city councils join in, and Congress, and....

Duluth, MN
Local activists are facing court date for throwing blood on the Air Force base. Meanwhile they tend the community garden, feed and house the many homeless who encamp here in the summer and then migrate south. A beautiful city, but put your car up top the hill before the big snows, or forever hold your parking place at the lake. 

Aiken, SC
Aiken Peace pulls out a good crowd for a small town, including a young Air Force bloke who sings us a strong and poignant song on the Patriot Act, and a self-described conservative who abhors the vacuum that is Bush: not only empty, but full of it - and, he sucks. My words. His: they're lying and killing, not to mention bankrupting.

Jacksonville, FL
Major turnout from the Democrats, thanks to a four-county aggregation of progressives attempting to take back the Party from the slackers and bureaucrats. Hard work when money talks: recent stats show the GOP paying $6 per vote to the Dems $1. Also, people are afraid to get involved lest their jobs take a walk. Other forms of progress proceed apace: a revolting development at the headwaters of two creeks is called Freedom Commerce Center. At least they've decided to spare the 1200 year-old cypress tree there. It'll be less lonely now.

Tampa, FL
Some churches got it goin' on. They do everything here at the UCC. Their sister church across town was burned down, but then they support gay rights, which is way over the top of something. 

May 2005
Durham, NC
Provoked by a shoe sale, I take up jogging. I wave to the Latinos keeping the neighborhood yards presentable, and am immediately transformed into the bourgeois running shoe customer who can't get his exercise the old fashioned way, as these workers do.

Speaking of old fashioned, somebody burned three seven-foot tall crosses all over Durham the other night. Vigils were organized in short order and neighbors re-committed themselves to unity, but while we wait for news and speculation on the motives of malfeasants, the school board remains deadlocked in racial contestation and a group of businessfolk propose to elect the board at large, county-wide - code for diluting strength of the black community. 

Meanwhile the North Carolina House of Reps has passed Instant Runoff Voting, wherein citizens express their second choice as well as first, so that when someone is bumped out the race you get your second fave instead of your worst nightmare. Will the Senate see its way clear to adopt a method already used internally by the GOP in Utah, in polls for football MVPs, and for the San Francisco mayoralty, as well as some offices in the United States proper? Hold breath.

Columbia, SC
A testimonial party for a leading local activist provides the opportunity to see what people value, to witness the creativity brought to bear in a small community of campaigners surrounded by - well, by a place Bush feels comfortable visiting. So they try to give Him second thoughts. A radical cheerleading team called reBELLEious eggs on the crowds. The knack for transferring the story we live into drama, comedy, or dromedy, hooked up to the ability to talk to anyone and both learn and teach, finding something in common to wield while threshing through the differences - these are essential skills in a creative, assertive, dynamic movement. Playing clarinet on a unicycle, dressed as Uncle Scam - this sort of thing garners extra credit.

April 2005
Watervliet, NY
Hard by Schenectady, this charming town is dominated by the Arsenal, to the point where the high school alma mater declaims:

Where our grim, fine arsenal stands
Dares our enemies, makes them quail

The citizens quailed, or just plain folded, when a Black Hawk helicopter landed on the high school lawn as part of Health and Wellness Day. Not clear how such machinery contributes to health but the climbing wall/tunnel/bouncing inflatable inside the fair, staffed by six Marines in camouflage, is certainly healthy, provided no one signs up for the military as a result. School personnel declare the military's participation is harmless and objections to it are Opinions, which should be kept out of Professional Life. And these people are educating our children?

Now it turns out the military is hitching itself to the DARE program, with a provocative slogan: Dare to keep kids off drugs and violence. The drugs I can understand - those are for whoever gets victimized by the dope that seems to flow out of each country we have a war in. But how the military keeps kids off violence - I guess I'm uneducated. It could be that by enlisting kids in the biggest, most violent gang on the big block, they put them above the law and keep them out of jail. Therefore the violence has been contained?  I must study up on this.

Meanwhile, suppose we had truth in advertising: the climbing wall and chopper would have to be labeled, first, as advertising instead of civic mindedness, and there would need to be a list of the possible side effects of using these toys: death for you, death for unknown children of unknown parents - some photos pasted on the side wouldn't hurt either. No, teacher, war is not a video game. Teach our children well. Or get out of the way so we can do it.

Little Falls, MN
Catholic farmers and Lutheran laborers combine in the Democratic Farmer Labor Party way up here where traditions die hard. Some of these Dems do value gun rights more than reproductive ones, yet they dug the off-the-map message and even laughed most at W's health plan for the children (coverage from early stages all the way up through birth).  This show, combined with a lovely supper in a supper club, is said to have drawn the line for some of these folks, either showing them how bad things are and thus clarifying for them why they're Dems, or irritating them enough to make them realize they're really not. The progressives are working to de-wedge the electorate. 

There is great diversity here - both Olson's and Olsen's - and the radical Franciscan nuns are always out to terrorize the militarists. Party activists, more progressive than some bystanders, set the pace for reclaiming some space for Americans to participate in politics. Seems reasonable; civic duty should be encouraged, if not mandatory. Especially in a blue stain on a red spot in a blue state.

LaCrosse, WI
Hyperactivists in the campus Progressives, Native American Student Association and other cabals have passed a living wage ordinance and held a Native summit on nuclear waste. After attempts to thwart their demonstration at a Bush visit, they nailed the cops for sending police chaplains to yank duly issued demo permits. People trying to exercise their citizenship apparently will not be thwarted. Take that, friendly fascism.

Winona, MN 
For a southern boy, even from California, this area gives the feeling of Canada or Norway. I'm wearing long johns to Earth Day fagawdsake, and there's white folks every time you turn around. Me aside, people are fighting to save their limestone bluff country from agro-toxins, and small farmers persevere after they've failed across the plains - nobody told these folks the world is now one big Wal-Farm.

Teaneck, NJ
Star of Goliath receives its first banning, coyly described by the executive ban-man as "not censorship."  My flier included the cautionary note: "may be seen as highly biased against long-range Israeli geopolitical strategies and in favor of Palestinian Survival." Apparently one or both of those biases is too provocative for locals who believe that peace is breaking out in the Mideast and we mustn't upset people by mentioning facts. Oh well, we move to the handsome house of a fine local activist unafraid to buck the bastards. Best review: "What was so bad about that?" Seriously though, my presentation features historical Israel-planners delineating their strategies; those who don't want to listen to their own leaders tell the truth about their nefarious plans need to get out of the way of those who want to get to the truth as the route to reconciliation, rather than skipping the first step. As for peace breaking out, holding breath: one, two, three....

Anna Maria Island, FL
The Island's End Bistro no longer exists, technically, but that didn't stop the County Democrats from throwing a bash there, seized by Shrub in a blatantly partisan intervention. In the spirit of W's signal that Hezbollah might be permitted a role in the new Lebanese government, Shrub offered to include the Dems in ours, provided they show flexibility on minor matters, such as principle.

Houston
Big art town, lots of oil money - oil painting was invented here. Or not. Progressive art galleries like the Art Car Museum and the Artery threaten to link art with expression of social ideas. Police are on the case. F'rinstance, across town at the Vine Street Studios one finds "Arab Eyes," work by Arab photographers, part of the enormous Foto Fest that graces Houston each spring.

The morning after a show at the always enjoyable Millbend Coffeehouse in the Unitarian Universalist Church in The Woodlands, I journey to the UU franchise in Northwest Houston to offer a sermon on Consumerism and the Soul. You heard me. Or those there did. My efforts at preaching were accepted in the spirit of the offering - laughter at jokes, toleration of songs, contemplation of possibilities for saving ourselves from hyper-Mammonization. 

March 2005
(near) Redway, CA
Though I'm known for playing at clubs that later close (cause-effect?) and getting rave reviews from papers that soon fold (direct result?), I think this is the first time I've played in a town that no longer exists. The beautiful Beginnings community center does, though, the community being centered apparently not being the town. Southern Humboldt retains the prize for ineffability and groovy good feeling. Great radio station too, KMUD.

San Rafael, CA
The Rachel Corrie Rebuilding Project pulled together a smorgasbord of entertainment from children playing classical selections to Star of Goliath in a hilltop church with a tranquil panoramic vista that contrasted with and stimulated contemplation of the atrocities of Gaza.

February 2005
Monterey, CA
Even in the most beautiful places in the world, people can take the trouble to look after their less fortunate relations, be they next door or across the seas. One fella muy concerned about Arabs wanting to drive Jews into the sea drove me back to the research lab where I learned of the time it actually happened. The other way around, as it happens. Or happened - in Jaffa, 1947. Good story - see http://www.palestineremembered.com/Jaffa/Jaffa/Story202.html

Anaheim
In Orange County, the Bastion of Birch, human rights rears its ugly head in the form of valiant activists, including some sixtyish folks just getting involved for the first time, or for the second after having been intimidated in the post-911 worldaphobia period. I hear tell of solid evangelicals who are rethinking their loyalty to the system after it screwed them on the labor front.

St. Louis
Only at St. Louis U is the male a cappella choir called the Bare Naked Statues - after actual ones that local boy J. Ashcraft hasn't got to yet - though the fountain figure "Floozy in the Jacuzzi" is rumored next on his list.

Back on the Wheels of Justice bus, I speak on Palestine/Israel and Shrub shows up periodically...

January 2005
Tampa
Professor of Engineering Sami Al-Arian has been among the most effective lobbyists in Florida and Washington for justice for Palestinians. That could explain why he's been in solitary for two years, unless you have a mystical faith in the U.S. court system. In any case, he heard our interview on community radio WMNF and cautioned his wife Nahla not to miss our presentation, so we got to meet her and a good group of hyperactivists who are fighting this sort of horrendous red-blooded American repression. This drawing by young Lars Underbakke shows Al-Arian going to meet his lawyer, hands bound, with his legal papers placed on his back. This went on for a year. (First they came for the engineering professors, but I was not Palestinian, so I didn't speak up...) See freesamialarian.com

Then down to the local high school thanks to some fine teachers, and finally to the Sacred Grounds, a fine gathering point for gay youth, where we combine our efforts with local musicians and met a wide variety of folks, thanks in part to WMNF, community radio yay!

Speaking of which, when their news staff went to cover the opening of a certain large, boxy emporium right next to the river, the manager asked "Are you the station that's been playing that anti-Wal-Mart song?" This clearly marks them as biased against free enterprise, unlike the stations that accept bribes to pimp consumer fascism. One man's opinion.

Sarasota
The Fogartyville Café in Bradenton hosts Amy Goodman in a fundraiser for a new low-power radio station, WSLR. That night Shrub takes the boards at the café. At New College we throw the show on an outdoor wall and learn of Aidan Delgado, who was sent back to Iraq for an unexpected second tour of duty and became a conscientious objector. Now he goes to college and spreads knowledge with his own anti-war show.

Miami
At Florida International University we find a refreshing mix of international students and international relations majors, blended
into Miami's unique cultural stew. We're hosted by a vibrant supergroup named SUPER (Students United for Palestinian Equal
Rights) has been showing movies and escalated to a bus visit, bringing views not often heard here.

For contrast we journey to the University of Miami Law School, where most of the audience is pro-expansionist Israel. We maintain a civil demeanor throughout. We then enjoy a visit to the University of St.Thomas, a private Catholic school with lots of low-income students, who know lots about the army, a low-income kind of thing to know about. The class on Religion and Suffering is particularly keen to discuss the problems of Palestine. Finally we meet with the Broward County Anti-War Coalition, with whom we share ideas of strategy. Work is difficult with small numbers of activists in a large city, but they persevere in the search for what works. Priorities: combat fear, fix the media.

Gainesville, Florida
A diverse group turns out to the Mennonite Church, seasoned activists welcome us to the Civic Media Center, and Shrub's concert puts buns in the bleachers at the County Museum. A Gulf War veteran with multiple disabilities from the much-denied Syndrome joins with our Vietnam vet driver in an emotional tag-team condemnation of the effects of war. An Iraqi woman tells that when the U.S. bombed the mosque where her father is buried, she felt like a little child wondering if her dad died twice. A round of Gainesville-style parties gives us the chance for some serious political discourse under the guise of having a good time. Or vice versa.

Savannah, GA
The stunning physical beauty of Savannah gets the play in the tourist glossies, but every town has its dark side. In this romantic mystery of a town, the good and evil isn't restricted to gardens; there's also Fort Stewart, whence our youth ship out to kill and be killed. The good news comes from the likes of Sgt. Kevin Benderman, who after nine years as an army mechanic is refusing to return to Iraq. Around town, in the streets, on the trains, and in the classrooms we meet army personnel with their varied opinions, some of which they can't share within earshot of you never know who.

Another side to the town is the downtown frown of the impoverished black community, many of whom wear a look of wonder regarding where the jobs may have migrated to. Unemployed, with meager housing provided by the prison-industrial complex, many migrating into the army and thence to oil-drenched battlefield. It may not be a job, but it's an occupation.

Professors at the two state colleges - black and white, in keeping with local tradition - welcome us to talk with social work graduate students about strategies for advocacy, and with students in the Criminal Justice, Social and Political Science department (criminality, if not justice, seems increasingly the dominant element in social studies any more - though some kinds of criminality get more discussion than others. Streets vs. suites.) The famous art college, though, seems to shy from political matters. Training students to isolate art from society may not be a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it should be. Next thing you know they'll impound the bus for violating the separation of art and politics.

If you go: land yourself at the Sentient Bean Coffee House. That's where most of the movies about Palestine are shown.
(End of Wheels of Justice tour. For me. For now.)

Durham, NC - Shrub was Oh-No-Gurated at the Blue Dot Ball, the Durham area being a blue dot in a red state. The swearing (in) bibles are the corporate reports of Halliburton and Enron. Hundreds took the People's Pledge to be good citizens in spite of the government, and partied on.

Ý

 

December 2004
San Francisco
Shrub does election calypso at a rally to challenge the tally in prep for the electoral college meetings in state capitols. Signs:
Ukraine has cojones, where are ours?
Voting without audits? Are we insane?
If every vote counts, count every vote.

November 2004
Northern Wisconsin
Folks fighting mines and power lines sometimes have success 'round here, a rare thing when tilting at power. The recent shutdown of an ELF (extremely low frequency) line has heartened the peeps, who have been battling to shut down this nuclear war trigger since 1969. Now we know that power lines are not windmills, and we may tilt at will. Native Americans and farmers and the countrified social justice crowd have the stuff, mo' powah to 'em. Next up: the Arrowhead/Weston line bringing power in from Canada. And over in the Twin Cities, Alliant, the subsidiary of Honeywell that's been cut loose with the cluster bomb and depleted uranium contracts. They need to reconsider.

All this ruckus is overshadowed at the moment by the tragedy of a confrontation between a Hmong man from Laos who shot and killed six fellow hunters in the woods. Fellowship seems to have been overshadowed by a combination of racism, rage, and perhaps war trauma left over from the U.S. "effort" in Southeast Asia. This is speculation, but one thing is clear: wars never end till we find alternative social organization. The hunter killer trial will unfold and hopefully clarify problems rather than deepen divisions.

Ft. Benning, Georgia 16,000 came to the gates of the School of the Assassins, formally known as something else - oh yeah, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. They cooperate to maintain Pax Americana, whatever the cost in democracy and lives. More stories and great photos at http://maritimes.buffaloimc.org:8080/news/2004/11/8575.php

Jacksonville, Florida
House concert was followed by two days of canvassing in exceedingly poverty-bound neighborhoods, then a day of poll monitoring with Election Protection. Apparently I didn't do it well enough, or got suckered into going elsewhere than Ohio, or forgot about the 4 million new fundamentalist voters, or failed to stop touch-screen, or neglected to tell voters that Iraqis are related to us....I must have slipped up somewhere. Well, full employment for George Shrub I suppose, and fresh angry/jolly songs on the way.

October 2004
Durham, North Carolina
Fourth national conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement takes place at Duke University despite the best efforts of contrarian parties. Good workshops on outreach to Jewish communities, different possible forms of a single/federal/bi-national state in Iz/Pal, the problem of attacks on civilians, anatomy of the organized pro-Israel community in the US, and many more. In a concert the week before with the Prince Myshkins in Chapel Hill, I premiere the short-short version of my Palestine song-slide cycle. I am mastering the operation of Powerpoint with my left toe.

Bloomington, Illinois
I cross paths with the Wheels of Justice bus tour, back on the road with a new paint job and an ever-changing, all ages cast, right up to Hedy Epstein, who fled Nazi Germany in the 30s and speaks out today to stop Israel from perpetrating horrors against Palestine. At the college we get the extra credit crew, armed with enthusiasm for grade points and even some interest in the topic. Tough crowd to do satire for, good crowd for speakers to sway. Or just to begin to pry open. Lively debate amongst the students is a good thing, though it seems a crime that young adults should know so little about their own country as to believe what its leaders say.

Urbana
The Socialist Forum continues to educate through a speaker series, of which I am an alleged episode - a benefit for the new low-power FM station Radio Free Urbana, which is added to the good work of community radio WEFT. The anti-war, anti-racism group AWARE works against war on Iraq and also continues to combat the cultural imperialism of campus sports mascot Chief Illiniwek. Citizens for Peace and Justice and Visionaries for Educating Youth and Adults (VEYA) are working on a little problem with police behavior in the African American community. Community members filming the cop stops of motorists were busted for eavesdropping. Cops are getting tasers, which should solve everything. The Indymedia folks put out a great paper called Public i that helps publicize all these activities and more.

Madison
The invaluable infotainer John Ross has a new book out on his life that is the most enjoyable look at the history of the US Left. This poet/journalist continues to report on Mexican politics while finding time and energy in his 60s to visit Baghdad and Palestine. Check out his tour - http://www.nationbooks.org/ - go see him!

Chicago
Craig and Cindy Corrie mesmerized the crowd with the story of their daughter's life and death. Craig has been asked whether he and his wife imparted their values to Rachel. He responds "No, she imparted hers to us."

Ashland, Oregon
David Rovics and I take a break from our joint tour to open for Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, and Norman Solomon. Ellsberg says we are now at Germany 1932. The discussion of strategies for ousting Bush continues.

Sylmar, California
In the farthest flung reaches of the San Fernando Valley sits Tia Chucha's Cafe, a Latino cultural center captained by poet Luis Rodriguez. Here David Rovics and I begin a joint tour that will take us up the coast to Seattle. Rovics covers even more topics than Shrub, with the added benefit of telling the truth. At Cell Space in San Francisco we complement reportbacks from the Republican Convention demonstrations in New York.

May 2004
Wheels of Justice Bus Tour
Traverse City, MI
Numerous folks hereabouts have gone to war zones to see, learn, and later teach. A confrontation at U.S. Rep Dave Camp's office pushed him to take action. 45 occupied his office for four hours demanding a town hall meeting on Iraq and Palestine. They got it. Camp (R) then signed on to a bill memorializing Rachel Corrie and one against the Israeli confiscation wall. He had been a supporter of military aid to Israel. We're watching.

Saginaw
New Vets for Peace chapter is organizing. For Christmas, Women in Black and friends went to the mall in all their favorite peace shirts on - part of the National Keep Your Shirt On Movement founded recently - earlier in this sentence, in fact. A local professor attacked for a pro-Palestinian Human Rights speech was defended by his Prez after he presented him with documentation from the UN on the Palestine sitch. The press is very conservative but did a great story on Wheels for some reason. The reporter, informed that a singing CIA agent was involved, demurred, "That's too controversial."

Cleveland
The jail-like high school has its own problems, yet some can relate to whole countries put in jails and ghettoes. Evening finds us presenting in a convent of social activist nuns like those who went to El Salvador in the 80s, some never returning.

Youngstown
Staughton Lynd, long-time labor historian - though he quotes his father saying "Lecturing on history is like lecturing on navigation while the ship's going down" - is now, like wife Alice, a prison lawyer struggling for justice for wrongfully convicted prisoners, in cases dating from a major prison riot in Lucasville, Ohio in 1993. Youngstown activists aim to unite labor and peace work, though it's hard to work with labor when there's none to be done - hereabouts the steel mills were replaced with prisons, and when the guards at one prison organized for a union, the prison was closed. The Youngstown area is lousy with lockups, including a gratuitous supermax. Criminal Justice is the biggest major at Youngstown State.

Alice notes similarities to prisons in Iraq. Lynd efforts have helped to cut suicide rates in the pen - lofty goal indeed - by getting some prisoners transferred to mental health facilities and bringing Human Rights Watch into the lockups for a look.

There are sleeper effects of the outsourcing of steel production in the 70s and 80s. Children have moved away for work, breaking a pattern of caring for elders. Retirees' pensions are keeping the service economy afloat, but that boat could sink when the old folks expire. Economic violence has long-term non-headline consequences, not unlike war - in a truck stop we meet a veteran of the Army Rangers who won't talk about what he did except to say "I have to live with it for the rest of my life." About service to his country: "Should I be proud? For what ? It's all about money. My dad was in Vietnam - that was crazy. You'd never know when, he'd just explode." On veteran's benefits: "My buddies get a check every month. But then, there's always something popping up on your skin, you don't know what. Cancer. Who knows? They never tell us nothin. It ain't worth it. Good luck to you guys. Keep doin' it."

Syracuse
Shrub joins Hart Seeley ("The Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld") at the 68th birthday bash for the Syracuse Peace Council as they push forth with their Bush Must Go campaign, including a youth festival, "Drop Beats Not Bombs." Lawn signs are everywhere and radical cheerleaders cavort. Oldsters stick stalwartly and youngsters join in co-op houses full of bikes, not bombs. The peace squad can't penetrate NPR, but they present a weekly edit of Democracy Now! highlights on cable access TV.

Buffalo
Here we learn that buffalo wings really are from Buffalo. Also that Democracy Now! is on at AM station. And about the Patriot Act from a lawyer whose three year-old looked at a demonstration and asked "What's that, daddy?" He: "That's America."

A middle-aged business pillar man went to Iraq, saw, awoke, came home to found a Pax Christi chapter. Hope.

Albany, NY
Vibrant, sprawling activist community has a three-story Social Justice Center with groups working on AIDS, environment, and other minor matters. And some joint called Revolution Hall that remains a rumor to us. Some of our potential crowd headed over to a hearing on an incident where police shot at a fleeing suspect and killed a bystander instead. Apparently if your only tool is a hammer, you just throw it at every problem. And hit the non-problem. We also compete with Laura Bush's Pay to Pray breakfast with the Governor - much more sexy than our show. By the way, What Would Jesus Pay?

Desperate women - which is to say, Women Against War - came together before Iraq Massacre '03 for a rolling 30-day fast at the Women's Center. Many of these were folks without prior activist resumes, and it got good press. New initiatives are in the works to re-invigorate the broken-hearted into further action.

The Amy Goodman movie "Independent Media in a Time of War" was made here by the brazen and stalwart Indymedia folks. On the mainstream front, a strong, persistent campaign to get the local papers to do their jobs - sometimes they actually print the Fisk items sent along for their edification. They got the editor to come to a showing of the Amy Goodman movie and offer a response. Mazin Qumsiyeh meets with the editorial staff of the Hearst paper and regales them with stories about his grandfather and a map of West Bank settlements. Some are more regaled than others. The editorial cartoonist is impressed, which is all that matters in this life.

In a nearby suburb, the town's mayor is married to the schools super, and everybody watches their back. A beleaguered progressive high school teacher doesn't bother to balance his presentations: "I am equal time." Tenure's a wonderful thing, but they can still make it hell for you if you protest massacres done by our side.

We pass, four times, a monument to a soldier with the inscription "Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii, Porto Rico." Great to know what we're proud of. Of course, that was the age of imperialism, which was then. I remember in 1969 when someone blew up a statue in Chicago in honor of the police who participated in the Haymarket massacre. I'm not sayin' anything, I'm just mentioning something that happened one time.

Worcester, MA
A highly diverse burg, with a couple dozen languages going on and less white flight than usual - the MLK club marches in the St. Pat's Day parade. We hold forth at the Spacement, a new Infoshop/Foodnotbombs kind of an enterprise with a good spread of vintages among the crowd. Then to Worcester Artists Group, a beautiful art gallery/political music spot (they dare to mix!) for a Shrub onslaught.

Ware, MA
A low-end town, pretty much down and out, unemployment and collateral forms of abuse. A youngster views the bus hopefully, with unwarranted anticipation: "What are you going to do to our town?" We'll try, sis. Other young folks with family in the military scream at pacifists, who coax them over to the vigil for a civilian discussion which everyone appreciates in the end. We repair to Agape, a rural Christian pacifist community growing its own food and making its own way to a peaceful world, with straw bale house and too many Mayflies.

Lenox, MA
Talking to five classes at a high school that we actually get into - the Israeli army sent one of its teams to chat up occupation, so we were already the equal timers. Everyone should do this - you don't need a bus. Just go to Palestine, come back, do your job.

Boston
We roll around an emergency demo at Boston Common, blaring music, bearing local placards, "Is your SUV worth the rape of Iraq?", "Stop Collective Punishment in Fallujah," "Bush Lies, Another Soldier Dies," "Imagine Cluster Weapons in Your Neighborhood." Then zoom to

N. Andover, Mass.
where we dominate the local press for days because a presentation on Palestine is just way outside the bounds of safety for the high school folk. Parents and rabbis alike are raisin' a ruckus about the dangers of letting eyewitnesses speak to defenseless teens. The superintendent decides to give us 7 minutes, along with 7 for a rabbi, and questions from the class. The reduction of education to sound bites batted back and forth like a pale imitation of Crossfire is bad enough, but now's not the time for your tears: the whole sorry sham is lauded in the press as a victory for freedom of speech. And this after a speaker espousing weapons of mass destruction spoke at a nearby high school the day before. This gentleman, representing the good folks at Raytheon, did not require equal time for a peace speaker. No wonder Americans grow up knowing how to go to war but not why not to. Bury the rag deep in your face..Well, at least the next election will be invalidated due to repression of free expression during the campaign.

Then into the community where the peace groups have six vigils a week, including one at Raytheon. We journey to Lawrence, site of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike, now 60% Puerto Rican and Dominican. We lunch with priests who help janitors with unionization. The local peace group vigils at the big intersection, eliciting a constant stream of waves and honks. I might like to move to Latin America - I like it here. Except for all the incinerators being built here, already the site of the highest asthma rate in the state.. And the fact that there's no longer a bus to get to the jobs they no longer have.

April 2004

"Collateral Damage: The fallout from the war in Iraq" tour
I've joined with a tour put together by Witness for Peace - Great Lakes. Damu Smith of Black Voices for Peace and the National Black Environmental Justice Network wings in from Washington, and Blanca Velazquez Diaz, founder of the independent labor union center, CAT, comes from Puebla, Mexico.Later we're joined by Rev. Graylan Hagler, chair of Ministers for Racial, Social, and Educational Justice (Mrs. EJ).

Dayton
The University of Dayton, a private Catholic school, gets $50 million in research contracts from Wright Patterson Air Force base. Blanca zips through the student store checking sweatshirt labels: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. Ever wonder why they call them sweatshirts? Kids are walking around wearing secret advertisements for the suppression of world labor, protected by the Air Force.

Springfield
Blanca tells of maquila workers giving their lives to the machine. Bruised hands and hearts, chemicals burning skin and breathed in, no masks. Bodies end up like the jeans, distressed. No freedom to associate (independent unions) despite Mexican constitution. Two minutes max in the bathroom. Plus sexual harassment. Codes of conduct my ass. A conservative Christian student comes to our student host: "I'm confused - I'm thinking liberal. What do I do?" And another: "I'm in. I want to join United Students Against Sweatshops."

Galesburg
Maytag is moving to Mexico, tossing 7,000 people into the ashcan. The town will die; this is what we're so patriotic about.

Chicago
On the South Side of Chicago we present in a large Methodist Church. Damu connects with organizers from PUSH and other groups, networking nationally and linking labor issues from the South Side to the Global South.

Indianapolis
We present in a church shared by two congregations. Now this is not black and white situation. OK, it is. Anyway, at least it's an integrated church. It just has two services.

Cincinnati
Blanca details the campaign against the Tannant Apparel groups, making jeans for your major labels including Federated, a power here in town. Workers' hands and Puebla's springs are turning blue from the dyes. Maquilas are now being located in rural zones, where subsistence farmers are driven off the land by cheap U.S. corn, straight into the conveniently placed sweatshops. The work is dangerous, and so is forming a union - Fed made no response to demands till workers came from Puebla to Cincinnati to protest at the gates of power. Think about these hands and these springs and these rights when you don your Tommy's, Gap's, Limited's and Levi's. Contact the Maquila Solidarity Network (http://www.maquilasolidarity.org/).

Here in Cincy police kill at will, most famously Timothy Thomas in 2001, precipitating riots that led to a boycott of the city. The People's Movement in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood features strong women's leadership battling gentrification with a twist: the entire neighborhood is on the National Historic Register due to the largest concentration of Italianate architecture in the world, build by German immigrants in the 19th C. After driving African Americans into this zone so they could build a freeway to new white suburbs, though, the city is in no mood to preserve the neighborhood for the poor black and Appalachian folks who call it home. As in the rest of the global South, indigenous people are not needed. They are scattered like so many Palestinians; settlements go up at the margins, zoning takes the place of tanks, trendy clubs are guarded by many clubs and guns, local TV produces hit-pieces on housing activists worthy of Fox or British dossiers. Our young student host has hosted mini-Witness tours from nearby Miami University, zoned for rather more privilege in the countryside nearby.

St. Louis
We tour a largely-demolished neighborhood dotted with Catholic Workers and co-housers - people who take in Honduran women who walk four days to enter the U.S. with twins in the belly. Neighborhood youth rehabilitate sturdy old brick buildings for low-rent housing. A Nixon-era urban mall sits in decay, with only a thriving old-time soda shop hinting at past vibrant neighborliness.

At Washington University, Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), a project of Jobs with Justice and the United States Student Association, sponsors a rally for living wage for campus employees. Nearby, Boeing develops smart weapons, while kids next door grow up in despised neighborhoods, forged in the psycho-order of people put in their place, then expelled from it. The economic draft blows through these neighborhoods, tempting these youth to be all they can be, kill all they can kill, and come back to more of the same. Like maquiladora workers they are fed into the machine, processed out the other end with bruised hands and hearts.

March 2004
Fayetteville, NC
Military families against the war in Iraq helped spearhead a demonstration in Ft. Benning's back yard. I interviewed the counter-demonstrators , mostly a motorcycle gang, and quite nice folks if you were white and pro-war. Spirited drumming and chants from Hip-hop groups. Later at a debriefing in Raleigh the local Fayetteville organizers discuss their progress from inaction through fear and on into decisive activity against war. They credit the existing community of activists with helping them bridge to their future as good citizens. Later at a debriefing from the debriefing at the Pour House, a local music hall, we note a bumper sticker prominently displayed on the stage: "Real patriots question our lying government." The band "Freeloader" hands out a pledge in which they proclaim themselves "proudly American, deidcated to the principles for which our federal government stands, freedom through fascism, enlightenment through zealotry, enrichment through consumption, number one country, under God, with all the justice money can buy."

Washington
Church of the Brethren's annual youth study event focused this year on the Middle East. Shrub explained it away. Next morning, the 100 Christian Citizenship Seminar participants went down to the church the next morning to meet, but were confounded by checkpoints thrown up by their advisers, simulating the Palestinian experience they were studying this week.

March 2004
Gallup
Small town with large number of Palestinians, including one family running a Middle Eastern restaurant combined with Native American art sales. Palestinians with Zuni rings. One woman must run off from our program to attend Stitch 'n Bitch, a crochet and conversation klatch related to Move On. Our guest speaker, a 16 year-old Palestinian, explains to a Vietnamese questioner the motives behind suicide bombings. The Immokalee Workers are in town, traveling another direction in another bus.

Bisbee
If you can get past the shenanigans of the border ruffians - vigilantes who relive the old west by harassing Mexicans along the illegal border - you can repair to the bar where they serve the local "Darky" beer, complete with a grinning darky caricature on the tap for easy locating on your third brew. We enter and inform the barkeep why we're leaving. All the regulars have heard it before and disagree with us, imagine. Their refrain is that this is a great country where you can have your own opinion. (Not to mention your own ignorance: one young African American woman - maybe the one in town - avers that the icon is a tribute to the first black entertainers in America. My studies of minstrelsy indicate otherwise. And besides, I'm older.) Meanwhile black soldiers down the road at the intelligence base, Fort Huachuca, are afraid to use the road, at night, when America is a great place where you can have your own opinion.

February 2004
Tucson
Tabling on campus we meet an ex-Marine who says the higher he rose in the service the more he realized how wrong it was. In the abandoned downtown an indie bookstore struggles along as cops watch drug deals and city fathers aid only the developers, not the little gal. Barnes and Noble has a tax amnesty, but not a store specializing in hidden histories.

Tempe
We join in the third annual Local to Global Justice Teach-in at Arizona State U. Our new speakers are Brian Avery of ISM and Dennis Kyne of Gulf War medic corps and depleted uranium expertise. Following the teach-in we march up the main drag to inform the hordes of dolled-up diners and daters that homelessness is being criminalized by a new law against "urban camping." The city is forcing the poor out to Phoenix, then to the fringes of Phoenix, and from there to further invisibility. A makeshift shelter is carried, symbolizing the shelters the city doesn't build because they're fully occupied building jails. Periodically we stop and violate the law by sitting down. I lean against a no trespassing sign - on the street. On the street! A speaker can't be heard, so the crowd repeats his discourse line for line in a sort of liberation street mass. A chant goes up: "You've got to fight for your right to nap time!" Then, "One, two, three, sleep!" and we all lie down. One shopowner is distraught by our presence, since sales are infinitely more important than democracy, let alone homefulness. One passerby informs us, "Get a job!" I inform him that we had one, preserving democracy. He informs me, "I'll shove democracy up your ass!" An informative evening all around.

Sedona
We find our way through the fog of tourism and crystals to Verde Valley High School, a collection of teens from around the world who study and frolic amidst towering red rock cliffs. Not all are trustafarians - there are scholarships. Very bright, well informed. Liberation educology is rampant. Shrub joins in the student recital, countering classical piano and school of rock and folk with anti-rock, anti-folk monotribes.

Flagstaff
The ongoing situation at Big Mountain, concerns over plans to cover the San Francisco Peaks with fake snow, and other regional struggles combine with Native American rock band Blackfire, dancing by children from the nearby reservation, and our speakers to show greed war and oppression at home and abroad. A cheery evening, only because we make common cause and commitment. There is a long-standing identification between Native Americans and Palestinians, guess why.
On to Mountain English-Spanish Academy, a charter middle school for immigrant kids, who are most affected by stories of children dying. They can relate to refugee status, somehow.

Las Vegas

As always, the Catholic Workers are top drawer hosts, generous, informative and entertaining. In addition to their soup line and other help for the homeless, they are involved with the campaign against the Nevada test site and other reasonably pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-world activities. The university appears to be so far a hotbed of social rest, but folks are working on it. The Strip - casino central - has expanded way beyond my 1968 experience of it, when I was stopped 13 times just because the Mafia didn't give us license plates with our drive-away car. WWII veteran Norb (shown with his car) does a daily peace vigil on the Strip. M&M's has a superstore here, site of a demonstration right after we leave because they use child labor in west Africa. There are also replicas of the important cities and monuments of the western world, in case the originals ever collapse or get blown away by irate colonial fanatics.

San Bernardino
Why shout about the Middle East in a sportsbar with the all-stars game on one TV and the Grammy's on the other. Because we can.
Well, and because that's what there was. Anyway, five harcore/punk/reggae/R&B bands needed a place to shout, and to donate their time and the door to the Wheels. Shrub is nonplussed and rants at the youth not to heed the alien orders of Conspiracy of Thought <www.jointheconsspiracy.com>, All or Nothing H.C. <www.ontherag.net>, Adam Lopez & the Bored of Education <www.amador44.com>, and The Tangled Minds <www.zentone.com>. But the bands persist in heaping accolades on Wheels o' Justice between their songs against conformity, commerce, and other suchlike occupations. And all occupations.

Then back to the homeless shelter at the Lutheran Mission, papered with anti-war, anti-dying at 52 from being black with cancer, anti-militarism, anti-crack posters. Homeless guys asking questions of our speakers: "But what can we do? No really, what can we do to stop it?" Then the after-school program, voted best in the area, heavily laced with liberation. Open mic brings out the inner poet in the teens. Can't stay for the Tuesday night hip-hop-jazz mass - too bad, this center offers such a set of lessons. In this area, average annual wage $9,000, the banks redline the neighborhoods of used up, tossed out folks. They aim to eventually evict the undesirables and replace them with a lake, which will set the mountains off nicely, bringing tourists who will never know there were once people here, before they were species-cleansed. In the meantime the cops may not be involved in methamphetines - surely some of them are not - but this is the meth capital of the nation, victimizing lots of veterans fleeing their memories. It's not yet a crime to be homeless here, as it is in San Diego, but it is a crime to feed the homeless on the street.

Orange County
In exclusive San Clemente, home of Dick Nixon, the John Birch Society approach to civilization persists. The old restrictive covenants preventing sale of homes to non-whites are to be disregarded due to the arrival of 20^th-century laws late in the game, but you couldn't tell. We're not allowed to park the bus more than a few hours. Maybe we could put it in the mail? Probably not in the mall. Not to worry, says my legal staff: refusal of the right to park a moving billboard for peace in an exclusive neighborhood will surely invalidate the election.

Duly Quoted:
An Israeli child, watching TV news, asks "Daddy, are we the bad guys?"

All over the county peace activists defy the climate of this bastion of reaction. We foray to Huntington Beach High School, where one student sagely informs us "We won't be safe till there's a U.S. flag on every country." On to a direct action training where we hear of a mall-walking demo at Fascist Island (OK, Fashion Island), where activists with matching anti-war t-shirts and stickers on their pants went non-shopping. One store displayed military fashions; the store manager's number was posted on a peace site and the resulting calls forced them to change the display.

San Diego: Put It in the Mail
Good thing we were welcomed by a professor at SDSU (I never knew SDS would go so far!) to speak to 30 students, given that the cops, well, copped an attitude at Ocean Beach. I can understand wanting the beach to be litter-free, even commerce-free, but their insistence that even downtown you had to have a permit to give out leaflets led me to ask the philosophical question of where one should go to have discourse with other citizens about national and world events. They suggested a private place, like a mall. This struck me as bordering on the disingenuous, since anyone who follows world events knows you can't leaflet in a mall. It also raises the larger social question of why political discourse should be shunted to private spaces. And many related questions. But, choosing to limit my line of inquiry, I merely asked what we should do if the private spaces should also declare themselves outside of society, just like the public ones. Cops being charged, empowered and equipped to render judgment on such questions, they did not disappoint: "Put it in the mail."

Well, now, that was educational. It seems to me that any one such incident of prevention of political discourse constitutes grounds for de-certification of the next election. Anyone?

North San Diego County
At Cal State San Marcos, a heckler holds aloft a sign reading "If you hate America, leave," until Fernando Suarez, whose son was killed in Iraq, gets up to speak against the war. Then he leaves. Good strong minority opposition to war in this bastion of beast belly. The Progressive Activists Network carries the ball.

A fabric designer made a 40-foot cloth version of the Arlington West cemetery - a "Traveling Iraq War Memorial" - with crosses bearing names of the Americans killed in Iraq. It fits nicely on the side of the bus. It was originally carried in the military parade in nearby Oceanside, by Camp Pendleton. Mr. Suarez there urged young Marines to go to school instead of war, and countermanded direct orders from a sergeant to shut up.

There is much conscientious objector counseling afoot here. I'm told of a soldier who was so repulsed by killing he gave away his pet snake because he couldn't bear to feed it mice anymore.

Over in Carlsbad, birthplace of the Boogie Board, another strong minority of students at the high school flock to the bus for buttons, stickers, and other ways to declare themselves outside the imperial consensus.

January 2004
Santa Barbara

We visit Arlington West, the mock cemetery set up on the beach by Veterans for Peace. A cross is planted for each U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, with names and home towns, along with a sign reading "If we honored the Iraqi dead, it would cover the whole beach."
On to Vandenberg Air Force Base, charged with direction of war in space. Vets for Peace will have to plant crosses on the moon.

Bakersfield
We travel to one of eight Halliburton installations to try and pry their hands out of the U.S. Treasury. Lots of coverage from Radio KUZZ, which is owned by Buck Owens or his ex-wife, maybe. Lots of friendly responses from the allegedly conservative populace of this oil-based countrypolitan mecca. Lots of peace signs flashed from cars, though some only half-way there. American Patriots for Any War Anywhere (OK I made that up) have been driving by peace demos to throw bottles and shoot pellet guns at the post-Americans struggling to surmount the media-fenced mental environment here.

Local lore has an undercover agent in "Peace Fresno" dying in a car crash. On seeing the obit picture with a different name, the community group protests the infiltration after the fact, to which the police demur, "If you're not doing anything illegal, why do you mind if we observe you?" A copy of the Constitution is being overnighted to the chief.

Hollister
Hollister in Black hosts a Friday vigil downtown in this somewhat Republican town (except for perhaps some of the Latinos who comprise a very small majority). The Republican kingpin organizes a counter-demonstration across the street with somewhat clever signs - "God grants forgiveness, U.S. Armed Forces arrange the meeting;" "Violence does solve problems: they're dead;" and most educational of all, "Pacifists funded by Worldwide Communist Party." We are anxiously awaiting our pensions. The faithful followed Shrub to the San Andreas Brewing Company, dba Earthquake Country Cafe, where they called in the constabulary to rout our Agent for waving toy guns around - the 2nd amendment only covers the real deal. Six cops couldn't find one Shrub, however, as he had done his vanishing act - most likely upwards in a black helicopter, he being above the law and all. Over at the church, the bus gang was told the condition of use was no government-bashing. And we were doing so well with our fair and balanced bashing of all governments! Anyway, isn't that the job of a citizen in a democracy? I'll have to check the manual again.
(See article in Hollister Pinnacle)

January 2004
Vallejo
Bus spoke to 400 folks in the schools. Vallejo beats out Davis in the Real Democracy Town sweepstakes. Sorry Aggies.

December 2003
San Francisco
Joint event with the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane and the Deadly Poets Society reading from the poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld. These folks are wild. Shrub calms them down. At a major movie theater in Oakland, the marquee reads "Congratulations Halliburton on your great financial victory in Iraq." Shrub is looking into this.

Davis
Somebody - somebody - prevailed on a rabbi who prevailed on Davis High School to cancel our appearance. But after a press conference, the superintendent came to visit the bus and indicated that perhaps mistakes were made and we might be allowed in next month. Sacramento gig was threatened as well but went off fine. One woman who came to combat what she thought she'd hear was won over and offered to help get us into Davis and raise some money. Score 1 for human communication.

Palo Alto
Counter-demonstrators at our city hall rally comprised a swath of Zionist opinion, from those anxious to find common ground to a hostile and aggressive dude with a cell phone connected to what seemed to be the Bill O'Reilly of Israel. Good to communicate with those who wanted to. The rally was dedicated to International Human Rights day. Not sure what the counter-demo was dedicated to.

Santa Cruz
Mayor Scott Kennedy declares December 9 "Wheels of Justice Day" - he has two grown children in the West Bank as we speak to the assembled. Pirate radio - aren't they all, really, but anyhow - brings Shrub and speakers on right after Free Speech Radio News, which the respectable stations don't seem to have the sense or guts to carry. KUSP, however, the community station that suffers NPR, has recently added Democracy Now!, which is heard up and down the valley.

Monterey
Selected signs from the weekly vigil along the oceanfront: "Go Solar, Not Ballistic," "Troops Home, Halliburton Shareholders to Iraq," "One nation under surveillance - repeal Patriot Act," "Now we blow up their houses - that'll win their hearts and minds," and "Not Radicals - Care about Earth and Humanity."

Ft. Bragg
As everywhere, potlucks to excess (we love it) and community access TV shooting at us. Here also romps in the ocean - the one we share with Vietnam and the Philippines and other such homes for former stateside jobs. With the biggest Redwoods gone, the mills close and the jobs disappear. Tourism substitutes, and ex-urbanites arrive in paradise (well, that wind is a bit much). But retirees and their young friends still attend to social responsibility, hungry for the info we haven't succeeded in getting on CNN, Faux News, etc.

Ukiah
We hit the high school, city hall and brewery. That should cover it. People are eating up the eyewitness reports, asking searching questions, wonderfully lacking in grinding axes.

Arcata, CA
Several locals who have been in Palestine join with our bus speakers to update an already active community of solidarity. The destruction by occupation forces that goes down in Palestine is so stark, so extreme, so off the map of human rights - yet virtually invisible in this country. Why? After all, it's our tax dollars that keep these horrors going. One suggestion: hit them where it hurts - withhold funds from these thugs. Tall order. Peace and Justice Center thrives with all kinds of organizational support, infoshop, and good spirits.

Bio-diesel bus rocks through the Redwoods with edutainment. Redwoods don't like smell of rotting freedom fries.
The bus rolls on - I roll off into the amber waves of Douglas Fir - see above.
* * * * * * *

Miami, November 2003

I People vs. Profit
According to anti-FTAA activists, the trend in international trade is to dismantle local economies and cultures, handing control of production, distribution and thought to international corporations. And the trade delegations of some Western Hemisphere nations are taking exception to the imposition of such a regime by nation #1, our own Uncle, the nation about which Mexicans have lamented their geography in the immortal "So far from God, so close to the United States." The effort underway in Miami was to bring the rest of the 34 nations closer, into the all-seeking embrace of the great white father in Washington. Or Wall Street.

Arrayed against the resurgent market fundamentalism of Bush and Bechtel are doctrines of economic fairness and power decentralization, aiming towards the development of equitable, sustainable economies that can eliminate poverty, and perhaps corporate welfare into the bargain. At this particular meeting, the refusal of Brazil and others to invite the U.S. embrace deadlocked the discussions, which ended early in a face-saving delay of decisions. Two words for those without time to study up on trade minutiae: people vs. profit. Sad to say, it really is that simple.

II Bad Truckma
On a balmy November 19 mid-afternoon I was sitting on the corner of NE 2nd and 2nd NE, minding mostly my own business, enjoying a Mango smoothie near a street corner blockaded by police officers. I was in Miami to cover the protests against the misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, which should properly be called the Free Exploitation of America Regime, or FEAR. I had arrived in the area a day earlier to cover the feeder march of Root Cause, a coalition of South Florida workers, primarily immigrants, who among other things are pursuing a boycott of Taco Bell for not raising wages in three generations. My reports would help Free Speech Radio News establish whether or not the FTAA was a legitimate organization or a cabal of scurrilous usurpers of local authority and culture.

The next day I parked my pickup, full of the sorts of unidentifiable items associated with life on the road, in a parking deck a block from the hotel, in anticipation of checking in several hours later when the Chapel Hill contingent would arrive. My smoothie idyll, which was unfolding on the same corner as the parking deck, came to an abrupt end as I looked up to see my truck jauntily careening down the street on two wheels, kindly assisted by a tow truck.

Neatly and carefully depositing my cup in a trash can, I sauntered over uncasually to query the officers on the scene. I now saw why they had blocked the street - my truck was suspected of harboring a bomb. This intelligence was received from no less an authority than the FB of I.

Over the next two days of my efforts to retrieve my vehicle, the bomb story was downgraded to suspicious package and finally to suspicious vehicle. I had turned out not to be a bomb-carrying journalist after all. Imagine my relief. My joy turned to despair, if not anger - ok, anger - when the car was returned to me with both door windows smashed out, along with the padlocks on the camper top, and all my possessions thoroughly if not carefully mixed. My files, so meticulously organized and placed in boxes, were, in a word, defiled.

Since my computer had been in the truck all this time, I was unable to file stories with my news service. This was minor suffering compared to that of my colleagues who were shot with rubber bullets and fraudulently arrested. Still, valuable lessons can be learned. If you plan to be in the vicinity of a demonstration against a creeping fascist organization masquerading as a democracy, get a normal-looking car. With no windows. Better yet, leave trade policy, war and other such arcana to the experts. They know what they're doing, along with what you're doing. Or might want to be doing. After you find out what they're doing.

St. Louis
The local community radio station is leaning away from public affairs - "they don't make any money" - and folks trying to maintain the founding vision of the station (sound familiar?) are fighting to reclaim their air wave. Stay tuned. Or tune in again later.
In the black community, efforts continue to institute a civilian police oversight committee, with the Board of Aldermen split precisely on - are you sitting down? - racial lines. In bankrupt East St. Louis, a prisoner beaten in jail won a lawsuit and was awarded city hall. Somehow they seem to have gotten it back.
The peace movement took 4,000 yard signs door to door. The gay and lesbian communities have been very active in peace work; a popular G&L cafe is used as a drop point, meeting point, etc. Meanwhile the ACLU sued, and won, over the protest pens demonstrators had been forced into when Bush came to shove. Tom Ridge came to speak and field softball questions, so one clever truth-seeker passed up a written question about fire trucks, then was asked to elaborate, and did. But not about fire trucks.
Peace activists count among their number a Holocaust survivor just now making her first trip to the occupied Palestine territories, where she'll join up with the International Solidarity Movement. Also some Catholics who were first politicized when they went to Brazil on business and happened on some slums. Yay travel, way to broaden. Oh yes, and some Friends. Not to mention Quakers.

October 2003
Manhattan, Kansas
You can see, here and there, even along the interstate, the prairie grasses that were once the glory of these plains. All plowed under now, but hereabouts there's a preservation and research zone that promises to re-open our understanding of the buffalo-amber waving pre-grain eco-system - just as we have, some of us, come to understand how bears and wolves and forests and even Redwood trees might have some meaning to us, or just to the world. Forget dumb humanity, I sometimes say. Or anyway, those dumb humanoids that plow up beautiful nature to mass produce anything and everything, Wal-mart style, till we are what we eat, and it all tastes like parking lot. Enough. I've learned a brand new nostalgia, or appreciation, for an environment long gone before I ever came looking for it.
Gotta love that Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice, though. Twice on Saturday out there goading the Americans, that is, motorists, to make any kind of statement against lock-step pre-thought lifestyle. Out there by the university gate and up on the overpass after the Big Game, engaging people in thinking about the Great Game, and honking about it, and maybe someday they'll get out of the car and come over and join up and make new friends and alliances and political parties. Well, you never know.

Kansas City
The Iraq Task Force goes to the mall disguised as a pro-Bush demo, with signs like "Practice random acts of violence" and "Visualize World Domination." Meanwhile Friends of Community Radio continues its battle for - oh, you know, same as above. Also an internet radio project to increase access and get folks in the habit of being the media.

Rockford, Illinois
At the Minglewood Cafe, ravers mingle with Unitarians and good old fashioned original near-mint condition hippies. Members of Poets for Peace collide with business school professors, sometimes in marriage, to broaden the perspectives and poetics of peace and justice.

Madison, Wisconsin
The sister of a national guardsman stationed in Iraq speaks at a community speakout on the Capitol steps, wearing sunglasses to shield her suffering. Ten-year olds testify that we have no business meddling around the world.

Dekalb, Illinois
When I came here 17 years ago I was hosted by Central America activists. Today one of them is on the City Council, which condemned the Patriot Act. Another has been to Nicaragua six times and continues to support projects there. A regular vigil has elicited both joining and mooning.

Syracuse
The Syracuse Peace Council has only been active since 1936, so they haven't achieved peace yet. A while back some peace activists were been kicked out of the mall for wearing unapproved t-shirts. The shirts said something about being against war, which didn't promote shopping or mindlessness, so they were out of place. Street-corner outreach continues, encouraging drivers to break their silence by honking for peace. This is the first political step for homo motoris. It leads directly to marching, yelling, and running for office. The council also works on uranium weapons and has a man in Baghdad, a member of Voices in the Wilderness, sending reports. Locals are also involved with Doctors for Global Health, sending medical workers around the world and involving folks in cooperative projects. Meanwhile, the main industries, Carrier (air conditioners) and Nestle, have cut jobs or closed altogether, so it's looking like, well, like the rest of the country.
Thanks to a broad community campaign, the Syracuse Common Council passed a strong resolution against the Patriot Act. Sectors from librarians to doctors are getting involved in saving democracy from what one council member described as a situation reminiscent of the slide of the Weimar Republic into fascism: not a sudden coup, but a piecemeal descent into barbarism.

Hoboken
Rock against Racism and others put together a folk-punk-rock for peace day inches from the Hudson River, facing Manhattan's skyline. Fast and loud, that's Shrub.

Boston
On April 3rd, 2003 Professor Tony Van Der Meer of the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, was assaulted and arrested by campus police for questioning a National Guard Army recruiter for threatening a student who was passing out flyers to honor Dr. King on the 35th anniversary of his assassination.
The assault, battery, and wrongful arrest of Professor Tony Van Der Meer was a key point of conflict between the anti war movement and the United States government repression embodied in the policies of the Department of Homeland Security and the PATRIOT Act.
Info: http://www.justicewithpeace.org/

Warren Wilson College
This small private college in Swannanoa, North Carolina has a mission for social and environmental justice, and is grappling with an exclusive contract with Pepsi that would eliminate alternatives (can we say juice?) and prostitute the college's good name in return for a sports scoreboard and money for post-season games. Students meet to make decisive input, possibly overruling staff members who have turned to Pepsi for funds. At issue here is not the privatization of public spaces so much as the corporatization of civic life. Participation in brand-name wars through the purchase of drinks with prices pumped up to pay for extreme advertising is to some more distasteful than the bottled bad health itself.

September 2003
The Farm
Outside Summertown, Tennessee, this community is down from some 1200 in 1981 to around 200, but continues to be active with social justice movements. There is an involvement with the needs of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, and the Peace Roots Alliance based here has been putting up "Peace is Patriotic" billboards around the country. The Farm is also a leader in midwifery and teaches innovative building techniques and environmentally friendly technologies of all sorts at its eco-village. And the publishing house has a catalogue of vegetarian cookbooks. There's no Wal-Mart, but then they've been kind of busy.Their global community efforts with Ham Radio, incidentally, preceded the World Wide Web.

August 2003
Lawrence, Kansas
The City Commission is set to pass a Living Wage ordinance that will require companies that get tax abatements to pay workers more than enough to get them to work standing up the next day, which is described as a Life Support Wage. The Chamber of Commerce has failed to mount a coherent argument against the measure.

Manhattan, Kansas
Living Wage is pushing ahead here too, with support from Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice. Labor Day picnics around the state are an effort to build up steam in a union-busted region. It's not the South, but union membership is hovering at 10%. What a civilized nation we have! Along these lines, Stan Cox, a scientist at the Land Institute (see Salina, below) has done a study of wages at Walmart, where one million Americans work. See http://www.members.cox.net/t.s/walmart.html

Salina, Kansas
Don't let them tell you the difference between Kansas and yogurt is that one has live culture. There's an arts festival here with international acts, and political activism that's threaded with spiritual diversity - not just Unitarians! A recent event featured African American gospel and Tibetan monks chanting and sand-painting. Salina People for Peace works to spread the peace gospel, contending with a regional tendency to condemn all those who don't adhere to one particular brand of evangelical Christianity as being most likely bound for somewhere not heavenly. Onward, soldiers not only Christian! Or not even soldiers!
And in middle school choir news, a Mennonite girl received an F for refusing to sing in a patriotic medley. Out at the Land Institute they're experimenting in wind, solar and horse powered farming - brand new stuff no one's ever thought of before. Oil companies are expressing delight and plan to convert their investments straightaway.

Boulder, Colorado
Of course it's a vibrant center for political action, but they do have to contend with the tsunami of people who were spit out by the San Francisco dot-bust, raising rents and lowering consciousness. There's sprawl, y'all, and murderous traffic - they need to get off the road so I can drive on it in peace! Anyhow, KGNU continues to be a leading light of socially responsible radio in the nation, and is looking into buying an AM frequency to increase its paltry reach. And satellite-based Free Speech TV is headquartered here, giving folks all sorts of ideas about taking charge of their own air waves.
The Rocky Mountain Peace Center booked the Nomad Theater, a wonderful playhouse, and brought in the fabulously frantic Nancy Norton, who brought down that classy house. Shrub had to put it back together from scratch, using only a hammer and the files on the audience he brought with him.

Durango, Colorado
In the midst of a conservative area this is a zone of more varied ideas, but that doesn't stop the pro-war demonstrators from countering peace vigils. Activists search for ways to communicate across the lines, or at least to try and give peace a good face in front of the citizens caught in between and forced to weigh the relative merits of peace and war. There are lots of tourists here, and one hates to suffer civic embroilment on vacation - though there might be something to be said for a civic participation theme park as holiday destination. The city council did pass a resolution against the Patriot Act, despite patriots who yelled at an 85 year-old peace demonstrator to get a job.
Following a national pattern, the non-commercial station with the big signal runs NPR so you'll know what the government thinks, and the small student station runs Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News, in case you want know what the outside world is doing.

Salt Lake City
Salt Lake's got a weird rap, which it maybe once partly deserved, and don't we all. They have a community radio station playing Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News. They've had demonstrations by a new group, People in Black; Code Pink went to greet Dick Cheney with banners hidden under their clothes, and the Greens round out the color scheme running for office while People for Peace and Justice stands against the officers the Greens run against. The color scheme is, like Wagner's music, better than it sounds. At the Fiddler's Elbow I had a Polygamy Porter - motto: "Why have just one?" Salt Lake's movin' right along.

Meanwhile, Mayor Rocky Anderson is pro-gay rights and progressive on other issues.. Salt Lake has become the magnet for young gays and lesbians not wishing to leave the Rocky Mountain region. I heard the mayor interviewed on community radio station KRCL, which carries Democracy Now!, High Country News, and many fine music programs. Listeners are accustomed to a having politics laced into their folk, world and bluegrass shows. A vibrant station in a rapidly diversifying area.

San Rafael
The Marin Peace and Justice Coalition is going great non-guns, working against the WTO, the Patriot Act, and the occupation of Iraq. But they're not all negative - they're for impeachment. And also Healthy Communities and a Fair Economy. Good luck my friends, I'm right behind you. Some 90 year-olds came to the show, along with some boringly average-aged folks. The opener was yet another Dick Cheney, this time Chris Pray, late of many old-timey landmark satire groups in Bay Area history.

San Francisco
Always good to visit home. The San Francisco Mime Troupe plays for free in the parks every summer. This year's entry is Veronique of the Mounties, in which the U.S. undertakes to liberate Canada through Operation Frozen Freedom. Ed Holmes reprises his excellent Dick Cheney. My show, a benefit for War Resisters League West, was in a soup kitchen at Martin de Porres House on Potrero Ave. One of the ladlers owned a café I played in in the eighties. He wasn't invented yet when I played in it in the sixties. Who's proud of what here?

Whidbey Island
WINS (Whidbey Island No Spray) got the authorities to stop spraying Roundup along the roadsides, saving some kids from learning disabilities. Meanwhile, the Peace and Reconciliation Network educates on the Bill of Rights, not far from Oak Harbor Naval Base, which sends large numbers of soldiers to Iraq. A similar situation is confronted in

Bremerton
where I'm hosted by a peace café co-owned by a woman who was a Marine for eight years, and is now writing her autobiography, "Queer to the Corps." Peace workers are trying to reach people with a military mindframe through discussions of depleted uranium, cuts in veterans' benefits, and other gifts from Democracy, Inc.. Meanwhile, up in

Port Townsend
the show would have been held at the high school but the liability insurance would have cost four times the usual because the peace movement is "so high risk." No matter, the Rose Theater is a beautiful old place. Activists are working to stop nuclear waste dumping in ditches that leak into the Columbia River, not to mention the dubious storage at Hanford, WA. Meanwhile, the Juice Bar plays Democracy Now! on TV three times a day! Holy community educational political gathering, Batwoman!

Vashon Island
The Green Party here is working by district and county on local issues as well as grappling with national politics, sorting out how to keep GW from ever getting elected President, ever at all. Vashon Islanders for Peace are involved in various campaigns and working out strategy with their counterparts in the island-peninsula region, which, although rather beautiful, is plagued by 24/7 rain, Africanized mosquitoes, a rare breed of biting cow, interminable ferry waits, and an impenetrable dialect. Therefore no one moves here and few visit, except briefly to boost the local economy. Folks here do know how to party, though - there's nothing like a piano and a pool table, and home-made wine to ruin your pool game and some Dylan tunes.

Seattle
One of our elder sisters, or let's just say a Raging Granny, thought a police officer was rather too enthusiastic in his treatment of a young protestor at a recent demonstration against a new police organization designed to more thoroughly surveil and derail those of us who want our world back. She asked him three times, politely, why he was doing that thing he was doing, and the officer merely informed her to move it. Finally she slapped him on the face. Later she went to the hearings on the widely-observed officer brutality and said "I hit a cop, and I'll do it again."

July 2003
Helena, Montana
Members of Helena's Seeking Peace organization joined others from around Montana at a Minuteman missile silo to demonstrate support for four nuns being sentenced in Colorado for breaking and hammering on similar missiles. They monologued with the soldiers about their feelings regarding nuclear weapons. Meanwhile back in Helena the Montana Logging and Ballet Company, a political satire group, are wondering what to do with themselves since getting the boot from NPR, where they were theater in residence. The date of their redundancy (letting go) was January 20, 2000 - yay satirical cleansing o' the airwaves. Go Bush, beat dissent!

North Dakota
The Great Prairie stretched south from mid-Canada. Even the tall grasses are gone now; nothing in nature, it seems, survives the improvements of civilization. How smart, then, are we, to destroy that which gave us birth? I did see some wild horses, and the other kind as well, and observed a failed cross-fence attempt at interhorse.
When Steinbeck came through here in 1960 with his dog Charlie, the Indian-free landscape reminded him of his neighbor, an author who had served in the cavalry that harassed the Nez Percé for a thousand miles as they attempted to escape to Canada with their families. He said it was the saddest duty he had ever performed. Too bad there weren't more folks declining their duty in those days. And these. There are, however, peace groups in North Dakota - don't let them tell you there ain't.

St. Paul, Minnesota
A group of priests, including some from the Peace Studies Department at the University of St. Thomas, have just returned from Iraq. Their feeling is that in their recklessness and incompetence, the United States government may just be throwing out the baby with the Ba'ath. They originally went there in January in an attempt to forestall the invasion. They also continue their involvement with efforts for justice in Colombia, Venezuela and Central America.

Madison, Wisconsin
Community radio station WORT was the first U.S. station to break the story of the plagiarized dossier cited by Colin Powell in his UN speech. This station is part of a vibrant community that includes many peace groups, bookstore and food co-ops and also a store with a big sign that says "The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." That store is of course a bike shop called Revolution Cycles. Meanwhile, the CIA is coming to campus to recruit, and interested folks will meet them to ask questions that have come up about their endeavors in the world community.

June 2003
Chicago
Chicago newspaper publisher Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi has been charged with acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign country -- Iraq. The last time this type of case was prosecuted in the area was more than 40 years ago, when federal officials charged a man rumored to be a member of the Communist Party with being a foreign agent of the Soviet Union. Listen to Chris Geovanis' Free Speech Radio News report from Chicago. at http://www.fsrn.org/news/20030721_news.html

Columbus, Ohio
Lots of work is going on against wrongful conviction. John Byrd, one of many convicted on suspect testimony of jailhouse snitches, was executed this year. Until we are able to see our corrupt system as clearly as others do, this travesty of justice will continue to claim innocent lives. See investigative journalist Bob Fitrakis' new book, "Free Byrd & Other Cries for Justice." Righteous research is happening in Columbus. See the Free Press.

Washington DC
National conference of US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
Two days of discussion of campaigns for education and mobilization against the occupation of Palestinian territories, and work on campaigns for divestment, with a focus on the Caterpillar company that supplies specialized bulldozers for demolishing houses and killing Palestinians and Rachel Corrie. Do we want our taxes and "our" multinationals supporting illegal occupation, dispossession, forced diaspora? I don't think so! Primo Levi said "Everyone is someone's Jew, and the Palestinians are Israel's Jews." Let's stop this - who's ready? You can tell this campaign is cool because they put together a g