It was a short walk to San Francisco's primary riot venues from my grungy tenement apartment at 925 Sacramento Street. Either up the hill to the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins, or through the Stockton Tunnel to the Union Square hotels. War criminals were always coming to San Francisco. Still are, lots of them welcomed and feted.
One night at the Fairmont may have given the feminist movement major forward momentum when the “chicks up front” seated on the curb across the street from the Fairmont took the first blows from the Tac Squad's fungo bats when the sadists in blue jumpsuits suddenly charged across the street as all us stop the war cadres massed between the Fairmont and the Pacific Union Club. The Tac Squad was selected for their size; they were all big, agile bastards who enjoyed beating people up, especially longhaired, loud-mouthed, highly irritating people like us. (There was a Tac Squad offshoot on patrol at night in unmarked cars. These guys were described by a cop friend as, “fat guys who like to drive around beating people up.”)
That night, we were hollering up at the impervious hotel facade for Field Marshall Ky, one of LBJ’s interim Vietnamese stooges, to go home. Ky was home, as it soon turned out, melting into Los Angeles to run a restaurant rather than the second-hand country he'd been looting for LBJ’s blundering imperialists.
Someone, probably an undercover cop grandly rechristened as a provocateur by us lefties who were on perpetual alert for infiltrators, sabs, and miscellaneous running dogs, although the sabs couldn't have been better than we were at sabbing ourselves, threw a balloon full of red paint up against the implacable gray wall of the grand old hotel, monarch of San Francisco’s inns.
No sooner was the paint running bright red down the hotel’s wall, the Tac Squad was sprinting across the street and clubbing their pre-designated demonstrator of choice. The chicks up front got the worst of it because they were no sooner on their feet to flee than the clubs started falling on them.
My brother and I jumped the stone wall into the Pacific Union Club — no Jews, no people of color, no women, nobody with a net worth less than half a billion. We were sprinting for the relative safety of Huntington Park past the basement door of the Club when a man in the black and white checked pants and cook’s hat of the kitchen worker, a bona fide member of the proletariat whose interests my comrades and I were theoretically committed to advancing, yelled, “You can't come through here!” Bro straight-armed the kitchen man, sending him clattering among empty garbage cans, and soon we were beyond the big boys wielding the clubs.
Behind us we could hear the screams and curses of the targets of opportunity as they were beaten by the defenders of order, and then things deteriorated into the usual 60s demo ritual of back and forth stampedes, this one up and down the flat Nob Hill block of California Street between Mason and Taylor.
We’d re-group when the Tac Squad retreated, then they’d chase us down California again, and on it would go for several hours, romanticized later in song and selective memory as ‘Street Fighting Man.’ It was more like running the bulls, with one or two cops scattering and pursuing a thousand middle-class book readers who'd never been in so much as a fistfight. We certainly weren't the Frisco longshoremen of 1934 in support of whom San Francisco was completely shut down for a week. The old working class stood and fought. The 1967 working class was with the cops all the way. We represented no one but ourselves, although public opinion was beginning to oppose the war even while enjoying the weekly spectacle of us getting whacked around by the Tac Squad and their East Bay counterparts when the demo targets were in Oakland and Berkeley.
That night we got smashed with the fungo bats and ran up and down Nob Hill streets, and very soon the worst of us, the fanatics, the true nut cases, the stone killers, the dwarf Lenins, took over the left, such as it was, and here we are today with millions of young people aware that America is not a benign force in the world and only rhetorically benign at home, but facing forces far more formidable than those we faced then, the primary one being the destruction of the global show itself.
I really enjoy these stories of resistance from the generation before mine. Last time you published this, I recounted the story of one of Caspar Weinberger’s visits to SF in 1985. This time I’d like to share a snippet of 2003 – not so much a story of resistance, just a snapshot in time.
In 2003, the brain rotting mind control embodied by Barack Obama had not taken hold yet. The Republicans were still thought of as the warmongers, the memory of Vietnam having faded and the memory of the first Gulf War still fresh. In 2003, if the government embarked on a war of aggression based on lies, people actually noticed – people actually protested. The largest protests in the history of the US, in fact.
I’ve always had a sense of when I was in a crowd that was about to be surrounded by the police. And (from the some-things-don’t-change department) the protestors would routinely self-sabotage themselves into a corral, partially because so many of the protestors had never protested anything. I decided that instead of being one of the sheep constantly running up against the police, I would try to keep as many people out of police custody as possible. I had only myself and a backpack of fireworks – sparklers and spinners, nothing that went ‘bang’ as that could get people hurt.
I probably kept hundreds of people out of jail that night. Every time I saw the signs that the police (there was no official Tactical Squad by now) were about to surround a group of people, some of us would create a disturbance to disrupt their plans. In one case all it took was clipping some zip ties to unlock barricades and push them into the street, creating an exit. Another time I lit a bunch of the fireworks in an intersection, causing cars to turn directly into a police line that was closing in.
At an intersection at the edge of The Tenderloin, my luck almost ran out. I sensed the police closing in on the crowd I was in just a moment later than I usually would, and I started moving to the edge. As I approached the intersection, I saw a line of cops on dirt bikes. I started running.
At moments like this, things really do go in slow motion. My memory plays it back frame by frame like a series of still photos. The vanishing gap of escape. The front tire of the lead motorcycle popping over the curb and onto the sidewalk. The sudden realization that “I’m not going to make it.”
And in the next frames, the bike, cop atop, falling over. The slight frame of a young man (boy?) rolling on the ground. My arm looping around his elbow, pulling him up. “C’mon!!!!” We ran. I didn’t look back, but I could hear motorcycles. Somehow, some way, when I did look back I saw a mob of people between us and the dirt bikes. I dumped all my remaining fireworks in an intersection, lining two of the crosswalks.
The gravity of what had just happened hit me. This kid, all of 5’3″, had pushed over the cop on his motorcycle, allowing us to escape. “Thanks for that,” I said, nudging my head in the direction we had come from, and asked, “what’s your name?” He replied, “Donny.” (I’m not using his real name in this retelling.) “Well, Donny, we better get off the streets, follow me, I know where we can go.” I could tell he was a little bit relieved. “Thanks, I don’t know San Francisco very well.”
A friend of mine was in a death metal band at the time, and I knew he would be at their rehearsal space in The Tenderloin. As we carefully and watchfully walked the two blocks to the rehearsal space, I asked Donny where he was from and how he came to be at the protest.
“I’ve been living in a tree in Humboldt for the last 160 days. Someone told me the war had started so I got on a bus and came to San Francisco. I’ve never been here before. I’m from Ohio.”
I had spent several years tutoring troubled and at-risk youth, high school age kids who were plenty smart, but wrestled with demons. Donny struck me as someone who possibly got bullied or perhaps was physically abused by one or both parents. I noticed he had ‘animal rights’ patches on his jacket. I knew of several young survivors who got into animal rights and being eco-warriors. I think defending the defenseless is something that struck a cord with them. I didn’t know this kid, so I didn’t ask.
We made it to the rehearsal space, a small, cramped room, heavy on ventilation, with just enough room for a few people and their instruments. Donny and I sat down and were finally able to take some deep breathes. I told my friend what had just transpired. He understood, but his bandmates were waaaay too cool to be associated with any sort of protest (again, it’s 2003 not 1968).
Someone pulled out a bubbler – a water pipe like a bong, but for crack or speed… in this case, speed. As it was being passed around, Donny leaned over and whispered “what is that?” … “Don’t take any,” I whispered back. Never have I appreciated good ventilation so much.
We left the safety/unsafety of the rehearsal room. “You have a place to stay?” I asked. There was a pause before he answered. “Not really, but I just need to find my people.” We walked another block before I had to turn south, back to The Mission. “Thanks again, man. Good luck with everything.”
Despite global protests that were the largest the world had ever seen, the war went on. US troops are in Iraq to this day. 2003 was just the beginning of Wesley Clark’s list of Neocon targets (“Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing it off with Iran”). Once Obama was elected in 2008, the anti-war movement ended. By 2011 when they unleashed yet another war of aggression against Libya – based on 100% lies as usual – we could only get 40 or so people to show up to a protest. Cindy Sheehan was there, livid at the paltry response. The US continued bombing Libya through 2019, with basically zero protest.
Wherever Donny is today, I hope he is living his best life.