EUGENE, OREGON CONTINUES ITS WOEFUL TASER TRIALS, fumbling with this new electric torture device that has cops in a tizzy from coast to coast.

I covered the very first use of Tasers in Eugene, Oregon while working for MTV’s Street Team in 2008. I also covered the fifth use of tasers here in Eugene, when demonstrating college student Ian Van Ornum was tazed to the ground until he had seizures (video here, and embedded below; article here). +/-»

Well, now we have another incident of Taser abuse in Eugene, Oregon (sombrero tip to Angry Asian Man) and believe it or not, it’s by the same cop who tazed Van Ornum. This time, he sent 50,000 volts into the body of a human being for Sleeping While Chinese.

The same Eugene police officer who used a Taser to subdue a protester last year in downtown Eugene is at the center of another high-profile stun gun incident — this one involving a Chinese, non-English-speaking college student whom the officer shocked during an ill-fated confrontation last month in west Eugene. …

This isn’t the first time Warden has faced Taser-related criticism. In May 2008, he used the weapon to control anti-pesticide protester Ian Van Ornum at a downtown rally while another officer struggled to handcuff the University of Oregon student.

Several witnesses charged that Warden unjustly used the Taser on Van Ornum, who was later convicted of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

Van Ornum filed a formal complaint with the city against Warden and other officers involved in his arrest, which prompted a city investigation into their actions.

That’s about the connection to Van Ornum. Here’s the recent result of our new Electric Sadism Machines:

An investigation is under way to determine whether a Eugene police officer overreacted when he used a Taser stun gun to subdue a foreign college student who the officer mistakenly believed was trespassing in a west Eugene apartment.

The male student is a resident of an Asian country who does not speak English. He is involved in a University of Oregon program, but it is unclear whether he is an enrolled student, city Police Auditor Mark Gissiner said.

The incident unfolded the evening of Sept. 22 when a prospective tenant of an apartment on West 11th Avenue saw a man sleeping inside and reported it to police.

The property’s landlord, Timothy Breen of Eugene, said police called him about the initial report. Breen — who said transients had caused trouble at the complex before — met officers at the apartment complex and told them that he believed the unit should have been vacant.

A few minutes later, Breen said, he overheard the sound of a stun gun being deployed. Officers then came outside and spoke to Breen.

It was then that the landlord realized that the two Asian men inside the apartment had picked up keys for the unit from his office about three hours earlier.

The last time Officer Judd Warden was accused of discharging his Taser in an inappropriate way, the Lane County District Attorney pulled some sneaky stuff. Before Cristina Beamud finished auditing the situation to determine if Warden should be disciplined in any way, the DA decided to jump up before she was done and instead charge Van Ornum with crimes. (See second letter for one Eugene resident’s feelings on this—they were not alone, many felt this way because it was a plainly dishonest maneuver.)

The cop was declared righteous, the student deemed criminal, the electricity that laid him to the ground in spasm, validated and just. And so the law and the law’s thugs work hand in hand to prevent a larger sense of justice from playing out, while a young man concerned with toxins in the environment learns a harsh lesson in college. Fighting the power means you are in a serious underdog position and that sooner or later, they will come for you with violence sanctioned by law.

This time, the Officer Judd Warden and the landlord, and probably the state will excuse this as “Well, Jeez. I meant to blast the shit out of a sleeping transient! Not a person who rents an apartment!” and I hope it’s immediately clear how amoral this type of thinking is.

And why is it that the cops—these supposed badasses with jingly guns, darts, masks, cuffs, and training in submission holds—are always blasting homeless people, sleeping people, wheelchair users, shackled people…?????

You really want the nation to fear and hate cops even more than so many do now? Keep at this. Keep zapping people. Keep electrocuting people for “attitude problems” or “fast moves” (like turning away from you), or for sleeping in the wrong place; keep making it clear that being law-abiding isnt good enough anymore. Keep creating a collective mental image of bulletproofed goons shocking vulnerable or already incapacitated people, and handicapped, and pregnant, and elderly, and mentally confused, and homeless people.

Enough of that and one day you’ll need to hire your own protection from those you are ostensibly here to protect!

[This is the video I made while the auditing process—of what was deemed a "test case" by the Oregon Emerald for Taser use in the city—was still playing out.]

by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger

A grafik made in 2007 for an older post, resurrected here for this special purpose

In 2008, a disturbing trend developed in mainstream media regarding Mexico. While Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón began his aggression against the Cartels roughly two years ago, the resulting uptick in violence was of no real interest to mainstream media. But when the U.S. Joint Forces Command report Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008) was issued in November, 2008, and declared Mexico and Pakistan nations in danger of a “rapid and sudden collapse,” mainstream news outlets and certain politicians began broadcasting fears of violence spilling over into the US.

Coverage quickly snowballed into a cycle of reporting grounded in unsubstantiated fear, which led to calls to further militarize the border. Democracy Now! highlights how President Obama’s readiness to deploy the National Guard to the border is directly linked to the sensationalized mainstream coverage. In an interview with host Amy Goodman, Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program for the Center for International Policy, says:

When we started to look at some of these articles talking about spillover of Mexican violence into the United States, what we found is that there’s no evidence of that whatsoever at this point. … In the case of using statistics, like there’s a lot of talk about the number of kidnappings in Phoenix, it turns out that many times those statistics are spurious, and they have no backup. They’ve been invented, or they’ve been twisted in many cases.

This is a real warning sign for us, because when we see an exaggerated threat assessment, as we’re seeing right now in terms of spillover of Mexican violence to the United States, it’s generally a prelude to militarization.

And it is: Truthdig reports on “a crime-fighting operation targeting Mexican drug cartels on a scale not seen since the battles against the US mafia” in F.B.I. Runs for the Border.

The War on Drugs has returned, via aid/force packages like Plan Mérida that simply recycle failed plans (like Plan Colombia). Under increased militarization, drug production actually goes up, as does the body count, but the seizure of drugs decreases.

In the interests of full disclosure, the increasing exploitation of the Mexican people and militarization of border towns like Ciudad Juarez and El Paso—my father’s birthplace—affect me on a deeply personal level. My father was the first of Herreras in my family to be born here. I am a citizen. He makes sure to remind me that my abuela (grandmother) gained her green card legally. I read of harm done to people like my grandmother—legal and undocumented and citizens alike—in jails teeming with neglect and hatred and it disturbs me. Immigration must be discussed as a human, not military issue.

In the below video from GritTV, Rosa Clemente, Immigration Campaign Director for Amnesty International USA, talks about the lack of response from the Obama Administration on immigration, even though ICE is predicting 400,000 arrests in 2009 and our 2009 budget allots 6.1 billion to the construction of new prisons. How many of those prisons will be detention centers?

Opponents of immigration reform (who are often opponents of immigrants themselves) often imply that they really do adore legal immigrants. Joshua Holland makes it clear how very tenuous that line is in AlterNet’s I Married an Illegal Immigrant. Holland writes that “the difference between legal and illegal is often a matter of simple chronology rather than a reflection of the character of the person in question.”

Disguising undocumented “aliens” as an unwanted, criminal horde, rather than productive members of our own society runs counter to American ideals of freedom and equality. It becomes easier to simply lock down the border and take a harsher stance, even if many of those who migrate were displaced by our own government’s actions in the first place.

The Drug War model is a failed method of dealing with immigration, even though Obama seems intent to resurrect it. Writing for The Progressive, Yolanda Chávez Leyva says:

For more than twenty years, those of us who live on the border have witnessed the increasing militarization of the border. The border wall is a daily reminder of this, as are the helicopters that fly over our neighborhoods, the checkpoints manned by the Border Patrol and local law enforcement, as well as the daily harassment of citizens who happen to have darker skin. We are frequently the target of various “wars” —against undocumented migration, against terrorism and now against drugs. I am tired of living in a war zone.

The model of “war” has not worked, and it will not work.

President Felipe Calderón—who Democracy Now! reports was elected in “the most controversial election in Mexican history”—is spoken of glowingly by our politicians, who are full of praise for his violence against the Cartels. Elena Shore details some of this language for New America Media.

Going back to Lauren Carlsen’s interview with Democracy Now!: “It’s completely unacceptable to ask a society to accept higher levels of violence as a sign that we are winning the drug war.” She’s right. We will never “win” the “drug war.” The body count is growing. More prisons are being built. People of color are the primary victims. And now, President Obama talks of sending the military down to meet Mexico’s military at the border. But what about the people caught in the middle? What about the people suffering in ICE’s custody today? What about the 400,000 more that ICE plans to capture in 2009?

We need better solutions than more guns and more soldiers. Militarization simply leads to more violence.

——————-

Also featured at The Sanctuary, Huffington Post,Talking Points Memo, Open Salon, DailyKos, MyDD, Open Left, FDL, Rabble.

[As usual, this edit on UMX may differ from the version published at the media consortium site and that which circulates on the above named outlets]

crossposted from my weekly gig at TMC, originally titled Weekly Immigration Wire: Abuses Rampant in US Detention Centers

by Nezua
Media Consortium Blogger

In political circles, we sometimes use the phrase “police state,” to describe losses of civil liberties or the encroachment of penal processes into our lives. But how does such a thing manifest in our every day experience? Some would point to the all-too-casual use of electric shock devices by legal authorities. Others would quickly mention the United States’ swiftly growing enterprise of detention centers, barbed wire and concrete compounds or camps managed by Immigrations Customs and Enforcement (ICE).

These centers are at the forefront of this week’s Immigration Wire, due to a riot at the Reeves County Detention Center in Pecos, Texas—the “second uprising in recent weeks,” according to RaceWire’s Feb. 4 article:

The protest began after a group of immigrant prisoners attempted to meet with the detention facility’s authorities, demanding that a gravely ill detainee be released from solitary confinement and be taken immediately to a hospital. The prison authorities refused to listen and did not take action. The detainees responded by protesting after being ignored.

In Desperation in Detention, Michelle Chen reveals other abuses related to the riot and quotes Wallace County, TX district attorney Juan Guerra, who warns that these conditions are a nation-wide trend. Guerra is right. While the conditions at Reeves County are shocking, they are not new developments.

In July of 2008, Alternet’s Joshua Holland moderated a workshop called How to Win the Immigration Debate and Beat Back ICE’s Emerging Police State, where he spoke of Hutto Prison in Texas. Latino Politico’s Man Egee liveblogged the event:

Guantanamo Bay receives global condemnation, but right here in the US the poorest of the poor are being rounded up in a migrant gulag. Many are not charged with crimes, health care access is withheld, etc.

30 minutes to the north of Austin, the T. Don Hutto, half of the detainees are children, as young as three years old. It is a medium-security prison that has been changed very little to house families.

New America Media’s Feb. 3 article, Fear and Hate Policies Along the Border: R.I.P., clearly defines the inhumane conditions at work in detention centers across the country.

Here, in the United States, there is an entire detention system set up to house thousands of migrants, including women and children. They are generally incarcerated without rights, without due process and without trials. In Texas, the Hutto detention facility (also operated by CCA) continues to inhumanely imprison migrant children, separating them from their families. According to the recently released “Unseen Prisoners” study, by researchers from the University of Arizona, some 300 migrant women were being held in 2007-2008 in three detention centers (two are operated by CCA), subjected to unwarranted and inhumane conditions.

For those of you looking for additional reporting on immigration, The Sanctuary is tireless in their efforts to expose what goes on in these facilities, as New Report Details Abuse at Privately Run Ice Detention Center illustrates. The Sanctuary also casts some light on the Reeve’s operators in Feb. 1′s Prison Riot Underway Due to Inhumane Treatment & Death! GEO Group cited for Worst Prisons Ever!

…The GEO Group is an international corporation that operates prisons around the country and is frequently in the news for its abuse of prisoners in its care resulting in many preventable deaths. At least eight people died at the Geo Group-operated George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania, the state’s only privately run jail. Several of those deaths resulted in lawsuits by family members who say the facility did not provide adequate medical care or proper supervision for inmates.

In the U.S.’s detention centers, human rights violations abound. In March of 2008, there was the outrageous treatment of Francisco Castaneda, who died shortly after being released from the San Diego Correctional Facility as a result of what U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson deemed “one of the most, if not the most, egregious ‘violations of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment that the court has ever encountered.’”

And in August 2008, Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng died in the custody of ICE with advanced cancer and a fractured spine. His family has not given up the fight for justice, as New America Media reported on Feb. 4:

Ng’s family seeks answers about his treatment during his detainment at the Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, RI, which allegedly denied him use of a wheelchair and failed to take him to scheduled medical appointments.

A Rhode Island court is expected to decide this month if the Wyatt Detention Center, which contracted with ICE but is not part of ICE, must turn over the records.

In the wake of the Decider, we are left with abuses of power, broken laws, and remnants of symbolic and wasteful movements, like the 669 miles of fencing along a minuscule part of the border between the US and Mexico.

Fear and persecution of the Immigrant come in cycles: We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. How will we handle it today? Will Obama’s agenda extend to migrant communities?

When President Barack Obama made it his first act in office to shut down Guantánamo Bay prison, effectively ended one shameful chapter in our country’s embarrassingly large book of human-rights abuses. It was not so much redemption as a reminder that this country has a long, long way to go when it comes to detention, due process, and the Geneva Convention. It’s not just alleged terrorists that are suffering from our inhumane treatment. [...] Children and families have suffered inexcusable indignities under this new policy, which treats them like convicted criminals instead of asylum-seekers and potential citizens. —The American Prospect, The Big Business of Family Detention, February 2, 2009

Maybe we truly are leaving behind some of our darkest days. There are signs here and there of positive change. Glimmers of hope.

Meanwhile we keep at it. At the least, we can do like the child who slipped a note into the hand of an adult visiting Hutto prison asked: “help us and ask questions.”

Also featured at The Sanctuary, Open Salon, Firedoglake, Huffington Post, Open Left, MyDD, Daily Kos, TPM

XOLAGRAFIK PRODUCTIONS releases a Fight All ISMs Venture: VENEER AND LOATHING, The Pollatix of Grain and Periphery, a 25 minute documentary of the Democratic National Convention as seen through the eyes of a few bloggers, officially credentialed and traveling the fringe.

I CALL IT VENEER BEER AND LOATHING for a couple reasons. (Video below, this title card is just a screenshot.) One reason is to remind myself not to take the whole thing too seriously, as when you invest weeks of your life—between shooting, editing, and all the inbetween activities and heavy thought and emotion process that goes into making a film that is 25 minutes long—it would be easy to get very serious and self-important about it. And you can watch the rest to understand the other reasons that went into taking a Hunter Thompson title and pouring hops over it. (I was naive to not realize that a handful of other people would upload videos online with the same main title, but ah well! update: the edit of this will be retitled ”Veneer and Loathing” as i like the symbolism better and i hate to have a film that is titled the same as tons of other ones. But I’ve been on this long enough, that will have to wait a bit.) update 2, 1 yr later: Done.

I also don’t mean to belittle the effort either, thought, as I did try my best to sketch out some of the reasons the trip and the convention was important to me and to mis blogmig@s.

IF anyone wants a DVD of the full-quality version for their own library and sense of historicality hit the paypal button and send $9 plus your shipping addy and I will send one out. Please note when sending $ what that it is for the DVD of the DNC08. Because soon I’ll be putting out the RNC08 video REPUBLIKANATION, too, and also use that PayPal for a few things. Alternately, if you just want to support these kinds of efforts, feel free to donate. Really. Totalllly free.

Gracias!

(PS: This will probably play smoother if you pause it and let it load first before playing…especially as it’s a long-ish piece. If you want, here is a dark room for better viewing.)

ON MEXICO’S INDEPENDENCE DAY, and just as the celebration was full swing, two grenades exploded among the crowd.

The latest [violence]  during the traditional “grito,” or shout for independence, late Monday night. Michoacan Gov. Leonel Godoy had just finished shouting “Viva Mexico!” from a balcony, when the two grenades exploded simultaneously in the crowd, blocks apart.

At first, the throngs of families thought the explosions were part of the fireworks display. Then thick, black smoke rose from the crowd, people started screaming and the cathedral’s bells fell silent. As the crowd cleared, rescuers attended to the wounded and dead.

Both state emergency officials and state prosecutors said seven were killed, although there were earlier reports that the death toll had risen to eight.

Godoy, who was unhurt, said witnesses saw a heavyset man wearing black throw one of the grenades, then beg forgiveness for what he had done. But he provided no more details, and there were no immediate claims of responsibility. Authorities made no arrests.

“Without a doubt, we believe this was done by organized crime,” he said. The governor’s office later said he was traveling to Mexico City late Tuesday to meet with Calderon.

The attack targeted a cherished tradition that brings millions of Mexicans together in public plazas each year, and cast an immediate pall over Tuesday’s parades, held in cities and towns across the nation to celebrate the 1810 start of Mexico’s 10-year war of independence from Spain.

—7 killed in Mexico Independence Day grenade attack

“Without a doubt” they “believe” this was done by organized crime…and without a speck of evidence!

It’s really amazing how fast all the papers are to pin this on the Cartels. Not that both the Mexican government (another organized crime unit) and the Cartels aren’t escalating violence, ever since Calderón stole the election. But so has the Mexican Government, in its dirty refusal to heed the people and their violent rejection of the corrupt Ulises Ortiz Ruiz. They both are. But even in the first paragraph, and without ANY evidence at all, articles are pushing the government line.

So Calderón, the slimy and illegitimate president, gets his little foto op of him stroking a girl’s forehead while he orders troops into Michoacán, and puts people on a “high alert” for more violence and steps up patrols in Morelia and other municipalities such as Apatzingán, Aguililla, Tepalcatepec, Buenavista, Uruapan and Lázaro Cárdenas.

US papers make sure to remind us, or imply, immediately what is behind that violence. (My emphasis:)

MORELIA, Mexico (AP) — Assailants threw two grenades into a huge crowd of Independence Day revelers, killing seven and injuring more than 100 in a brazen attack that escalates the war between Mexico’s army and drug gangs.

—7 killed in Mexico Independence Day grenade attack

Clever, eh? But sadly, it is true that this escalates the ongoing and escalating violence, even if it is not true that the “drug gangs” caused it. Even if this was done by the CIA or related people (a very popular trick of governments not only in the USA, but recently in Oaxaca, and historically, such as in Tlatelcolco), it will (and already is) being used to justify more violence by the Mexican government, more military presence, and more repressive tactics. It ain’t no new story.

It’s alllll about this:

MORELIA, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexico’s president called for an end to a culture of “impunity and tolerance” of crime on Wednesday after suspected drug traffickers killed seven people in a grenade attack during independence day celebrations.

But not an end to tolerance of stolen elections, corrupt governors, police instigating violence to blame it on la gente, no! That crime is okay. But clearly, this is a signal that things are about to change even more for poor madre México.

As I (and many others) write often, this “GWOT” is a front for more government control and militarization of culture and more juice to the corporate forces now sucking up loot and fuel in Iraq and all over.

Aqui, they scare us with brown people from poorer nations. Alli, they use the threat of Cartels to justify more intrusive methods of control. They don’t care what the ‘reason’ is. But they respond the same. More wiretapping. More weapons. More police. More jails.

They lie about what is really going on most of the time, and if justice or truth begins to surface, then people are simply erased, kidnapped, or killed.

And all this is coming down and revving up because while you and I are busy making a living from day to day, the fat cats in the government living on our taxes and other stolen monies have the time to sit around and look ahead. And what do they see?

They see the increasing shortage of resources. This massive imbalance that fuels the illusion of this Pile we can all have a part of and in reality is but a class war cannot continue forever. They fear turmoil in their Green Zones.

They know that if they are to continue to hoard and exploit the people and the workers of the world, they need to be more violent and forceful as supplies get low, and as the People resist more and more.

They do not trust the people, they do not trust Democratic process, they fear gente who are used to standing up. They are instilling fascism in degrees, because we’ll all take that. We’ll blog about it and talk about it, but for the most part, go on with our lives.
 

They continue to to normalize increased and unwarranted police presence, they instill fear of Tasers and detainment centers by using them abusively and meting out no justice that would punish the police; they sell us fear and false flags and react against the people’s gatherings with violence; they need to make us feel we are doomed unless they are marching in the streets with weapons.

There are simple ways to end so many conflicts playing out today. Very very simple. We could take the bite out of the drug trade by being honest about it. We could make profit from the massive amounts of marijuana that people smoke and will always smoke, just like we profit from Paxil, Prozac, Ambien, Xanax, and on and on and on. We could lessen prison time for non-violent offenders, we could offer help instead of harm to people who need healing. We could stop seeking punitive and harsh measures as a way of addressing human and natural reaction to economic imbalance and hardship. We could change our fearful, reactive, greedy, other-ing philosophies.

Sure, we could do all of that. We could lessen the violence in the world and the fear in the world by focusing on helping, giving, healing, growing. Not bombing, fearing, hoarding, killing. 

But sadly, amigos, they do not want that. These government agents who profit from our pain and fear do not want a world of peace. That’s not hyperbole. They fear Peace Tshirts, they fear the talk of a “Departnment of Peace.” They fear small groups of college students who simply plan to hold signs in the streets! These goons with fecal-flecked hearts and massive bank accounts fear everything except the justice which will one day find them. And it will find them.

Meanwhile, be strong. Seek your joy today, it is a greater power than any they wield. Share some with others. And don’t believe what the TV tells you.

HOME. 

Wow. I began playing some of the footage I have from the rally/concert/march/police action in St. Paul, Minnesota. It feels pretty intense. It’s some of the worst camerawork I’ve probably done…I’ll have to cut out some of the Blair Witch motion. But that’s because I was making sure to get media on my Edirol (audio) as well as on the still camera and the video camera and intermittently uploading iPhone fotos AND trying not to get stomped on by horses, pepper-sprayed by freaking cops, decapitated by swinging handheld TV cameras, or trampled by sudden movements of the excitable and increasingly agitated crowd. Not every moment was dangerous, but most of the time it felt like any moment, such a moment would erupt.

The shotgun serenade of excited voices, of anti-war, anti-imperialism-themed live music, cops screaming as if they are a sticky tangle of ten evil daddies with the fury of fifty and extending pepper spray can cocked, holding long slim batons; upset spanish language anchorwoman, empassioned chanting…I had to shut it off. I don’t think I can wait days to edit at least something together, so I’ll. begin tomorrow early. Yeah. And talk about the thin line between entertainment and war, half of the crowd was media of some type (myself included) from what I could tell. It was obscene. The fear, the media, the police…the environment was one destined to bring trouble.

“Change is coming.”
—John McCain

You know I used to be on MTV’s Street Team 08. Ended up opting out, but met some good peeps there. Turns out unexpectedly, one of them was there, Charlie from Wisconsin. He spotted me just when I was rolling up on the capitol hill where the crowd was just beginning to grow in anticipation of the music and march. (There was a permit until 5pm for the gathering/concert, none for a march.) I didn’t see Charlie, I heard him behind me.

“Nez. Nez!”

and I turned around. I was dressed in my black shorts, Nike Cortez, and black rainjacket with the hood up. Canon DSLR around my neck, Panasonic DVX100B in my right hand, monopod on my hip hung from a beltloop, as did my Edirol digital audio recorder and my iPhone, which I used to snap some pictures (like the first one in this post) and was uploading regularly directly to Flickr. My left ringfinger was gashed and bleeding from where only a minute before, i had turned the wrong way and brought my video camera swinging into my finger, which was wrapped around my still camera. I was a one-man media capture unit.

I turned around.

“Hey, Charlie! What’s up, bro?” 

We talked a little as we walked toward the sound. I grabbed a few words from a man in his 60s or so. He was happy but a little anxious about his home in Florida. There was a hurricane on. 

I laughed as I walked away, joking with Charlie. “See that? No release form. Mmmm. Man on the street.” 

“They are a pain in the ass,” he mumbled. We laughed knowingly. Then, we crossed the street. When we got to the foot of the hill, we said goodbye and good luck and all that. Parted ways.

That’s where the current took us both out to the sea of emotion and physicality that the day became. I ended up at the last minute finding a way to a bathroom which happened to be in a different area of town. That was after all the bullhorn speechifying, which I happened to love.

WE KNOW WHERE THE TERRORISTS ARE!!! Shouted the voice from the stage, addressing the crowd. Preparing us to march.THEY ARE IN THE EXCEL CENTER, GIVING SPEECHES ON TV! I guess it was like a lot of the rhetoric you’ll read on left wing blogs, actually…but this was people gathered shouting it with their voices amplified and their faces naked, rather than typing the words behind a screen. Which is why the State took it seriously.

The day was not as orderly as it may sound here. The static pictures don’t tell the whole story. Wait for the video. The energy comes through there very clearly. The sound terrain, the anxiety, passion, fear, fury. These were just moments I managed to hold everything together enough to steady myself and frame up. There’s a lot of shots that didn’t come out and footage that is just chaos.

Ended up in a different part of town after marching all the way down to the street and up to the bridge. That was after the cops were circling us with horses and four wheel vehicles, and after I read, via Twitter, that the cops were breaking out the gas masks and giving the order to disperse. (This was separate from the earlier very tense moment where I personally saw (and photographed) them put their gas masks on only feet from me, when the crowd pressed too close to them.) That was after the cops blockaded the path to the Excel center. It was also after they blocked the bridge with snowplows and dumptrucks, clustered in riot gear…choppers overhead, sirens in the air.

Sitting by myself away from the action, I really felt I was in some apocalyptic terrain. I felt like some strange kind of media soldier cut off from his unit, even though we were all basically moving around on our own. 

(Thats when I ended up realizing there were people of color in St. Paul because my path out of the knot of thickening tension and violent energy took me to a bus stop where all kinds of brown and black people were. Not saying there weren’t many in the spots where convention-goers were gathering…all the McCain T-shirt hawkers in the park where I shot a few recent videos were black and admitted they were voting for Obama, and only being paid to sell McCain’s shirts.)

It was so odd sitting there with all my gear waiting for the car to zero in on me. Choppers circling and hovering above. Liza and David searching for me, but not able to reach me because of so many blocked streets. We yelled over static on our cell phones, fighting to reconnect in an area of town locked down to a few routes. Cops wouldn’t even let me cut across the grass of the field where the concert was just held. They redirected me far around, just as the police detoured Liza, David and myself out of town itself the first night we showed up to drive past the Excel center. (We never got there.)

I had to get up and walk to a part of town where they could pick me up. We immediately went out for a few drinks. And then off to eat Ethiopian. And then I fell asleep.

I’ve been wondering since how all the footage came out…and I really didn’t think I’d end up on this computer so soon. I got into shorts so I could hit the park and get some sun and just …do nothing. But I popped the tape in because I had to know if I even captured it or did something stupid like forgot to hit “Record.” 

Oh, yeah, Charlie got arrested this time, not me. It was a choice. I knew at a certain point if I kept going, I’d be arrested. I have heard since that many people were let out in but a few hours…seems it was not like my stint in 2004, where days went by before we breathed outside air again. If I didn’t have mijita here and a plane to catch in the morning, I would have pressed all the way in. Jail or no. 

Many people in the area I heard from said “the protestors deserved it.” Completely overlooked the atmosphere created by the GOP with their paramilitary procession. Or refused to address the validity of outrage to such events that have become normalized in the last 8 years. Blamed gente reacting to so many wrongs with visceral and immediate outrage for that which was causing the outrage.

This is what spurred some of the anger in my last post. But it’s a prevailing message online, too. This gradual obsoleting and demeaning of genuine physical and emotional reaction, this sneering at protest.

This worries me. I can’t believe it doesn’t worry everyone. You do see what is happening, right?

I got no patience, now. So sick of complacence, now.

—Rage Against the Machine

Obviously we’re way past the “no standing armies” thing. But this is not normal nor acceptable. Did I mention the National Guard was also guarding the Excel building? The National Guard??? Protecting a political convention??

I mean what is going on here. Did we not begin with revolution? And refusal to be subjects? Sure, that was one end of the continuum, but…wow. Somehow, we are now to the point where one day we basically go on with life without much of a hitch, most of us, even knowing our government has blatantly lied us into murdering over a million people (or oKAY it was OOOONLY SIXHUNDREDTHOUSAND whatev), mainstreamed torture, used the entire DOJ as their war room, gutted Iraq for corporate and military interests/profit, admit they spy on all our communications and store up that private information…and ON AND ON AND ON—and we curse and snarl at protestors? 

Ay Dios Mio.

The GOP actually needs an army now, to make itself evident and dare celebrate anything in public. They have lied, killed, they laugh while we suffer with health problems or bemoan the loss of life and humanity. They bring their army to protect them from the voice of the People they supposedly serve.

Chale. I am not sorry that I refuse to cheer for that army. I refuse to belittle those with enough heart to throw themselves at the symbols of encroaching police state and behind them, those who are responsible for all this hell and horror that our nation has entangled itself in and has unleashed upon other nations and thus, is becoming, morally and actually.

If I’m wrong, I’ll be happy. I just don’t think this is going to go away. I think as class divisions increase and resources become more scarce and the elitist politicians and CEOs and related kinds horde more treasure and starve the rest of both food, honest government, and truth, they will need more and more force to keep the illusion of a fair society in place.

Like I said, I hope I’m wrong. But I was there in both Denver and in St. Paul. And as most of you know, I was also arrested in 2004 for protesting the GOP. It’s been four years and now this behavior surrounds both major parties’ conventions (though far worse at the GOP’s, granted) and as far as I can see, is only increasing in intensity.