Reflections
On Inauguration Day, 2017-The First Days Of The Resistance-Down With The Trump
Government! Build The Resistance!
By Fritz
Taylor
Frank
Jackman, the old time 1960s radical, sometimes writer and a guy who thought he
knew a few things about the world, about the American world anyway was as
bowled over as anybody on the morning after. No, not the morning after some
drunken carouse or tome virtuous sexual escapade as had happened many a time
although the latter not much of late but The morning after the 2016 election to
wake up his Internet server homepage announcing that one Donald J. Trump had
been a surprise victor in the American presidential race against one Hillary
Rodham Clinton, heiress of the Clinton high-flying, well-financed and organized
political dynasty soon to turn to dust (or had already turned to dust and we
just catch up with the fact the morning after).
It wasn’t like Frank had not
seen certain signs that there was an uprising going on down at the base of
society, the base of society that he was very familiar with since that stratum
was where had had come from, come from the Riverdale “projects,” had come of
age there. So he knew of hunger, of being hungry for the main chance, of not
getting the fucking brass ring, of being left behind although truth to tell he
had survived and not badly so he was little rusty in the hunger department.
Yeah, Frank knew that there were a lot of frustrated angry people out in the
vast American dark night, some who loathed the idea that a black man had been
President of the United States for not one but two terms. Loathed the idea that
a well-educated articulate woman might just take over the reins of power right
after him, who loathed the idea that their cities and towns were looking a lot
more like a world-wide melting pot than the old stand-by white European melting
pot they had grown up with whether or not they had read old Professor Moynihan
on the subject, who loathed that everybody but them and theirs was getting
ahead in the globalization race to the bottom, and who loathed the whole
political correctness thing that one Donald J. Trump was saying was fucked up.
He knew all
that by heart but Frank had more current experiences going through the saw mill
of the discontents down at the base that should have tipped him off more
decisively to avoid that morning surprise. He and his golfing buddies, Sid,
Kaz, Keith and Pat had during the whole previous year been around golf courses,
public golf courses not Trump venues where older white guys go to die-or pass
away the time until then. (The standing joke among that golfing brethren was
that if Trump won he would privatize those public courses or burn them
down-take your pick).They had run into serious Trump supporters along the way
from guys who said they had voted for Obama or had not voted for a long while but
had sent money to the billionaire Trump and wished him god speed. But Frank had
been carried away just as much as the whole traditional and social media
networks being way off the mark (except followers of the trollers who were
wreaking havoc on the planet for kicks-and the “fake news” in favor of Trump) by
the improbability of a political novice who was not a general like Grant or
Eisenhower beating a seasoned political operative and her vaunted organization
like a gong.
Shame on him
for believing anything the paid pundits, commentators, bloggers, gurus and
their tenacious hangers-on had to say about anything, anytime on any subject.
That was then though, the morning after blues. By that late afternoon Frank had
regrouped himself and began to understand what he needed to do to project his
new political profile. He had been rather neutral about the outcome of the
election prior to that morning since for a variety of other reasons he would be
opposing Mrs. Clinton and her very upfront and frankly scary war policies which
she intended to thrust on the country when she was sworn in (and he had taken
much flak from friends and loved ones for not believing that there was a
qualitative difference between this pair of rogues). But the reality of the
Trump triumph and the accompanying sweep of everything in sight by the ghoulish
Republicans, those who favored him or not, who had their own reactionary agenda
to push through had placed him on immediate war footing.
That “war
footing” idea was no literary flourish although those same friends and loved
one would tell you that Frank was entirely capable of such flourishes but an
understanding that it would be necessary to begin the resistance to Trump and
his government whatever it looked like (and in the end it looked very much like
a rogue’s gallery of the 1% that he had been campaigning against for the
previous decade or so-in who were being tagged by Trump in person in some cases
to put their grimy fingers on the affairs of state). That afternoon he wrote a
blog for a website, American Politics,
that he wrote for occasionally arguing that the election results along with the
general dead-end trend of American politics and the extreme divisiveness pulling
society apart, putting it into two distinct and visible camps had confirmed
against his better hopes from the evidence of the past year that the
country was in a state of cold civil war (with the unstated implication going
back to ante-bellum times that the nation was on the cusp of that turning into
a “hot” one).
From that
afternoon on he would when making commentary use that slogan or mantra if you
will-“the cold civil war has started” whenever he posted anything politically
relevant on his various sites (although a strong argument could be made that it
had only come into the open and that had started years before-at the very
beginning of the Obama era-maybe earlier on the economic side with the
tremendous loss of decent jobs). Frank though is, has been an activist, a
left-wing of some sort of activist since he was a kid. Since back in 1960 when
he was a slip of a teenage boy hanging out with Quakers and pacifists
publicly protesting against the escalation of nuclear weaponry in favor of
disarmament. So the axis of his slogan was not to make abstract and academic
political points, he would leave that to the egg-on-face pundits and
bull-shitters but to help prepare for the social struggles ahead once old Trump
was sworn in. To get people prepared to go into the streets since the electoral
process had proven bankrupt. He argued and would continue to argue that unlike
the died-in-the-wool Democrats who were miffed about how unfair things had
turned out and looked forward to some future utopian electoral victory with a
“better” candidate that the resistance needed to be organized on the
streets-and maybe given the way the political deck was stacked the only place
that mattered for the duration.
Of course
you can only effectively argue about what needs to be done when something
happens-something like the inauguration of one Donald J. Trump and so Frank
would point out that from day one, from noontime come January 20th
the resistance needed to be publicly organized. What Frank meant, what he determined was necessary to show his new
state of mind was that he decided he would go down to Washington on
Inauguration Day and protest the swearing in of the next President of the
United States. This was no mean task since Frank had purposefully avoided going
to that event for all of his long political life seeing the event as a waste of
time (and in recent years worthless as a place to protest since there were so
many restrictions placed on protestors as to defeat the purpose). Helping him
in his decision to go down the few hundred miles from his home in Dalton about
forty miles west of Boston was that the next day there was to be a Women’s
March on Washington and so the weekend would be one of activity and
struggle.
Frank had
over the previous several years since he had slowed down his professional
activities as a lawyer been to Washington on a number of occasions to protest
the Obama war policies in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and wherever else
that administration was bloodying its hands and also in defense of the heroic
Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning when his trial was going on at Fort
Meade just outside Washington. (As one of his last acts in office Obama would
commute Chelsea’s horrendous thirty-five year sentence for essentially telling
the truth about American atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq via his Wiki-Leaks
revelations to his thankful credit from supporters and opponents like Frank
alike).
Of late
Frank usually would fly to Washington but this time he decided to drive the
four hundred or so miles in order to take three young passengers with him who
had no resources to go otherwise. He would foot the travel bill since the cost
of travel by car would be about the same as a flight for himself. (One an Iraq
War veteran who was trying to stabilize his life after a serious bout with
drugs and two graduate students who by definition are poverty-stricken) He had also decided to use his hotel loyalty
points in Baltimore order to have lodging for all four since anyplace closer
would have been over-the-top expensive and given the lateness of his decision
to go most protester-friendly places like U/U churches were filled up and or
spoken for. On the 19th of
January having picked up the three guys in Cambridge they headed south to
Washington to do political battle the next day.
The next day
after spending a restless and talkative night at that Baltimore hotel location
the four men headed by car to the nearest Metro station at Glenmont on the Redline
to get to downtown Washington. The train was not crowded (as opposed to the
next day’s efforts, the gigantic Women’s March, where they would have to wait
for a long time both to get into that same station and to board the train) and
they made downtown in good time (and didn’t have to worry about where to park
amid all the restrictions on the streets that day). They got off at Judiciary
and proceeded to head toward the security checkpoint on Fourth near the
National Gallery of Art so they could get a spot on the parade route to give
Trump the old raspberry on opening day. (One of the reasons that Frank in
recent years had decided not to go to any Inaugurations to protest was the
whole security apparatus set-up, the “running of the gauntlet,” which
effectively acted to tamp down any serious in-your-face protest so he knew that
they would be limited in what they could carry for signs, etc.)
That day it
never got to the raspberry on the parade route point though. As Frank and his
companions were standing in the slow-moving security check-point line a group
of young people who later identified themselves to Frank as part of Surge
Washington which had been formed mostly by young people who were students or
who worked in Washington to protest in a peaceful but forceful way the impeding
coronation of Trump sat down in front of the security tent and blocked the
entrance. Classic tried and true honored civil disobedience. Naturally that
event stopped Frank and his companions in their tracks since unlike others
trying to get through the checkpoint they would not cross the line set up by
their fellow protesters. This action, part of several around city, were acts
of symbolic speech and while later he
and his companions would discuss the value of the particular action they were
all under the bane of “picket lines mean don’t cross” an old labor slogan
honored many times more in the breech than the observance.
This action
which was intended to shut down the checkpoint for a couple of hours and then
move on to other such locales wound up being Frank and his companions’
activities for the day and they never did get to the parade route to protest.
So they moved with the protesters whenever they moved.
Not only were they
acting in political solidarity with the protesters but Frank was there to
defend them against the sometimes angry spectators who could not get through
whatever he thought of the tactic. (There were several testy situations when
some Bikers for Trump tried to break the line at Fourth Street but were
dissuaded by the Secret Service agents who had closed the checkpoint tight so
nobody was getting through anyway). Their mostly young faces had heartened him
that there would be another generation to pass the protest torch on to.
Moreover since he was admitted as a lawyer in D.C. he could represent them if
they were arrested. Throughout the day there were arrests around the city, a couple
of hundred according to news sources, but no at any of the actions that Frank’s
groupings were at. So that is how Frank (and his companions) spent his first
day of resistance, his first day as a “soldier” in the brewing cold civil war
which has been unleashed in the American dark night.
[Frank and
his friends would attend the Women’s March on Washington the next day which was
spectacular but really uneventful except as a wonderful realization that there
were plenty of people, plenty of women who had joined, or were ready to join
the resistance. Yes, they came to Washington half a million strong to make a
first full day point.]
Join the
resistance!
