Up Against the Wall Motherf**er
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—Old Navy, Banana Republic and the GAP (as Fisher family businesses, rapers of Northwest forest lands and sweatshop laborers)
—NikeTown and Levi’s (whose overpriced products are made in sweatshops)
—McDonald’s (slave-wage fast-food peddlers responsible for destruction of tropical rainforests for grazing land and slaughter of animals)
—Starbucks (peddlers of an addictive substance whose products are harvested at below-poverty wages by farmers who are forced to destroy their own forests in the process)
—Warner Bros. (media monopolists)
—Planet Hollywood (for being Planet Hollywood)
This activity lasted for over 5 hours and involved the breaking of storefront windows and doors and defacing of facades. Sling-shots, newspaper boxes, sledge hammers, mallets, crowbars and nail-pullers were used to strategically destroy corporate property and gain access (one of the three targeted Starbucks and Niketown stores were looted). Eggs filled with glass etching solution, paint-balls, and spray-paint were also used.
The black bloc was a loosely organized cluster of affinity groups and individuals who roamed around downtown, pulled this way by a vulnerable and significant storefront and that way by the sight of a police formation. Unlike the vast majority of activists who were pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed and shot at with rubber bullets on several occasions, most of our section of the black bloc escaped serious injury by remaining constantly in motion and avoiding engagement with the police. We buddied up, kept tight and watched each others’ backs. Those attacked by federal thugs were un-arrested by quick-thinking and organized members of the black bloc. The sense of solidarity was awe-inspiring.” (Infoshop.org http://www.infoshop.org/octo/wto_blackbloc.html)
32 Herbert Marcuse, “A Note on Dialectic,” preface to Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. xii-xiii.
33 Carolyn Merchant traces the role of science in preparing the world for exploitation back to the sixteenth century:Between 1500 and 1700 an incredible transformation took place. A “natural” point of view about the world in which bodies did not move unless activated, either by an inherent organic mover or a “contrary to nature” superimposed “force,” was replaced by a non- non-natural non-experiential “log” that bodies move uniformly unless hindered. The “natural” perception of a geocentric earth in a finite cosmos was superseded by the “non-natural” common sense “fact” of a heliocentric infinite universe. . . . Living animate nature died, while dead inanimate money was endowed with life. Increasingly capital and the market would assume the organic attributes of growth, strength, activity, pregnancy, weakness, decay, and collapse obscuring and mystifying the new underlying social relations of production and reproduction that make economic growth and progress possible. Nature, women, blacks, and wage laborers were set on a path towards a new status as “natural” and the human resources for the modern world system. Perhaps the ultimate irony in these transformations with a new name given to them: rationality. (Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution [New York: Harper and Row, 1983], p. 288)
34 Bill Clinton, Speech At The Signing Ceremony For the North American Free Trade Agreement, September 14, 1993, http://www.craypoe.com/1/historic_docs/speeches/clinton_nafta_speech.html.
35 George Bush, Remarks by the President on Iraq, Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati Union Terminal, Cincinnati, Ohio October 7, 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html.
36 Arnon Regular “‘Road map is a life saver for us,’ PM Abbas tells Hamas,” Haaretz, April 2, 2006, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=310788&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y.
37 Vaclav Havel, “The End of the Modern Era,” New York Times, March 1, 1992, http://www.gse.buffalo.edu/FAS/Bromley/classes/theory/Havel.htm.
38 W. E. B. DuBois, Black Folk: Then and Now (New York, 1939), p. 144, quoted in Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 133.
39 “A Television Conversation: James Baldwin, Peregrine Worsthorne, Bryan Magee Encounter/1972,” Fred L. Standley, James Baldwin, Louis H. Pratt, and H. Pratt Louis, Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), p. 116.
40 “The Basis of Black Power,” Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Position Paper, 1966, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/387.html.
41 Tony Kushner, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Theater Communications Group, Inc., 1995.
a Abbie Hoffman was less inclined to put aside his reservations. “Demanding that artists do antiwar art is like demanding that chefs cook antiwar food,” he wrote in a letter to the Village Voice, in which he criticized the whole concept of an Angry Arts Week, arguing that artists should “transcend anger” in their work and affirm life (from For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, Jonah Raskin California: 1996, p. 84).
b An unsourced entry on Koch in Wikipedia has a less dramatic description of what happened and says nothing about his fainting: “The poet regained his composure and said to the “shooter,” “Grow up.”
c Newsreel made a short documentary entitled, of course, “Garbage.” This is the only Mother-
fucker action documented on film.
d Ben denies the rumor that she got the gun she used from the Motherfuckers as depicted in the 1996 movie, I Shot Andy Warhol.
e Bill’s recollection in Bill Graham Presents does not jibe with the account given here or with contemporaneous news reports. He claims that we had two months of free nights before he closed us down and then six months passed and then came the night with the Living Theater, which marked the end of our efforts to liberate his theater (Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents: My Life in Rock and Roll, Doubleday, 1992, p. 253-257).
f Not everyone shared Alfonso’s and my wariness of Barry. Jonathan, one of the younger Motherfuckers, still remembers him with affection. Jonathan says Barry had a great tough-guy sense of humor, was always kind to him, and treated him like a little brother.
g Alfonso remembers it differently. He believes he stayed in the bus, and recalls seeing the spare tire rolling around inside. I prefer my memory.
h A year later, they adopted a policy of phased full divestment from companies doing business in South Africa.
i As the Northern Alliance entered Herat, a city in Northern Afghanistan, the Taliban fled leaving behind in the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice a hardcover copy of a Taliban Penal Code, containing a list of “unclean things.” These included: “pork, pig, pig oil, anything made from human hair, satellite dishes, cinematography, any equipment that produces the joy of music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computers, VCR’s, televisions, anything that propagates sex and is full of music, wine, lobster, nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogues, pictures, Christmas cards” (Amy Waldman, New York Times, “Taliban penal code defined virtue vice,” November 22, 2001).
j A 2007 Harris poll found that more people in the United States (62 percent) believe in the devil than in Darwin’s theory of evolution (42 percent). Thirty-one percent believe in witches (http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN2922875820071129).
k The metaphor is filched from Hegel: “The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly when the fruit appears, the blossom is show up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead.”(Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 2.)
Copyright © 2008 by Osha Neumann
ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY OSHA NEUMANN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neumann, Osha, 1939-
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-583-22996-5
1. Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (Gang)—History. 2. Neumann, Osha, 1939-
3. Gangs—United States. I. Title. II. Title: Up against the wall motherfucker.
HV6439.U5N48 2008
364.1092—dc22
[B]
2008032958