Appropriate for today
On the day Elon Musk tweeted that he was forming his own party, the “American Party,” a thing that will not happen, and will not matter if it does happen, and if it does matter in some monumentally stupid and evil way, it will just be an expression of him shoving the same fucking -illions of dollars that he would have shoved at something else, and in that sense would simply be more of the same shit from the same shit, and anyway, on that day, which is today, the fifth of July, I spent an hour with Berkeley grey-hairs protesting Tesla on Fourth Street, as they have been, every Saturday, for months.
With the median age deep in the sixties, it was so quiet that dictating this into my phone made me hush my voice, even a block away in front of the coffee shop, where a guy was playing a very cheap-looking ukulele, with a “Stop Mass Deportation” sign resting gently on his lap. It was quiet enough that you could occasionally hear the saxophone player a block away, across from the other coffee show. Someone was intermittently rattling a tambourine; someone else was clanging a bell just as intermittently. Otherwise it felt like a crowd in the throes of waiting. When a car went by and beeped its horn at us, a few people “woooo-ed” and then when a train went by, and blew its horn at Berkeley, they did it again, I would assume with irony, though none that I could really detect.
(I record three minutes of audio, and the words the transcriber picks out to transcribe are: “No political plan right now. Appropriate for today. Volume four. Oh yeah, so are you? I guess not. Originally, I came from Greece.”)
There were a hundred people here, which I know because it’s the kind of protest where people stand still enough that you can stand on the other side of the street and count them, south to north, and when you get to a hundred, there are still a few more people milling around, but not all that many, so you stop at 100.
The signs are many and varied, and mostly recycled; this spring and summer’s protests are well-represented—“No Kings!” for example, and “Stand up for Science”–and while I stand with my back to the Tesla showroom, I type a few more down: “Total recall of musk and his dumb trucks”; a lady with a “Let Gaza Live” shirt has a dog with “Know your parasites” shirt, with pictures of a “deer tick,” “wolf tick,” and “luna tick” (Trump); “Make Dystopia Fiction Again”; “These clowns are stealing from you,” with pictures of Musk and Trump in clown paint, a baroque “Trumpet Dumpty had a great fall”; a stylized picture of an Artichoke with the lettering “Art or choke” which confuses me a little; “Stop the Musk/Trump Billionaire Coup”; a “The only immigrant stealing your job is this Nazi”; a really complicated one about tax cut percentages; “Elect a rapist, expect to get fucked”; “Resist”; “Deport ICE not neighbors”; “The art of the steal”; “Not a cabinet more like a junk drawer”; “Every contract musk got while a US employee was a crime”; “Think protesting is a drag? Try fascism”; “Traitors”; “Impeach Remove Prosecute”; and “Fight back now while you can.”
Two men are chatting next to the door to the Tesla showroom, and when one of them politely requests that a lady clear the entrance way, the way he says “but the rest of you are fine” makes me wonder if he’s the manager.
No one is really faced towards anything except, very loosely to the Fourth Street drivers whose honks they elicit. There's no program, no stage, no music or chanting, just people in the same space at the same time. No one is having fun. They’re certainly drawing energy from each other, and the sound of the few who are chatting, spiritedly, drowns out the solemn silence from the many who are not. But it's just tense, bitter anger, being collectively felt and shown. You can feel it, and hear it, and see it, even if no one is yelling and even if there's no soundtrack of chanting or speakers or music to focus that anger. They have been so angry for such a long time, now. This is a place to come and put that anger, for an hour and a half, every Saturday, and so, that is what they have done, on this Saturday.
A lady gives me this. See you Friday.
