Excerpt from Transcendental Hobo

a memoir by A. Iwasa

Chapter 1?

I often think of September 29th, 2001 as my birthday.  It was the first time I marched in Washington, DC, and in many ways was the culmination of a process that started about three years earlier when I found out about the School of the Americas (SOA), a Latin American military officers’ training facility located at Ft. Benning, GA.  But that day in DC there were two demonstrations against the impending war in Afghanistan, and I participated in both.

I had been to protests before, but nothing I had experienced in Cleveland, OH (Clevo) prepared me for the tense and sometimes violent Anti-Capitalist Convergence (ACC) march on the World Bank, which ended with hundreds of us getting detained in the plaza in front of the building.

In retrospect, of course, the differences make total sense.  What’s demonstrating for the legalization of marijuana with maybe three hundred people mostly too stoned for any sort of serious shenanigans, or participating in a so-called solidarity rally while people on the actual front lines are breaking unjust laws elsewhere?

This on the other hand, was something akin to a front line.  Don’t forget, September 29th that year was just 18 days after the terror attacks, and DC had been hit.

Though I technically had been informed that the ACC march was unpermitted, I had no idea what the implications to that were.  By the time I got to the initial rally point with a handful of other young radicals who had gotten on the bus at Cleveland State University the night before, and some students we had picked up from Kent State along the way, the sight alone of the rows of riot cops waiting for the march to start let me know in no uncertain terms shit was about to get real.

Dozens of young people wearing mostly black, masked up, some carrying shields, formed a Black Bloc that was ready for violence I wasn’t expecting.  Again, I was totally unprepared.

Food Not Bombs (FNB) was serving, and I got some slices of cantaloupe and a cup of black coffee. Though I’ve at least occasionally drunk coffee for as long as I can remember, I had always thought unsweetened black coffee was straight up disgusting.  Here I was with a whole cup of it, figuring I should slug it down just so it wouldn’t go to waste and I actually enjoyed it. Being 21 at the time, I wondered if it was true that you had all new taste buds every seven years, or if your tastes changed systematically along those lines for some other reason. I have a reputation for being too serious, or serious all the time.  But frankly most of my thoughts are exactly like this so I just keep them to myself.

As we started to march, about 4,000 deep, the police instantly surrounded us, with extra police in cars and on motorcycles or horses in front, alongside and behind us. The march itself was tense but largely uneventful, with chants such as “Pigs here, bombs there, the USA is everywhere!” highlighting the basic confrontation.  But as some of us filled up the plaza in front of the World Bank, apparently cops in cars drove through the march to divide us, followed by cops on hoof brutally dispersing those not in the plaza, while sealing up those of us inside.

Once we realized we were stuck, dozens of people began playing soccer, drumming in the largest drum circle I had seen up to that point in my life, or dancing around the drum circle. But most of us, including myself, mostly sat or stood around nervously, not sure what to expect. Someone gave me a bandanna soaked in vinegar to cover my mouth and nose with in case we were tear gassed, then a Kent student traded me a gas mask for it since she couldn’t breath with it on.

After about an hour and a half, we were allowed to march on the 20,000 strong, permitted rally organized by the Workers’ World Party’s then newest front group, the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition.

Someone rockin’ a Clash back patch of their first album’s cover in the Black Bloc made “Remote Control” play in my head as I looked upon the capitol building’s dome:

“Who needs the Parliament /Sitting making laws all day/ They’re all fat and old/ Queuing for the House of Lords”

After another tense but largely uneventful march surrounded by the police, we eventually  made it to the ANSWER rally. There was another FNB serving, and in line I met a comrade from Baltimore who I would repeatedly re-connect with at other demonstrations in Philly, New York, and again in DC exactly a year later protesting the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. I’ll call her Jenny here. It’s almost embarrassing how all these years later I can still remember snippets of our first conversation. We talked about Food Not Bombin’ in our respective cities, the commune she lived in, how Jack Kerouac received a medical discharge from the military when he left a drill to read…

Jenny was my first serious activist crush, and our interactions and correspondence still define the excitement of my protest-hopping phase, which lasted about a year and two months. The things we talked and wrote about to each other were all the things I loved about that time.

But this was all just beginning for me. On certain levels, I was aware of the Life of Brian-esque commie alphabet soup. As served in Clevo, I had already encountered the RCP, the SWP and the Non-Governmental Organizations that kept it confusing with their NGO ingredients. But holy smokes was that just the tip of the iceberg!  I would go on to encounter the SLP, the PLP, the ISO… not to mention their front groups like NION, R&R, and the IAC which technically started ANSWER, making them the front group of a front group. Then there were so many different kinds of Anarchists with their own rainbow of colors to rep various ideologies along with the standard black uniform which I had taken on in opposition to the Nazis at my high school in the 1990s.

When we finally got to marching with ANSWER, I had the feeling of walking in time with thousands of other misfit resisters who had once waged lonely arguments with high school classmates about what the US-trained and financed military governments were up to in Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s; but here, we were all together and there was potential power in that. Now we had to go home, organize, and come back stronger.

By the end of the day my bookbag was full of newspapers, flyers and a slim book, and my head was awash with all sorts of ideas. That pile of literature became an interesting feature of my room.  Added to and subtracted from quite a bit, eventually spawning a couple more piles, but maintaining a roughly chronological order that made pawing through it a sort of trip every time I did so.

Now I felt like it was on. After 9-11 the president had a 92% approval rating, and I opposed him more than any previous politician.  Now I was fully part of a movement to stop the war in Afghanistan and people were trying to connect it to so many other struggles. It was electrifying!

At the same time, though, I felt like I had my feet in two different worlds, heading in a direction that was by and large neither sustainable nor effective. I still worked for wages and/or went to school most of the time, had ties to my white racist family and to friends who were not supportive of my politics for the most part. Without a doubt all these connections were fading fast as the reports kept coming in from all fronts of what was shaping up to be a world war of sorts, and I proceeded along ever more complicated and narrow paths towards what I hoped to be a Permanent Revolution.

The feeling of being in two different worlds played itself out in so many bizarre ways it’s hard to know where to begin trying to describe them, or if it’s even worthwhile. Perhaps the best example is how much my comradeship with Jenny came to represent to me everything in the world we were working for. By the same coin, I could suggest the end of my relationship with someone I’ll call Christina as a symbol of everything I was leaving behind.

After about a year and a half sober, in the fall of 2001, I went rolling off the wagon with Christine. She was one of a tiny handful of old party friends from high school I still hung out with occasionally. Our heavy thing started with a make-out session to Carcass* on her bedroom floor ended about one drama-filled week later. What I thought might have been the beginning of a life shared with the first woman outside my own family that I had ever Loved, was really the brutal end of a chapter of my life that had way overstayed its welcome.

Local actions and national convergences became my world. I was used as a human prodding device at a Free Mumia! demo in Philly, then watched riot cops goose-stepping as chemical weapons and puppet parts flew through the air during the main day of action against the World Economic Forum meeting in New York, Saturday, February 2nd, 2002.  That day I handed Jenny a leaflet during one of the marches for an upcoming action in Ohio, and as soon as we made eye contact she hugged me so hard she spun me halfway around as she kissed me on the cheek, telling me how she had been looking for me all week. I can’t believe how happy that memory still makes me, and it sort of weirds me out that I also remember the exact date, along with so many others. Sometimes we used the date to name the actions, like those which occurred on and around April 20th, 2002 that were called A20.

This was during some of the fiercest fighting of the Second Intifada**, so the actions ended up taking on all sorts of things other than the original SOA Watch call to lobby against Plan Columbia. Protests against the war in Afghanistan, the impending war in Iraq, military funding of Israel and the spring meeting of the IMF / World Bank.  The main march was 75,000 strong, including many of the by-then usual suspects, but also a fair number of Arabic students from my community college.

This was the best part of my life up to then. I lived for the next action, and spent my time between actions reading, writing, leafletting, talking with people, listening to speeches, watching films; all of this building up to the next action, which in turn we hoped would lead to some sort of Revolution.

Again, I knew this was totally unsustainable, but hoped that out of the swirl of politically charged action would emerge place to fight, a group to fight with, and paths by which to organize and form strategies for our struggle. This search culminated for me in November of 2002, when the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) met in Chicago.

Editor’s notes

*Carcass: “Arguably the most influential band to come out of Merseyside since the Beatles.” https://www.facebook.com/OfficialCarcass

**The Second Intifada: The Second Intifada, also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, was the second Palestinian uprising against Israel – a period of intensified Israeli-Palestinian violence. It started in September 2000, when Ariel Sharon made a visit to the Temple Mount, seen by Palestinians as highly provocative; and Palestinian demonstrators, throwing stones at police, were dispersed by theIsraeli army, using tear gas and rubber bullets. (From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Intifada)