Give me your Starbuck’s, your Gap,
Your Nike Towns full of sweatshop inventory,
Your McDonald’s, gobbling profit and craving more,
Send these, and tacky corporate-branded outlet malls to me,
I put my Louisville Slugger through your plate-glass door!

Oh, alright, so I’m not the first to parody Emma Lazarus, but it seemed to fit so well here, and was one of my rare moments of lyric/poetic mockery inspiration; the verse just sort of sprang out of my head fully formed and ready, and it seemed a shame not to use it.

I’d also done several versions of Miss Liberty, but all of them portrayed as a victim, or as being set upon by mobs of born-again rightist nutcakes. This is the first time I’d done her as someone taking direct action on her own behalf, and with a downright awful attitude.

This was a companion piece of sorts to Who Will Control The Government’s Guns?, addressing the whole question of corporate property destruction and what constitutes “violence” in the context of the mass actions in Seattle which shut down the WTO meetings that year.

Like Who Will Control…, this was done within a few days — if not the very day after — seeing TV footage of the night of November 30 and reading accounts via the Seattle IMC of police violence against nonviolent protests and Seattle city government abuses of the basic civil liberties of the general population. I ended up taking a position on the property destruction issue which, like my gun-law stance, provoked a lot of eyebrow-arching among the old-line “Gandhi Groupie” contingents in The Movement™. Basically, I decided that if no humans were targeted or injured in a Black Bloc-style attack on corporate property, it was OK, and that it didn’t constitute “violence”. What the hell, I thought; when the windows on big banks and the fronts of Nike Town or Starbucks are smashed all to hell, do all the un-smashed globalized chain stores’ windows organize a solidarity commmittee? When the windows on all the Navigators and Explorers are smashed out within five blocks of the WTO meeting, do all the other SUVs organize a collection to cover the repair bills? Besides, what about all the destruction of human lives and communities being carried out by the corporations whose windows were smashed out during WTO Week? Windows are comparitively cheaply and easily replaced.

I also suggested the reactionary Old New Left types consider the acts of the Berrigan Brothers who, by dragging cabinets full of draft records into a parking lot and setting them afire, helped impede business as usual for the Vietnam War, not to mention proabably saved a lot of young guys from dying in Vietnam. I also reminded the Gandhi Groupies to take a look outside the coddled world of US activists, and consider how demonstrations and direct action are done in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and pretty much the entire planet outside of the USA — the French students in 1968 flipping cars to use as barricades, striking Bolivian miners bringing dynamite sticks to protests because they know the police and soldiers aren’t there to protect them.

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Government (in the form of police) violence against nonviolent protesters at the Seattle WTO Meetings had many in The Movement questioning the relevance of strict Ghandian Nonviolence in modern street protest. It also changed a lot of my attitude toward Federal and State gun-control laws. I suddenly noticed that all of these laws were about disarming the People, and not the State.

Things got really awkward all of a sudden. Now, I’m really not a violent guy at all. I’ve always believed that war — and situations that drive citizens to take up arms against their government — are an indication of epic failure: ethical failure, cultural failure, moral failure, and spiritual failure. After Seattle, though, I started thinking more about people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, who are fighting US-backed state/corporate dictatorships and are forced to literally fight the police — and often soldiers — in the streets, often just for the right to gather in the streets to voice their grievances in the first place…and they aren’t necessarily fighting by Gandhi’s rules. I started thinking about the Palestinians, engaged in their resistance against the Israeli occupation of their country… and, they weren’t exactly holding candles and singing kum-bah-yah, either.

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About this time, at the peak of O.J. Frenzy, I was noticing a pattern in the media: that of what I liked to call the “Enemy Of The Month”. Didn’t it seem like that to you… seemed like every other day, there was some huge hysterical alarm in the media about some inflammatory hot-button bullshit issue like rap lyrics, or heavy metal lyrics, or cyberporn, or immigrants, or the Iraqis, or “hate speech”, or… O.J.!

Brilliant — in a ham-fisted fashion — when you think about it: what better way to keep peoples’ minds off of any actual real economic and social issues than keeping their panties in a bunch about a constant parade of shallow, sensationalistic “issues” like flag burning, TV violence, cyberporn, rap lyrics and — most heinous of all at the time — teen smoking. For some mysteriously weird reason that summer, a longtime American tradition was being raged over as if it were an asteroid about to hit the Earth. Needless to say, much of this starred President Elvis all over the TV lecturing us about teenaged smoking, using his Baby Boom membership as a tired-assed “I know, I remember the Sixties” bully pulpit. Hearing the broadcast browbeatings made me ask any Liberal within earshot, “Did you people honestly think this guy was going to give us any meaningful policy reforms on medical marijuana or drug policy in general? I mean, f’cripesake, listen to the guy!”

The real, personal insult on top of injury came that summer, a couple of weeks after Jerry Garcia had died, when President I Didn’t Inhale, in his daily radio blather, chose once again to beat us over the head with the teenaged smoking “issue”, vomiting smarm and condescension over my radio at staggering rates, alarmingly making note of Garcia’s death in the speech, finishing with words to the effect of “remember what happened to Jerry! Just Say No, Kids!”

Right then, in that very instant — that very fleeting little instant, sitting next to the boombox on the beach, mouth poised over a fresh slab of pizza, gulls snatching fries off the blanket, airplanes towing advertising overhead — I felt that I could’ve dropped what I was doing, gotten some clothes on, driven back to DC, and risked certain life imprisonment for assaulting El Presidente, just for the satisfaction of crashing the speech and smacking President I Didn’t Inhale square across the chops, on the air, for using rhetoric so crassly exploitive that it set a perverse “Gold Standard” for crass exploitation, even for the Clinton Mob.

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I always hated listening to Democrats and Liberals bitching about government abuses in the name of “fighting terrorism” under George W. Chimp, as they always seem to forget that their own boy, Bubba Clinton, wanted to do just about the same things after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. Who were the first people he wanted to go after? Go on, take a guess. Not surprised? Neither was I, hearing that President Bill’s number-one target under his prototype Patriot Act was the Left. The crackpot “militias” in Montana, Michigan and Idaho — guys who had actual guns and openly professed a willingness to use violence against their opponents, guys like OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh — apparently were no huge threat, until Clinton needed the threat of rightist violence to scare people into accepting his authoritarian “anti-terror” measures… and then, oh, yeah, the rightist militia cranks were the goddamn’ Enemy Of The Month. Never mind that Mr. Crime Fighter, Mr. Put Several Hundred Thousand More Cops Onto The Streets, Mr. Three-Strikes, never appeared to lift a finger on the womens’ clinic shootings and bombings. Nahh, Mr. Crime Bill’s first instinct here is to go for the crowd pleaser, and jail the Left — as per usual.

So, some years later, when I saw the Government’s response to 9/11 — basically, the Oklahoma City response dialed up to 11 — I wasn’t all that surprised (unlike all the pants-pissing Liberals around me), having seen it all before from a Democratic administration, that of the Clinton Mob… but just try and point that out to your average mindless partisan Liberal, and watch their goddamn’ heads explode from cognitive dissonance overload.

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