| Neal's
West Coast report YoYO Bartcopsters! In retrospect, it was quite an intense experience. It began WEEKS BEFORE September 24, with lots of phone calls and emails to and from Bart and Chicago Jim. Posters needed to be designed and sent both ways across the country; not only did 500 posters have to get printed and 1000 sticks sawed up, a large chunk of which had to be shipped to Jay and Shawn in DC, c@'s posters needed to be received by me and the Squeaky Wheel team for distribution in LA and SF. It was very labor intensive at our end, especially since we hand-silkscreen screen all of our posters. I ended up doing a couple of all-nighters, one of which was the Thursday night before Don and I drove up to San Francisco on Friday, September 23. I wasn't much help on the 500-mile drive to the bay area, aside from my snoring, which may have kept Don more alert in the driver's seat! The signs were still not completely finished, and when we got to the bay area, we had to do a couple hours of final top-stick stapling. On Saturday morning, we arrived at Dolores Park a little late, at 10:10 AM, and there were already bartcoppers waiting for us. We met bartcopper Kathy who immediately got to work assembling and stapling posters to the main sticks. There were other cool, friendly, extremely helpful Bartcoppers, but it got very hectic and I'm terrible with names. Thanks to everyone that helped! A Bartcop photographer took some pix of the operation, including some of me stapling posters. We had a little problem when some of the LIARS posters got stapled to WPE sticks, causing the WPE posters to run short. I had to take them all apart to fix the problem. All of the posters use different sized sticks... <sigh> A friendly chap in a psychedelic Cat-in-the-Hat stars-n-stripes hat introduced himself to me, "Hi, I'm Mark!" It wasturned out to be none other than Bartcop's own Mark Perkel. He was distributing Church of Reality bumper stickers and he gave me a few which I passed out to people along with some of my own stickers that I was selling at the protest. People LOVED all the posters, and late-comers were very sad that they had missed getting one. I seems like we just can't make enough posters for these protests! The march was HUGE. Well, not as big as DC, but at least 25,000 people, and maybe as many as 50,000. It's very hard to get a handle on the size of these dynamically moving events. A respectable turnout, to say the least. San Francisco, hippy/gay mecca that it is, has
protests that feature all manner of street theater and lots of powered
megaphones with people ranting noisily about all kinds of crazy, intense,
radical stuff. I've been to protests in LA, DC, and NY, but SF takes
the cake hands down for entertaining protesting. It's a special place
that gets its uninhibited charm from its roots as a wild Gold Rush town. One fellow that I met and photographed was a sort of anarchist-looking dude. I pointed out the Bartcop.com logo at the bottom of his poster, which caused him to say. "I had a really bad experience with Bartcop!" He then went on to describe a police-abuse scenario, which confused me until I realized that he was talking about the BART cops. In SF, BART stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit. The BART is the municipal train system, and yes, they do have their own cops! I set him straight and he said he'd check out the site. The march had excellent energy, with lots of chanting, dancing, and singing. It ended up at Jefferson Square Park, which is on a hillside. ANSWER presented a series of speakers with a variety of viewpoints from far left to moderate left. Vendors plied their wares under shady trees (it was kind of a hot day, especially for SF). People stuck around for about three hours, until about 5 PM. Later, we saw great coverage on TV of all three major protests, with the Bartcop posters featured prominently. On Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle published a pic on the front page with a couple of the posters (which Bart showed on the page on Monday). The Fox station in SF covered the story OK (with a brief glimpse of a WPE poster), but then added utterly irrelevant footage of "anarchist violence" from some distantly previous protest. Lame. The NYT had a pic of a WPE poster. The LA Times appears to have suppressed the story and made a big deal in a separate story about the "400" counter-protesters in DC. LA people, PLEASE write to the LA Times and complain about the biased coverage! Actually, I might be premature on that on because I'm going by what I saw on their web site; I wasn't in LA to see what the Times actually printed on Sunday. Anyway, Don and I are back in sunny Southern
California now, mission accomplished. -Squeaky Wheel Neal
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