Hella Nation - Evan Wright [50]
She surveys the scene. “This is just so hella California.”
“Hella fucked,” Siren adds, walking away from her ex-boyfriend Austin.
I join Wingnut outside when a gangly boy comes up the driveway with a guitar and a backpack slung over his shoulder. His name is “Sorrow,” and he is sixteen years old. He rode a freight train into L.A. two days ago. He has walked approximately forty miles across the city looking for the co-op. He did not realize how big a city Los Angeles was.
Sorrow came to L.A. from the Minnehaha Free State, an organized blockade of a highway expansion across sacred Native American grounds in Minnesota. Like Wingnut, he has battled federal law enforcement agents from atop a monopod and lived in a tree. Unlike Wingnut, Sorrow identifies himself as a “nonviolent anarchist.”
Sorrow, whose mother passed away when he was very young, was raised on a farm by foster parents. He wandered from home when he was fourteen and has been living the life of a drifter-activist ever since.
Wingnut offers Sorrow a rollie, and the two join a circle of young punks sitting outside the house on the bare dirt (where a lawn used to be). Wingnut begins to tell the young punks about the Unabomber Manifesto and the need to take up armed resistance against the state.
Wingnut’s and Sorrow’s paths have been crossing a great deal recently. They have both spent time in Eugene together and at the tree sit in the nearby forest. They both smashed windows at the WTO protests in Seattle. Meeting again in L.A., they resume a long-running argument. While Sorrow believes in the right to destroy property for political protest, he calls taking up arms a “horrible thing.” He adds, “The Unabomber just killed people. It was wrong.”
Wingnut counters, “If you don’t riot, you don’t have the right to complain.”
Sorrow retorts, “The Unabomber didn’t riot. He just killed people.”
Wingnut asks, “If people broke into your house and were raping your mother, would you fight back by any means necessary? What about Mother Earth?”
“You can’t win against the U.S. Army,” says Sorrow.
“A single Molotov can take out twenty-five soldiers,” says Wingnut.
“They have nuclear bombs,” says Sorrow.
“I’d rather die standing than on my knees.” Wingnut launches into his favorite parable, about militiamen defeating the much more powerful British army in the American Revolution.
The punk boys seated nearby side with Wingnut. One of them says, “A violent struggle must be fought.”
“You’re mowing me down,” Sorrow says to the group.
“You’re talking until I’m blue in the face,” Wingnut says, causing the punk boys to laugh. One of them, who looks like a young Johnny Rotten, sneers at Sorrow. It’s a schoolyard look of contempt—pacifists are wusses. Sorrow takes his guitar and leaves.
Wingnut pulls out his knife and sharpens it.
THE SOLIDARITY FEST OPENS at the Aztlan Cultural Arts Foundation the next morning. The building is a barely refurbished former county jail not far from Dodger Stadium. There are still bars on the windows and cells upstairs.
A hundred anarchists and punk rockers in black leather, mostly from the Southwest, arrive by noon. Half of them sit on folding chairs arranged in a circle. A lone black man enters the circle and takes a seat. He introduces himself as Bloodhound, a Bloods gang member, and says he represents his chapter in an outreach program aimed at white outlaw groups.
Bloodhound asks the assembled white kids what punk rock means. A few raise hands. The room has the politely strained atmosphere of a 12-step meeting. A guy with his head shaved down to a Mohawk defines punk as “resisting the system.”
“That’s about the same with us,” Bloodhound says. “That we was an outlaw criminal gang was just a smear put on us by the media.” Bloodhound then regales his audience with tales of being shot at by rival gang members, being beaten up in alleys by cops who then dropped him into rival gang turf to be killed. He asks whether