Hella Nation - Evan Wright [52]
Siren has decided to come along since she has nothing better to do, now that she and her ex-boyfriend are finished for good. For the night’s action she’s borrowed a pair of shoes and a sports bra from an anarchist girl in the co-op, so she can run fast if there’s trouble with cops.
The three of them form an “affinity group”—a leaderless, autonomous cell formed for revolutionary action. Wingnut distributes the Super Glue. Along with spray paint and rocks, Super Glue is a favored “direct action tool” of anarchists. The glue will be used to sabotage select retail establishments by squirting it into their door locks after closing time.
Siren tears open the containers of Super Glue. “Look at all this wasteful packaging,” she frets.
In the darkened car in the parking lot, the anarchists plot.
Siren favors tagging anticorporate slogans on a local Tower Records store.
“What are their specific offenses?” Panic asks.
“They’re a huge corporation,” Siren responds.
“Selling crappy corporate rock isn’t good enough,” Panic says. He adds, “According to Martin Luther King, the first principle of direct action is identifying a specific offense committed by your target.”
Wingnut makes a bold proposal. “Let’s fill buckets with paint, go into a Gap and heave the shit at racks of clothes.”
Siren disagrees with the tactic of destroying clothing. “It’s still a waste, even if it is Gap.”
Panic and Wingnut recall an action in which the two of them threw a bucket of urine into the kitchen of a McDonald’s. “It was classified a toxic hazard,” Panic says, laughing. “They had to shut it down for twenty-four hours.”
“We could do that in the Gap,” Wingnut says.
“Not if we destroy clothes.” Siren remains opposed. “Unless we could call the Gap store later and tell them to donate the damaged clothes to charity.”
“No one’s going to want clothes covered in piss,” Wingnut reasons.
“Then we shouldn’t do it.”
They agree to tag the Gap with slogans but leave the clothing undamaged. They also decide to hit any Starbucks they encounter along the way, though no one can think of a specific offense committed by Starbucks.
“It doesn’t matter,” Siren reasons. “There are really only six corporations that own everything in the world. It doesn’t matter who you hit. It’s all the same.”
Panic wants to tag a Starbucks with “I came in your coffee.”
“That’s offensive,” Siren counters. “And it doesn’t educate people.”
Chastened, Panic says, “Maybe we should only do child-labor tags. We can hit dozens of targets across the city. Then call the media and tell them what we’ve done. We will say . . .” Panic’s voice changes into a menacing monotone, like that of a TV terrorist. “We demand you focus on child-labor issues, or we will not stop.”
Wingnut scoffs. “The media doesn’t care about graffiti unless it’s racial shit like swastikas.”
AN HOUR LATER, Wingnut enters a Gap in Santa Monica. He pulls his Zapatista bandit mask over his face and walks up to a customer. She is picking through a stack of khakis. “Did you know these clothes are made with slave labor?” His voice is midway between speaking and shouting.
The woman jumps. In the brightly lit Gap, Wingnut is a gnomelike figure in his black mask and hoodie. The woman is blond and in her late twenties. She has probably devoted more time to grooming herself in the past twenty-four hours than Wingnut has in the past five years. She hurriedly exits.
A salesgirl approaches.
Wingnut shouts, “The Gap uses slave labor!” A dreadlock falls from his hoodie and shakes over his mask as he repeats himself.
The salesgirl giggles nervously.
Wingnut turns and walks out as calmly as he entered. Siren and Panic were supposed to have followed Wingnut into the store and shouted slogans with him. Instead, they remained outside and tagged the wall with the anarchy symbol in black and the word “GREED” above it in red. The entire tag is about six feet tall, dominating the white stucco wall that faces Wilshire Boulevard.
Wingnut