Hella Nation - Evan Wright [53]
They feel emboldened by their success at the Santa Monica Gap, and I spend the next several hours driving them across L.A. to attack additional outposts of capitalist oppression. Panic assures me he would drive if I weren’t in the car with them, but by this point I am enjoying the lawlessness for its own sake. I am coming to suspect that the simple, transgressive thrill of committing vandalism is a major draw for their particular revolution.
They spray-paint “WE WON WTO” on the wall of a Jaguar dealership. They tag a Starbucks with “STARBUCKS RAPES RAIN FORESTS.” They hit a McDonald’s with “McMURDER.” Wingnut Super Glues the locks of a Venice Gap.
By midnight we are in Long Beach searching for additional targets. Wingnut’s lingering cough leaves him so breathless he can barely run. He suggests everyone call it a night. But Panic and Siren want to keep going, so they leave Wingnut and me by the curb and head for a nearby Gap.
Panic and Siren stride to the Gap, shaking their spray cans. They have done this so many times in the past couple of hours, they become careless and take too long as they spray-paint the wall with the Gap’s alleged crimes—clear-cutting redwood forests, using child labor.
A cop car zooms onto the curb a few feet from the taggers. Panic takes off down an alley. Siren stays behind, and two cops hustle her to the ground.
Wingnut and I watch helplessly from a couple hundred feet away. We see the cops put Siren into a car and drive her off. Panic’s fate is unclear. A police helicopter beats overhead, washing rooftops and pavement in white light. Wingnut walks toward the Gap to look for Panic. As he approaches, a cop beams a flashlight in Wingnut’s face but lets him pass, probably assuming he is just some homeless guy. None of the cops pay much attention when Wingnut walks away shouting “Panic” into the night.
The next morning at the co-op Kendra learns that Siren and Panic are being held at the Long Beach jail on misdemeanor charges for their acts of graffiti on the Gap. Siren contacts her parents and asks if they will post her $300 bail. They agree to do so only if she renounces anarchy and agrees to pray with them and read the Bible every night for one hour. Siren refuses to renounce the revolution. Both she and Panic opt to do a few days’ jail time in lieu of paying fines.
Wingnut ceases to exist the following afternoon when I drop him at a truck stop in the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. I last see him walking toward a truck, a future primitive going nowhere.
Fewer than six months later the young man named Craig Marshall is arrested for setting fire to several SUVs at a car dealership in Eugene, Oregon. I know him as Wingnut. Prosecutors allege he is a member of Earth Liberation Front and claim he is responsible for causing more than $43 million of property damage during the previous five years. They charge him with several arson counts related to the car dealership fire, and Marshall accepts a plea deal, drawing a five-and-a-half-year sentence. His co-conspirator in the crime, Jeff Luers, a twenty-three-year-old with the revolutionary name “Free,” takes his case to trial. He is convicted of multiple counts of arson and sentenced to twenty-one years in prison.
HEIL HITLER, AMERICA!
In Pastor Richard Girnt Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nations, the cross and the swastika are united, and prayers are said with a Sieg Heil salute. The good news Pastor Butler preaches is that race war is coming to America. Each summer his Christian Identity followers—an assortment of skinheads, Nazis and Klansmen—gather at his Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, to celebrate white pride under the warm glow of flaming crosses. This past July at the 1996 Aryan Nations World Congress, we were on hand to observe the festivities.
Pastor Butler calls his religion Christian Identity, and its tenets are simple: White “Aryan” Americans are God’s chosen