Recommended: Ken Layne's articles about the DC protests @ Popula

[blogslut]

Ken Layne used to own Wonkette and wrote for Gawker, among many other publications during his long career. After he sold Wonkette to Rebecca Schoenkopf, he retired to write about the nature and lore of the California desert. He publishes a wonderful publication called Desert Oracle ( https://www.desertoracle.com ). Popula managed to get him to leave his personal paradise to cover the ongoing DC protests:

https://popula.com/2018/07/21/from-small-things-big-thugs-sometimes-fall/

There’s the bench where I used to smoke cigarettes through my lunch breaks, while working at UPI’s world headquarters around the corner on H Street. It was such an ugly and soulless 1970s halfhearted-brutalist building that I always slowed down while passing the neighboring Dolley Madison House, stately and tasteful and filled with the ghosts of the slaves who toiled there. The Saudis owned the wire service when I was hired and the Moonies owned it when I quit, 18 years ago. Bill and Hillary Clinton were in the White House at the time, year seven of their curious reign. Sometimes I’d face the mansion and blow smoke towards it and wonder how much worse it would get, before the dam breaks. Before a revolution I welcome in theory and can just barely imagine in reality.

Well, reality is for suckers. Or realists. And I’d rather avoid them both. The shadowy park and its tall trees blocks any hint of action ahead. And like walking up to Zuccotti Park for the first time, in Lower Manhattan seven years ago, it is underwhelming. A handful of people, maybe? A few voices. Then I get around the last big trees and it opens up, this dark blocked-off stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. The music starts again; the black and white guys taking care of the huge battery-powered speaker in a backpack have made whatever adjustments, and the protest music blasts again. Sixties oldies, hip hop anthems, Neil Diamond’s “America” and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Power To the People.”

https://popula.com/2018/07/23/an-elusive-anti-trump-occupation-in-the-deluge/

The one-day march events long popular in America are meant to make a single-news-cycle statement and serve as a social outing to encourage the believers and make their numbers known to their oppressors. And then the people take their signs and go back home, hoping for the rare kind of action like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which followed Martin Luther King’s March for Jobs and Freedom by only 11 months.

But each permitted and crowd-controlled million-something march on the National Mall acknowledges the brutal military attack against the Bonus Army occupation of July 1932. More than 40,000 American war veterans and their families set up camp outside the Capitol in demand for payment of their military service bonus. It was the worst year of the Great Depression and many of the soldiers were homeless. Herbert Hoover’s administration launched a savage U.S. Army raid on the family camps, a raid led by Douglas MacArthur. Hanging around after dark is an invitation for your government to attack you, peaceful gathering or not. Even venturing onto the wrong side streets is enough for the government to arrest and prosecute, a lesson learned by the handful of angry demonstrators at Donald Trump’s embarrassing inauguration. If they can set the calvary loose on hungry World War I veterans, they can come after you.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

1. K&R