OLA AntiSocial Media

There once was a fetid swamp of white bourgeois, liberal bilge called Occupy Los Angeles... We found each other there and emerged from that muck and mire still believing that we can win. Ask us about it at the barricades sometime. We are sometimes anti-social - always anti-fascist. We like to smash things but sometimes our smashing is purely figurative. Some of us don’t run as fast as we used to. Chris Hedges, Kevin Zeese, and Tina Dupuy all suggested we were pigs. David Sirota said we should ‘go fuck ourselves.’ Having drawn the ire of such liberal luminaries, we think we must be doing something right. We are a dynamic and evolving community who eschew authorship, believing it provokes ego and craving. We promote anonymity, collective decision-making, community and truth. We have modeled this tumblr and twitter feed on the Black Bloc tactic - erasing identity and promoting solidarity - as a symbol against the corruption inherent within our movement, representing that of the wider world. All our content is open source to those who are our comrades. We refuse to allow our words to be reproduced by any organization that is using this content for the purposes of soliciting financial or other donations. If you would like to use our words to solicit resources, ask us.

[ara-la]

Just got a heads up about this really weird event with Jeff Schoep of the nazi NSM in Beverly Hills tomorrow, along with Najee Ali and Jasmyne Cannick of a Black women’s group and Leon Jenkins of the LA chapter of the NAACP. The graphic on the website features Schoep most...

[ola-asm-blog]

Anti Social Media

"Et s'il faut commencer par les coups d' pied au cul faudrait pas oublier qu' ça descend dans la rue"

It's time we admit something: we don't know shit about tumblr. The truth is, we were in a hurry to get shit posted back in January 2012 - and this was the fastest way to do so. So, now that we finally have what seems like a break in the "action," we've moved our entire archive of original content over to the above Wordpress. We hope to see you (and your continued contributions & support) over there! for anarchy,

-OLAASM

[gradientlair]

When I write about 2013 being a year of White supremacy and racism, I don’t mean to imply that these are “new” things that happened in feminist space and politics. An adequate look at the history of mainstream feminism, even a quick a look at it reveals that 2013 was simply like any other year....

[ola-asm-blog]

Marxian Hipsters, Old Skool Marxists and the Abstract and Fetishized Notions of Social Emancipation

The hipsters of value critique can often be heard describing present society as one founded on an abstract and fetishized mode of social domination. Most of the rest of us have no idea what the fuc...

my brain. pain.

[ola-asm-blog]

Marlon Brown Dash Cam Release Being Run Over - Ocala Post

Krystal Brown, Marlon Browns Ex-wife, received a payout of $550,000 for Marlon Browns death from the city of DeLand

this is so fucked.

[hellyesjohnsteinbeck]

Commonly misquoted:

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

As quoted in A Short History of Progress (2005) by Ronald Wright, p. 124; though this has since been cited as a direct quote by some, the remark may simply be a paraphrase, as no quotation marks appear around the statement and earlier publication of this phrasing have not been located.

This is likely an incorrect quote from America & Americans, 1966:

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. "I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves." (source: Wikiquote)

[fuckintellectualproperty-deacti]

[ola-asm-blog]

In response to our review of the Calle 13 video, which we admittedly sensationalized with the click-baiting title "Kill the Tom Morello In Your Head," guitar god Tom Morello himself deigned to reply, "that's the spirit Fellow Worker!" Having had a similar experience with Boots Riley a few months ago, we wondered: what is it about globe-trotting performing artists that leads them to assert they are "workers?" This seems, to us, the same kind of reductionist class analysis conjured in the bumper sticker slogan of occupy, "We Are The 99%."  Well. We think we found the reason why musicians think this way. What are your thoughts?

[hairy-stargate-lesbian-deactiva]

Don’t assume those you intend to help even wanted your help.

You are not there to ‘help’ anyone. Help assumes you are in authority and they depend on you.

You are there to work with people.

Those people are not charity cases: they are human beings with feelings history…

[ola-asm-blog]

anywhere. 

[rewiredotnews]

#SolidarityIsForTheAbleBodied aimed to spark a conversation among people with disabilities who “have to fight, and hard, to adapt … to fit into the world,” Carter, a political consultant who lives in Maryland, said.

More so, it was meant to uncover the ableism experienced daily by the one in five people in the United States who has a disability. Just take a quick scan of the hashtag on Twitter, and you’ll read tweet after tweet of inequitable treatment. Denied government benefits because you’re not “disabled enough”? Check. Confronted by a “take the stairs” campaign when you use a wheelchair? Check. Avoided visiting the doctor’s because it’s inaccessible? Check. Told your depression is nothing but temporary sadness and that you should “just smile”?Check.

While #SolidarityIsForTheAbleBodied shined a light on incidents of able-bodied privilege from across the globe, showing how ableism is a systemic issue in all political and societal respects, it also revealed something that has long been known by some, but that has been unrecognized by others: that feminism has an ableism problem.

[fuckyeahfeminists]

Please read. This is so important. And it’s sad this has gotten like, no mainstream attention. 

[humbleasatumble]

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.”

Full Article

[blog-mons-deactivated20191027]

Mexico 13-12-2013 Protesters burn a coca cola christmas tree after demonstration against the privatization

[ola-asm-blog]

Socialism In One 'Rock God'? No, thanks. Kill The Tom Morello In Your Head

The very first frame reveals a rainbow, arcing triumphantly across an otherwise bleak, almost-monochromatic sky. We quickly zoom into a dusty, hillside village. Then – with another frenetic cut – we see a guard tower overlooking a foreboding fence. Shit, as they say, just got real. Real fast.

Jump cut to some deteriorating wheat pastes, weathered and fluttering in the wind as their aging adhesive loosens its grip.  Another jump cut and we’re in a child’s bedroom - jumping again and again between apparent bullet holes, a map of Palestine and the handdrawn art that typically clutters kids’ walls; a sketch of a soldier getting shit on by a dove or a tank exploding after hitting an IED. You know, the usual things kids draw.

The pacing of these cuts, paired with the insistent, siren-like wail of the song’s intro, give “Multi_Viral” a sense of urgency. Any video depicting a brutal, ongoing occupation should be urgent and insistent.  This one is. So, it got one part right.

Sadly, however, Kacho Lopez Mari’s video for Calle 13’s recent collaboration with Kamilya Jubran; Harvard-educated, millionaire rockstar “revolutionary” Tom Morello and Ecuadorian-embassy-ensconced, rape-accusal-resisting Julian Assange is fatally flawed by its own, unmistakable and counterrevolutionary narcissism. Thematically, the entire video is a representation of the struggle to – live out the fantasy of being Tom Morello, rock fucking god. Fuck that individualistic, hero-worshipping fuckshit and everything it implies.

I have to admit, I don’t know shit about Calle 13. Apparently, they have won a fuckload of Grammys - which everyone knows is as sure a sign as any of one’s truly revolutionary, artistic credibility. [/sarcasm?] I read that they are from Puerto Rico. I likewise read that Mari is, too. Jubran is a Palestinian. Assange is Australian (ostensibly.) And Morello is from the U.S. - specifically, Westwood, California. The international solidarity on display in this project is great - but this video? This video is fucked.

With over 600,000 views on YouTube since its publication on December 13th, Mari’s direction has proven adept at one thing: Virility. Combining a moving, almost-kaleidoscopic assemblage of powerful, revolutionary imagery with an anthemic track - “Multi Viral” demonstrates the importance of propaganda. And then, in the blink of an eye, it aptly demonstrates how ill-conceived propaganda can send a wholly loathsome message.

Let’s go over the linear narrative employed in “Multi Viral” so you can see what I mean…

The sleeping child wakes up. Nothing too groundbreaking there.

Then, he hurriedly grabs a book - which holds within it what appears to be an ammunition cartridge. As De La Soul once said, Stakes is High!

Okay, Mari - you’ve got me. This looks like some subversive shit. I’m hooked. I watch on as the young boy sneaks his way past sentries…

past other, subversive street art…

adds his own (anonymous) message...

and conspires with other young radicals to achieve their objective…

   which, we will soon learn, was to fabricate a guitar that looks like an AK-47…

climb to a rooftop, and pretend to be… Tom fucking Morello.

That’s your linear narrative - make no mistake about it, kids: “Wake up, risk your life, get to the stage (by yourself, by any means necessary) and ‘rock the fuck out,’ just like rock god Tom Morello,” with or without a guitar that looks like a fucking Heineken advert (Red star on white with a green background? Am I missing something?). I half expected Morello to pick up a frosty beer and sit with the kid at the end of the video with a bag of Doritos and toast the “revolution” as they watch the Super Bowl.

I don’t care enough to go further into detail about how troubling this unabashed narcissism is (particularly when paired with Julian Assange - who is nothing if not a fucking wanna-be, global icon more consumed with his image than with affect), but there you have it. If you’re going to say “art matters” or “symbolism is important” or any of that fuckshit, then take a few fucking minutes to think about how a video represents messaging. Think about how individualism, or artistic achievement itself as it manifests individual achievement, is actually disempowering to others? Or how becoming a “rock god” actually might not be the goal of struggle itself?

The symbol of risking one’s life to enact a selfish fantasy of being Tom Morello for a day is as unmistakable to me as it is counterrevolutionary. For that reason, this “viral” video is bound to succeed - but bound to be thematically fucked. I mean, if I was a 'rock god' - trying to demonstrate what 'solidarity' might look like - I'd probably try for the M1 (from DeadPrez) approach, rather than appearing to use Palestine as a mere setting for my singular exaltation as the embodiment of revolution... I could be wrong. I often am. Either way, kill your idols.

[edit: More links on the video translation of the song's lyrics here read NPR's glowing review here

[danceforthatanarchy]

This is what initiating a snatch squad looks like.

Capt. Horace Frank of the LA Pigs Department is pointing out organizers to arrest them, without probable cause. Arrest first, charge later.

On March 19, 2012, about 20 of us were protesting in front of the LA Metro Detention center for their targeted unlawful arrests of our comrades, which happened during our sidewalk festival celebrating Occupy Wall Street’s 6 months anniversary. About 60 pigs surrounded us, detained our comrades who were holding the FTP banner, then snatched another couple of us, beating the rest of us out of their way.

They do this to intimidate the organizers, many of which have pending trials for prior civil disobedience arrests, to scare us into never again marching the streets and challenging the status quo.

But little do they know, our fear transcends to hypervigilence. Now we’re militantly aware and our solidarity is stronger than ever.

So FUCK YOU, police state. We’re not backing off, and we’re never going to stop until you are smashed down to the core.

FUCK THE POLICE.

[ola-asm-blog]

memories!

[nowaronthepoor]

Los Angeles, CA December 19th, 2013

Protesters, non-profits and local autonomous groups have been challenging an upcoming motion by two politicians that called for “City Departments [to] come together to determine a solution that addresses non-commercial feeding in the public rights of way”....

[ola-asm-blog]

“From Saying ‘Officer’ to Screaming ‘Pig’; How I Learned to Stop Equivocating and Hate the State” PART 2

“From Saying ‘Officer’ to Screaming ‘Pig’; How I Learned to Stop Equivocating and Hate the State” [PART 2] [An Origins Story]

I grew up in bucolic, Great Falls, Virginia - a sleepy, suburban village that transformed before my young eyes from a community of rolling horse farms and their attendant, country homes to one of increasingly ostentatious McMansions and the nouveau riche who populate them. By 2011 that “transformation” was complete: my hometown is now being heralded as the 12th richest zip code in the United States.

Situated in Fairfax County - across the winding Potomac River from Washington, DC - Great Falls increasingly made itself home to the executives and entrepreneurs of “a private sector that feasts on government contracting” who feted on largesse during the booming 1990s. In fact, Fairfax County itself now reigns as the third wealthiest County in the country, bested only by its two immediate neighbors, Falls Church and Loudoun Counties.

Boasting seven out of the country’s top ten “wealthiest” counties, the entire region has itself developed an insulated, out-of-touch, and recession-proof wealth bubble that people outside of it - in “real America” - just can’t relate to. This insular community, however - the lobbyists, access journalists, think tank fellows and pork-subsidized corporate opportunists - further isolate themselves even in "the DMV" in exclusive, gated communities and country clubs. South East DC and Prince George's County in Maryland, on the other hand, have become final holdouts for the working class and otherwise-disregarded, as the city itself has been increasingly gentrified.

The “inside the Beltway” stigma, thus, is itself a gross oversimplification. The well-compensated technocrats of the ruling elite who proliferate the region aren't actually constrained by the highway that rings the city. In fact, they seem to prefer the exurbs, relying now on "Lexus Lanes" to zip around the region while those who survive precariously by serving them languish in ever-increasing traffic jams. DC itself, with its proud minority-majority, has been singled out for an even more unique indignity - denied the very voting representation the wealthy merchants who founded this Republic mythologically revolted in order to secure.

Growing up there in the exurbs as the Washington Consensus asserted itself with "TINA," I was surrounded by political powerbrokers. I went to elementary school with Casper Weinberger's grand-daughter and Oliver North's children. After failing Freshman year of high school, I joined the "graduating" class of one of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's daughters. Scalia himself gave my sister's high school commencement speech. As I grew up, the political surnames that echoed during class roll calls were increasingly joined by the surnames of wealthy lobbyists and entrepreneurs. Of course, I never related easily to the children of these insidious insiders who became my soccer teammates and classmates. I related more to those who resisted. 

My dad came from Jersey City, working-class stock. In nearly a century, our German ancestors had never made it far from the docks where they arrived. His father, my grandfather, had worked at a Firestone Tire store in Hoboken and died of a massive heart attack while at work one day. My father was still sixteen at the time. Instead of focusing on school, he did his best to take care of his mother and younger sister instead. So while Dad had attained some considerable financial success in his own life, notably (and to his perpetual shame) without a college degree, he always maintained the stinginess of someone who knew his money hadn’t come easily and could quickly disappear again.

Despite living amid plenty, surrounded by kids who were gifted sparkling imported cars for their birthdays, my experience didn't exactly correspond to what I saw around me. The dearth of food in our family’s fridge and the cunning my Mom employed just to buy essentials, always keeping purchases secret from Dad to avoid his scarcity-plagued wrath, seemed to imply we were always on the verge of financial ruin. When we occasionally had a well-stocked refrigerator, my father would joke that it was “only for viewing.” I actually made and consumed condiment sandwiches. I drank pickle juice sometimes. Asking for money from my Dad for anything was an agonizing ritual that involved writing contracts - even in crayon - in order to demonstrate that the money would be accounted for.

We weren’t destitute, of course. While my parents assuredly over-extended themselves living amid such privileged environs - they never came anywhere near reaching the area’s stratospheric, $194,000 annual, median income - my siblings and I attended top public schools and never wanted for anything, really. We may have seemed destitute in comparison to our peers - but it'd be dishonest to sing sad dirges about a hardscrabble upbringing I didn’t have. The reality is: if my family ever needed anything, or wanted it, we probably could’ve had it. It just took convincing my dad (or leaving him, as my Mom eventually would). After all, there was always credit, home equity or otherwise.

I did make friends growing up - I don’t want you to think I was a total outcast. However, I was a determined iconoclast from my earliest days - compelled to resist conformity on every front. If nothing else, my scarlet hair - always a subject of ridicule on the playground at Great Falls Elementary - distinguished me from my pasty peers and set me physically apart, because in Great Falls, being a "ginger" was about as exotic as it got. In this country, othering is such an entrenched practice it apparently can be applied even within an almost monolithically white community.

In time, I came to embrace the role of the mythical outsider - turning my early social stigma into an asset, internalizing it, and becoming that obnoxious, adolescent champion of “being different” who just wouldn’t shut up about it. I was so "different," I intentionally dressed "preppy" when I hung out with skaters, taggers and punk-types. Non-conformity was my mantra, even amongst non-conformists. From that foundation, I went off to find out what that meant to other marginalized people - and I quickly found out the consequences for it, for being different, were far more real and more substantial for others than the comparably mild playground taunts a "carrot-top" kid had endured. Being a redhead quickly became laughable as I started to become aware of white supremacy, particularly as it exists beyond a few knuckleheads on Geraldo. It was even more laughable when I learned about other forms of oppression - most of which I personally benefited from.

Eventually, that sense of total alienation that comes with being set apart got the better of me, though. I dropped out of one of the best public high schools in the country, condemning the student body there as vapid materialists every day from a booth at a nearby diner - where instead of attending classes, I chain-smoked cigarettes, read Sartre and Camus, drank endless cups of coffee, and insisted, “I’m a writer!” No, I had seen wealth and privilege - and everyone around me was miserable. At least their kids were. So, my first revolt was against a life directed towards accumulation. It was what made the most sense to me. I could see how it solved nothing, especially for an adolescent in the grips of existentialists.

I’d show everyone, I imagined. I wasn’t fooled by the vapid trappings of wealth - I wouldn’t suckle at Mammon’s teat for his temporal lucre! (I actually wrote like that! I still do!) I was going to be the honest guy who made an honest living; John Lennon’s real, “Working Class Hero.” And then I'd write about it. Or I’d sell weed and fake id’s and write about that.

It didn’t really work out that way, of course. Things rarely go according to adolescent plans. Instead, I floundered in odd job after odd job, flopping around various cities chasing myriad pipedreams - losing parents to age, losing teeth to poverty and neglect, and losing friends, girlfriends, and siblings to their sinking suspicion that maybe I had no future worth sharing after all. I quickly went from “having so much potential” to being everyone’s perennial “disappointment.” It was becoming obvious that the life of a self-described “luftmensch” was not one that could easily be shared - and people started to smell the stench of failure on me. The kind of people I grew up with avoid that particular smell, I guess. 

When I finally landed in Los Angeles in 2007, I was still pretending to be a writer - but I had found myself increasingly annoyed at having to explain why I was a writer who didn’t write anything; the scribe who couldn’t - or wouldn’t - scribble. It turned out I wouldn’t have to do that anymore in LA; everyone there that I met was trying to be something other than what they were. As Mike Davis observed in City of Quartz, to go to Los Angeles was “to submerge oneself in spectacle and fraud.” As broken and battered as I was when I got there, I knew I was finally home.

[ola-asm-blog]

“From Saying ‘Officer’ to Screaming ‘Pig’; How I Learned to Stop Equivocating and Hate the State” Part 1

“From Saying ‘Officer’ to Screaming ‘Pig’; How I Learned to Stop Equivocating and Hate the State” [Introduction]

Four days after I got out of the LA County Jail, released on my own recognizance after a brief three day stint there, an unarmed 19-year-old was shot and killed by the police a few miles North in Pasadena. Other than the shared setting, however, there are precious few other similarities between the killing of Kendrec McDade on March 24, 2012 and my own first, truly adversarial experience with law enforcement. In fact, the stories are neatly defined by one stark contrast: I am a white male and Kendrec McDade was not.

There are significant differences in our cases in addition to ‘race’, to be sure. Yet many of those very differences serve to amplify a disturbing similarity between McDade and an ever-growing list of brown and black men felled by police gunfire around the country in recent years. An unarmed McDade “fit the profile” of a suspect in a reported crime and allegedly “reached for his waistband” while he ran from police - three distinct details that, when combined, seem to invariably precipitate the use of lethal force by police in America. If you are of color, unarmed, and dare to move when someone pulls a gun on you, you can be legally murdered in the United States of America by police and other vigilantes.

None of these three factors played a part in my arrest, of course. As one who presents as a white male, I hardly ever “fit the profile.” With the decimation of the labor movement, there is also far less of a historical impetus for a white guy to ever run from cops any more. By and large, the police - as an institution - are entirely trusted by white folks like me. Finally, at 33 years old - well passed the baggy pants style I admittedly once modeled - I now also almost never have to "reach to my waistband" to pull my own pants up. In fact, I can hardly be bothered to run at all.

So common has the “reached for his waistband” trope become in officer-involved shootings of late, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department acknowledged it openly in their September, 2011 semiannual report. There they noted that over a six year period, “waistband shootings are increasing, making up about one-third of all hit and non-hit shooting cases in 2010,” and that “approximately 47 percent of all waistband shooting suspects were confirmed to be unarmed.”

The report also alarmingly revealed that during the same period a staggering 90% of suspects shot by deputies were black or Latino. So the question is, then, why are police officers and deputies making seemingly standard practice of shooting black and Latino men who are fleeing from them? Further - are they cynically manipulating this “reached for his waistband” mantra in order to indemnify themselves from accountability? In the sordid, near-genocidal realm of so-called "officer involved shootings," or "OIS," the suggestion that a victim "reached for his waistband" is becoming the 'Twinkie Defense’ that actually works.

This theme would play out again later in the summer of 2012 in nearby Anaheim when Manuel Diaz, 25, fled from a police 'stop and frisk' in a working class neighborhood there. It was alleged in the media, though not attributed to any specific source, that Diaz “threw something on the roof of the [apartment] complex” during the pursuit. Other than that, there wasn’t even a passing mention of violence, menace, or the mere hint that Diaz ever posed a threat to anyone, let alone the officer who killed him. All Manuel Diaz did that summer day was run away.

It seems patently outrageous, then, that such clearly non-threatening behavior could justify Officer Nick “Buckshot” Bennallack then firing the two fatal shots to Diaz’s back and head that killed him that day on Anna Drive. After all, running away from something is about as non-aggressive as you can get, isn’t it? But Diaz - a latino victim the Anaheim police and media had no problem maligning over and over again as a “gangmember” - allegedly "reached for his waistband” while he ran. Thus, after merely two weeks of paid leave, Officer Bennallack was back on patrol.

The murder of Diaz seemed outrageous to neighbors, too. They emerged from their homes immediately after the cold-blooded, daytime execution to get answers from the Anaheim Police Department. What these residents - primarily women and children - got instead of answers, however, were bean-bag rounds, rubber bullets, and even a vicious mauling by a K-9 unit at the hands of the same civil servants who so steadfastly claim to “protect and serve.”

Yet as I emerged from jail on March 20, 2012 - I didn’t know any of this. In fact, these two tragic incidents hadn’t even happened yet. Kendrec McDade and Manuel Diaz were both still alive, mostly unknown to anyone outside their respective communities. With the exception of McDade's high school football glory and Diaz's quiet reputation in his neighborhood, they were just regular guys like me. Except they weren’t white like me. So, if I was aware of the epidemic of police shootings under suspiciously similar circumstances  in America - or what that might soon portend for me - it was only in the theoretical realm. “Cops lie,” or so I had been told.

I knew who Mark Fuhrman was - I watched the OJ Trial between bong rips and keg stands at high school house parties in the suburbs. But it isn't about "one bad apple," no matter what they say. I’d read about 'throw downs'; planted evidence, including firearms, conjured by police officers to make stronger cases. I’d even had encounters myself with undercover cops while selling dime bags of weed - but with a combination of luck and privilege - I had managed to avoid their wrath. I had never really experienced the depth of police duplicity firsthand. That quickly changed, of course, but only after I resumed political organizing after a decade of committed-but-quiet self-destruction.