The war rally was pretty amazing, humungous amount of people, too spread outto guess how many, will be interesting to see the aerial shots all thosehelicopters must have been snapping. March from The Embarcadero to the Civic Center, which is like a mile or so. Then a rally on the big lawn of the Civic Center, MC'd by Danny Glover, which was interesting. Booming sound system to the whole yard. Really amazingly planned.

2/16/03 Market Street, San Francisco - SF Chronicle story and pix

Everyone carried their pickets, all with clever little slogans like "stop mad cowboy disease" and "bu**sh**" and my personal favorite, "I'm so mad about U.S. foreign policy that I made this sign!". Most of the slogans struck me as a little too clever so it was hard to get meaning out of them, but I guess the important thing is the show of solidarity.

Hung in the Civic Center listening to the speeches, clapping with the roar, then walked to the outskirts and happened on the "illegal march", which was a bunch of Seattle-style "anarchists", complete with face masks and facial tattoos, walking a spontaneous route and being followed by probably 50 cops with riot helmets ready to wear. The cops had a big old school bus which they'd converted to a paddy wagon, and it struck me that everyone has their idea of the ideal bus conversion, even the cops.

The anarchists seemed like professional protesters, they had great snare drum music and bull horns and adding all sorts of drama with smoke bombs which seem like tear gas until they reach you. Every now and again some invisible command would spread through the phalanx of cops via their ear pieces and the helmets would be put on and the clubs would come out and I'd realize that these are some very large cops, and I'd run to get away from the epicenter, back to being a bystander. A bunch of the anarchists locked arms inches from a shoulder-to-shoulder row of scowling cops, and the protesters yelled things at the cops that I couldn't hear, and the cops smiled hateful little smiles behind their kevlar face masks, and a German woman started yelling at the protesters "you're being violent! stop it!" Good point, but so is the one that there are many ways to protest.

When the news cameras showed up and some extra smoke bombs hit the pavement and the face masks went on and the fists went into the air I heard a father telling his tiny kid "they get all excited when the cameras show up, they have to do something bad for the cameras so they'll get on TV. This is fun for these people, they go from town to town doing this". And the kid replied "can they come to our house?"

Eventually it got tiring and I watched a minor spectacle for too long and the main thrum got away from me, so I went to get a bite at some Tenderloin Indian restaurant, and half the people were Tenderloin bums and the other half were dressed in devil costumes and that sort of thing, and leaning their pickets next to their tables like umbrellas.

Wrybread