Reflections On Inauguration Day, 2017-The First Days Of The Resistance-Down With The Trump Government! Build The Resistance! 

By Fritz Taylor

Frank Jackman, the old time 1960s radical, sometimes writer and a guy who thought he knew a few things about the world, about the American world anyway was as bowled over as anybody on the morning after. No, not the morning after some drunken carouse or tome virtuous sexual escapade as had happened many a time although the latter not much of late but The morning after the 2016 election to wake up his Internet server homepage announcing that one Donald J. Trump had been a surprise victor in the American presidential race against one Hillary Rodham Clinton, heiress of the Clinton high-flying, well-financed and organized political dynasty soon to turn to dust (or had already turned to dust and we just catch up with the fact the morning after). 

It wasn’t like Frank had not seen certain signs that there was an uprising going on down at the base of society, the base of society that he was very familiar with since that stratum was where had had come from, come from the Riverdale “projects,” had come of age there. So he knew of hunger, of being hungry for the main chance, of not getting the fucking brass ring, of being left behind although truth to tell he had survived and not badly so he was little rusty in the hunger department. Yeah, Frank knew that there were a lot of frustrated angry people out in the vast American dark night, some who loathed the idea that a black man had been President of the United States for not one but two terms. Loathed the idea that a well-educated articulate woman might just take over the reins of power right after him, who loathed the idea that their cities and towns were looking a lot more like a world-wide melting pot than the old stand-by white European melting pot they had grown up with whether or not they had read old Professor Moynihan on the subject, who loathed that everybody but them and theirs was getting ahead in the globalization race to the bottom, and who loathed the whole political correctness thing that one Donald J. Trump was saying was fucked up.

He knew all that by heart but Frank had more current experiences going through the saw mill of the discontents down at the base that should have tipped him off more decisively to avoid that morning surprise. He and his golfing buddies, Sid, Kaz, Keith and Pat had during the whole previous year been around golf courses, public golf courses not Trump venues where older white guys go to die-or pass away the time until then. (The standing joke among that golfing brethren was that if Trump won he would privatize those public courses or burn them down-take your pick).They had run into serious Trump supporters along the way from guys who said they had voted for Obama or had not voted for a long while but had sent money to the billionaire Trump and wished him god speed. But Frank had been carried away just as much as the whole traditional and social media networks being way off the mark (except followers of the trollers who were wreaking havoc on the planet for kicks-and the “fake news” in favor of Trump) by the improbability of a political novice who was not a general like Grant or Eisenhower beating a seasoned political operative and her vaunted organization like a gong.

Shame on him for believing anything the paid pundits, commentators, bloggers, gurus and their tenacious hangers-on had to say about anything, anytime on any subject. That was then though, the morning after blues. By that late afternoon Frank had regrouped himself and began to understand what he needed to do to project his new political profile. He had been rather neutral about the outcome of the election prior to that morning since for a variety of other reasons he would be opposing Mrs. Clinton and her very upfront and frankly scary war policies which she intended to thrust on the country when she was sworn in (and he had taken much flak from friends and loved ones for not believing that there was a qualitative difference between this pair of rogues). But the reality of the Trump triumph and the accompanying sweep of everything in sight by the ghoulish Republicans, those who favored him or not, who had their own reactionary agenda to push through had placed him on immediate war footing.                      

That “war footing” idea was no literary flourish although those same friends and loved one would tell you that Frank was entirely capable of such flourishes but an understanding that it would be necessary to begin the resistance to Trump and his government whatever it looked like (and in the end it looked very much like a rogue’s gallery of the 1% that he had been campaigning against for the previous decade or so-in who were being tagged by Trump in person in some cases to put their grimy fingers on the affairs of state). That afternoon he wrote a blog for a website, American Politics, that he wrote for occasionally arguing that the election results along with the general dead-end trend of American politics and the extreme divisiveness pulling society apart, putting it into two distinct and visible camps had confirmed against his better hopes from the evidence of the past year that the country was in a state of cold civil war (with the unstated implication going back to ante-bellum times that the nation was on the cusp of that turning into a “hot” one).         

From that afternoon on he would when making commentary use that slogan or mantra if you will-“the cold civil war has started” whenever he posted anything politically relevant on his various sites (although a strong argument could be made that it had only come into the open and that had started years before-at the very beginning of the Obama era-maybe earlier on the economic side with the tremendous loss of decent jobs). Frank though is, has been an activist, a left-wing of some sort of activist since he was a kid. Since back in 1960 when he was a slip of a teenage boy hanging out with Quakers and pacifists publicly protesting against the escalation of nuclear weaponry in favor of disarmament. So the axis of his slogan was not to make abstract and academic political points, he would leave that to the egg-on-face pundits and bull-shitters but to help prepare for the social struggles ahead once old Trump was sworn in. To get people prepared to go into the streets since the electoral process had proven bankrupt. He argued and would continue to argue that unlike the died-in-the-wool Democrats who were miffed about how unfair things had turned out and looked forward to some future utopian electoral victory with a “better” candidate that the resistance needed to be organized on the streets-and maybe given the way the political deck was stacked the only place that mattered for the duration.            

Of course you can only effectively argue about what needs to be done when something happens-something like the inauguration of one Donald J. Trump and so Frank would point out that from day one, from noontime come January 20^th the resistance needed to be publicly organized. What Frank meant, what he  determined was necessary to show his new state of mind was that he decided he would go down to Washington on Inauguration Day and protest the swearing in of the next President of the United States. This was no mean task since Frank had purposefully avoided going to that event for all of his long political life seeing the event as a waste of time (and in recent years worthless as a place to protest since there were so many restrictions placed on protestors as to defeat the purpose). Helping him in his decision to go down the few hundred miles from his home in Dalton about forty miles west of Boston was that the next day there was to be a Women’s March on Washington and so the weekend would be one of activity and struggle.    

Frank had over the previous several years since he had slowed down his professional activities as a lawyer been to Washington on a number of occasions to protest the Obama war policies in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and wherever else that administration was bloodying its hands and also in defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning when his trial was going on at Fort Meade just outside Washington. (As one of his last acts in office Obama would commute Chelsea’s horrendous thirty-five year sentence for essentially telling the truth about American atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq via his Wiki-Leaks revelations to his thankful credit from supporters and opponents like Frank alike).

Of late Frank usually would fly to Washington but this time he decided to drive the four hundred or so miles in order to take three young passengers with him who had no resources to go otherwise. He would foot the travel bill since the cost of travel by car would be about the same as a flight for himself. (One an Iraq War veteran who was trying to stabilize his life after a serious bout with drugs and two graduate students who by definition are poverty-stricken)  He had also decided to use his hotel loyalty points in Baltimore order to have lodging for all four since anyplace closer would have been over-the-top expensive and given the lateness of his decision to go most protester-friendly places like U/U churches were filled up and or spoken for.  On the 19^th of January having picked up the three guys in Cambridge they headed south to Washington to do political battle the next day.

The next day after spending a restless and talkative night at that Baltimore hotel location the four men headed by car to the nearest Metro station at Glenmont on the Redline to get to downtown Washington. The train was not crowded (as opposed to the next day’s efforts, the gigantic Women’s March, where they would have to wait for a long time both to get into that same station and to board the train) and they made downtown in good time (and didn’t have to worry about where to park amid all the restrictions on the streets that day). They got off at Judiciary and proceeded to head toward the security checkpoint on Fourth near the National Gallery of Art so they could get a spot on the parade route to give Trump the old raspberry on opening day. (One of the reasons that Frank in recent years had decided not to go to any Inaugurations to protest was the whole security apparatus set-up, the “running of the gauntlet,” which effectively acted to tamp down any serious in-your-face protest so he knew that they would be limited in what they could carry for signs, etc.)           

That day it never got to the raspberry on the parade route point though. As Frank and his companions were standing in the slow-moving security check-point line a group of young people who later identified themselves to Frank as part of Surge Washington which had been formed mostly by young people who were students or who worked in Washington to protest in a peaceful but forceful way the impeding coronation of Trump sat down in front of the security tent and blocked the entrance. Classic tried and true honored civil disobedience. Naturally that event stopped Frank and his companions in their tracks since unlike others trying to get through the checkpoint they would not cross the line set up by their fellow protesters. This action, part of several around city, were acts of   symbolic speech and while later he and his companions would discuss the value of the particular action they were all under the bane of “picket lines mean don’t cross” an old labor slogan honored many times more in the breech than the observance.

This action which was intended to shut down the checkpoint for a couple of hours and then move on to other such locales wound up being Frank and his companions’ activities for the day and they never did get to the parade route to protest. So they moved with the protesters whenever they moved. 

Not only were they acting in political solidarity with the protesters but Frank was there to defend them against the sometimes angry spectators who could not get through whatever he thought of the tactic. (There were several testy situations when some Bikers for Trump tried to break the line at Fourth Street but were dissuaded by the Secret Service agents who had closed the checkpoint tight so nobody was getting through anyway). Their mostly young faces had heartened him that there would be another generation to pass the protest torch on to. Moreover since he was admitted as a lawyer in D.C. he could represent them if they were arrested. Throughout the day there were arrests around the city, a couple of hundred according to news sources, but no at any of the actions that Frank’s groupings were at. So that is how Frank (and his companions) spent his first day of resistance, his first day as a “soldier” in the brewing cold civil war which has been unleashed in the American dark night. 

[Frank and his friends would attend the Women’s March on Washington the next day which was spectacular but really uneventful except as a wonderful realization that there were plenty of people, plenty of women who had joined, or were ready to join the resistance. Yes, they came to Washington half a million strong to make a first full day point.]

Join the resistance!