-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 8, 2007 5:48:51 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Old Hippies Never Die -- Antiwar Granny Busted at "Summer
of Love" Memorial
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE:
An antiwar protester gets arrested during a Summer of Love redux.
Excuse me?
By Cary Stemle
June 5, 2007
http://leoweekly.com/?q=node/4841
Cities and antiwar resolutions
During the Vietnam Era, it was common for municipal governments to
pass symbolic resolutions expressing disagreement with the war. The
same thing has happened during the Iraq War; more than 150 cities
have passed such peace resolutions, according to Cities for
Progress, a project the Institute for Policy Studies
None of those cities is located in Kentucky.
The subject is again on the mind of some Louisvillians who have
actively protested the war. Several people who contacted LEO after
the arrest of protester Carol Trainer last week are angry about
Mayor Jerry Abramson’s failure to intervene (authorities say that
would not have been his place), and they see it as part of a larger
context in which the mayor excels at civic cheerleading but goes
silent on difficult issues of social justice.
A peace resolution was prepared and sent to the mayor in 2005,
according to Ken Nevitt, an attorney who helped to form the
Louisville Peace Action Community, and who represents Trainer.
Nothing has come of it.
That’s because such resolutions should emanate from the Metro
Council, Abramson spokesman Chris Poynter said. He declined to
discuss the mayor’s views on the war, but said that if the Metro
Council passed a peace resolution, “We would take a look.” Poynter
also said it’s not appropriate for the mayor to use his bully
pulpit to advocate for such a resolution.
Tony Hyatt, communications director for the Metro Council’s
Democratic Caucus, said Democrats have suggested no such
resolutions. In fact, the council passed a resolution, sponsored by
Councilman Doug Hawkins, R-25, in January 2003, which expressed
support for the troops that were about to go to war in Iraq.
Hyatt noted that Brandon Sword, the son of Councilwoman Madonna
Flood, D-24, was recently injured while serving with the Army in
Iraq, and he said the council’s tone has been “more to support the
troops.”
Steve Haag, director of the minority caucus, said Council
Republicans prefer to avoid addressing non-local issues that can
dilute bipartisanship and distract the Council from important
matters such as the budget and public safety. —Cary Stemle
To many onlookers, the irony was simply too much: an antiwar
protester, handcuffed and led away from an event that celebrates
one of the original antiwar rock bands, 40 years after the Summer
of Love.
To others, it was a simple case of rude behavior being dealt with
pretty much appropriately, however unfortunately.
Beyond the sundry superficial hot-button issues that get tapped in
this type of scenario — baby boomers (and neo hippies) sympathetic
to the whole hippie/Beatles vibe, co-mingling with regular folks
who just like the tunes (and hold varied political views or none at
all), mixing with various folks who just showed up to have
somewhere to go — there are other, sketchier elements at play.
Memory and perception. Chaos. Fear and loathing. Defiance.
Retribution. For starters.
Add heat and humidity, the first weekend of the year with air that
actually resembled our beloved Ohio Valley Sludge.
Alcohol. God knows what else.
The subtle but looming presence of the King.
Maybe too much god-awful tie-dye.
At any rate, observers say, it blew up into something.
They just don’t quite agree as to what.
A Vietnam vet
Carol is a veteran — she served with the Air Force from 1965-68.
She has been engaged in protesting the war, in Louisville and
elsewhere, for about five years, under the auspices of both Vietnam
Veterans Against the War and the Louisville Peace Action Community.
It was with her VVAW hat on that she trekked downtown each of the
five days of the Abbey Road festival. For four days, she
distributed fliers at the entrance and eventually went in to hear
some music (she paid), without a protest sign. On Monday, having
seen other signs, she took one inside, receiving explicit
permission from the event producer to display it.
The sign read: END THE WAR. Her T-shirt, on the day she was
arrested, read: BRING THE TROOPS HOME.
Her hat, a black visor, read: VETERAN AGAINST THE VIETNAM WAR.
Before the headliner could take the stage on closing day at 6 p.m.,
Trainer was taken to jail, where she remained for some 12 hours.
The story was on page 1 of the C-J’s Metro Section for one day. It
hit local TV news like most nuanced stories do — like a butterfly
landing on cotton candy. Too complex, too run-of-the-mill.
Poof.
What did you see?
Carol and Harold Trainer are not speaking to the media now, on the
advice of her attorney, Ken Nevitt, who says he wants to calm
things down. Nevitt has also been active in the Louisville peace
community, helping to form LPAC in 2003 and providing legal support
to the group since. His stepped down as a facilitator after he got
married in November.
Trainer was either A) hastily grabbed from behind and subsequently
manhandled, without provocation, by a Jefferson County Sheriff’s
deputy or B) asked to walk with the officer to discuss a situation,
as citizens are bound to do when the request comes from a peace
officer, at which point she became belligerent and struck the
officer in the chest.
Other key facts are more widely agreed upon.
The officer is large — everyone I spoke to described him as at
least six feet tall and more than 300 pounds.
He had spoken to Trainer earlier that day, specifically asking why
she insisted on holding a sign with an antiwar message, and why a
simple peace sign wouldn’t suffice.
The event producer’s right-hand assistant made a point to tell the
officer that Trainer was there with the full understanding and
blessing of festival brass. Trainer, on a blog post after she got
out of jail the next morning, said the producer, Gary Jacob,
thanked her for her efforts.
Also, after some confusion and initial disavowing by the Mayor’s
office, it is now beyond dispute that Mayor For Life (or, as LEO
fondly refers to him, when we’re not calling him Mayor Jer or
Hizzoner or whatnot, “King Jerry”) Abramson was pretty much sitting
within plain sight of the whole thing, which went down in a tight
but open area to the left of the stage.
Another issue of general concurrence involves Abramson. At some
point after the Sheriff’s Deputy, Ted Mitchell, approached Trainer
— whether she followed the officer as he asked and she then bolted,
or whether she broke away from his vise-like grasp — Trainer made a
beeline toward a small set of bleachers, diagonally oriented in
relation to the stage, and slightly behind and to the left of the
area where the incident occurred.
Some say he grabbed her lightly — “like you might grab your 10-year-
old,” said C.A. Johnson, who told me he witnessed the incident —
and that she flailed her arm wildly in what must have been a
reflexive manner. Others say Mitchell snatched Trainer’s left arm,
then virtually bear hugged her off the ground before he and a
Louisville Metro Police officer, who was holding one of Trainer’s
signs, whisked her off to the far left side of the stage, brutally
applying the handcuffs somewhere along the way.
Countless cameras were whirring by that time, and there are
photographs, taken sometime after that, that show Trainer sitting
handcuffed on a set of bleachers, with a group of men gathered
nearby. Some witnesses told me the men were taunting her. Others
said the gaggle had been urging Trainer to calm down and avoid arrest.
The peace action folks have been around long enough to know the
ropes. A call was made to a judge who said he would call downtown
and get Trainer released on her own recognizance. If so, she
typically would have been released by 9 p.m. For whatever reason,
she did not emerge until 6 a.m. the following day. No one seems to
know why.
The Courier-Journal message board is on fire with posts, many
vilely predictable. There are fewer such posts on the Abbey Road
site, but they’re there — some rant about the incident, which they
see as wicked karma placing Louisville in an extremely unfavorable
light. Others take pains to point out their true liberal colors,
then say Trainer was out of line.
Jacob, the producer who moved Abbey Road on the River from
Cleveland to Louisville three years ago, admits giving Trainer the
permission to protest, and told me she largely reflects his own
political sentiments. He also said he has heard consistent stories
from a disparate group, many of whom would fit the liberal/antiwar
stereotype, and that Trainer seems to have crossed the line of
acceptable behavior.
Jacob said he has enlisted Mitchell’s private security firm, which
Mitchell operates on the side, each year the festival has been in
Louisville, and that he has been extremely pleased at the rarity of
incidents.
Jacob did not see the incident, but based on what he has heard, he
thinks Trainer may have gone too far. “I am from the ’60s,” he
said. “This was not a cops vs. us issue. … I’ve seen cops vs. us
issues. I know what they look like. This wasn’t one of them.”
Asked why Mitchell’s arrest report didn’t include a mention of
Abramson — “subject decided to stop and talk to someone,” the
report reads — spokesman Yates said the identity of the person she
stopped to speak to is not germane.
He said Mitchell had no intention of arresting Trainer, but that
changed when she touched him. “When it gets to the point where they
shove or hit you, you’ve got to make a decision very quickly,” he
said. “You’re not hurting the person, you just want to get them
away from the crowd, before more people feel like it’s OK to join
in. The last thing you want to do is be standing there in the
crowd. That’s why when she stopped, he was concerned and wanted to
get her out of there.”
Hizzoner takes a hike
Trainer was charged with three crimes: resisting arrest and
disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors, and assaulting a police
officer (third degree), a Class D felony, punishable by one to five
years in prison. She was arraigned last Wednesday morning and
entered a plea of not guilty. A preliminary hearing is set for June
28 in Jefferson District Court.
Nevitt was guarded in discussing her case, saying that as an
activist, he is concerned about possible injustice, but as her
attorney, his main responsibility is to adjudicate the case in her
favor. He did describe previous engagements between Louisville
peace protesters and Louisville Metro Police. After one incident —
during a 2005 event featuring then-U.S. Rep. Anne Northup at the
Olmsted in St. Matthews, police made LPAC members disperse, though
they were acting properly. Later, Nevitt said, he spoke with police
and highlighted parts of the Metro Parade Law that allow for
peaceful assembly on public rights of way. Nevitt said Metro Police
then acknowledged that the protesters had done nothing wrong and
informed officers of how to properly enforce the law. Trainer was
present at that event, Nevitt said, adding that the peace community
has generally felt good about its interactions with Metro police.
As for the mayor, he got the hell out of Dodge soon after Trainer
was in his face. As word circulated that he’d seen the incident,
people began to call his office on Tuesday. LPAC member Marge Manke
said she reached Steve Fenster, one of Abramson’s bodyguards, who
told her Abramson was in a completely different area at the time.
After hearing at Wednesday’s arraignment that Abramson was there,
she called Fenster again. This time, Manke says, “He laughed. It
was a kind of ‘the joke’s on us’ laugh, like he had been wrong. He
said he spoke to Jerry after I called the first time, and Jerry
told him he saw a disturbance but didn’t know what it was about and
was not close to it.”
Chris Poynter, a spokesman for the mayor, chalked Manke’s concerns
up to “misinformation,” and said he doesn’t understand why Fenster
was taking such phone calls and responding to e-mails. Poynter
acknowledges that Abramson was present, and said the mayor told him
he had heard some patrons complaining that Trainer’s sign was
blocking their view. The mayor didn’t notice the police involvement
until he heard Trainer scream, Poynter said, and it was only when
the mayor read the story in The Courier-Journal last Wednesday that
he understood the nature of the incident.
It would have been inappropriate for Abramson to intervene, Poynter
said. “You have to remember, he (didn’t) know the context. He had
no idea if she was a danger to him or others.”
Jacob, the producer, said as well that it would have been
inappropriate for him to try to intervene.
Where are we now?
So what do we really know?
We know tensions are running high.
One witness, C. A. Johnson, told me he believes anger started the
incident. He said he was about 50 feet from Trainer and noticed her
leave the area, leaving behind a protest sign that was stuck in the
ground. When she returned, he said, the sign had been stuffed in a
trash container. Trainer retrieved it, he said, and seemed visibly
angry. He said she began to argue with several people nearby.
But Kimberly Woods, who said she was sitting in a lawn chair about
15-20 feet from Trainer, told me she could see Trainer the whole
time, and that Trainer was dancing and not really talking to anyone
in particular. She insists the deputy approached Trainer and
immediately grabbed her sign before taking her away. She noted that
a number of Metro officers accompanied the deputy.
Clearly, it is difficult to project how the legal case will turn
out. At the end of the day, though, we know the lefties are angry
(certainly this telling has not gone far enough for some), and they
fear that legitimate dissent has been marginalized in the United
States, to the point of tyranny.
The righties are up in arms, too — any sympathy for the pansy left
is sorely misguided, and surely this account is far too generous.
With the right’s false dichotomies and their ever-so-effective name-
hanging apparatus, they could make you think people like Carol
Trainer spend their spare time uploading pep talks to Osama bin
Laden’s smartcavephone.
There are other aspects. Who can protest, for example? Some folks
say people who have been in the military get wider berth,
automatically, to speak out … unless they leave the farm and go
soft, of course, or run their mouth before they serve out their
time. Others would like to think that a principle is a principle is
a principle, and that what you see happening around you could, in
fact, be as every bit as bad as it looks.
Regardless of what actually happened down at the Belvedere last
Monday — and many people expect video of the incident to emerge,
yet they are uncertain whether even that will prove anything — the
heated and confused aftermath stands as a pretty good summation of
where America finds herself in 2007:
Befuddled, agitated, and not too keen on having bad shit brought up
when WE’RE TRYING TO HAVE A GOOD TIME. We certainly don’t seem to
be able to speak about disagreements, beyond finger-pointing,
whining and name-calling, brinksmanship and intimidation.
The real irony may be that 40 years removed from the era that might
have been a defining moment in our young republic’s history, the
sort of motivated and focused action that went down back then is
not evident in sufficient quantities to put a plug in the fear
fountain. That is why, as you may have noticed, I refrained from
naming some sources who gave a specific account of seeing the
incident. Some expressed extreme discomfort about having their
names associated with the story in print — one person mentioned
getting in hot water at work, where a boss has foisted political
views, and action, on employees. There is no point in furthering
that fear.
And so, while this may all sound like shades of ’67, it is hard to
avoid the feeling that that so-called magic year’s rosy afterglow,
to borrow a phrase from John Hiatt, seems awfully long gone.
Uh, like a Nixon file.
Comments
Those evil, violent grannnies.
Submitted by JPark on Thu, 06/07/2007 - 8:07am.
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