The people demonstrating in the park were students from colleges and institutions around the area, who identified with the brilliant undergraduate who’d rebelled against The System, which they referred to in capital letters. There were also groups of poets reciting their verses and organizing discussion forums. The people walking around the area had necklaces, tattoos, and headbands, they had flowers hanging from their hair, and there was something about them like schoolkids on vacation; they reminded me of the picnics that the Communist Party organized back when I was going to high school (but not to those picnics). Groups of good kids defending good causes, with bulletproof delight. What was the reason behind the fascination that Munk provoked? It was the pure quality of his rebellion; he was wicked, he was demonic, and he was a great event in the fight against injustice and manipulation. He was an American hero in the full sense: a very well-educated individual, an intellectual of great academic standing who made the decision to abandon his possessions and then withdrew to live in the woods with the elegance and simplicity of a monk, and, as a result of his reflection and experience there, decided to show that rebellion is possible, that one lone man could put the FBI in checkmate.
These were the opinions that were being gathered in discussions and small groups and among the activists camped out in the park. It wasn’t a political demonstration but rather a new kind of unrest, a party, as if they were celebrating a legendary rock group that never actually turned up. They were on their own. There was no TV channel, there were no journalists or photographers covering the event, but they were communicating with their cell phones and posters, and a couple of alternative radio stations were broadcasting the action from a white tent. In total there were about three or four thousand people, including women, children, the old, the young, social warriors, and pacifists, all supporting the actions of a terrorist, or, at any rate, the need to let him be heard.
They’d come from the hills of Southern California, from the central valleys, from the watchful one-horse towns of the Midwest where lights stayed on all night, in campers, in beat-up cars, in Greyhound buses, in sports cars, in farm trucks, an endless procession of old idealists, children of hippies and stoners, animal rights activists, environmentalists, pacifists, anti-racists, feminists, unpublished poets, artisans from Big Sur, but also human rights activists from New York and Chicago, defenders of minorities, a tide of rebels, former Marxists, anarchists, Trotskyists, and many had fought against the Vietnam War, against the Gulf War, against pesticides and nuclear centers; they were defenders of rural communes, of small-town businesses, of self-sufficiency, of prisoners’ rights, of the homeless, of all lost causes and all defeats; it was as if Thomas Munk had dared to do what many of them wanted to do or say, though they never had the strength: Kill all those technocrats and capitalist bastards!
The great moment of the day was a performance organized by a group of avant-garde artists from San Francisco who performed fragments of Jarry’s Ubu Roi in front of the security cameras at all of the city of Sacramento’s public buildings and guarded strongholds; they acted in small groups on corners, in front of banks, in parking lots, at ATMs, station bathrooms, dangerous corners, airports. They performed for the eyes of the cameras in the doorways of buildings, in the aisles of supermarkets. Little agitprop groups that for twenty-four hours saturated the entire city’s security images with their performances, reciting Jarry’s explosive speeches, waving banners, and spreading songs right in front of the police, who, in attacking them, became a part of the happening.
In parallel they were making a formal presentation before the State Supreme Court, demanding that all of this material be preserved because it was a work of art, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art, and it couldn’t be censored or destroyed without infringing upon the United States Constitution, which protected freedom of expression and artistic work.
5
In the evening I stopped in front of a group that had erected a platform, and I listened to them argue and laugh and condemn the new anti-terrorism law that Clinton wanted to have passed. They considered Munk to be a new Thoreau (“furious Thoreau”), who had raised the right to civil disobedience, which—according to them—included a right to violence against a repressive state that routinely took the country to war in order to sustain the infernal machinery of its weapons factories. They considered Munk to have been the first to respond actively to society’s implicit demand for the defense of the natural world and for social justice. He attacked only the dark figures who supported the social framework and the techno-military structure. He hadn’t set his sights on political puppets or corrupt congressmen, nor did he attack the salaried police or executioners; he didn’t attack the economists and financiers responsible for the catastrophe, he attacked the ones he knew better than anyone, the technological intelligentsia of criminal capitalism, its conceptual culprits, its ideologues, the demented scientists with their infernal machines and their biological practices. It was wrong to kill, but it was fine to defend yourself and, above all, to use violence in order to break through the wall of silence and make known the new manifesto, a theoretical work in the finest
