John Rossitas Take Over San Francisco City Hall

Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

There was a takeover at San Francisco City Hall yesterday.

Led by revolutionary writer John Ross and incendiary MC Diamond Dave Whitaker, a radical crew brought business as usual and poetry unusual to all who were willing to listen and many who weren’t.

Yesterday was John Ross Day in the City of St. Francis, though you’d never know it if you read the Chronicle or listened to KCBS.

The Board of Supervisors declared it so during its otherwise lugubrious meeting through a resolution introduced by Sup John Avalos.

Award winning writer John Ross is the author of Murdered By Capitalism—150 Years of Life and Death On the American Left, Rebellion From the Roots—Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, and numerous other works of journalism, fiction and poetry.

Ross was present in the Supe’s chambers, but instead of humbly accepting the honor, he used the occasion to skewer the Supes for making SF “a city of sanctuary for the rich.”

Following the ceremony, the Rossistas adjourned and eventually reassembled for a much more satisfying one—free food.

Around that same time, as the Supes droned on, jacking up the city’s bus fares while cutting service, a soft high pitched sound began to echo around the Hall. Suits and uniforms poured out onto the lower floor, agitatedly asking, “What’s that sound? Where’s it coming from?”

This event converged with the Fourth Annual Poems Under the Dome, hosted by Diamond Dave, and scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. with John Ross as guest of honor.

Soon the source of the sounds emerged at the top of the stairs on the second floor, in the form of a man making a shell sing, along with a crowd of Rossistas who Diamond Dave had managed to pry away from the free food. They began to descend the stairs, then halted on the first landing.

There Diamond Dave announced that this was where “the 60s started, the New Left began.” He went on to explain that in the early 60s students from Berkeley came to protest the presence of the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the Supes Chambers. For their efforts they were hosed down the steps and literally flushed out of City Hall.

But the next day militant dock workers and other labor and student radicals came out in force there, and HUAC never came back to town.

Then the Rossistas marched down to the first floor, where people formed a circle and held hands. The shell singer went before each of the circlers, including John Ross, and shook a rattle in a purification ceremony. Of course the usual burning sage wasn’t allowed because of the facility’s smoke free policy.

Meanwhile, perplexed suits and security guards looked on.

From there the Rossistas proceeded to the North Light Hall for Poems Under the Dome.

Diamond Dave introduced SF Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond, who introduced John Ross, who continued the critical marks he had skewered the Supes with earlier.

Somewhere in all this Ross’ poem “The Revolution Is Not a Faucet” wafted off the walls of the Hall, where the words are still reverberating:

The Revolution does not begin
over coffee at the Epicurean,
does not begin over gravy and grits,
in the first joint, the last hit,
the Morning Chron, your morning shit.
The Revolution does not begin
pulling greenchain on the graveyard
shift,
or making the welfare line by nine.
The Revolution doesn’t begin
in your mind, your heart, your liver,
your prick, doesn’t begin
when you clench your fist,
The Revolution doesn’t begin in 1776,
1917, the depression, the dawn,
doesn’t begin with gurus, Cinques,
the news from L.A. Havana, manana.
The Revolution does not begin,
with both barrels, at the bottom of
bottles,
on the pages of bibles, with the blues.
The Revolution does not begin,
The Revolution has no beginning.
The Revolution is unending.
The Revolution is not a faucet-
you can’t turn it on and off.
The Revolution leaks all the time-
you can’t call a plumber to fix it.

And then, with presumably literary-minded metal detector-obsessed security guards staring, scores of Rossista poets came forward for the next several hours. Many of them railed against the usual goings on at City Hall and other social maladies.

Viva los Rossistas!

Originally posted at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/05/13/18594580.php.