> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Guest Commentary
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/guest-commentary-20020831/
- Published: 2002-08-31T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T00:42:46.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Westwood, #archive-import

*By Hank Rosenfeld*

Did you know G.W. Bush was on the westside last Saturday? Where were you? If you showed, you already know it was maybe the most pathetic anti-war protest ever. G.W. doesn't come to our state, let alone L.A., very often (twice in the last how many years?), especially not to the southwest corner of Westwood and Wilshire to nosh and fund raise for “embattled” gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon at the rooftop Regency Club.

This was too much to pass up. “I went down to the demonstration/to get my fair share of abuse,” Mick Jagger once put it, not that I could convince any of my friends to join me. Most folks on the westside would rather circulate e-mail petitions like the one I received four times that week: http://www.moveon.org/nowar/. E-mail protest? Give me a break.

With fire and flood engulfing the world, isn’t it time to put our bodies on the front — if not the bottom – lines? In Portland, police had just pepper-sprayed families when a thousand people took to the streets angry over Bush's environmental policies, the threat of war in Iraq and government corruption. Just a day ago, Medea Benjamin, the former California Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, was thrown out of an auditorium for shouting at him in Stockton.

“Scores of demonstrators” is how our rally will be described on NPR — meaning upwards of what... 60? 80? The Times will write of “several hundred jeering demonstrators, corralled on the sidewalks … of Westwood and Santa Monica boulevards…” Well, they got one of three right. Corralled is the word. Here we are, held on three street corners by the ever tactically-vigilant LAPD, and rendered ineffectual. There may be power in a union, but divided by three a certain amount of righteousness can lose its massive attack.

Where are the babies, the tree-hugging, monkey-wrench gangbangers down here on the westside of L.A.? All twelve-lanes wide, Wilshire is smooth sailing. The presidential-sealed limos and posse of vans arrive at 8 a.m., circling like wagons to keep us natives backed well off the street, behind stretched-long yellow “Linea de Policia” tape.

One activist has distributed “STOP BUSH” traffic signs on sticks. Some drums and dancers wail from the northwest corner well across Wilshire. I wear my “www.BushOnCrack.com” T-shirt, which I got at the L.A. Shadow Convention in 2000\. But do I chant, “Bush Gotta be on Crack/To Attack Iraq!” and start a movement, any kind of movement? Of course not. No coffee yet, so I’m as lethargic as everyone else. Protesters like me ain’t got no imagination.

And the police hold all the power, not the people. One female officer with a heart helps out, but the LAPD force watching our southeast corner (MTV, VIACOM tower) insists on hassling, of course. One complains we’ve knocked down his yellow tape. And apparently the sticks holding our placards are too long. Like airport security or a hockey ref, he threatens to measure one. (We’ll have to hold the placards with both hands now. Hands up?) A man standing next to me says he’s not aware of such a “stick law,” but the officer pleads he’s just a “sergeant on the bike detail” and doesn’t really know how it came to be, either.

“Then why can't we use them?” I ask. “A less peaceful person than yourself could use the stick as a weapon,” the officer explains.

Why in L.A. are we made to feel like we’re breaking the law by exercising our freedom of assembly? If we carried talking sticks would they have to go, too?

A woman with a bullhorn no one can hear — when will some techie update this primitive protest device? — announces she’s taking a group to a different corner. This only serves to reduce the size of our southeast assemblage. Don White, of the International Action Center, acknowledges later that “it was a big mistake.” He told me two organizers at the rally, the I.A.C. and National Lawyers Guild, were trying to challenge the Secret Service restrictions and move closer to the building where Bush was having breakfast.

But suddenly the limos roll back out of the building at 9 a.m., and those of us left try to shout as quick and loud as we can as the motorcade swerves away down Westwood: “GIVE US BACK OUR COUNTRY!” “NOT IN MY NAME!” “NO CHENEY, NO RUMSFIELD!”\[sic\] And my favorite — which I pass along to an AP reporter sitting by looking bored — “Thief Executive Officer!”

With G.W. gone, nothing left for us to do now but wave at cars that go by our corners, “honking for peace.” I've been to protests in Minneapolis, New York and San Francisco, and this has to be the weakest (most police state-like?) gathering. Is this the extent of our outrage? Honk for peace almost any day you like just a little further west along Wilshire as you drive by the vigils in front of the Federal Building.

What’s wrong with the progressive movement in L.A.? No UCLAstudents back yet? People can't get up by 8 a.m. on Saturday? (Good planning by the Republicans then.) Is everybody at the beach taking yoga class with Sally Kirkland?

I read there was a feral cat support rally in San Pedro with more attendees today, and seven hundred anti-globalizationers were stun-grenaded in South Africa.

“I guess we’ll get more here when a war starts,” Don White says, which reminds me of the joke about protesters after the ‘91 “Brief War” in the Gulf: “If only it had lasted a little longer, we would have been able to stop it.”

Is everyone still inside and numb since last September? Okay, it’s been eleven months, so, according to the Kaddish, mourning is over in America. And when I yell “F--K YOU BUSH, YOU DAN- GEROUS F--KFACE!” directly at the tyrant (okay, at his limo), it does make me feel better than sending a petition around the Internet. (Although the protesters who look at me when I shout make me feel like a very bad boy.) “America was born in the streets,” is the pitch line for the movie “Gangs of New York.” Is it dying on the sidewalks in L.A.? Driving through wide-open Wilshire-Westwood on my way back to Santa Monica, I blast the new Springsteen CD out of my car windows, in a lame-late attempt at raucousness. The song “World Apart” has a powerful Pakistani beat and inspiring guitar scream underscoring its lyrics. “Let love give what love gives,” Springsteen sings. I honk, some lingering demonstrators cheer and I make it home and back to bed by 9:30.

Hank Rosenfeld is senior anchor on KCRW for Santa Monica City Council meetings on some Tuesdays.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 31, 2002.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/083102.pdf?ref=smdp.com)