because it happened before.
That’s what I’m telling you.
It happened before.
There was just as much commitment,
there was just as much passion
and violence and hate.
See, after the Watts riots there was something called the McClellan
Commission.
Fine.
That was for two years
and we forgot about Watts.
So here we are again.
We all have to make a commitment
that this is never going to happen again
to Los Angeles,
and we have to meet
on a regular basis,
and we have to have the
power
in this group,
quasi-public
quasi-
political group,
that we can call the governor,
that we can call the publisher of the LA Times,
the President of the United States,
and say,
“hey,
we gotta see you,
we got something
cookin here.”
It’s gonna cost all kinds of money.
(four counts of pause)
I think businesses should give some,
government should give some,
and I think we’re gonna have to be taxed.
Hit us all on
sales tax
or gasoline tax
or something
and take a cent or two from everybody
and build up some kind of fund.
You got to have money.
And I realize what I’m gonna hear from people who want money for
education and AIDS and
health care. Those are very, very important.
This is more important to me,
’cause if our cities deteriorate into jungle land, which they are now …
A Deadeye
Owen Smet Culver City Police Department, former range manager, Beverly Hills Gun Club
(There are guns’ shooting sounds in the background. He is wearing tinted glasses and a black silk jacket.)
After the riots our business went up forty percent, maybe as much as
fifty percent.
We have a membership here that shoots,
riots or no riots,
but because of the feeling of
danger overall in the community …
Long time ago you used to say there’s some areas of LA County
where you couldn’t walk
after dark,
and it’s progressed to the point where you say, “Gee,
there’s no place
safe
in LA County, daylight or dark.”
People are looking for an opportunity to defend themselves.
They just need something,
and this is one of the places they come.
Shooting is a skill just like anything else.
A deadeye?
Is a very good shot.
Yes,
I am a deadeye.
I’m not a natural one.
I spent
couple years in Vietnam,
and that will make you good if nothing else.
You don’t want to get over there and hit your foot.
(The shooting starts)
Sure,
a lot, of these are handguns.
If you look at the top row, those are the smaller-caliber guns,
twenty-twos,
and then as you work your way on down to the bottom row,
that’s the forty-fives.
I guess you’d say the least powerful at the top
to the most powerful at the bottom.
Probably the most powerful here
are the forty-fives.
This is a forty-four
Magnum gun,
probably the most powerful handgun that we have here.
I usually start people with a thirty-eight.
One of the most popular for the drive-bys are the nine millimeters.
But the gang members and some of the more organized groups out
there are using everything,
everything.
There’s no question about it, they
are probably better armed than we are.
Ask Saddam Hussein
Elaine Brown Former head of the Black Panther Party, author, A Taste of Power
(A pretty black woman in her early fifties. She is in a town outside of Paris, France, on the phone. It is 5 P.M. France time. Spring.)
I think people do have, uh,
some other image
of the Black Panther Party than the guns.
The young men, of course, are attracted
to the guns,
but what I tell them is this:
Did you know Jonathan Jackson?
Because I did,
and Jonathan Jackson was seventeen years old.
that you could meet.
He happened to be a science genius.
He was not a gang member, by the way,
but Jonathan Jackson
went to a courtroom by himself
and took over for that one glorious minute
in the name of
revolution and the freedom of his brother
and other people who were in prison
and died that day.
My question to you,
seventeen-year-old young brother with a gun in your hand,
tough and strong and beautiful as you are:
Do you think it would be better
if Jonathan Jackson were alive today
or that he died
that day in Marin County?
Me personally,
I’d rather know Jonathan Jackson.
That’s what I’d rather do,
and I’d rather him be alive today,
to be among the leadership that we do not have,
than to be dead and in his grave at seventeen years old.
I’m talking merely about strategy,
not swashbuckling.
I think that this idea of picking up the gun and going into the street
without a
plan and without
any more rhyme or reason than rage
is bizarre and so, uh …
And it’s foolish
because it will, uh …
I think that
all one has to do
is ask, to ask the Vietnamese
or Saddam Hussein
about the power and weaponry
and the arsenal of the United States government and its willingness to
use it
to get to understanding what this is about.
You are not facing a,
you know, some little Nicaraguan clique
here.
You are not in Havana in 1950 something.
This is the United States of America.
There isn’t another country,
there isn’t another community
that is more organized and armed.
Uh,
not only is it naive,
it is foolish if one is talking
about jumping out into the street
and waving a gun,
because you not that bad,
you see what I’m saying?
You just not that bad.
You think you bad,
but I say again,
ask Saddam Hussein
about who is bad
and you’ll get the answer.
So what I am saying is:
Be conscious of what you are doing.
If you just want to die
and become a poster,
go ahead and do that—
we will all put you on the wall with all the rest of the people.
But if you want to effect change for your people
and you are serious about it,
that doesn’t mean throw down your gun.
Matter of fact, I would def … definitely never tell anybody to do that,
not black and in America.
But if you want a gun,
I hope you can shoot
and I hope you know who to shoot
and I hope you know how to not go to jail for having done that
and then let that be the end of that.
But if you are talking about a war
against the United States government,
then you better talk to Saddam Hussein
and you better talk to the Vietnamese people
and the Nicaraguans
and El Salvadorans
and people in South Africa
and people in other countries in Southeast Asia
and ask those motherfuckers
what this country is capable of doing.
So all I am saying is:
I’m saying that
if you are committed,
if you seriously make a commitment,
because …
and that commitment
must be based not on hate but on love.
And that’s the other thing.
My theme is
that love of your people.
Then you gonna have to realize that this may have to be a lifetime
commitment
and that the longer you live,
the more you can do.
So don’t get hung up
on your own ego
and your own image
and pumping up your muscles
and putting on a black beret
or some kinda Malcolm X hat or whatever other
regalia
and symbolic vestment you can put on your body.
Think in terms of what
are you going to do
for black people.
I’m saying that these
are the long haul,
because then you might be talkin’ about
bein’ in a better position for a so-called
armed struggle.
At this point you talkin’ about a piss-poor,
ragtag, unorganized, poorly armed
and poorly, poorly,
uh-uhm,
poorly led
army
and we will be twenty more years
trying to figure out what happened to Martin, Malcolm,
and the Black Panther Party.
Twilight #1
Homi Bhabha Literary critic/Writer/Scholar
(Phone interview. He was in England. I was in L.A. He is part Persian, lived in India. Has a beautiful British accent.)
This twilight moment
is an in-between moment.
It’s the moment of dusk.
It’s the moment of ambivalence
and ambiguity.
The inclarity,
the enigma,
the ambivalences,
in what happened in the L.A.
uprisings
are precisely what we want to get hold of.
It’s exactly the moment
when the L.A. uprisings could be something
else
than it was
seen to be,
or maybe something
other than it was seen to be.
I think when we look at it in twilight
we learn
to …
we learn three things:
one, we learn that the hard outlines of what we see in daylight
that make it easy for us to order
daylight
disappear.
So we begin to see its boundaries in a much more faded way.
That fuzziness of twilight
allows us to see the intersections
of the event with a number of other things that daylight obscures for
us,
to use a paradox.
We have to interpret more in
twilight,
we have to make ourselves
part of the act,
we have to interpret,
we have to project more.
But also the thing itself
in twilight
challenges us
to
be aware
of how we are projecting onto the event itself.
We are part of
producing the event,
whereas, to use the daylight
metaphor,
there we somehow think
the event and its clarity
as it is presented to us,
and we have to just react to it.
Not that we’re participating in its clarity:
it’s more interpretive,
it’s more creative.
Magic #2
Betye Saar Artist
(Phone interview. She lives in Laurel Canyon.)
It was, um,
still light,
because it didn’t last for a very long time.
So it’s like this sort of in between day and night
when the sky is sort of gray
and we were walking back to the car
and Tony, who was very political, was sort of adamant about
there was gonna be trouble and so forth
and we were making plans to go to dinner
and when we got to go to dinner, the area
we wanted, it was dark already
and we were going to a place up toward the moun …
up toward the Hollywood Hills
and we couldn’t get by
because of people in the streets
and
disturbances.
Now, this is in West Hollywood,
where there was not …
where there is a predominantly
gay and lesbian population
and these were mostly gay men
who were
protesting the uprising by,
uh, writing “guilty” on the pos …
graffiti,
they were actually doing graffiti work,
and the street was actually blockaded,
they were protesting the verdict,
and we went to the restaurant and we heard
more protesting on the radio.
But to get back to the sky.
That’s kind of what I remember about the sky,
the kind of surreal time of day,
because it’s between day and night,
and I hadn’t
heard anything else about the rest of the city
until I got home.
It’s sort of limbo time,
and the same with dawn,
because it’s not night or day,
because it’s transition,
and to me it implies a sort of limbo.
It’s very surreal, I think,
or maybe even magical.
But magic is not always good,
because it implies
all sorts of things,
like evil
and control.
I just use it like magical, like enchantment,
that sort of mystical quality,
and some people
think that it’s the work of Satan and so forth.
Justice
Screw Through Your Chest
Harland W. Braun counsel for defendant Theodore Briseno
I didn’t want to take the case
because I regard it as a racial beating
and my son had had a racial incident.
He is in Princeton.
My son was going to
Harvard boy’s school over here in Coldwater.
He was driving over here
in Westwood.
He had a two-seater Mercedes
and he was the passenger
and his friend
was driving the car
and his friend’s mother is a partner
a
t O’Melveney and Myers.
They’re driving, I guess, a Tuesday or a Wednesday night
and LAPD pulls them over.
My son is sort of outspoken.
I don’t know where he gets that from,
but
he
jumps out of the car
and says to the cop,
“I know why you stopped us—
because Bobby’s Black.”
Which is obviously true.
I mean, Westwood,
Mercedes,
a Black kid driving a Mercedes.
They thought he was a dope dealer or something.
They’re gonna pull him over.
So the cop turns to my son and says,
“You shut
up or I’m gonna put a screw through your chest.”
Well,
I’ve,
I’ve never heard that expression.
I’ve been a DA since ’68 and a criminal lawyer since ’73.
I’ve just never heard the expression “put a screw through your chest.”
And you’re sort of
ambivalent about it.
On the one hand, you could kill the cop for this.
On the other hand,
you wish you could strangle your son
because he put himself in danger.
I mean, really, he was lucky he was in Westwood, in a public area
where he was not likely to get hit or something like that,
and it’s sort of a naiveté for a seventeen-year-old at that time
to think that he’s gonna be able to not
just watch out for himself.
So I said no way am I gonna get involved in the Rodney King case,
’cause I regarded it as a racial beating.
But what scares you—
it gives you pause when you find out how wrong you can be,
because you then
learn about an entire
historic event
and realize
that it’s been misperceived.
Even Clinton,
who I like,
he got up on that morning and says, “Justice has finally been done.”
How does he know?
What does he mean by justice?
Is he assuming that they’re guilty?
Very strange, uh,
and I probably would have said the same thing if I was in his
position,
and I know,
I think I know what happened out there.
I mean,
I think,
I was certainly glad that Ted,
I was certainly glad that we escaped.
If you ask it more blatantly:
Is it better that two
innocent men get convicted
than that fifty innocent people die?
What is the answer to that?
I find the ambiguity …
I recognize it for what it is
and I’m willing to face it.
I’ve never,