We Are the Fire Brigade: Reflections on No Kings

Walking toward downtown Northampton for “No Kings Day,” I see an older man effortfully wielding a sign that reads, “So Bad Even the Introverts are Here.” I sometimes think that the quality of cleverness, the accumulated wit of all the protest signs at an event, define the power of a movement. But the crowds in their sheer size might be just as crucial, and Main Street overflows with people. Maybe 2,000, possibly 3,000—a collection of folks somewhere between “not enough,” and “maybe there is hope.”

A marching band turns east from Gothic Street and a drum ensemble has gathered on the island separating traffic on Route Five. The drummers beat furiously with hands or sticks on snares, congas, cowbells, plastic containers and bass-drums while others clap their hands. Music soars everywhere, tunes cross one another in the air with joyous, cacophonous insistence - a man in a wheelchair strums a twelve string guitar. An acapella ensemble sings tight harmonies through bullhorns, an oddly improvised way to combine the crudest form of sound magnification—associated with police commands to pull over—with the delicacy of human voices merged in practiced counterpoint.

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A man in a grim reaper outfit, walking on stilts bears a sign reading - “Donald Trump burned 168 Iranian girls alive.” The streets overflow with people trying to stand apart or blend in. Some signs simply say “no kings” - minimalism in a time when the point might be nothing more than numbers. The crowd, I imagine, embodies a limitless number of questions. Is it too late? Are we too few? Too old? Too disorganized? Too peaceful? Too unthreatening? Too divided?

Indeed, these people, the majority for sure, sport grey hair, wrinkles, wearied gaits and maybe the strange understanding that, in a seeming eyeblink, we all have been transformed from young, zealous radicals who once chanted “two, four, six, eight, organize and smash the state,” to becoming part of a last stand against the fascist nightmare that would have blown our minds in 1968. I see young people too, but not enough. Mostly white people make up the throngs, but Northampton is just a small piece of something vastly larger. My wife shows me a photo on her cell phone from Minneapolis where a wide angle photo cannot take in the vast crowds. No one knows just yet the scope of the rallies, the size and distress of the nation that marches in enthusiastic disunity. We are the counterpoint running concurrently with the megalomaniacal dipshit and his World War III players. Confusion and a primitive, momentary unformed passion guide people to surge, pause and move again.

I project my own darkness onto this crowd. I am frantically creating a composite out of faces, signs and movement, building a narrative out of images that refuse to be captured. Do people stare in mutual horror at the bottomless pit of banality and evil? The pain that our empire inflicts always occurs just beyond the horizon - but the agony seems palpable, intuitively closer, the Doppler effect of a high pitched whine as objects close in.

We march from Strong Avenue toward Smith College—so local, so familiar—past Bucci’s Hair Stylists, past An Oriental Taste, past Citizen’s Bank with their armaments holdings. As we pass the Bank with its unremarkable green sign, a woman holds a piece of cloth up high: “Citizens Bank Funds the War Machine.”

An elderly man seated on the curb at the corner of Main and Masonic holds a sign reading, “Shame GOP! In your guts, you know he’s nuts!” Another person dresses as Donald Trump with a huge, misshapen, paper mache face and limbs cloaked in American Flags with the words, pedophile, murderer, liar and idiot scrawled on each limb. Trump is everywhere - on signs, on flyers, on handouts, in the involuntary, almost epileptic impulses torturing our brains.

In my 78 years I’ve never seen anything comparable—we have walled off an entire universe into separate parts, the classical Freudian defense mechanism of splitting the psyche into good and evil. Trump has evicted all of the pain of human existence, and greedily taken the role of inflicting hellish agony all to himself. Some of us might believe his demise will summon eternal life—utopia in a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet style earthly garden of delights. When Trump gets the fuck out, the lion will lie with the lamb. The celebration following Trump’s removal from office cannot be fathomed.

In front of the Mexican restaurant, Bueno y Sano, I see a large Saint Bernardish dog with a sign on his back saying, “I’d be a better president.” This sentiment is often in our minds - the notion that animals embody goodness. We grope for jokes, distractions, explanations and comfort. A sign on a baby stroller asserts, “I gave up my naptime to fight fascism.” There are no speeches today in Northampton, just the naked, spontaneous expression of the moment - in our dire predicament the wit and cleverness of ordinary people becomes the last means of defense.

I am almost astonished that the local no kings organizers have the wherewithal to refrain from handing microphones to politicians, media personalities and local celebrities. The last No Kings Day created the lamest possible version of opposition to fascism - a snapshot of a deluded faction eager to retreat into the recent past of Obama/Biden/Harris. Today we have no shape, no ideology, no vision. We are all united, if that is even a meaningful word, in a common inchoate distress.

We have the mutual understanding of not knowing what comes next, of not understanding how Leave It To Beaver America went to sleep and awoke as The Fourth Reich, and of course, no one really knows what we should do. I have friends who feel that No Kings Day is a sham—a performance by comfortable people donating an hour and a half of a single afternoon as a ritualized payment—a token given to assuage guilt in lieu of real commitment. To them, these people, are fooling themselves. My ultra-radical friends are not here, but I see a good many people who have committed their lives to activism in these streets right now - people who I know from “Demilitarize Western Mass.” A local man who belongs to the CPUSA marches down Gothic Street with a hammer and sickle on a red flag.

Most of the things that I have written about, the causes that I trumpet in lonely passion, do not have a visible presence in No Kings Day regalia. No one holds a sign demanding sortition, direct democracy, veganism, or even socialism. There are anti-war slogans and calls to abolish ICE, and many signs proclaiming, “we are all immigrants.” But the thing that strikes me most is the utter shapelessness of this event. We are primal soup, something not yet declared, resolved or defined.

The people, all of us, need to begin with spontaneous freedom - the unstructured community of vague connection.

I have my own ideas, but so what? Things take shape by increments. At some point there will hopefully be mutual clarity, plans, resistance, strikes, boycotts, blocked traffic, but we need sheer numbers, and a pause in ideological oneupmanship.

In my opinion we cannot survive without a host of arcane innovations. I have spent the last two years of my ancient life learning about, and writing on the topics of direct democracy, sortitition and degrowth. No one at The No Kings Day protests holds signs proclaiming the virtues of my passions. The spirit of the day goes beyond ideology, beyond the long term solutions needed to dig our planet out of the toxic sludge of centuries old human hubris. We come together in a spirit of desperation, like a community passing buckets to put out a fire. The task is utterly simple, there is nothing to argue about.

As the hour and a half protest winds down, people leave on foot. Solitary souls and small groups walk slowly away, up route 9 toward Child’s Park. My wife has driven, but I want to walk. I sense a hovering air of uncertainty, shared by many, a pensive inability to preserve the event as it drifts away, and a palpable loneliness, as if friends sense they are parting forever. A man dragging a folding chair walks up ahead, and as I pass him he turns to me, his mouth opening hesitantly. “Wasn’t that something?” he asks rhetorically. I reflexively start to gather too many thoughts, as if to convey a properly nuanced ambivalence, but I stop myself. “Yes,” I say. “It was quite amazing.”