I had heard that a bus belonging to some RNC protesters had been impounded while driving down I-94 in Minneapolis a few days ago. But the Whistleblower column in today's Star Tribune gave the full scoop on the Permibus.
The family that owns it uses the biodiesel-fueled bus to demonstrate urban permaculture practices, from sustainable gardening to water conservation, recycling and worm composting. While doing a demonstration at a theater in Minneapolis's West Bank neighborhood on Saturday, they were surveilled by police, who saw them putting "large sheets of plywood" and "large containers" onto the bus.
Assuming that the plywood was meant to create barricades to block traffic in St. Paul and the containers held feces to throw at police, the police intercepted the bus as it drove east on the highway. Of course, the "large sheets of plywood" were actually welded wire panels, part of a portable chicken coop, and the buckets contained food scraps for the family's chickens.
When the bus was pulled over, according to the driver, Stan Wilson, the first thing the police officer did was question whether Wilson loves his country. Then he and other officers evicted Wilson and his family and the four other people whom they had been giving a ride to (along with their chickens and dogs) and left them standing on the side of the road.
You can read about the saga of the bus from the Wilson family's point of view on their blog.
Not coincidentally, this was the same day that police raided a number of houses in the Twin Cities looking for evidence of conspiracy to riot and furtherance of terrorism. From what I've seen, the supposedly suspicious materials found at the houses all could have innocuous explanations (duct tape and chicken wire were mentioned... paint... geez. I guess we're all conspiring). The brother of one young woman who was arrested after her house was raided has written a wonderful post on his blog explaining the political philosophy that motivates his sister (and others).
All of this makes me think of an exhibit I saw in Buffalo at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the former church turned art gallery that houses Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe recording label. It was called Seized, and told the story of art professor Stephen Kurtz. Here's the "bullet" as they say on ER:
Kurtz had called an ambulance when his wife suffered a heart attack in 2004. While police were in the house with the EMTs, they noticed what they thought were suspicious biological materials, and notified the FBI. While Kurtz was going to his wife's funeral, he was detained by the FBI for 22 hours. A three-day raid followed, in which the materials, his computer, his car, and even his cat were seized. His wife's body was even seized from the coroner's office.
Why? What was this suspicious material?
Kurtz -- who is, after all, an art professor -- creates installations of harmless bacteria in petri dishes (some of which I saw at Hallwalls) to demystify germ warfare programs and their possible effects on global public health. These dishes had been publicly exhibited multiple times before the raid, and Kurtz's work is well known in the scientific and local artistic community. But the government spent four years investigating him for everything from bioterrorism to mail fraud to murder (at taxpayers' expense, of course) before all charges were dismissed in April 2008.
An essay by Kurtz's Critical Art Ensemble in the show's program described the situation as Kafkaesque. His experience echoes that of others preemptively arrested or evicted from their bus this week in the Twin Cities:
In the paranoid political climate of the United States, American authorities leap all too easily from ideological criticism to terrorism.... A citizen can be arrested without having committed any act of terror or without having done anything illegal at all. Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft has unofficially reformed law enforcement policy and practice according to the Bush administration's idea of "preemptive war." He has argued that if indicators -- any type of dissent in relation to the ... "national interest" -- suggest that a person or group could do something illegal, then they should be arrested, detained, deported, or otherwise persecuted...Increasingly, I'm afraid, this appears to be true. Young people fed up with an ongoing war, who may be thinking about committing civil disobedience, are raided and imprisoned before they've even done anything. People with chickens are evicted from their home because they might be thinking of blocking traffic.
Like the saying goes, I love my country but fear my government.
(More about the Kurtz case can be found at caedefensefund.org.)
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