Only a dream

I dreamed a whole bunch of us (Who? I don’t know. I knew these people in the dream.) were going to an “event.” What was the event? I don’t know. In the dream, we all knew. And we all knew we needed to go to the event.

We were travelling on foot. It was daytime. We were walking through green fields. The journey took us to some steep place, like a quarry. One woman was just sliding down into the quarry in her ass and going “Weeeeeeeeeeee!” I looked down and it seemed like an awful long way. But I slid on my ass down the slope and I got a bit scared at times. But I survived and we walked on.

The woman was in a wheelchair. We ended up in a room were about seven of us got into a knife fight.

Later on, the corridor got very narrow. It was just me and the woman in the wheelchair. But we came to a door that had a sign over it. There was a young woman standing in front of the door and she said to us, we absolutely weren’t allowed to come in here.

I asked the wheelchair lady if she could stand or walk and she said she couldn’t. And I knew I couldn’t get her out the way we came. I asked the door lady, if there was a way out past that door? She said there was, but I wasn’t going to be allowed through. So I said, “OK this is not my problem.”

And I turned around and walked back through the tunnel by myself. In the knife-fight room, there was nothing but bloody body parts on the floor, so I had to walk on them, fairly carefully. Climbing out of the quarry wasn’t as impossible as I first imagined.

Then I woke up at about 1 p.m. and I thought, maybe it’s good that I usually don’t remember my dreams.

License mislaid

It is 6 a.m. and the rats are twittering in the ducts of this basement, where I have taken refuge. Yesterday afternoon, I phoned the San Diego Police Department's outpost on Skyline Drive to speak to officer B. Downing, who arrested me July 31.

I asked him to cast his mind back to the events of that evening to see if he could shed any light on the whereabouts of my driver's license.

In the process of being ejaculated out of the county jail system in the wee small hours of Thursday, Aug. 6, the very last thing that happened, after handing back prison clothing and putting on the traditional shorts and wifebeater I had been arrested in, was the formal handing back of my personal property, which must be signed for without opening the sealed plastic bag in which it has been stored.

But, here's the thing, there are signs all over the room (at this final point of the labyrinthine path out of the belly of the beast) and those signs clearly state that it is forbidden to open the sealed bag before you are out of the building.

Looking back, I suppose there might have been a way for me to carefully verify (through the clear plastic) that all my cards were present in the little metal wallet thing I had bought, many years ago, from the shopping channel.

So I signed for my bag of wallets (I also carry a small leather wallet that holds such things as medical insurance IDs and the sort of cards that might qualify me for a free cup of coffee if sufficient holes are punched in it for all my cups of coffee that yearn to be free).

You know where this is going. It was only when I was standing under the street lights on the sidewalk of Front Street, enjoying the fresh night air, that I discovered my driver's license was not in the bag.

I had my bank debit card. And the first thing I did was stroll into a 7-Eleven for the biggest cup of black coffee and the most exotic pack of cigarettes. It turns out the 7 Eleven sells non-filtered Turkish cigarettes, which were fairly satisfying. And then I started walking to the downtown Police Station to lodge an official complaint.

I felt a little like Terence Stamp in The Limey (1999) as I strode past the huddled masses of homeless Americans. San Diego's main polices station was, at that time of night, still closed to the public. But I found my way into the employee parking lot and accosted a sergeant who was working in his car.

Why would I wish to lodge a formal complaint against my arresting officer? Well, a funny thing happened, back on July 31, on our way to the downtown police station. This was after I had been placed, handcuffed, in the back of his car. We left the rented townhouse that had been my home and we turned right into Imperial Avenue. I wondered, at the time, why he stopped opposite the main entrance to Greenwood Cemetery and then doubled back. He parked in the middle of the road, next to the median, opposite the 24-Hour Fitness. We were safe enough from passing traffic, because all those pretty lights on the roof were flashing, but without the siren. Officer Downing was rushing up and down the street with a flashlight, looking for something.

When, at last, he got into back into the car, I asked him what was up. He was quite embarrassed to tell me he had made a mistake. Most police officers are accustomed to using the hood of a police car as a convenient desk. And Downing had spread my belongings on the hood, before we set off, and then forgotten about them when we drove away. He told me he had seen my cards falling off as we accelerated along Imperial.

In the back seat, my hands locked behind my back, I had been unable to see much. He checked off that he had all the items that were loose in that metal wallet thing I had bought from QVC. He had my EBT card, my worthless Unemployment Insurance Card, my Fresh & Easy customer loyalty card, my bank debit card and MY DRIVER'S LICENSE. It was only when we were certain all those items were in his possession, that we drove to the downtown police station, in the basement garage of which, he finished off all his official report writing, prior to driving me to the UCSD Hospital, where my right hand was x-rayed for a suspected fracture of the pinky finger.

And, at that time, Downing who, in many ways, is a decent man and a considerate man, possibly also a brave man (ex USMC, two tours in Afghanistan and two in Iraq) confirmed to me that his report would have to include the whole embarrassing story of how he scattered my belongings along the highway after having left them on the hood of his police car.

Well, standing outside that basement garage of the downtown police station nearly a week after the fact, I told the story to several sergeants. And they all agreed there was no need to make a formal complaint, considering how simple it is to go to the DMV and be issued with a duplicate driver's license. Also, this was the wrong place to lodge such a complaint, because Officer Downing doesn't work out of that police station. He's based out on Skyline and we only dropped by the downtown location because that's what every cop does when he's taking a prisoner to the downtown county jail.

But I do recall there was a moment when Downing mentioned to me that he had my driver's license separate from my other property. I'm just not entirely sure whether that was in the car, at the police station, in the hospital waiting room or at the jail. At all of those junctures, he would have needed to look at it so he could enter my personal details into whatever part of the system he was committing me to at that point.

As it turns out, the DMV is not about to issue me with a duplicate license very easily. So I'll just hope the license turns up in a drawer at the jail or in the laundry of Officer Downing. Stranger things have happened.

When your own family sends you to jail...

Wow! What a week I've had. I don't suppose it occurred to anybody to check the San Diego County Jail.

Absolutely nobody bothered to check the San Diego County Jail. I'm out now, but it was a damned close run thing. It was a lost weekend that lasted from 8:30 p.m. Friday until 4 a.m. Thursday.

Fortunately, I have my Get Out Of Jail Free card. White privilege? I never leave home without it. What does not kill me seems to make me stronger. They let me out at 4 a.m. and liberty smells sweet in every way.

I owe some serious apologies to Sanns Dixon, because my incarceration prevented me from acting in the movie he had planned to shoot yesterday (Wednesday).

All last week, my stepdaughter told me she would buy groceries on Friday. Look at what she bought. Five boxes of Cheezits? Seriously? And my son-in-law's riposte was, "You don't have to eat it." Can you imagine a stupider remark? I was annoyed. But is that any reason to spend a week in jail? Who needs family like that? I've got to get out of here.

I never actually slapped anybody. Her husband (who has won cups for karate) twisted my pinky, causing a serious sprain. And, when I pulled it away, my fingers made the gentlest contact with her cheek. This was the "battery" that sent me to jail.

Those who expected me to remain in custody should be aware of the nickname bestowed upon me in 1992 by the national organizer of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Committee): The Teflon Bolshevik. Seriously, if I didn't have this white skin and a middle-class education, I'd be dead meat, by now.

Memorize the phone number of a reliable friend, just in case you ever find yourself in the lock up with no money and no chance of bail. They allow free phone calls, during the intake phase. But each call costs $5 once you're "housed." If you have no money on you, when you're arrested, your only hope is for an outsider to go to the jail website at sdsheriff.net and put some money on your "book."

During Friday night or the early hours of Saturday morning, I met a gentleman who had been arrested and taken to jail barefoot and wearing a hospital gown. His only crime was getting into an argument with his brother about an overdue debt. "So, he went for his shit and I went for my shit," was the way he put it. In other words, they attempted to settle the dispute with AR-15s. The brother didn't get off any rounds at all. About four shots were fired into a corner of their mother's home, which the prisoner assures me was completely harmless.

I also made the acquaintance of a young man who was arrested on Friday night after a high-speed police chase across the Coronado Bridge, while drunk and naked with a young woman sucking his wing-wang. That's a trick I mean to put on my bucket list.

One of the most interesting men I met in the jail was ***** ****, who is 11 years older than me. He was a student at NYU, back in the 1960s, when his study partner showed him a mayonnaise jar full of smart pills that he'd got from his professor Timothy Leary. With the exam two days away, they decided to try the pills. **** says he thought taking two pills would make him twice as smart. So they dropped the acid and very soon they were wrestling with paisley-patterned hallucinations. Neither of them made it to the exam hall. As soon as I was released, I made a couple of calls so that ***** got out on bail by 6 p.m. How he's going to get into his apartment is entirely his problem. The police who arrested him locked his keys in there when they slammed the front door shut.

So many times I have overheard one side of a telephone conversation that suddenly goes into:

"You're my boo and the reason I love you so much is because you're having my baby…"

I think I heard the same prisoner say those words in three different phone calls, probably to three different women.

Sometimes it goes like:

"I know we broke up and I know things were never right between us, but please be there for me while I'm in here. I really need someone."

Probably the most impressive character I met during the first 24 hours of incarceration was a drug dealer who bore an uncanny resemblance to Antonio Banderas. They pulled him over in North Park with a pound of meth in his car. Everybody in the tank looked to him for advice and guidance, because... Charisma? Intellect? At least we got each other's jokes. Heavy hitters like that get housed on the 5th floor of the jail. I was on the 4th with the punks and junkies.

Fifth-floor prisoners get access to the commissary, where you can buy food that is not sub-standard bologna and such luxuries as instant coffee. Down on the 4th floor, there are no luxuries. And they don't offer any hot drinks at all. It's the tap water in the cell, six ounces of apple juice per day, 12 ounces of milk. The nurse gave me Ibuprofen to help with the caffeine withdrawal. After a couple of days, I started passing my Ibuprofens to my celly, who was suffering severe pain from scoliosis.

Jail routine is bizarre.

4 a.m. Breakfast (oatmeal or grits with waffles in a plastic-wrapped tv-dinner tray.

Lockdown

Noon Lunch is four slices of wheat bread, two slabs of the worst bologna imaginable, a slice of pretend cheese, a small sachet of coleslaw dressing. This comes in a plastic sack and they throw it at you three times a day, during the 24 hours it takes to be processed into the modules. Once housed, you get two sugar cookies, 6 ounces of orange juice and 6 ounces of fat-free milk with lunch. There's also soup that they ladel into your cardboard tray once you've scooped the sandwich makings out of it. Those cardboard trays come in handy, in the cell, for stashing the odd cookie for the long periods of lockdown.

Lockdown

4 p.m. Dinner, which is something hot in a tv-dinner-style box. Last night was maceroni with hamburger helper and quite tasty. I got a double helping, because, on that day, I was one of those entrusted to hand them out. There was also a small bag of chopped lettuce and a sachet of Italian dressing with that.

Lockdown. Sometimes, when this lockdown ends, I wake up from a deep sleep and think it's tomorrow. But it's only 8:30 p.m. the same day.

8:30 p.m. Potential free association with the television on. But you don't get to choose the channel and you might get locked down in the middle of an episode of... Friends? I laughed at a line in Friends, three days ago. I call that my Papillon moment.

10 p.m. Final lockdown.

2 a.m. Medication. They finally got around to finding me some HIV meds, which are supposed to be taken with food. I took the option to hold onto them until breakfast rather than accept another gratuitous bag of bread and bologna. All that sodium is going to kill me.

The deputies brighten up an otherwise dull lockdown by dropping by and demanding to check identity wristbands. I hadn't planned a tunnel, because it would only lead me to the 3rd floor.

Nothing like incarceration to bring me back to reading The San Diego Union-Tribune, every section. The whole module agreed that George Varga's pre-gig interview with Bill Maher was lame as fuck. Everybody agrees with me Nick Canepa is the finest writer in the county. Last night, I completed both crosswords!

Deputy: So what brings you here?

Burgess: At 58 years old, I embarked upon a life of crime.

Kingsman was what they used to call me in jail. That's not all they called me. Sometimes it was "OG," sometimes "English." When they call me "English," I think of Col. Stok talking to Michael Caine in Funeral in Berlin (1966).

At 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning, they put two young junkies in my cell. Immediately, one of them asked me to give him my top bunk. Fuck no! They both banged around in the lower bunks for a while, but neither of them seemed able to cope with the confinement. The one who wanted my bunk ended up laying his bedding on the floor and sleeping next to the toilet. They both remained in the cell during breakfast (served every morning at 4 a.m.) and I happened to notice the cheeky bastard had climbed up into my bunk and was resting his head on my "pillow" (my sheet and blanket rolled up to serve as a bolster). My cartel-member buddy and I stormed into the cell to explain the facts of life to him, but he wouldn't move. So, on the advice of "Mafia For Life," I pulled my mattress out from under him and he fell like a rock onto the hard floor. He was like a zombie. Blank eyes. Didn't utter a sound. Just climbed back onto my bunk. So I appealed to the screws. Next thing I know, we're all on lockdown again. I moved my bedding into a nearby cell. The zombie must have made a wrong move. Something like 30 deputies turned up from nowhere and pinned him to the floor. Some were laughing. One was writing notes in a little book. One was punching the poor sod in the face. They took him out on a stretcher and I never saw him again. It was quite shocking. A man could easily die like that.

I was supposed to read the newspaper article about her to Mafia For Life, because he likes Amy Schumer. Well, that newspaper got tossed and, after the next lockdown, other things were going on in the module, so that never happened.

And there was a homeless man who told me he never pan handles or dumpster dives, because he's got eight hustles he can hook you up to. His favorite is to hang out in Starbucks and wait for you to go to the bathroom. Then he scoops up your phone, your iPad and your laptop and runs out the door before anybody gets out the second "Hey!" in "Hey! Hey! Hey!"

But the one who had two broken ribs from being wrestled to the floor by "loss prevention," was the Scotsman (Permanent Resident Alien Permit, lovely cross of St. Andrew deconstructed as a tattoo on his forearm. All he stole was a large bar of Hershey chocolate with almonds. So we, in the module, referred to him as the Hershey Bandit. Nobody in this country has heard of the Milky Bar Kid.

When my cell door opened and they called for me to roll up my bedding and walk to the gate, I could have screamed for joy.

Can you believe they still didn't wash the pan and throw away the teriyaki sauce from the chicken legs I barbecued for the kids last Friday night? So it's been sitting here a week with stuff dropping in off the trees. I would have washed it up, myself, but I was unavoidably detained.

The trouble with Wikileaks

In fact, Kim Philby, who spied for the Soviets during the hottest period of the Cold War, observed in his 1968 book, My Silent War, that secret documents, though glamorous, are frequently a snare and a delusion.

Quote, “Is it a first draft, a second draft or the finished memorandum? Was it written by an official of standing, or some dogsbody with a bright idea? Even if it is unmistakably a direct instruction to the United States Ambassador from the Secretary of State dated last Tuesday, is it still valid today? In short, documentary intelligence, to be really valuable, must come as a steady stream, embellished with an awful lot of explanatory annotation.”

Philby concluded, “An hour’s serious discussion with a trustworthy informant is often more valuable than any number of original documents.”

— Spoken by Brooke Gladstone of WNYC’s “On The Media” on National Public Radio, Dec. 3, 2010.

David Kitson obituary

Anti-apartheid activist who was eventually shunned by the ANC high command

Denis Herbstein

David Kitson looked as though he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but in his day he had been a bomb-instructor for the African National Congress’ military wing and spent 20 years in prison. His interrogators did not know he was a member of the liberation army’s high command. “They thought I was one of those middle-class fuddies who get involved in things,” Kitson, who has died aged 91, once said.

There was little thought of revolution when he studied mechanical engineering at Howard College, Durban (now KwaZulu-Natal university), but it was a useful preparation. Graduating in 1942, he served “up north” as a sapper with the South African army. Thus his future adversaries taught him how to prepare explosives. After the war he moved to London – where his Jewish father had been born – working for de Havilland Aircraft as a draughtsman. He was active in the engineering union Tass, while doubling as secretary of the Communist party branch in Hornsey, north London. Tass sponsored him for two years at Ruskin College, Oxford. Afterwards, when at British Oxygen, he was offered promotion on condition he end his union activities. He refused and was sacked. After that, jobs were difficult to find.

He married Norma Cranko, a South African Jewish woman who was also active in the Communist party, and with her he returned to South Africa in 1959, ostensibly to introduce their son, Steven, to his grandparents. Within months, the police fired on unarmed protesters at Sharpeville, killing 69. There was now no thought of returning to Britain. Kitson’s first allegiance was to the Communist party, which, like the ANC, had been driven underground. When the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, or Spear of the Nation), launched its sabotage campaign in December 1961, Kitson was teaching the bombers their trade. He was a dependable behind-the-scenes cadre, not a coal-face primer of bombs.

But when virtually the entire leadership of MK was arrested at Rivonia, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, and several leading communists had fled the country, the lower ranks were catapulted in to replace them. Kitson was now one of four members of a high command directing the revolutionary struggle. Arrest was inevitable. He held out for 131 days.

Kitson was not subjected to intense physical torture but did suffer interrogation. “With modern methods they are going to get something out of you sooner or later,” he once told me, “so you proceed with a series of lies.” He gave away nothing of importance, managing to withhold his membership of the high command. Norma was held for three weeks. His lawyers thought hanging was a distinct possibility, so the 20-year sentence (for sabotage and membership of the Communist party) came almost as a relief, even if there was no prospect of remission for good behaviour. Pretoria local prison housed the white “politicals”, and their treatment was nothing like that meted out to black prisoners on Robben Island. But there were bullying warders and a vindictive minister of justice stopped their studies for three years.

Kitson acquired arts and science degrees (in mathematics), and was even allowed to study Russian, before the authorities cottoned on. He remained a hardliner, not overly keen on the “liberal nonsense” spouted by his student neighbours likewise jailed for sabotage. He was philosophical about his plight, regarding himself as “a casualty of the conflict”, and he made no objection when Norma divorced him, moved to Britain, and married fellow South African Sidney Cherfas. However, when Steven visited from London and was arrested, allegedly for sketching the prison, Kitson’s equanimity was tested.

Norma later divorced Sidney, amicably, and remarried David when he was released from prison. Arriving in London, Kitson found himself in a political cauldron. Norma had founded the City of London anti-apartheid group, whose non-stop protests on the pavement outside South Africa’s Trafalgar Square embassy had become a tourist attraction. The confrontational style incurred the wrath of the sedate Anti-Apartheid Movement’s national leadership.

In return, Norma treated her critics with disdain. The ANC and the influential London cell of the South African Communist party told Kitson to denounce his wife. He refused. The couple were suspended from the ANC, a speaking tour of Britain was cancelled, and his old union, Tass, had the offer of a lectureship in mathematical statistics at Ruskin College withdrawn from him. David and Norma moved to Zimbabwe.

In time, at the behest of Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, the couple were reinstated by the ANC and honoured as “veterans of the struggle”. It was half-hearted. There was no invitation to Mandela’s historic inauguration. After Norma died in 2002, Kitson returned to Johannesburg. The hero of the struggle died a non-person in the new South Africa. He is survived by his daughter Amandla. Steven died in 1997.

• Ian David Kitson, activist, born 25 August 1919; died 9 November 2010

© The Guardian

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RELATED LINKS:

David Kitson's obituary [Sunday Times of South Africa]
David Kitson's obituary [FRFI]
David Kitson and me
Steven Kitson: photo
Steven Kitson
Pie in the sky
Norma’s Obituary [FRFI]
Norma’s Obituary [Guardian]
Norma Kitson [Photo]
Where Sixpence Lives

The great South African communist and fighter against apartheid David Kitson has died in Johannesburg aged 91.
FRFI 218 December 2010/January 2011

A senior member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the 1960s, he became a commissar of the national high command of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, after the arrest of the ‘Rivonia Eight’ ANC leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu, in 1963.

David Kitson was arrested in 1964 and, with four others, was charged with sabotage and being a member of the high command of MK, and jailed for 20 years. His wife Norma was detained a month later.

Norma Kitson subsequently was forced into exile in London and with the Revolutionary Communist Group formed City of London Anti-Apartheid Group, which in 1982 held a non-stop picket outside the South African Embassy over deteriorating conditions faced by David and his fellow prisoners, who were being held on Death Row in Pretoria Central Prison. After 86 days, the prisoners were moved to better conditions, and this victory was the impetus later for the four-year Non-Stop Picket against apartheid and for the release of all South African political prisoners maintained by City AA outside the South African Embassy from 1986 until Mandela’s release in 1990.

City AA, committed to opposing the racism of the British state as well as the apartheid system in South Africa, and to support for all organisations fighting for national liberation in South Africa, found itself bitterly opposed by the ANC/SACP exile establishment in London which wanted to channel all protest through the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), which it controlled.

When David was released in 1984 and joined Norma and their children Steven and Amandla in London, he found himself caught up in the vicious efforts of the ANC/SACP to politically isolate Norma, City AA and the RCG.

Despite the fact that David was the most senior MK leader and longest-serving political prisoner at the time to be released from South Africa, at the AAM AGM in 1984, a few months after his release, a significant proportion of the movement’s leadership refused to join in a standing ovation when he stood to speak, or even applaud him, and he was denied a seat on the AAM National Committee. Having fought against the apartheid state, David now found himself having to struggle against the opportunism of the movement in Britain. When he refused, as he put it, to ‘jump through hoops’, he and Norma were suspended from the ANC. With the collusion of erstwhile communist Ken Gill, leader of David’s union TASS, David was told he would be reinstated as an ANC member and get funding to take up a promised emeritus post at Ruskin College, Oxford, only if he publicly denounced his wife and City AA. Always one to take a principled stand, David rejected this poisonous blackmail and, as a result, found himself without a job or source of income.

In an obituary in the South African Sunday Times, Chris Barron writes of the attempts to isolate David politically:

‘One view is that his return to London after his imprisonment constituted an embarrassment and a reproach to members of the SACP, including Joe Slovo, who had fled SA in 1963 in defiance of a central committee directive that they should stay. Kitson obeyed the directive and paid heavily for it. He and Slovo had ideological differences, and it has been argued that Slovo had much to lose if Kitson was restored to his old seniority in the movement.’

As David said at his trial: ‘There came a point where I could choose to run or I could choose to stand. And so I stood.’

Significantly, the head of the ANC in London, who informed David, by post, of his suspension and who was a key player in the political attacks on City AA, was Solly Smith, later unmasked as a South African police spy along with other prominent London members.

While in London, David maintained comradely relations with the RCG and spoke at a number of our public meetings. After returning to live in Harare in the 1990s, he wrote regularly for FRFI on the situation in Zimbabwe. He moved back to South Africa after Norma’s death in 2002. Steven Kitson died in 1997.

FRFI salutes David’s unwavering courage and communist principles and we extend our sympathy to his comrades and family.

© Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 2010

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RELATED LINKS:

David Kitson's obituary
Steven Kitson: photo
Steven Kitson
Pie in the sky
Norma’s Obituary [FRFI]
Norma’s Obituary [Guardian]
Norma Kitson [Photo]
Where Sixpence Lives

Smash the racist English Defence League (EDL) & The British National Party

Demonstrations by far-right activists such as the English Defence League are fuelling Islamic extremism, West Midlands police said today.

Groups such as the EDL lay the groundwork for the recruitment of Muslims to radicalism, according to counter-terrorism officers.

Since the EDL emerged last summer, it has held demonstrations in towns and cities against Islamic extremism, with another planned for Preston city centre on Saturday, Nov. 27.

But the West Midlands counter-terrorism unit said there is evidence that violence or damage towards Muslim property associated with EDL demos encourages extremist retaliation afterwards.

Detective Superintendent John Larkin told BBC Radio 5 Live: “They look for the hook to pull people through and when the EDL have been and done what they’ve done, perversely they leave that behind.”

Hope Not Hate campaign chairman Nick Lowles said: “This demonstrates how hate breeds hate.

“The EDL breeds Islamic extremism and Islamic extremism breeds the EDL.

“It’s time to break the chain.

“…make a stand against extremism on both sides of the divide.”

Please change your Facebook profile pic to “Some people are gay. Get over it!” this week for National Anti-Bullying Week, and show support to anyone experiencing homophobic bullying in schools and Stonewall’s campaign to tackle this. Please encourage all your Facebook Friends to do the same to show the anti-gay bullies they won’t win!