Pelosi event report

Dear everyone,

It's hard to say if there has ever been a book tour event quite like
the one last night. In a subsequent email I may include my own
personal experiences of what was a night so truly amazing that I
couldn't quite soak it all in at the time, but which upon reflection
leaves me kind of flabbergasted. But this morning, since I'm sitting
in my cab at the airport cab lot (I've been on on the road since 4:50
a.m.) I'm just going to give a quick overview.

Only about 30-40 activists showed up. We clustered around the
entrance waving placards and signs and making a little noise. Mike
Dean of World Cant Wait was corralled inside a chicken-wire
'Guantanomo freedom cage' to give the media a photo op. A couple of tv
stations were on hand, but I don't know if any of this made the news
-- I doubt it. Toward the start time, everyone filed into the
auditorium, which holds 400 and was maybe 80% full. Pelosi and her
interviewer, Michael Krasny of KQED "Forum," came on stage to much
applause and a few scattered boos and hisses. Early on, someone near
me hummed "Nah-nah-nah-nah, hey-hey, good-bye" and I hummed it back,
but that was the last time I heard it during the evening. I don't
personally know all the activists who were there, so it's really hard
to give an accurate count, but we were scattered individually and in
clusters throughout the crowd, and a few minutes into Pelosi's talk
someone, not me, yelled "Impeach" or something, and the cry was echoed
by other people around the auditorium, then it stopped, and Pelosi
droned on. She told a lot of stories about her start in politics, most
of which are from her book. And every now and then, someone in the
crowd, not me, would scream, "Iraq!" Or "Torture!" Or "Impeach!" And
pretty soon I was screaming right along with everyone. When she
scolded us all, "You're just being silly now! If you want the Iraq war
to end, you should put all this wonderful energy into electing Barack
Obama!" At which point I found myself pointing my finger at her and
screaming, "We elected YOU to do that..." My cry was drowned out by a
chorus of others: "Do your job!" "IMPEACH!" "War CRIMINAL!" It went on
like this for quite a while, causing several stoppages. Soon there
were security people running up and down the aisles like ballpark
popcorn vendors, trying to identify who was screaming, but it was so
spread out, and so loud, that they really couldn't do much. If they
went to one area of the crowd, protesters in another area shouted out,
and if they surrounded someone, protesters yelled, "Leave her/him
alone!" Pelosi and Krasny several times stopped and pleased with us to
stop. The crowd was, numerically, mostly in Pelosi's corner, screaming
at all of us screamers to stop. And on it went... I have to say that
Pelosi was pretty much unflappable -- I don't think we caused her any
big reconsiderations, don't think we did anything to budge her, but
you never know. In the film "The Fog of War," former head of the US
Department of Defense, Robert McNamara, said that it was the
demonstrators, particularly the one who set himself afire right
outside McNamara's office, that got him to question what he was doing
in regards to the Vietnam War. One guy, not me, was hauled off by four
or five policemen, but I have no idea whether or not he was arrested
-- doubt it. In the end, I came away amazed at what a country we have
-- I was in the aisle about 8-10 rows from the stage in the small
theater, and Pelosi's chair was angled so that her natural gaze would
be toward me, and there were many times during the evening when she
was looking right at me, and I was screaming at her. I came away from
the evening with the sense of having screamed at the Speaker of the
House for about an hour -- and even though I don't kid myself that it
accomplished anything, it FELT good, it felt RIGHT. She has so choked
off debate on the subject of impeachment, and anything else she
doesn't want to talk about, that this kind of thing is about the only
avenue of protest we have left, and it felt absolutely fair to me that
we took that avenue. The majority of the crowd was angry at us, at me,
but, hey... sorry. There are bombs dropping in Iraq with our names on
them, in a completely unjustifiable war. There's some poor sonofabitch
strapped to a wall or a table right this minute in our names. It's
enough to make you scream.

I stopped screaming at the end of the evening, and stopped at the
table where Pelosi was signing books. I knelt down and slid mine
across the table. Our heads were about three feet apart. While she
scribbled her name, I said, "On behalf of the several thousand people
who came to the Beach Impeach events last year, I want you to know how
profoundly disappointed we are that you took impeachment off the
table."

I hadn't expected a long conversation, and I didn't get one. I felt
big strong hands wrap around my biceps from behind. I heard a female
voice, maybe her, but I thought not, say, "Let him alone."

The cop loosened his grip. I grabbed my book from the table, told the
cop, "I can walk." I turned and walked away. Pelosi called after me.
"Thank you for coming." I turned and looked back at her. Eye contact.
She said, "I GOT the message."

The end. (no time to edit -- sorry for any mistakes)