This t-shirt was designed by the legendary activist artist collective Gran Fury 17 years ago.

Today South Africa has national health care.

A lot of people still think they can do something to help drag our own country into the [twentieth] century. Some of them know they have to ACT UP to get there. But activists also know how to party, and sometimes a little cash is needed to help make a stink, so ACT UP is throwing a $20 celebration/benefit bash this evening, and everyone is welcome.

The doors of Manhattan's LGBT Center at 208 West 13th Street (just west of 7th Avenue) will open at 7 pm. The program will start at 8 or 8:30 and will feature readings/performances by Pulitzer-prize winning author Michael Cunningham, the notorious Church Ladies for Choice, Mark Hannay (formerly of the Hot Peaches), and fabulous downtown performance artist Penny Arcade. The evening ends with a dance party that goes until midnight.

[image via ACT UP]

across from the Stock Exchange yesterday

If yesterday's ACT UP twentieth-anniversary action demonstrated anything, it was the coalition's own renewal, and its transformation from an AIDS activist group once largely made up of young middle-class queer white males into one devoted to the this country's larger, evolving healthcare crisis and composed of a much broader community of people who have realized we are all directly affected by both AIDS and a medical system completely inadequate to address it or other health needs.

In New York yesterday every age group and every community in this hugely-diverse city appeared to be represented in the crowd which gathered in and around the Wall Street area. They hurled chants at a powerful corporate medical, insurance and political establishment, reached out in conversations to regular passersby, they brandished both printed and hand-lettered signs addressing an aloof, fortress-minded establishment, and they carried or dragged with them some 50 bulky black body-bag props as they wound through the narrow downtown streets in a band of roughly a thousand souls. At the site of the bull statue near Bowling Green some 30 people were arrested for civil disobedience while lying down in the street amongst those bags.

The NYTimes did not consider the event worthy of a single word or image. See See Andy Humm in Gay City News for the best account of the day.

The new ACT UP appears determined to be only the nucleus [or perhaps, this still being ACT UP, really only the trigger] for re-igniting an enormous popular movement, coinciding with the run-up to the 2008 election, directed toward finally securing this nation's adoption of a single-payer healthcare system after something like one hundred years of broken dreams and promises.

What follows are a few scenes from the struggle as renewed just yesterday.

going back for more, 20 years later

Apparently as a nation we can accept throwing away something like half a trillion dollars (and counting), and very likely some 700,000 lives, on a remote elective war whose only accomplishment was a second term for the regime of the biggest Big Brother we've ever had, but we [or at least our media and our elected representatives] still think a single-payer healthcare system means handing over too much power to government.

ACT UP has always supported a single-payer health care system, and its members have always understood the role of war in thwarting its achievement. Tomorrow morning, Thursday, at 11:30 this remarkable and unfortunately still indispensable activist group of stalwarts will be marching on and in Wall Street to mark its twentieth anniversary and the beginning of its campaign to make access to healthcare for all, including single-payer insurance and drug price controls, a major issue throughout the 2008 election campaigns.

Anyone who is able to make it is welcome to join us as we gather for the march at 11 am. We will be stepping off from the Federal Building downtown, on the east side of Broadway at Worth Street, just above Chambers Street.

Twenty years on, the press will no longer be labelling us all "homosexuals", as did the NYTimes in its coverage of the first action, shown in the image above, although it was exactly that powerful picture and its caption which sucked me into the group. As far as tomorrow is concerned, while it should be assumed that only those who have decided to commit some form of civil disobedience could be arrested, there is less certainty about that than there ever was in our present terrifying, and terror-stuck, political climate.

I'm bringing my camera, for surveillance purposes.

An editorial in the current issue of The Nation is an excellent tribute* to the historic accomplishment of ACT UP and a reminder that neither the role nor the actors have yet disappeared. Excerpting the last three paragraphs of the editorial:

During the years that followed, ACT UP stormed the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control to protest their shortcomings. On the local level, Catholic dioceses and boards of education were targeted for blocking HIV information in public schools; city governments for failing to provide care and housing; jails and prisons for setting up segregation units. Some ACT UPers set up guerrilla needle-exchange programs; others staked out the entrances to junior highs to distribute condoms directly to students. Just as essentially, ACT UP members became self-taught experts in such arcane fields as virology and patent law and in so doing rewrote the patient-doctor relationship and helped put the idea of universal healthcare--now favored by a majority of Americans--on the political map.

Along the way, ACT UP borrowed strategies from other radical movements: antinuke protesters for techniques on civil disobedience, antiapartheid campaigners for bringing political funerals to the streets. Many of its tactics--videotaping demonstrations as protection against police brutality, coordinated but autonomous affinity group actions--have become standard fare in the global justice movement, as has ACT UP's deeply democratic tradition.

ACT UP is now a shadow of its former self, but its alums have gone on to found Health Gap, a driving force for global treatment access; the Treatment Action Group, which continues to push the AIDS research agenda; and Housing Works, which has won housing for thousands of New York City's HIV-­positive homeless. And true to form, the organization will mark its twentieth anniversary with a march on Wall Street March 29 to demand single-payer healthcare for all.

*
including a candid apology for the progressive journal's own historic neglect: "Though barely noticed in the pages of this publication, ACT UP would revolutionize AIDS research and treatment, as well as inject new life into the gay movement and infuse the tactic of direct action with its own style of theatrical militancy."

[image from actupny]

Sue Coe Wheel of War 2004 mixed media drawing on board 12.5" x 8.5"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday defied President George W. Bush, voting to impose a September 1, 2008, deadline for withdrawing all American combat troops from Iraq.

Ummm, . . . .

Am I supposed to get excited? Did you see that end date? Almost five months after the Congressional election which was essentially a referendum to end the Iraq war House Democrats were finally able to rouse themselves from their criminal political lethargy long enough to (almost) agree on a resolution which (sorta) says we should withdraw (note: it says "combat troops") by September 1, 2008. That "deadline" is almost two years after the election and five and a half years after this disastrous war of aggression began. Not surprisingly, there are all kinds of ifs and buts in the agreement, and apparently nothing has to be done this year, so Bush can continue to send additional troops.

Anything can happen when this Executive gets to make the decisions for another eighteen months; think of the all the things he/it could engineer to make support for a continuation, even an escalation of this war entirely likely.

In any event, the White House has already said Bush will veto such a bill should the Senate manage to cooperate with the House resolution and one finds its way to his desk.

By the end of this year, if not sooner, the war will belong to the Democrats as much as the Republicans, and I'll wager that since the oil and permanent bases secured by this Administration now belong to both parties we're never going to leave Iraq.

I used to think the only solution was the impeachment of both the President and VIce-President, followed by their successful criminal prosecution. Now I'm thinking that even that unlikely (but not inconceivable) scenario probably wouldn't change anything at all in the Middle East.

[image from artnet courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne]

(PIG BUSH, DEMOLISH THE BORDER WALL) reads the message on the side of the big pink pig aloft during the Roger Waters concert in Mexico City on March 6, two days before his Bush visit warm-up performance in Bogota

Bush's imperial entourage dropped into Bogota yesterday, but the presidential visit to what the media describes as the administration's strongest South American ally was cut short because of security concerns. The President, who had traveled to and from a private stage set downtown in a 55-car motorcade which was preceded by an additional, 12-car phony/decoy motorcade, fled the country after staying little more than six hours. Oh, should I mention here that I've read that on this trip, and apparently on every trip, our president apparently has access to Marine One (perhaps shipped in the hold of a jumbo cargo jet)? Pretty soon we're talking real money.

The idea of the visit had been to give a morale boost to a government dogged by a scandal involving its association with drug traffickers and brutal right-wing paramilitary death squads . Bush's meeting with Alvaro Uribe Velez in the presidential palace on Sunday brought out some 2000 protesters (and 20,000 police and heavily armed troops). On Friday, in a concert in the same city (presumably, traveling sans motorcades) former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters introduced the subject of the huge amounts of U.S. money which maintains and corrupts the Columbian regime (Colombia receives more U.S. aid than any country outside the Middle East and Afghanistan). The band's legendary helium-filled pink pig hovered above the stage, this time bearing the legend:

EL PATRÓN BUSH VISITA EL RANCHO DE COLOMBIA
(PATRON BUSH VISITS HIS COLOMBIAN RANCH)

Sigh. Do we have any idea of what we look like?

Are the Americans who voted for this regime noticing that from the very beginning of his term in office Bush has been unable to appear or speak in public except before military or invited audiences, and that this is also true on the rare occasions he travels abroad, even when he is a guest of a government described as closely-allied to our government? What does this say about Bush, and what does this say about us?

Do those same Americans believe that all those "foreigners" hate us personally, and not just the selfish and exclusive policies of our government? If we continue to choose governments like this one I have no doubt that eventually, as very fortunate people who represent ourselves as part of a democratic system, we will come to be despised by the world as individuals, and very rightly so.

[image of Fernando Aceves and Marco Peláez from laJornada]