Most people who watched the inauguration did so from the safety of their homes. They saw the same boring speeches, the same platitudes about freedom and justice, the same boring parade as they had seen every four years since television started covering it. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has become a Stalinesque figure for the “conservative” right-wing, capable of doing no wrong, making no mistake, telling no lie, so long as he saved them from their arch-traitor nemesis, Leon Trotsky… er… I mean John Kerry.

Given that, my decision to protest the Inauguration should not come as a surprise, so on Wednesday night, I threw together a few things and took off for Washington. I didn’t get a chance to tell my roommates that I was leaving, and I traveled alone. Fourteen hours and a huge snowstorm later, I arrived, unsuccessfully tried to sleep in my car for a half-hour, and eventually set out for Malcolm X Park (the unofficial name of Meridian Hill Park), the starting point for the counter-inaugural march.

After a detour around the area looking for a bathroom, I eventually gave up and walked back to the park, and had a few smokes while listening to various speakers and waiting for the march to start–a hip-hop artist, a 95-year-old woman who had hiked and skied across the country, a priest from Haiti who talked about how Aristide was kidnapped by U.S. Marines and taken to a French military base in Africa, to be replaced by a former death-squad leader, and David Cobb, the Green Party candidate in 2004. Meanwhile, some neo-fascists decided to show up and start trouble with the black-clad Anarchist contingent, ostensibly to show that “anarchists aren’t for free speech.” To some extent this is correct: the KKK would do well to avoid my street, for example, and that isn’t “pro-free-speech.” However, considering anarchists rose up and formed armed militias against a military coup backed by Hitler in Spain sixty years ago, I think these fascists got off easy getting thrown out of the park without their signs. As always, the communists were selling papers, and the La Rouche supporters were hawking their “Bush is Satan” books. By the end of the couple hours spent standing in the park, turning them down had almost become rote: point to my red and black tattoo and say “No thanks.”

We started marching shortly thereafter, led by the organizers from the D.C. Anti-War Network (DAWN). After DAWN stopped the march for the fifth time, the anarchists went off on our own, taking about 1,000 people with us as we snaked through the streets, avoiding the police blockades. We eventually filtered through a group of D.C. police on motorcycles, and I couldn’t resist muttering “We’re back, bitches,” in reference to large groups of protesting anarchists. The march crested the hill, and this is when the trouble started. I didn’t see what started the whole thing, but I later learned of some “protesters” (really undercover police officers) wearing the kind of checkered scarf which Yassir Arafat wore (kuffiyeh) took them off, whipped out hand-cuffs, and start arresting people. On the drive in, I had seen someone dressed in all black and a rolled-up ski-mask casually talking on a walkie-talkie from the middle of a gaggle of police cars, paddy-wagons, and officers. At any rate, we tried to link arms as the police charged and forced us back down the hill, beating with their batons anyone who did not get out of their way fast enough. I was fortunate not to be hit, but I did have the unfortunate duty of having to pull several people who were being beaten away behind our “lines.” I’ve since heard that the police used a fire-hose on the demonstrators, but I didn’t actually see it happen–if true it’s far worse than it seems, there was snow on the ground.

After a few tense moments, the police stopped beating people and the remnants of the march dispersed down the hill. I wandered over to 14th and Pennsylvania where the Secret Service had established a checkpoint for people who wanted to protest along the parade route. On the way there, I passed a bunch of Bush supporters coming from the inauguration site, including a minister. I asked him how it felt to “help kill 100,000 people, given the collar and all,” and “who would Jesus bomb?” He didn’t answer.

After milling around at the SS checkpoint for a while, somebody decided to take down some flags from the hotel next to us and light them on fire, which nearly caused a fight with some random guy decked out in stars-and-stripes everything. After vague threats to the people who were trying to light the flag on fire, he claimed it was a shame that we burned the flag, since in Communist Wherever they would make him eat it. I responded that the real shame was all the dead Native Americans and all the black people dragged here in slavery, not some pieces of cloth a few kids wanted to burn. I could’ve ranted some more, but he took off, which was really too bad. Not because I wanted to rant at him, but because I wanted to ask him if he caught the irony of claiming how much freedom we have after we’ve been beaten and hosed down in the freezing cold, or even the irony of talking about how free we are to love our government–a freedom I’m pretty sure even the Chinese had during Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.”

At this point, a few people started throwing snowballs at the cops (again, this is how cold it was), and lifted one of the barricades out of it’s position. The cops put it back.

After that I moved closer to the barricades and after a brief staring contest, I asked one of the cops how it felt to defend a Nazi, talked about the voter fraud and dirty tricks in Ohio (due to an idiosyncrasy in the way computers count numbers–ala the “Y2K” problems from half a decade ago–the Diebold electronic voting machines only count votes up to 32,768, then start subtracting votes, and the high-voter, vastly Democratic inner-city districts received fewer machines than the low-voter, marginally Republican suburban districts), and asked if he even voted for Bush. His (white) commander muttered something to him, which sounded like “don’t talk to him.” The cop I was talking with told me to “Go home,” to which I responded “this is my home.”

At any rate, several more sections of the barricade were lifted out of place, and the police grabbed their batons and started hitting people, then put the barricade sections back in place. Some people began throwing themselves against the barricade–which everyone knew was a futile and symbolic gesture, since we had just seen that removing the sections required just a quick heft), and a new group of cops stomped in started pepper-spraying people. Not just the people who were actually removing sections of the barricade, but random people. They pepper-sprayed someone standing near me, and I caught the ricochet off his head in my right eye. It hurt, but I was able to wash it out pretty quickly thanks to the medics that protesters now have with us.

Let me clarify: because the police forces in major cities have gotten so violent towards protesters, we now have our own medical corps that follow the protest around, and treat the people that get assaulted by the police. One of the surreal but enduring memories I have is the EMS tech wearing his government-issue “MEDIC” vest treating someone who had been attacked by the riot cops in their government-issue “POLICE” riot gear.

At any rate, I got pissed. I wasn’t tearing down a barricade, I wasn’t throwing things, I wasn’t cursing at the cops, and I wasn’t flipping them off. The only interaction I had was some (pointless) banging on a handcuffed-down barricade, and asking that one cop those few questions. A reporter from the Washington Post noticed my eye and asked me what had happened and I told him that the police beat and sprayed down the crowd after a section of barricade was removed. He asked me how it felt, and I responded sarcastically “How do you think it feels?”

Let me digress for a moment to describe the weaponry used by the Metro D.C. Police Department. For protests, the police are clad in full hockey-style (probably bullet resistant) body armor. They have metal batons about 2 and a half feet in length. They have military-style shielded helmets. And they have pressurized CO2-powered spray guns which dump about a quart worth of pepper-spray per shot, not the little hand-held self-defense spray-cans you see on TV. And, of course, they have their regular pistols. More to the point, given all the armor the police were wearing, they would be hard-pressed to feel a couple snowballs and some cardboard tubes on anything but a psychosomatic level.

So after washing the spray out, I paced along the barricade, smoking a cigarette, and mentioned to the same officer I had talked with earlier that “I’m still here.” The cops continued to spray people standing near me, and I walked down the line, flipped them all off, then stood back, heels at the curb. A few moments passed and one of the newer cops (armed with a pepper-spray gun) screamed at me to “get back on the curb,” and I did. I stood on the curb, six feet away from him, looked him in the eye, and he shot me in the face.

At this point, I lost consciousness. Which isn’t to say that I passed out, just that my conscious brain disconnected when my senses of taste, smell, hearing, and sight disappeared. At that exact moment, I knew what it was to be a wild animal, totally devoid of civilization, science, reasoning, and all the other trappings of modern (in the geological sense) life. I stood in that spot without moving for a second, and then roared my lungs empty. I don’t really know what it sounded like to anyone else, but from inside my own head it sounded like a raw mixture of shock and anger. I was clenching my fists, and then sneezed out what felt like a massive gob of mucus. I believe they sprayed me a second time as I stood there, but I really can’t be sure. I later learned that a man dressed as Jesus who was holding an “I had nothing to do with this” sign was sprayed, along with a Fox News Cameraman. I also was told that a cardboard coffin that someone had set on fire was pepper sprayed as well, but, as it turns out, pepper spray is flammable. I still shudder to think what would’ve happened if they had shot someone while they were lighting a cigarette.

So, I can’t see, smell, hear, or taste anything outside my own head. My consciousness had returned somewhat after yelling, and I called for a medic to wash out my eyes–I knew the longer anything goes un-treated, the greater the chance of a long-term injury, and I can’t see. Someone came up and gently walked me back a couple yards before describing (politely) in detail that they needed to touch my eyelids and whatnot. By this time my sense of pain had returned, and my whole face began to feel like it was on fire. I yelled at him to just “Do It!” (referring to forcing open my eyelids and dumping water on them to clean out the spray). After some confusion he did, and I could almost open my eyes for a second before everything went dark again. At this point it started to become difficult to breathe–though I’m not sure if it was the result of panic, the cigarette I had been smoking before I was sprayed, the spray itself, or all three. None would surprise me. I bent over and coughed ferociously.

Someone else came up to me claiming to be from the Washington Post as I was recovering, and asked me what had happened. I told him that this was the second time I’d been interviewed by the Post, and the second time I’d been hit with pepper spray. I considered asking him to “not bury the story,” but I figured that he was just as powerless as me in that regard.

The medics washed out my eyes a couple more times, and I stripped off my coat, hoody, and shirts, down to my bare, pale-as-snow chest. The guy who was describing what he was going to do offered to give me his wool shirt, which I took. As they walked me out of the area, someone came up to me and told me to stop spraying water on my face, since “water activates the pepper-spray.” The guy I was walking with told me that he was a cop and could be lying, but after the spray had dried out it didn’t hurt so bad (at least in the cold air). I later came to the conclusion that the cops had seen me hacking my lungs out and were worried that I’d collapse or die, which is not only really bad PR, but a serious lawsuit to boot: killing a 24-year-old college student for standing on a curb has got to be pretty expensive in court.

Anyways, being blind, soaking wet, 25 blocks from my car, and with my face feeling like I had thrown a freshly cooked pizza on it, I asked the guy who was walking me to take me back to my car. After a couple more wash-outs, my sight started coming back, and after wandering around with him looking for the friends he came with, we took the subway back to my car. I drove with them to someone else’s house to crash for the night, and then set out the next morning for DeKalb, eventually getting back around four in the morning on Saturday.

Before leaving D.C., we met up with a middle-aged gentleman who was sleeping in an abandoned warehouse while he took classes on computer security. He relayed how he had mentioned to one of the Bush supporters that this country was rapidly becoming a police state, and how the person in question replied “Good!”

Thank God for freedom.