Requiem for the Oaks

"It's a shame the University made itself into the oppressor."
Tony Serra on the Memorial Oak Grove struggle.

September draws to a close and with it the impression of events remarkable on anyone's scale remain on the shore.

Berkeley is justly known for its many, many trees-- how abundant, how profuse they look in aerial photographs. The ripened smell of trees this time of year comes in with the breeze. The fall came in this September along with a few hot days after a cooler than average Summer. The battle for Wall Street swung into naked combat. The cracked-vase President wanted $700billion handed over to his administration without oversight and he'll go quietly at the end of his term. Senator Barney Frank of Massachusetts said when he demanded compensation caps from the investment bankers "They acted like I'd ask them to have the rabbi serve bacon on the high holy day." A pundit commenting on the issue on the PBS news hour remarked, "Wall Street wants the problem solved before the Jewish holiday."
Sheer demagoguery was laid bare in choosing a combative Pentecostal small town beauty queen as vice-president under a cancer-survivor in his seventies. That was at a convention that temporarily suspended itself rather than have Cheney seen on a split screen with another hurricane in the Gulf. Then old Snakeface McBush himself temporarily "suspended his campaign" to hammer out the Wall Street pay-off. The next request we expect from the GOP will be, of course, to temporarily suspend the election.

It seems we are well on the other side of the looking-glass and into a dystopian wonderland. Berkeley, ever reflective of the macrocosom, has seen it share of scary developments as well. I am not referring to the site of Cody's last stand ending-up once again as a Hallowe'en store.
naturally I am contemplating the last stand of the storied Oak Grove and other eventualities less brightly lit.

When I last wrote I tried to fill in the history of the the confrontation that began when UC Berkeley dropped its plans to rip out a substantial grove of old coastal oaks and redwoods to build an uber-mensch training center next to their football stadium in order to build up their sports donor base. After long clandestine planning they dropped it as a done deal to the shock and horror of neighbors, ecologists, and the general public alike. Young activists took to living in the trees and for a year the University tolerated them and the ground-support community that grew around them while various lawsuits ground through courts dominated by GOP appointees.
After ten months of this and with another football season coming, the University erected a huge complex of fences surrounding the grove and adjacent parking lots and hired round-the-clock guards. No expense seemed to great as when darkness fell they began switching on banks of klieg lights directed at the tree-dwelling youth. Crowds of UC cops loitered in the vicinity collecting paychecks including Chief Harrison who was recently hired back at an enormous rate of pay after taking a 2million plus retirement earlier in the year. Mogulof the UC spokesman who resembles Jiminy Cricket's evil twin spent his days meeting with news people or in sinister conversations with grim potentates at the back of the grove, then driving his fat paycheck to the bank on the way home.
After this lavish display of homeland securitizing, and the courts predictably siding with money and power, they are demanding that the City, the neighbors, the protesters, the tax-payers, and whatever other rubes they can implicate pick up the tab.
And the day after the decision saying they could they began the tree slaughter in earnest. Groups of reactionary footballers stood around with signs saying "free fire wood" and yelling "timber!" between cheers. These ballsy boys in cut-off tea shirts momentarily lost their bravado when a few middle-aged ladies got in their faces. Luckily the superfluous dullards in blue saw fit to protect the out-numbering arm pit boys.
Executioners with chain saws made quick work of the mighty oaks and towering redwoods, bull-dozers ran against others until they cracked and few with huge groans. By nightfall almost all that remained was a lot of pale disturbed dry dirt and piles of the amputated limbs and trunks of freshly killed trees. That evening on the news Mogulof and a group of interested parties from the UC pool of self-interest appeared for a photo-op, appeared looking positively jubilant. The unilateral destruction of a vital wild-life corridor and a place that was a balm for the souls of passersby was for them a cause for celebration.

Almost all the trees had been cut that Friday. One tree was left standing, a redwood in which three of the tree-sitters remained. On that day of arboricide they had merely sliced-off all the branches below the sleeping platforms. There remained a small group of branches topped by a now-iconic look-out structure, the only feature of there habitation that had been visible when all the trees were still standing. The University had given them a deadline of Monday to climb down or be removed.
I visited the grove on Sunday coming up through campus, up new flights of stairs to a gate just North of the grove. The sight was stunning despite what I'd seen of it on TV. The raw knob of the stadium obtruded over a a heart-rending scarred-dirt lot with the one half-butchered tree rising over the barbed wire and the beefy squad of cops still preventing the tree hold-outs from receiving supplies. It was saddening to say the very least.
The demeanor of the cops was far less intense than in recent visits. A concert crowd was assembling at the Greek theater--many pedestrians and endless automobile traffic poured through narrow passage now bordering a wasteland. I joined several people on the median below the tree-sitters. On their sparse limbs they may have been a little nervous as they talked to each other and on a cell pnone to others elsewhere. After all they'd been through-- nights in wind and rain, days in hot sun, resting only precariously--I can only imagine their good hearts and admire them.
Just then one looked directly at me, "Fresh" now called "Shem." A tall strapping bearded blond young man, he was the former UC student who did the more arduous central campus tree-sit earlier this year. I gave him a peace sign and smiled; he smiled and waved back. I felt better--hope he did too.

Tuesday noon when I emerged from my building under the constant ominous drone of stationary news helicopters, I knew that up the hill it was all ending. I shook my fist at the sky, as futile a gesture as any. As we saw that night on the news, they surrounded the tree with cherry pickers manned by the police, Then they had workers build an instant tower of scaffolding around the tree until they were on a level with the tree-sitters' perch. Then Shem, Mando, and another sweet young cat voluntarily stepped onto the platform and were arrested.

The last tree was gone in minutes. And the UC representatives reneged on their promise to give the tree-sitters movement the stump of the Grandmother oak, a tree several centuries old. The UC people said it now belonged to the tree-cutters they hired. The raggle-taggle gypsies, young people who love life and love trees, had planned to turn the stump into a drum.

An appalling postscript concerns this appalling character Birgeneau, recent Chancellor of UC Berkeley. On Saturday September the 27th, he officiated at the ceremonial ground-breaking for the $140 million advanced athletic training center at the cavity on the faulted hillside. It was undoubtedly a gala although somewhat secretive affair--somehow despite my obsessive consumption of local newspapers I saw no publicity for the event.
Birgeneau had been in the news a few times that week as well. He had been outraged at a "anti-Semitic obscenity" "on campus." At a bus shelter on a public sidewalk cross Bancroft way from me, someone had defaced a pro-Israel propaganda poster. It was a political statement and not "hate speech"--a swastika meaning fascism equated with a star of David standing for the Jewish state. Sponsored by a pro-Israeli public relations group, the poster said "only in Israel" can Arab be a sports star while no Jew could ever represent an Arab state. It did not promote peaceful co-existence, it made the usual argument for Israel's exceptionalism and superiority over its barbaric neighbors who, by extension, deserve anything that happens to them.
Birgeneau, however, said nothing to address an accompanying incident -- actual threats against an actual campus group supporting Palestine that had been written on the wall of a UC classroom.
The other news story appeared in a Berkeley independent paper, the last one to remain critical of UC Berkeley in any meaningful way now that the corrupt Express and the pathetic Daily Cal have both gone whole hog reactionary. This story concerned how an alumni couple who had distinguished themselves by donating money to the University had written him to decry both the wanton over-reaction and ill-treatment of the opposition to the destruction of the grove and to the many examples of unethical compensation schemes exposed recently. They received a reply from Birgeneau which they described as an attempt at intimidation and turned over to the press. In his letter, Birgeneau wrote that the majority of opposition to the athletic center came from people who were motivated by racism against the low-income minority students who will benefit from it the most.

I say a prayer for the trees now lost and for the all the beings who abide.