A standing-room-only crowd gathered at United Mission Presbyterian Church on 23rd and Capp Feb. 25th to remember Guardian correspondent and hell-raising investigative poet John Ross. John’s old friends Q.R. Hand, Hermann Bellinghausen, Frank Bardacke, Kevin Quigley and me spoke; his kids, Carla Ross-Allen and Dante Ross, gave moving remeberances. Then we marched through the Mission, led by the Musicians Action Group playing the Internationale. It was a perfect Ross moment: A few of the celebrants put pieces of yellow tape across their chests and stood in the streets halting traffic to the let the procession pass. A couple of confused bicycle cops went by, but took no action, which was good for all involved.
When we reached Cafe LaBoheme, the crowd took over much of 24th Street — but the air of fun and solidarity was so visible and loud that most of the cars simple stopped and waited patiently for room to crawl past. A wild, crazy anarchist funeral mob on the streets of San Francisco; we sent him off right.
PS: The generally nice obituary in the Chronicle described Ross as
“an author, poet, liberal activist and journalist who toiled against perceived injustice from the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, to the baked streets of Baghdad.”
Which is wrong on two accounts. First of all, there was nothing “perceived” about the injustice Ross saw and wrote about; it was very real. But that’s just a daily paper trying to be objective in a way that turns out to be embarassing. More to the point, as his longtime friend Elizabeth Bell noted, calling Ross a “liberal” is wildly inaccurate.
Here’s the letter she sent to the Chron:
Although some time has gone by since the Chronicle’s obituary of Bay Area activist and poet John Ross, I must correct a glaring inaccuracy–indeed, slander–that appears in the very first sentence of your otherwise adequate write-up. John Ross was not at the time of his death, nor had he ever been, a “liberal.” He was not a liberal-diaper baby, his pioneering refusal to serve in the Vietnam war was not the act of a liberal, nor was placing his body between Palestinian olive farmers and club-wielding Israelis. His response to a Mexican journalist who asked his profession, “Soy comunista,” does not translate to “I’m a liberal.” A raucous rebel and man of the people, Ross believed to his dying day that revolution in the United States was necessary and possible. A brief vocabulary lesson, Mr. Coté: Gavin Newsom is a liberal. John Ross was a liberal like a Molotov cocktail is a gin rickey.