Visit With Philipos, Part 1

Philipos sits in a wheelchair in front of his protest/tent collage, his eyes shielded by large sunglasses. He is speaking to an older white woman, who had come to the White House with her husband in tie-dye and Beatles merch, trying to restart the summer of love in the middle of a warmer than average November.

“It goes back to an influence from my pops. He was out here against the Korean War, 50 to 53 and then six and a half months into Eisenhower's presidency. Eisenhower, who had been a general in the US military, knew that the Korean War was nonsense, pulled the troops out. So, I kind of like a commander in chief like that. He happened to be a Republican. He's the last Republican that I think was a very, very decent man that was in the White House. So that's why I'm out here, because my father raised us to think like political activists. My mother, she would take me to women's equality rallies too. So that was also another side of political activism.

We had the Chevron refinery, the second oil refinery in all of California, and that's why it's called El Segundo. The Second. And it was a big, big impact on us, having grown up right there with less than half a mile away from all the ones that want to lead all men to slaughter. So, one of my first political songs I wrote was government's gonna lead all men to slaughter. I wrote the song that the band didn't perform till 1977. The band I was in at that time, we played more songs about like, relationships and how young boys and young girls deal with that as we were 13 when we formed.

I'm not black flag. I love Keith and I love Billy, I love Dez and Chuck. But okay, you write a song like Police Story? They hate us. We hate them. We can't win. Okay. But why didn't you ever play one benefit concert that would be against funding of the LA Police Department? They were raiding all your shows, hardly letting some of your shows finish. They were the shows that did finish, they were chasing the crowd that came to see you through the streets. The cops weren’t getting taken to court for rocking a guy's skull open, man. and people weren't like, thinking about their civil rights. Like we were just lucky to get away with it, being alive.”

The Truth Conductor

I meet “The Truth Conductor”, an older black man with some camping chairs, and a sign reading, “STOP HATING EACH OTHER BECAUSE YOU DISAGREE…” Next to him sits a white boy, somewhere from the age of 17-20. His face seems familiar to me; it reminds me of one that I used to see in the mirror.

“Well, man, I come out here almost every day. And I've been doing it for a couple years now. Because we got to stop hating each other because we disagree. That's where the biggest problem is. You know, we can get some families to start talking, man, half of this stuff will be solved… See, if my half of the ship go down, yours doesn't stay afloat. We all are doomed. And we got people right now trying to destroy the other half of the ship. Like theirs is okay. We all are doomed. Yeah. You know, we got to stop talking at each other with the division and the hatred and animosity. We all got some isms, man. Okay, so ain't nobody perfect. So how come we can't talk to each other?

​​There's profit in division. Out here, I can sit out here right now with a “let's go Brandon” sign. We know what that is the code word for. And my bucket would be full. You see what I'm saying? You see, hate will finance itself. But when it comes to unity, and love and togetherness, they don't finance that. That's not profitable.”

I ask the Truth Conductor about his political affiliations and find out he is a Republican, in his words a “Black Republican”, and that he does black history tours of the city. I find this interesting, and his younger comrade begins to question me as to why I would be so surprised. In the middle of this interjection, a bike cop pulls up and tells the two men that if they need anything, there is a group of officers nearby. After he leaves, I steer the conversation back towards the Truth Conductor.

“Well, because I understood what the Republican Party meant to my people, as a whole... Friedman's Bank across the street from the White House, 1865. Frederick Douglass was the last president of that bank. Okay, he said it was a black man's cow, but it was the white man's milk, Okay? And the majority of the things that we've done have been under the Republican leadership, not Democrats. I started out as a Democrat, okay. Until I learned the truth about what party's meant to the history of my people. And under the Republican Party, we gained more as black people than we did under Democrats, as Republicans. Man, take Berry Farms over in southeast DC, which was one of the roughest places that was the first contraband camp in DC. Every street in Berry Farms is named after a Radical Republican. And most folks don't know that. And back in the day when we was like the murder capital of the world, shit, if you saw white people over in berry farm, they seriously lost; looking for some dope or some sex, or both! It was just that bad.”