!G for gone (a remembrance)
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agk's diary
4 January 2022 @ 09:00
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written on Pinebook Pro
while Evy works and baby plays with parachute cord
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Most weekends I take a little bag of pig jacks to
the child and adolescent units of the psych hospital
where I work. Remember jacks, the child's game where
you bounce a ball and pick up spiky chrome caltrops?
Instead of caltrops my bag holds 8 tiny rubber pigs.
I picked up pig jacks almost ten years ago when Mark
'Migs' Neiweem (1984--2021) was released to house
arrest on parole. I hoped they'd give us something
to do other than talk when I visited him. They might
ease pressure, pass the time, and be funny---Migs
*hates* the pigs.
Migs named each jack after a screw in Pontiac
Correctional Center. He bounced the ball. "Snatch-
ing Ramirez," he said, and palmed that pig.
I met him before the 2012 Chicago NATO summit. I
think we first met when he came to a weekend-long
street medic training I led. The training taught
tactical first responder and community health
worker skills to people planning to protest NATO.
There were many reasons to protest the NATO summit.
* NATO recently bombed and destabilized Libya,
long the most prosperous and equitable African
country, causing a failed state with open-air
slave markets.
* NATO forces still violently occupied Afghanistan,
protecting massive money-laundering and poppy-
growing. Veterans, Afghans, and victims of the
opioid industry wanted NATO out.
* NATO was destabilizing Syria, killing civilians
with bombing. NATO nations were fostering the
growth of Da'esh ("ISIS"), Jabhat al-Nusra, and
other Salafi jihadi gangs who turned territory
they held into hell.
* NATO was (as always) pushing ballistic missile
batteries ever closer to Russia in defiance of
treaties, rendering member nations "not agree-
ment-capable." In the process it destabilized
Ukraine, fostering the re-emergence of overt
fascism in Europe.
When the Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1991, NATO should
have dissolved.
The NATO summit wasn't the only draw. Occupy Wall
Street milennarianism was seeking to transform what
it could of the indebted, foreclosing, evicted,
underemployed, humiliating world it discovered
was not each individual's private shame. The G8,
makers of economic policy, falsely announced they'd
meet in Chicago concurrently with the NATO summit.
That spring, Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel used econ-
omic shock therapy to extract public goods from org-
anized constituencies. Despite historic teacher
union mobilization, a terrifying number of schools
were closed by surprise, without prior public
notice. Swaths of Chicago sat vacant, foreclosed,
bank-owned. Suddenly the school was gone too, the
community center, neighborhood mental health center.
More than once, Migs and I toted small first-aid
kits in small crowds mourning, chanting, and bearing
witness to the demolition of community institutions.
***
At the medic training, one trainer-in-training told
me she was concerned about Migs' presence. Chicago
Antiracist Action circulated a communique calling
him a snitch for allegedly informing on a white power
gangster while locked up, maybe on heroin possession
charges during a bad, embarrassing time in his life.
I don't remember the details.
He was at my training because he wanted to play a
support role, help other people during whatever might
unfold. He was clean from the heroin or pills, trying
to find his way back into the Chicago anarchist scene.
I let him stay.
The communique followed him around like a bad fart.
Nobody trusted him. He wanted to expose his kindness
from under the crust of a hard life, but the rumor
mill isolated him. Another long-time medic, a leftist
attorney, and I agreed if the FBI was looking for
anyone to entrap to justify their absurd budget for
the event, it would be Migs.
We tried to keep an eye on Migs, but they got him.
Preying on his isolation and human need for connect-
ion, getting him drunk and paying for a motel room,
encouraging secrecy, being manipulative, the FBI
followed their playbook for this kind of entrapment.
An agent bought some kerosene and styrofoam, they
stuffed some empties with flammable gel, the raid
found the three (or whatever) Molotov firebombs.
In jail, and eventually prison, Migs stayed clean.
He refused to join the Aryan Brotherhood or limit
communion with prisoners of color. He refused
"protection" that divides prisoners by race.
Migs' politics were visible, tattooed in his flesh:
red and black anarchosyndicalist flag on his neck,
circle-A for anarchy and circle-E for equality, a
klansman getting shot, a lynched pig in a police
uniform. Like many people with intense tattoos he
was gentle and awkward.
Anarchist Black Cross, a prisoner support network,
sent him books to read. He wrote a lot. On the word
of a prison snitch he was "trying to organize a
collective," (which he denied) and the basis of his
tattoos, books, and writing about radical freedom
and responsibility, he spent the better part of a
year in solitary confinement in a 6' by 9' cell.
I wrote to him once or twice. Mostly my little
friendship with Migs was in the months before his
arrest and after his release to house arrest. He
was from the western Chicago suburbs and helped me
understand the importance of a left politics that
addresses suburban youth. Everything we talked
about was soon reinforced by the suburban uprising
in Ferguson, Missouri after white cop Darren Wilson
shot and killed black suburban youth Michael Brown
and left his body in the street.
In places like Niles and Brookfield, Illinois, where
Migs grew up and to which he bitterly returned when
times got hard in Illinois cities, of course there
were punks in high school. There were garage bands,
struggles to keep VFW posts and bowling alleys as
venues for all-ages shows, pills and heroin, negl-
ected infrastructure, debt and foreclosure, and
there was vigorous racial politics.
Migs was in a little crew of anti-racist punks, up
against a bigger crew of nazi punks. They fought
with fisticuffs and improvised weapons; a '90s West
Side Story. The anti-racists got their politics
from the bands they listened to, and to a degree
from 'zines. They wanted to leave, get out and find
city punk scenes where white pride assholes were
the persecuted minority in the scene.
"We didn't have anybody in our school or our towns
to look up to," Migs told me. "We were fucking
stupid, but our hearts were in the right place."
They left soon as they could. "Somebody has to
organize places like where I grew up," Migs said.
"Young people know shit's wrong. They're pissed.
They want an explanation of what's been destroying
their future. The left doesn't know they exist and
doesn't talk to them, so the fascists do. A bad,
reactionary force is gonna come from suburban
white kids if that doesn't change. The fascists
use them. They don't give a fuck about them. We
should."
***
Fancy called yesterday. Migs' girlfriend called the
leftist attorney two weeks ago. Migs is dead. He
overdosed. Evy and I regularly see, in hospitals
where we work, what happens after someone doesn't die
immediately from opioid overdose.
Migs got naloxone, but not enough, or not fast enough
or who knows. The fentanyl in his mix was higher
than he expected. An anoxic brain injury is brain
tissue death from oxygen starvation. How it looks
depends on which tissue, and how much. After the
hospital extracted its tens or hundreds of thousands
of dollars for a suitable interval, Migs' family
decided to withdraw life support.
The pandemic draws people into our little pods of
family. For those with strong family, with stable
housing, with jobs that weren't disrupted, with
health insurance, without addiction or with strong
recovery, etc., it's been more or less okay.
For many, family and friends died or disappeared,
isolating them with very little over-stretched
support. When crisis struck, neither government,
nor civil society, nor family was there to care.
This was the worst year maybe ever for overdoses
and suicide in my country, and the worst in decades
for murder. These are the curses of economic shock
therapy.
Migs is dead. When we hung out, he pushed me kindly,
lovingly, and successfully to care about kids in the
suburbs, especially the white boys. He profoundly
influenced my politics with his life lived politic-
ally against all forms of domination and his pro-
found faith in people in tough circumstances.
The weekend after his overdose I retrieved my pig
jacks from the staff assigned to an increasingly
bored, violent teen transboy who spent months locked
in the psych hospital where I work because deficien-
cies in the DCBS system are exacerbated by pandemic
times. Foster homes and group homes lack beds for
teens for the foreseeable future.
The boy told me "I named them. Jackson, Jake, Jace,
Jack, Jacqueline, Crispy Bacon, Jackie...."
