Grandma Wants Retribution Against ICE

A report from behind a snare drum at No Kings NYC 

Edited by Sam Thielman

FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS, I've been strapping a snare drum to my waist and drumming at anti-ICE protests. 

When I was a teenager, my free time was devoted to drumming: disciplining my hands and my feet, expanding my conceptions of rhythm, developing style, figuring out when and how to breathe when each of my limbs is engaged in an independent high-stakes activity. Most importantly, learning how to play with other musicians, and serving the song instead of my ego. Many people I've played in bands with over the years would surely tell you I never quite got that last part right. 

My father is a drummer—my name is the ethnic word salad it is because he named me after Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden—and when I was an 11-year-old seeking to start out, drumming was a way to be closer to him. He rewarded me by giving me a solid foundation: I had to prove my seriousness by learning rudiments and demonstrating them on a pillow to my father's satisfaction. Only after I could do that would he let me touch his drum kit. It took me six months. I resented it. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Like Ralph Macchio in the Karate Kid, I learned technique before I realized it. 

It's for that reason that I never stopped thinking of myself as a drummer despite drifting further and further away from playing drums. But drift I did. Journalism took the central space in my life and my self-conception that drumming once occupied. It was the opposite of what I thought would happen when I moved to D.C. after college. Instead of joining the legendary lineage of D.C. hardcore musicians, I became just another transplant, passing through for work and not contributing to the culture. I did play when I lived there—one time the CIA director attended a show I played—but I was only moonlighting as a drummer. A wise woman once called what I was doing searching for a former clarity. Sometimes I even found it: Many years later, I drummed on a Ted Leo track inspired by REIGN OF TERROR. That was how, when I was young, I imagined my life turning out. 

But if you imagine your life turning out differently, and you don't act on that, you're—well, I don't want to say you're already dead, but you're headed in that direction. I had to face that about myself.

When ICE ransacked Minnesota in January, a good friend from high school, one of New York City's most accomplished trumpeters—yes, we were in a ska band back then [This is one of the bravest things you’ve ever written—Sam.]—told me about a group of improvisational musicians that was going to show up at a Union Square demonstration. I grabbed my beater snare—my Rogers Dyna-Sonic is a cherished family heirloom and would stay home—and the strap from my cymbal bag and got on the train. No longer would I regret not becoming a protest drummer.

It was freezing cold and I should have brought gloves. But the hours I spent marching sustained me inside and out. The crack of a snare drum really echoes through the canyons of Manhattan. Angry people, united in purpose, cannot help but mobilize when they hear a snare supplying them with the rhythm to march. When the horns and the flutes come in? Forget it. One guy showed up with a Korean buk and suddenly I had a bass drum to match with. When the horns and flutes dropped out and it was just us and the tambourines and shakers, people started chanting. I don't remember what exactly they were chanting, but it amounted to FUCK ICE, and it was beautiful. 

If I still worked in a newsroom, appearing at a protest, to protest, rather than to cover the protest, could have gotten me fired. Back during Black Lives Matter in 2020, when I still worked at the Daily Beast, I attended anyway, even though I didn't formally perform any journalistic function, and got away with it. When I show up to protests with my snare belted to my waist, the residual newsroom creature in me whispers that I'm crossing a professional line. Then I hit a double-stroke roll to cue the musicians and the marchers and I can't hear it anymore. It was never supposed to be in my head in the first place.

Last week, the group of musicians I played with in January let it be known that we'd be playing No Kings, the gigantic nationwide anti-Trump rally that took place on Saturday. There is no one who can fire me these days, so I didn't think twice about attending. This was a rally I wanted to observe as much as I wanted to participate. Reacting to the circumstances around us, it had more urgent demands than the vague and capacious no kings umbrella: no ICE; and no war. I wanted to beat out a rhythm for that countermobilization. So began five hours of marching and drumming that crescendoed into me putting down a rhythmic base for Brad Lander, the former NYC comptroller and current congressional candidate, to sing through a bullhorn. 

"What I saw at No Kings" is obviously outside the normal scope of FOREVER WARS, so we're going to keep this behind the paywall. Buy a subscription to read further. You don't want to know what I took away from No Kings? Sure you do. You kept reading this far for a reason. Maybe you've been meaning to support FOREVER WARS because of how thoroughly and insightfully we cover the compounding Iran-War crisis and the rest of the permutations of the War on Terror, all outside the paywall. What better time to buy a subscription than now?