“Hybrids, yes! Hummers, no! Oil addiction has got to go!”


Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin, the activist masterminds behind Code Pink for Peace, had been lurking in their rose-tinted “HUMMERS SUCK” T-shirts long enough that someone should have already noticed them and the seven other similarly dressed women. They had gathered in the Los Angeles Convention Center bathroom behind the Hummer exhibit and heatedly discussed the timing of their action; they had marched out on the floor still rehearsing their chants. But only when the women actually climbed into one of the triumphant gold machines with their wide pink banners did they become conspicuous to the crowd lined up to experience the Hummer.


“Soldiers are dying, the Hummer’s not complying!” they shouted, standing on the Hummer’s seats and hood. “Don’t buy a Hummer! Hummers are a bummer!”


They looked sweet, really — Evans in her bare feet and glittery hippie skirt, diminutive Benjamin in her little pink angora cap. A small woman with bleached blond highlights couldn’t stop giggling; another young woman with short brown hair, a worried brow and a pleading soprano sang out her words as if she were taking this all personally.


Almost immediately a man snatched a shimmery pink banner out of Evans’ hands and a counter chant went up: “We like ’em! We like ’em!” Another man wanted the women to prove their claims. “How do you know if they suck?” he asked. “You don’t know fuck-all about cars.” A woman chimed in to insist that the problem is a lack of resources, not Hummers. And a handsome young blond, who’d sacrificed a warm January day outdoors for this spectacle, thought the women might benefit from night in jail. “Lock ’em up!” I heard him say. When I asked, he assured me he meant it: “I didn’t come to the car show to see this.”


True enough. He probably didn’t even notice the small group of activists outside the Auto Show banging drums, chanting, burning incense and handing out literature on smog and global destruction. “Rising up, rising up, indigenous people rising up,” they called out to oblivious throngs of car lovers, who would sometimes glance at the body bags lined up on the corner of Figueroa and Pico but rarely stop long enough to absorb their meaning.


“The glaciers are melting, the glaciers are melting!” yelled artist Leo Limón of the L.A. River Cats Project good-naturedly. “Get a hybrid! Get some rims on it! A big stereo!”


But the dads in Dockers with well-fed children and pregnant wives could not be persuaded to contemplate torn-up wildlife habitats, toxin-choked air and children with missing limbs. They were here to revel in the glory of cars.


And oh, how I envied them. As I wound my way through the breathtakingly perfect Saleens and the elegant Morgans and rocket-ship Ferraris, scarcely one bettering 20 mpg, I lamented the day I’d ever come to think of the gasoline-burning internal combustion engine as evil, the root of human suffering and planetary destruction. The new BMWs looked so smart; the Lexus and Lincoln luxury SUVs sparkled with promise; even the Ford trucks called out for me to rest my shuffle-weary legs and back in their ergonomic coziness.


But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I sought out the Toyotas, and sat for a fleeting moment in an attractive-but-not-sexy blue Prius that, for all its sophisticated efficiency, could never make me feel like I had much over anybody except a conscience. Part of the Hummer’s beauty is its badness; driving one marks you as blissfully defiant of concerned people’s opinions. The Prius, on the other hand, identifies you as wholesome, like someone who attends neighborhood community meetings and Unitarian church services. Even the Prius’ spokesmodel looked unappealingly sensible, while the Hummer girls were babes.


After a few minutes security guards pulled the Code Pink women out of the Hummer, with a little help from an LAPD officer. Incredulous show visitors milled around and grumbled.


“In America you’re free to protest,” said Aaron Boeck, who served in the Navy from 1991 to ’95. “But this is starting to become urban terrorism.” Boeck believed the women had the wrong target, anyway. “The problem isn’t even cars,” he insisted. “It’s traffic. I don’t see them protesting so the government builds wider freeways.”


Ronald Purcell, a man in his 50s who had come to the show with his family, claimed no particular love for the Hummer, but had even less patience for the protest. “It was my turn to sit in the front seat when they started in,” he told me. “Those girls ruined my day at the car show.”


Without visible evidence of fuel cells

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and solar panels, my day at the Auto Show was already ruined. I walked listlessly through the Porsche exhibit, lingered for a moment at the Gruppos and tried to engage the Ford women in a discussion of their FCX line, which runs on hydrogen and emits no vapor more polluting than water; they looked stunned. Defeated, I retired to the Galaxy Cafe, where I ordered a Chinese chicken salad without the chicken and tried to keep my mind from drifting to thoughts of where the lettuce had come from.


—Judith Lewis


Victory in Gaza


The long-delayed championship soccer game of the Gaza Cup tournament this year — the first Gaza Cup since the intifada started — was a face-off between two teams from the most wrecked part of Gaza: Rafah, the southern tip, right along the Egyptian border.


In Rafah, almost 900 homes have been demolished by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since the start of the intifada, 287 people have been killed, and American Rachel Corrie was run over by an Israeli army bulldozer. Recently, the Palestinian Authority housing minister was attacked by a mob when he told Rafah residents with demolished homes that the P.A. couldn’t give them new houses. Hardship has not been an ennobling experience for people in Rafah. They’re angry, and sometimes scary.


“There is no authority in Rafah,” said the translator as we drove by a group of


men running off to either watch or join a large fight.


The IDF says it destroys houses in Rafah because weapons are smuggled in from Egypt through tunnels that sometimes end in people’s homes. Palestinians say the IDF destroys way more houses than it needs to. On the walls near Rafah’s brand-new Rachel Corrie kindergarten, graffiti attributed to the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades claimed responsibility for a suicide attack that killed four people in Israel a few days before.


“This is revenge for what happened in Rafah,” it said.


Over at the soccer field in Gaza City, the Gaza Cup began with a show of goodwill. Both teams — the Rafah U.N. Refugee Services Team, in green shorts, and the Rafah Youth Sporting Club, in blue — jogged over to smile and wave at each other’s fans, and the fans threw candies onto the field.


The translator later said: “These two teams hate each other.”


Injuries started occurring almost immediately, and from the performances of the injured parties, it was impossible to tell who was truly hurt and who simply wanted to persuade the referee that justice, in the form of a penalty kick, was required. One player sank to his knees and then fell over, another curled into a ball and pounded the earth with his palm over and over, and another lay huddled on the ground while his teammates played on around him. If you focused on the field, it could have been a soccer game anywhere in the world.


At halftime, there was no score, and the blue-team coach, 52-year-old Omar Abu Zaid, was furious. As another reporter observed, he resembled Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris — fat and dissolute-looking, with shoulder-length gray hair and the manner of a man on the very edge.


“I don’t believe what you’re doing! Go pray and come back!” he screamed at the blue players, some of whom jogged off to form a prayer line with a few riot police who also wanted to pray.


When the team reassembled, the coach alternated between soft, menacing sentences and shouts that convulsed his entire body. “Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. Just listen to me. LOOK FOR THE EMPTY SPACE! FLY TO THE EMPTY SPACE! You look in shape, you look good, BUT IT’S A SHAME WHAT YOU’RE DOING! We have to win. We’re playing football; they’re not doing anything. BE LIKE A HAWK!”


He ran his hands through his hair.


When the other team scored in the first five minutes of the second half, the blue side started to unravel. A scuffle broke out between the coach and one of his players. The blue fans started chanting, “Sonofabitch referee! Sonofabitch referee!” A few minutes later, a blue fan threw a soda can onto the field, and the coach stalked across the field to yell at the ref.


All at once, the riot police appeared, holding round shields made, surprisingly, of wicker. The blue coach was escorted off the field and play resumed, but at the dugout, another fight almost started when one of the riot police pushed one of the blue players. The coach rushed over, other players rushed over, and the only man who could stop the madness was the head of the riot police, a calm black man who killed everyone with kindness — smiling, putting his hands on their shoulders, hugging people if necessary. To the fans, he said: “You’re good people. You’re nice. Don’t throw anything.” ‰

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Suddenly everything changed: The blue team scored, courtesy of 28-year-old midfielder Jamal Al-Holi, the best player. The fans roared. The coach fainted. For a minute it seemed he’d had a heart attack — a crowd stood over him pouring water on his face, holding his legs straight up, and waving a jacket over him to give him air. When the coach revived, his son, with tears in his eyes, staggered around shouting, “God give us victory!” and tried to pick a fight with the player who had yelled at his dad earlier.


Al-Holi was one of three blue-team players whose homes had been demolished. He’d told us about it earlier.


“Tanks and bulldozers came,” he said, “and the Israelis called out over loudspeakers: ‘Whoever wants to go on living must leave his home immediately. Whoever wants to die can stay behind.’ They took us to a place about 300 [yards] away, and then we heard a big explosion. My house was destroyed. Nothing was left.”


The blue team won, in overtime penalty kicks, led by Al-Holi. The coach fainted all over again and was hoisted onto the shoulders of players and fans, and paraded around the emptying field.


—Nancy Updike

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