Rest In Peace, Diamond Dave Whitaker

I almost feel like I shouldn't say this, but a couple of nights ago I thought of Dave and wondered how he was doing and if he was still alive. Tonight I was checking twitter for other stuff and noticed someone had liked a post I did (I haven't posted there in over three years) about Dave. I realized this might mean he died and that someone was searching him on twitter. So I did a google search and sure enough, he died today.

He was a really nice and interesting person, hilarious and sometimes repetative poet, which made him a true character. And yes, he was friends with Bob Dylan. He turned Bob Dylan on to three things: Marijuana, Woody Guthrie, and Jack Kerouac. Would Dylan have even been himself without Diamond Dave? I kinda doubt it.

But Dave was basically an anarchist as far as I'm concerned, and seemed to be engaged in activism every single day of his life. The first time I met him I was at City College where I was taking a French class. I used to hang out a lot in the Anarchist Library there around 2005, when a bunch of us were organizing the San Francisco Fare Strike. One day I went in and Dave was there. Some guy from the International Socialist Organization walked in and left a bunch of flyers about something they were organizing. After the ISO guy left I looked at the flyer and said something like "Oh, the ISO. That's for squares." Dave immediately perked up and smiled. "Oh really?" he said raising both eyebrows. The ISO were not really his cup of tea either. I remember running into Dave at the vigil for Stanley Tookie Williams on the night he was put to death. It was a sad and stressful night, but I got a chuckle when Dave told me he saw some guy from the ISO hawking their dumb paper seconds after we found out Tookie was dead.

He was a perpetual student at City College, like he never stopped taking classes there, which I think is great. We would talk at one of the outdoor cafes when I'd run into him there and he'd lay some history on me, like something about Cornelius Castoriadis, or Grace Lee Boggs, or C.L.R. James, and he'd go into the various socialist tendencies in the US. The guy was a walking historical library. He had seen the early Beats in San Francisco and the transition to the hippies. As he put it "Beats plus LSD equals hippies."

He always supported resistance to capitalism. He was a regular at Food Not Bombs. His main ethos seemed to be helping others. "Take what you need. Give what you can. Where you can. When you can. However you can. In other words, lend a hand. What happens then? Strangers become friends. Friends become family. Family becomes community. A community on the move."

I don't know much about the Rainbow Gatherings, but I'd heard about them from fellow workers at the SANE Freeze office when I'd worked there in the 80s, and I guess Dave was somewhat of a big organizer of those events. I remember that he went with them to New Orleans to set up soup kitchens after Hurricane Katrina.

He would often talk in poetry, with a rhythm, and use his famous hand gesture. It was as if he was placing concepts or historical facts on a shelf he saw in his mind. I would often impersonate him and it was sometimes in jest, when around other friends (not when he was around!), because there was a comical aspect to his routine. But it was never out of condescension. More like wanting to channel Dave's weird and warm character into the moment.

One go-to piece of advice Dave would always offer seems perfect for the moment and our time: "Don't Panic. Keep it organic."