What a drag it is getting older as the forces of reaction grow bolder. For a quarter century the people’s liberation front gathered at its headquarters in Columbus, Tradewinds. You entered the revolutionary space through a door under the sign of the Dragon.

On Wednesday, July 19, the Dragon breathed fire no more. Scott Solomon, lacking wisdom, evicted the store’s owner Yvette Garayalde Wyman from the legendary storefront. The late Libby Gregory, activist extraordinaire, founded the original store. It gave shelter to the Columbus Free Press when the underground newspaper was being hounded by a joint operation of the National Security Agency, CIA and FBI in the 1970’s. Indeed, there’s a certain nostalgia for the terms MH Chaos and COINTELPRO.

Perhaps it would have been a more fitting way for the store to go out being blown up by the neo-Nazi Gerhardt brothers in the early 80’s – in fact they testified under oath to plotting the bombing to destroy the progressive movement in Cowtown.

In one of those ironies of history, the new aesthetic Gestapo and bribed tools of the bourgeoisie are former campus progressives now working for Campus Partners. These partners in crime, in plunder, and in deed put in motion the forces of homogenization that can’t tolerate the tidal wave of real people that washed down High Street during the Age of Aquarius.

No more leafleting, no more spare change, no more headquarters.

Sadly, solemnly, mural creator Paul Volker applied the death shroud to the “Dragon,” the “Moon and the Stars,” and the “Great Wave.” Beneath the white paint, you can still hear the muffled voices proclaiming “the people united will never be defeated.”

There will come a time in the future – when the city is no longer named Columbus; when the corporate fiction is vanished; when one thousand flowers bloom – when the paint is removed and the Dragon roars again.