The Anti-Bush Anarchist

By Gabriel Thompson, In These Times. Posted May 2, 2006.

Standing 5' 9" tall, weighing 240 pounds and sporting a shaved head, Jeff "The Snowman" Monson looks like a cartoon ready to pop, a compressed giant of crazy shoulders, massive biceps and meaty forearms. When he sneers, people shudder. When he sweats, they turn away. When he's angry, your best bet is to run.

He's angry right now, even though his combat career in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) -- an often-bloody tournament that combines martial arts disciplines like Brazilian Jujitsu and Muay Thai Kickboxing -- is taking off. In February's pay-per-view event, Monson easily beat his opponent with a chokehold in the first round. If things keep going this way, he could have a title shot in the heavyweight division, against the explosive Andrei "The Pit Bull" Arlovski. So no, it's not his future career prospects that have him pissed. It's the state of the world.

"I'm not some sort of conspiracy theorist," Monson says of his political leanings. "I'm not talking about how the government is trying to hide UFOs. I just want to do away with hierarchy. I'm saying that our economic system, capitalism, is structured so that it only benefits a small percentage of very wealthy people. When I was traveling in Brazil, they had us staying at a really posh hotel. Outside the hotel there was a mom sleeping on the sidewalk with her two kids. That's when reality hits you. What did that woman ever do? Who did she ever hurt?"

Monson wears his politics on his sleeve, as well as the rest of his body. An anarcho-syndicalist star is tattooed on his chest, an anarchy sign on his back and another "A" on his leg. While he loves his sport, he also feels a responsibility to use whatever exposure he receives for a larger purpose. "I don't think I'm more important than anyone else, but since some people are paying attention, then I'm going to use this as a vehicle to express myself," he says. Some fans have labeled him anti-American, but he shrugs off such criticism. He was slightly taken aback, however, when three Secret Service agents showed up at his gym in Olympia, Wash., last fall.

A t-shirt prompted the visit. While Monson was preparing for a fight in Portland, a film crew came to the gym and recorded his outfit that day, which included a tank top that read "Assassinate Bush." When he entered Portland's Rose Garden for the fight, a video clip of him training in the shirt was played on the Jumbotron, and after he finished off his opponent in the first round, he was more interested in speaking to the post-match media about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina than his fight career. He mentioned his anger that the Bush administration had diverted $76 million from the Army Corps of Engineers for the levies, and that the National Guard were in Iraq instead of Louisiana and Mississippi. "I was making a political statement, trying to open people's eyes," says Monson of his t-shirt and post-fight comments.

Not long after, he had three sets of open eyes walking through the doors of his gym. "The Secret Service told me that they wanted to search my gym and my house. They said that if I refused, they would have a warrant within an hour." They poked around the gym and then headed over to Monson's house. "I told them that they could go to my house if they wanted, but that I was going to stay here and finish my workout," Monson says, not sounding the least bit intimidated. "They haven't bothered me since."

The UFC fighting style is called Mixed Martial Arts, but at times it looks more like a barroom brawl, especially to non-practitioners who miss the technique and strategy. It's easy to poke fun at the event: heavily muscled and tattooed men wearing skimpy skin-tight trunks, celebrity models in the stands beside drunk frat boys wearing wife beaters with their caps on backwards. Its popularity has skyrocketed, thanks in part to the self-styled "first cable network for men," Spike TV, which has a UFC-based reality show. Tickets can go for nearly $1,000, and sell out quickly.

Gabriel Thompson is a Brooklyn-based journalist.

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