Posted on 09/11/2012 8:15:01 PM PDT by Revolting cat!
It was the yearly street fair. The big one. Sunny Sunday afternoon, booths selling tchotchkies, Mexican and oriental food (try calling it politically correctly ‘Asian-American’ when the sellers themselves called it ‘Oriental’), insurance companies, banks, chiropractors offering free spinal exams, political candidates and political causes, save the planet, save the greyhounds, church booths - I didn’t see the community church which bear hugged me last year and which I promised myself to visit and never did, but they were there according to the map, absent were the Scientologists this year and the usual masked protesters against them, masked because they said they were afraid of reprisals by the Almighty Xenu, but the Nichiren Shoshu guys were there, the ones who chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo to, they once told me, a lotus flower with the sole shameless purpose of obtaining material rewards, and there were artisans and artists, among them a remarkably original ceramist, and only one photographer selling prints, brave if entirely mediocre, two stands selling hats, one of them with a prominent sign forbidding photographs and videos, like the U.S. Embassies abroad, elsewhere a geezer seeing my DSLR invited me to the booth of the local camera club, all geezers there, I noted, and I’m not too much into geezering.
Crowds. Predominantly white and East Asian, some Latinos speaking Spanish (Latinos speaking Latin have been rare lately), a few older middle class, assimilated blacks. I noticed a couple of homies and followed them for a bit seeing how uncomfortable they felt and behaved, this was no place to assert themselves as homies must. Apartheid happens. All by itself, homie.
Groups of teenyboppers, all of them white, unrepresentative in that of the local school demographics, all giggling lolitas without exception wearing their hair long, this must be today’s fashion. A young tall white woman in her late twenties, dressed all in black, head to toe, black shades (of course!) pushing a large hooded baby stroller, all black, no chrome or colored straps could be observed anywhere. Was the baby black, too? I didn’t get a look, but the woman’s companion and presumably the child’s father was a goofy looking white dofus, so probably not, and further I suspect that the infant’s get up, or at least the diapers , must have been black or blackened as well. The latest fashion from the oldster mourners of Sicily via the Cosmo magazine. It's ugly, repellent and I don't get it.
Still with me? Good, I’m getting there.
Then, there was the booth of the local atheists with a big sign above it, promoting exactly what? Ah, the question of the century. Three serious, some would say grim faced white (naturally) middle age guys, all neatly dressed, like some Scientologists, sitting behind a white table. There was no line to see them, like there were lines to a radiostation booth to spin a wheel and win a frisbee or a tote bag to carry groceries and breed bacteria, or to a Subaru dealer to sign up for a raffle and endless telephone calls from its desperate salesmen, and they (the atheists) weren’t giving away pencils or pens or candy like many booths, or red delicious apples like one booth I visited and promised to support in the future, but can’t remember now who it was. From a distance I didn’t see any colorful brochures on the table, maybe some fliers, that’s all.
It was, I thought, as if the Anarchists were promoting a slogan stating “Anarchists Unite!”, a contradiction in terms at the base of itself (a belated ‘sic’ to the title above, which is not misspelled!), because what was it that the atheists were promoting, were selling? Absence of faith? Or perhaps faith in disbelief? Faith in nothing? You can promote faith in clean air, as some do, because air, while invisible (except in New Jersey), is something, isn’t it. It’s not vacuum. And those hapless fellows were there, to my mind at least, and I didn’t speak to them to argue or provoke as I would have two or three decades earlier, they were there promoting faith in the vacuum of the universe (Ya think those four words oughta have been the title of the piece, doncha? Well, that’s why they ain’t!) Well, homie, I’d rather be certified insane for believing that my dear grandmother in heaven, whom I had never known, is now talking to my recently departed canine friend, than to be certified “normal”, Norman, believing in the vacuum of the universe!
Laz, I’m not on your PING list (my choice), but you’re on mine , first and last (my choice.)
Does the title urge anarchists to stop wearing neckwear?
There have been traditions that opposed Big Government and supported the Individual. They are out there. But many "anarchists" are pure fools.
Analogous of how today's Liberal has practically nothing to do with the classical liberal; certainly nothing in common to the liberal of the dictionary.
“Anarchists Untie’’ “Untie’’ what? Shouldn’t that read “Anarchists Unite’’? Anarchists Unite’’. Now there’s irony.
I dated an anarchist chick once.
She was fun to untie.
And tie.
And untie again.
Ah, but did she have suspenders?
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