Posted on 08/28/2002 10:14:13 AM PDT by daviddennis
Last Sunday, there was a loud, noisy and cult-like protest of President Bush's breakfast appearance for Bill Simon. A small but dedicated band of freepers launched a counter-demonstration. I was there with my Canon XL1 3CCD camcorder to record the show. And we sure did get a show, friends!
Since I know many of you don't have QuickTime or don't want to download 11-odd megabytes, here's a quick summary:
I hope you'll enjoy the video, and I look forward to seeing your comments. If it gets slow from my site, feel free to mirror it elsewhere and post a link.
Enjoy!
D
PS If you can't play the video, see the technical notes below.
Send me enough encouragement, and I'll do more of these at future events; they are great fun to do, but a lot of work as well.
D
Keep up the good work!
Read those signs folks. Take a good look at what's going on in your nation. These are the allies who work behind the scenes to support Democrats. You and I may not like to think of it that way, but that is exactly what is going on.
(excerpt)Later, two men are in an idling station wagon in the parking lot as we are on our way out. They were seen earlier in the viewfinder of daviddennis' XL-1 at breakfast as we watched the replay of them repeatedly giving the camera the finger.BlondeMale: Oh, it's "Luvya Dubya" girl.OtherMale: Are you a native of California?A FReeper: No, I'm a political refugee of the socialist democracy of Canada. I'm trying to save California from asimilar fate.HangFire: I'm half Native American... I go back I don't know how many generations. And leftistliberal loser policies are destroying this State.OtherMale: You're a traitor to your own people. They used to worship the oil when it was in the ground, theywere thankful for it.A FReeper: What the heck are you talking about?BlondeMale: Yeah, and now you and Bush are pumping all that oil and spraying it in the air and causing all theseearthquakes.A FReeper: What?!HangFire: Uh huh. Well you just keep telling yourself that as you drive home in your car, okay?They drive off, the BlondeMale repeatedly spitting through the passenger side window as they exit stage left.
Or simply go here.
Hope you enjoy!
D
Or maybe he thinks only his side should have Canon XL1s? There was at least one other there, and it was lefty-owned.
Perhaps he knows what it feels like to have a microphone shoved into his face without warning, and he doesn't like the feeling.
As I recall (and I really wonder what his account of this would be), I noticed his anti-Simon signs. Then I went over to him and asked him what he thought of Gray Davis, and whether Davis wasn't worse than Simon. I think it was his sidekick (the one who accused me of being Conterlpro, whatever that is) who said that both of them were s---, and that Simon was like s--- in ice cream. It must have been about then that I realized this was film-worthy and posed the question you see in the beginning of that sequence.
I'll tell you, the actual visceral experience of having those people shoving their fingers at me was pretty bad. I talked to another lefty (apparently a talk show host of some kind) who told me they were just expressing their opinions and enjoying their free speech rights. I guess he hasn't figured out yet that, from a public relations standpoint, what they did makes their side look stupid and brutal, hardly something I would want an "enlightened" bunch to feel. Certainly it was a great contrast to all those peace signs and the like.
Perhaps the most enduring aspect of watching this protest was the cultlike atmosphere. My video of "Stop the sanctions, stop the sanctions now" was meant to envoke that. Later in the day, they had more repetitious chanting as they crossed the street repeatedly for the TV cameras. If anyone wants to see some of that, let me know.
I think the cultlike atmosphere might explain a lot. You know what cults think of dissent within the ranks, don't you?
I did ask someone why they were against our fighting Iraq. They told me the Iraqi people deserved their rights to democracy and self-determination! I tried to point out that Iraq was a brutal dictatorship and wasn't going to spontaneously turn into a Democracy, but they weren't buying it. I'd love to know their theory on how Democracy will appear in Iraq since Hussein seems to have a pretty tight stranglehold on the place.
Oddly enough, I checked Democratic Underground and Smirking Chimp, and didn't find anything at all on the protest, even though Smirking Chimp appears to have been a major organizer. I wonder why.
Or maybe I do know. We protestors were outnumbered some 50:1 but at least we had fun. The Smirking Chimp crowd, for all the strained humour that appears on the site, seemed to lack any sense of humour or fun. It felt more like people were dutifully going through the motions, without any real passion.
Our side is not only the right side, it's the fun side. And I'm very proud of that.
D
(I think I'm just afraid I'll spell your name wrong :-) ).
D
D
Great work. Gotta love the sophisticated refutation of the middle finger from the left.....
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