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Marchons, marchons, marchons, marchons....

By Mike Flugennock on Monday October 4, 2010 08:45 PM

After happily committing to blowing off that thinly-disguised Donkeycratic GOTV rally, I ended up letting my comrades in the Town Hell Posse talk me into coming out with them to shoot it with the idea of putting together a nasty, sarcastic music video to the tune of the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday In Cambodia".

Jeezus, what a fucking mistake. This was, without a doubt, the dullest demonstration ever held in DC -- and I mean the Dullest. Demonstration. EVER. Even inasmuch as my pals warned me what I was letting myself in for, it was still a soul-crushingly wretched scene in its own way even worse than Beckapalooza was in August. No street theater, no puppets, no militant pizazz, no civil disobediences, no genuine sentiment, just a bunch of goddamn' liberals waving mass-printed placards. I chose to cover the immigrants' rally and feeder march because 1)it was at the Capitol, five minutes' walk from my house, and 2)the immigrants' protests have always been better because they all come from countries where they really know how to throw a protest. Huh, some fuckin' hope. The immigrants' rally was totally overrun by SEIU jerks still proudly wearing their goddamn' purple Obama '08 jackets -- and featuring Al Sharpton, to boot. Augggh, Reverend Fucking Al, The Cosmic Media Attention-Sucking Vortex, spouting his standard-issue faux militant boilerplate. It was all downhill from there.

(For example, The bubbly young thing in the clip above is a great favorite of Father Smiff's, Sara Haile-Mariam, captured in full burble, which will give you some idea of the tone of the event.)

I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial just in time to hear some guy yelling about how "we can't let Obama fail," or some godawful shit, and I knew then that I was in for a long, hard afternoon.

This Kool-Aid tripper was followed by a bunch of students taking turns reciting pieces of King's "I Have A Dream" speech as if they were in some kind of school Christmas pageant, followed by MSNBC's Ed "I Know No-THING" Schultz who bellowed his usual partisan line of bullshit at the top of his goddamn' lungs. You don't know scary until you see that windbag Schultz yelling at you from a goddamn' Jumbotron.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to mention the Jumbotrons -- lots of fucking Jumbotrons. Yeah, nothing says bottom-up, grassroots peoples' mobilization like a fistful of Jumbotrons.

After I finished having the skin peeled off my face by Ed Schultz's blustering, I decided I just couldn't take any more and headed back to the Washington Monument snack bar for a hot dog and a beer or three.

Normally, I just couldn't see paying three and a half bucks for a goddamn' Budweiser, but after witnessing that weak-assed spectacle I was more than happy for a few overpriced Buds to help me recover.

It wasn't until I met up with the rest of the Posse and headed back to my house to review the footage that the true wretchedness of what I'd just endured really set in.

I only shot about half an hour of tape that afternoon because I knew I wouldn't be able to stand looking at it again. Boy, was I right. The more deathly dull footage I saw rolling by, the more I realized that here was five hours of my life I'll never get back again, and found myself wishing I'd just stayed home and made a start on painting the living room, like my wife's been begging me to do.

Comments (12)

You took one for the team, Mike.

O.
M.
F.
G.

This is the worst speech in human history right here.

It has it all, including the bogus, self-flattering/self-pitying lie that youth are "finding reasons to believe" in politics. Jesus, who isn't at the zenith of that when they're 20? And what rebellious heart doesn't flare at the daring, in-your-face warning to "media narratives!" And the utterly radical conclusion: "We're going to vote!"

And Flug, Flug, Flug: You forgot to mention that they were also obviously using teleprompters! Holy Christ! I'd have paid $20 for a beer after that...

To give Sara and her business suit and Condi-conk proper credit, she did call Obama "the impossible."

dblhelix:

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

op:

one tight golden heffer box
touting another
tight golden heffer box

both are expected to be treated
as sacred

so .....?

what possible reason
would one have
to get exercised
this way or that
by this chitter ???

why not rail against
the weather report ???

as these things go
the speech was
short trite and orderly

nuff said

Jeezus, what a load of crap. I must've missed that speech. Good thing, too.

Hell, chick's even got one of those hyphenated double-barreled names, too. There's a job writing for The Nation waiting for her.

binky:

Heres a problem. This generation of Black "leaders" has been treated as if everything they've ever said or done is pure solid gold genius. Not unsuprisingly this uncritical environment has convinced some of them thats true. Obama, Fenty, this mediocre woman,Ben Jealous, etc., represent a class. are all seeking and finding lucrative jobs as spokespersons for global capitalism. All with the uncritical assuption that they are "moderate" of "pragmatic" and not merely incompetent, greedy and dishonest.

@ binky, October 5, 2010, 6:24pm:

Interesting you'd bring that up. My wife, who's nine or ten years older than I, double-majored in Political Science and Antiwar Organizing at GWU, class of 1970.

She eventually dropped out of The Movementâ„¢ for reasons much like what you describe. For fear of being tagged as racist, white members of every coalition she worked with for every mobilization staged at GWU or greater DC pretty much went along with any and/or all proposals tabled by black coalition members, no matter how unworkable or flat-out cockamamie the proposals were -- and the DW could tell you first-hand, there were some real humdingers. The sad thing is, most of them grew up to be the current generation of Black American "leadership".

Trouble is, it isn't just the "leadership". Anybody here catch this L.A. Times article?
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/10/obama-approval-gallup-blacks.html
Yeah, that's right, still 91 goddamn' percent. Yet, if you were to point out to anyone among that 91 percent that Obama has done absolutely nothing to improve the lot of Black America today; if you were to cite his escalation and widening of the war in Afganistan (and now Pakistan), his continuation of George Bush's assaults on civil liberties, his propping up of oligarchs and Wall Street, his appeasement of the Right, that 91 percent would probably shriek that you were a racist or a "hater". After all those years that King and Malcolm spent trying to warn them about "players" and "house slaves" and about how not to judge people by their color, they still become so fearful and desperate that they'll support a shallow, selfish, crass opportunist just because of his goddamn' color.

It's the kind of hopeless dysfunctionality that makes me really impatient to reach my 60th birthday, so the DW and I can retire to Mexico, kick back with a fattie and a couple of margaritas, and watch this whole goddamn' shithouse collapse on TV.

Is it an uncritical environment, and simply a detached elitist environment where social-climbing bullshit sells? NYU's Communications Department ain't exactly the Movement.

Personally, I don't put much stock in presidential approval polls, either, especially when there's no context and nobody in the MSM who could provide an alternative way of framing the question of approval.

As to going along to avoid being called a name and saying that blacks would shriek at you if you tried to point out Obama's shortcoming -- wow. I'm a bit afraid to say what I think of those two statements, for fear of being shrieked at. Sounds like the china calling the corningware white to me.

Most of the people who've called me a racist for criticizing Obama, they've been White. I think maybe all of them.

MJS:

These polls tell us nothing except that people have a soft spot for politicians who look like them, or talk like them, a fact Tammany Hall realized long ago. Catholics like Catholic politicians, Baptists like Baptists, Irish like Irish, Italians Italians, Jews Jews... Ho hum.

This 91% number is broad but shallow, among the general public.

On the other hand, opportunist climbers like Sara are, of course, going to love Obie more than life itself, because he shows that they, too, can Make It.

MJS:

PS: Maybe I'm just really lucky, but the most trenchant critics of Obie whom I know personally are, with maybe one or two exceptions, a lot less melanin-challenged than I am.

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