Walking Tour of San Francisco Protests: Political tourism in the Age of Obama
4. San Francisco Tax Day Tea Party — 4:00pm, Union Square
And finally: the climactic conclusion of our afternoon tour: The real Tea Party, in Union Square.
On the stage in the background is event organizer Sally Zelikovsky. The Reaganesque speech she gave that day has been transcribed and can be read here, for those who want to understand what the self-described values of the San Francisco Tea Party movement really are.
One of my favorite Tea Party shirts was this one, a riff on the Internet meme “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!”
And my other favorite shirt was this deconstruction of the iconic Che image, morphed into Reagan.
A nice summation of the self-sufficiency and individual responsibility advocated by the San Francisco Tea Partiers.
I already partly covered this Tea Party event in my previously linked “Crashing the Crashers: Tea Party Infiltrators Outmaneuvered in S.F.” report, with many photos of the would-be infiltrators and the response to their attempts. Thus, the photos included here on this page are simply interesting and amusing images of the Tea Partiers themselves.
I diligently scanned the crowd for “extremist” and “racist” and “violent” messages. Total found: Zero. This sign was about as extreme as they got.
Anti-communism was the underlying message of the rally. And of course, driving this fresh rejection of communism is the unspoken assumption that the current president and his administration are pushing socialist economic policies. Is that an extreme assumption? You decide. I tend to think it’s a pretty fair characterization of the direction Obama is headed.
Oh dear! He used the President’s middle name! Stop being so extremist!
Yup. That about sums it up.
But wait! Notice how she combined “racist” and “fascist” to create the misspelled combo-word “rascist.” This definitely is destined to be highlighted by Tea Party detractors as yet another example of “Teabonics,” a catchy name to describe the occasional misspellings on protest signs at Tea Party rallies.
So, naturally, I also spent the day looking for other examples of “Teabonics,” to see how common misspellings really are at these events.
After searching for hours, I only discovered two other boo-boos. Here’s one. Look! She accidentally left the “u” out of “Requiring!” That means her entire worldview is flawed!
And this guy left the second “n” out of “Government.” True he noticed the mistake, and later put the second “n” back in there, to correct the typo, but don’t you try to fool us with your proofreading, you ignorant teabagger! You left out a letter! And you will never live it down!
Of course, the truth is that I’ve seen (and photographed) infinitely more illiterate and misspelled signs at left-wing and anti-war protests over the last eight years. This inconvenient fact is universally ignored by the bozos promoting the “Teabonics” meme.
In fact, long ago I would occasionally highlight just a few of the overwhelming number of misspelled left-wing protest signs, such as this mini-report which I titled “DOWN WITH LITERACY!” But after 2005 it became wearisome and I stopped focusing on them or even pointing them out, mainly because I realized that noting your opponents’ misspellings in no way legitimately challenges their political philosophy — a lesson which the modern-day detractors of the Tea Party have yet to learn.
This being San Francisco, naturally all sorts of eccentrics showed up, as they do at every public event. Tea Partier? Infiltrator? Tourist? Or just part of living in San Francisco? (Adding to the strangeness: He was barefoot.)
Mattel has now released a life-sized Tea Party Ken doll!
Taking the expression “Swirling the drain” literally.
At his inauguration, Obama and his supporters liked to compare him to Lincoln. But this Tea Partier found a nice Lincoln quote which contradicts Obama’s economic policy.
As noted in my “Crashing the Crashers” report, several objectivist Ayn Rand fans showed up to proclaim their fondness for capitalism. Has it really come to this, that it’s necessary to protest in favor of capitalism, because the whole system seems under assault from our own government? Adam Smith help us!
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I don’t know who made the first of these signs, over a year ago, but the “Spread My Work Ethic, Not My Wealth” slogan is now so common that it has practically become the unofficial Tea Party motto.
And so our tour comes to an end. A San Francisco experience you can’t find in any other city!
Want to experience America’s most unique tour company? Come join the fun! The itinerary* for tomorrow (April 20, 2010) will take us to several events, including:
✦ A Taste of Rope — Erotic Rope and Wine Sampling: “A unique and intimate erotic adventure. A Taste of Rope invites you and your submissive to join us for an erotic wine tasting featuring some of California’s finest Zinfandels and the world’s finest ropes. Experience the intricate differences in the ropes bite, toothy or sleek quality, the smell, the taste, its ability to make your submissive squeals or moan in deep pleasure.”
✦ Mornings in Jenin: A Palestinian Epic Narration: “Come and listen to the Palestinian narrative…history, identity, friendship, love, terrorism, surrender, courage, and hope. ‘Mornings in Jenin’ forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining conflicts of our lifetimes.”
✦ The People Speak — screening of Howard Zinn documentary: “Throughout April 2010, the International Socialist Organization will be holding community screenings of the documentary feature film The People Speak at more than 30 campuses and communities around the country….Narrated by the late, acclaimed historian Howard Zinn, The People Speak brings to life the letters, diaries and speeches of everyday Americans who fought for equality and justice from the bottom up.”
✦ Walk Against Rape: “The goal of Walk Against Rape is to empower survivors, their friends, families and supporters, to break that silence by walking together on the streets against rape, and declare that San Francisco will not tolerate sexual violence.”
✦ LGBT Economic Empowerment Day: “The theme of this year’s event is Discover, Dream and Design.”
✦ Art as Propaganda Workshop: Being Artist. Being Aware. Being Arab-American: “Participants are invited to bring digital cameras and will be sent into the streets to photograph a finite number of images, using Hyder’s instructions, then return to share their findings.”
✦ Yin Energy Festival: “The ‘Yin Energy Festival’ in recognition of SWAN Day, a new holiday that celebrates women artists worldwide.”
* Note: Satire. No actual tours given. The April 20 events listed above are all real, and the April 15 protests all happened exactly as shown, but if you want to go on a San Francisco political tour, you’ll have to arrange it yourself!
Oh, no, watch that video a little longer than two minutes so you can see the ‘reporter’s’ brain cells start exploding when he can’t figure out what a woman means by ‘I’m not a Christian. I go to synagogue.”
Wow, do these folks work? They seem to have an awful lot of time on their hands.
Having lived in the national version of San Francisco, France that is, I can answer this question. My response would be “As little as cosmically necessary.” The first time I ever set foot in France I was greeted by that most French of national hobbies, the transportation strike. Jet-lagged and seriously in need of a luke-warm shower, I had to drag my bags around a kilometre to my hostel because various transportation interests thought that not working was not serious enough, so they decided to block many of the main thoroughfares to ensure that taxis were also out of the question. While I can appreciate political activism, I was astonished that there were daily events protesting almost everything imaginable complete with striking and general chaos. Vive la stupidité.
The events that always amaze me the most revolve around social welfare policies. You’ve never seen a more motley crew than the long-term unemployed marching because they were going to get their holiday benefits cut. (That’s right. Many European countries offer holiday welfare to the professionally unemployed so that not drawing a salary doesn’t inhibit them from obtaining their “rights” to binge drink abroad on a foreign sofa a couple weeks a year.)
From what I’ve seen of Zombie’s blogs, SF’s protests resemble France’s in that they tend to include various factions with completely divergent and often unrelated issues that march together in a spirit of left-lunacy. I have been an avid follower of Zombie’s posts since I first stumbled on them, but it scares me how similar to France many of the events seemed. France cured me of my leftist tendencies completely. Many of these subjects, both those documented by Zombie and the ones I saw myself in France, prove that many of these people may have a terminal case of the stupids.
Jacob, I hate saying this but regarding ‘a terminal case of the stupids’, let’s not forget that many Conservative folks send their children to schools filled with Left-Wing-Nut-Jobs. HELLO? And we wonder in wide-eyed amazement over Jews being Democrats when we send our very children to them? HELLO?
We need to overhaul OURSELVES as conservatives.
What are we FOR? If we are for self-empowerment and less government then we need to show we can govern ourselves in our innermost daily lives in a capacity that should and COULD be an EXAMPLE to all and that means being healthy, non-obese, non-smoking, non-alcoholic, non-druggie, home-schooling, house-downsizing, healthy eating UPsizing and all around general ability to exercise personal restraint and shove it in the Leftist’s whack-job ‘everything goes no matter how sleazy’ faces.
Agreed. My personal philosophy with dealing with statists now can be summed up in one word: Greece. Although it hasn’t gotten much press in the American MSM on the right or the left, this should be our rallying cry when arguing for smaller government. A lot of coverage here in Germany has been extremely negative, since German taxpayers will be footing a substantial portion of the bailout money for a country that socialized itself into insolvency. A lot has been made about the constant cronyism in Greece, which is indeed part of the problem. But, as a warning to us, the country is regulated to the max, has an extremely hostile environment for private enterprise, and currently, 25% of the population works for the government. (Why wouldn’t they? They get far more money and benefits than people trying to navigate the tangles of Greek bureaucracy and work in the private sector.) As I have been telling my socialist German colleagues, this is what happens when the money runs out. Germans, who are largely social Democrats to the core, have suddenly found my arguments compelling faced with dishing out money hand over fist. Just call it the “angry ant” syndrome as government workers spread some of his harvest to the fiddling cricket justifying his play today attitude.
Just imagine this scene as the music starts to cue up. A Greek mercenary in full battle gear standing in front of the IMF shouting “THIS…IS…SPARTA! And we’re, like, totally broke man. Do you think you could front us a few billion or sum’n?”
I’m not really sure people understood the “crash the tea-party” idea at all. The idea was as brilliant as devious: to go to rallies and blend in with extremist or confused messages to help push the idea that tea-parties are a hotbed of racism and radicalism that don’t represent the American mainstream. As you have pointed out, it was a failure of epic, Milli-Vanilli-esque proportions. The video is perhaps one of the least credible attempts at “infiltrate and discredit” guerilla political warfare imaginable.
For example, I know of almost no one, either conservative or liberal, that is in real life so radically gay obsessed. Pretending not to understand that the woman in question was Jewish was perhaps some of the worst slapstick in the history of slapstickery. Odel? Seriously. That’s just perhaps the most obvious failed attempt at infiltration in the history of failed infiltrations. He sticks out as violently from the crowd as a 400 kilo ape in a burka riding a segway by Orange Julius in the mall food court.
Unfortunately, I don’t think “Odel” got the irony at all. He tried a failed infiltration to elicit radical hate speech, but to do this, he obviously made sincere tea-partiers uncomfortable with his failed gay-bashing. The only radicalism there was brought by crashers. There must be a country song stuck in all that irony just waiting to be written.
The new ‘Leftists’ have all lived comfortable lives. It’s hard to be angry and radical when someone else is paying your expenses. Non? Oui!
That’s the trick involved in socialism. Everyone thinks someone else will be picking up the tab!
But you have a very valid point. I live in Hamburg now in a lovely little neighbourhood located a mile or two from a festering sewer of outright communist agitation. There are some “occupied buildings” as they are called that belong to someone else but have been taken over by radicals and the state generally refuses to enforce the owners property rights. As the 1st of May is rolling around, take a couple of seconds to think of poor me living next to what will be effectively a war zone for a couple of days. Of the many sad facets to the story is that most of these so called autonomous radicals are from comfy, middle class backgrounds. I just hope they don’t firebomb any of the cars on our street. There have been spates of arsons on luxury vehicles for some time, but they have recently turned to smaller cars. I thought about putting a sticker on the back temporarily that says “I brake for the proletariate” to avoid any trouble.
It is always interesting to see this mindset in Zombie’s posts. The cognitive dissonance created by groups like “Queers for Palestine” could replace fossil fuels if we had a way to extract and bottle it.
Death by a (what are we Americans up to now…) a million/trillion little cuts?
We are a sorry excuse for a country and our founders should bitch slap us all.
Boy oh boy. Whatta trip. This was a lot to digest.
(And, what is that SMELL)?
Loved snarky the enders.
okay…at least now we understand who votes Pelosi in and why…clowns drawn to the circus.
Grossi Pelosi is the perfect image of ‘jet-setting Elitist de jour’.
Pelosi is an old ‘skool’ fool tool. Don’t insult clowns who often come from horrible backgrounds and hide their inner sorrow and misery behind a face of happiness. Speaking of which, Jim Carrey suffers from horrible depression as do many folks of great comedic talent.
I of course, never ever never ever cover up my personal pain with comedy. Nope. Not me. lol
Great material for a future tour-guide book: Zombie’s Lonely Planet…or maybe, Looney Planet!
Ahem. The tea-party folks have proven time and time again that they ARE the middle-class, tax-paying, SUCKER Americans who clean up after they leave a place and are decent, upstanding folks who more represent our Aunties/Uncles rather than the basement dwelling internet/sexting, lazy youth of today (Alinsky didn’t count on children just being plain lazy). Spread the worth ethic? It seems teachers who sit in ‘teacher jail’ can’t really teach our youth any ‘work ethic’.
What’s in your wallet?
Or, better, what’s in you heart and soul?
Ruled by the senses, we have lost our defenses.
I certainly felt like a sucker today. I’ve lived in Germany coming up on 4 years and I’m a small business owner. (I’ll be forced to leave due to business regulations, but that is another story.) Since I’ve been here, I have ploughed a lot of my money back into the business, and additionally, I have payed every cent of my taxes. I’m still limping.) I have worked overtime, I have worked nights, and I have worked weekends. In order to save on cash, I bought the necessary software and learnt how to build and maintain my own website as well as design my own advertising. I was watching t.v. today during lunch, and a show that helps arrange some form of work for the professionally unemployed came on. One women, a single mother of 40, was trying to “ease” back into the working market after a 5 year hiatus. Read that last part again. 5 years. She really didn’t look unemployed though. She had on new clothes, styled and dyed hair, and a couple of visible tattoos that looked relatively new. She managed to arrange a job interview at a nightclub, and even though she failed to impress, the manager offered her a trial period in which she could either prove herself worthy of the job or be fired without negative repercussions for the business. She didn’t last one night. The manager immediately sent her to the back to help clean up and restock the kitchen. She worked for under one hour before asking if there wasn’t something else she could do, and said the job just wasn’t what she had imagined. She left. When asked why, her response was “Just didn’t feel like it.” No negative consequences. Her cheque will be in the mail. I looked at my computer, waiting for me to jump back into preparing more training materials and thought just one thing.
I am a sucker.
Socialism rewards sloth.
In a socialistic system there is no such thing as ‘getting ahead’ or building a ‘nest-egg’. No, you live and die by the labour of your neighbor and you hope you don’t have to work as hard or harder for the same gravy as the shmuck in line behind or ahead of you.
Socialism: Master/Slave
A single mother of 40? That’s a lot of welfare benefits.
Even better when you see she’s passed the half-decade mark and is just getting into her stride!
Zombie:
Frankly, I think that you’re crazier than a bed-bug in a sleeping bag for seeking out these weirds and freaks of your own volition, but God bless you for your work…
…and damn your eyes for that pic of the Scrotal Inflation geezers a few years back.
My therapist and I are STILL working through the trauma of seeing that!
Great post as always! One bone to pick:
The Abraham Lincoln quote was actually a misattribution: it was actually from “The Ten Cannots” by William J. H. Boetcker. At one conservative rally, a pamphlet was distributed that had an actual Lincoln speech on one side and the Ten Cannots on the other — and some people misremembered everything as having been by Lincoln. See:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Misattributed
I briefly lived in San Francisco in the late nineteen-eighties. The experience turned me BACK into a Conservative Republican. San Francisco…what a vast collection of ???????????.
fags right? you were gonna say fags weren’t you. right on man, right on.
Zombie, I WISH you DID do walking tours like that, that would be a great, fun day, loaded with pictures to impress and amuse the folks back home!
I think I would take part. I would especially love to get a good look at the Arabic signs. If people aren’t afraid of writing “All Jews are terroist (sic)” in English, then I imagine the Arabic signs must be chock-a-block full of calls for genocide.
I read an article a couple of years back that I think about every time I look at a Zombie post. Specifically, the article mentioned how SF’s years of homeless friendly policies had made large parts of the city a dumping ground for junkies. The article specifically mentioned one person complaining about finding used needles and the occasional squat next to his car, in the bushes outside of his house, as well as local parks where his children played. The theme of the article was the shifting views of SF residents who had begun to take a harder stance on the homeless, in addition to other social issues traditionally supported by the left-leaning city. Does anybody know if this is still valid, or was this article just misinformed? I want to think that not only do these people fall far outside of the mainstream of American politics, but that they also don’t represent a large section of CA’s citizens either. More specifically, I have to add something to what Bilgeman said. The scrotal inflation thing left me scarred as well and I don’t want to think that the person next to me on the bus may be sitting on a watermelon. Even as a libertarian, those people just gave me the creeps.
San Francisco became a colony of Berkeley. Those are bad places to be when our economic house of cards comes down. Zombie, I hope you have an escape plan.
Excellent work Zombie
A real tour de farce. I have never been to SF and now realize why – I would need hazmat training and clothing to enter.
I am with Gary #11 on this one – pack your sanity and plan your escape.