An open letter to the sad jagoff pictured above:
“Dear Sad Jagoff,
Your jacket tells me you are a Walmart employee, but your beard, hat and glasses tell me you found that jacket hanging from a used clothing rack inside a Williamsburg consignment shop. If you are some jagoff hipster, you get points for using cardboard for your sign, instead of expensive poster board, and a progressive amount of extra points if that cardboard is made from recycled material and/or was retrieved from outside of a store that sells artisan salad tongs and rolling pins.
Now, let’s talk about what you wrote on your jagoff sign. A typical rule of placards is the message should be simple and clear. If you can chant it, you can write it. For example, “No Blood For Oil!” or “Black Lives Matter!” Nobody marches around chanting, “DON’T INVADE AN OIL RICH COUNTRY SO THAT WELL-CONNECTED ENERGY COMPANIES GET SWEETHEART CONTRACTS!” or, “THE RACIALLY DISPROPORTIONATE STATISTICS OF SHOOTINGS BY POLICE OFFICERS IS A MANIFESTATION OF WHITE PRIVILEGE AND PROTECTION OF THE POWER STRUCTURES THAT CONCRETIZE SYSTEMIC RACISM!”
Good luck convincing any passers-by with your jagoff convoluted, faux-clever message, which is only telling us that you want people to not pretend that it’s possible to live on minimum wage (it totally is, by the way; maybe not if you have a few kids and live downtown, but prevailing wage scales are not meant to be dependent on a person’s expenses. Your cost of living has no correlation to compensation for level of in-demand skills).
Let’s pretend for a moment that you actually are a Walmart employee. Instead of standing there like a jagoff, wasting your time holding that sign, get another part time job to help you make ends meet, or get a college degree and/or job training so you have some skills that will enable you to command a higher salary and not have to work at Walmart. That is, unless you want to manage a Walmart location, which would be a responsible career move on your part since they include a weekly allotment of frozen burritos, and two free copies of your favorite National Lampoon movie in their benefits package.
***
Trump will be inaugurated tomorrow. I hope he goes out of his way to make it memorable, as only he can. Maybe do some product placement on a table next to his podium, a cadre of dancing girls, repeatedly performing that gesture he uses to mock people…something that will wind up being included in this website of inauguration facts and trivia.
I’m sure he has been practicing a prepared speech, but I hope his teleprompter gets hacked or malfunctions so that he has to go way, waaaaay off script. William Henry Harrison holds the record for longest inaugural address (Harrison also refused to wear any heavy clothing to protect him from the chill and rain, and developed pneumonia, becoming the first president to die in office, just one month after his inauguration). I hope Trump tries to beat the record, and just blithers on and on, making up words and roasting people on the dais, and doesn’t stop talking until the crowd grows weary and disperses.
***
Trump will have little to worry about regarding heckling and interruptions of his inauguration. The Secret Service do a very good job thwarting violence against those bodies they guard; they excel at keeping a wide gulf between presidents and their families and the general public, so for protesters to get in the grills of the subjects of their ire, they have to settle for the next best thing, which, apparently, are wax statues.
The Guardian reports, “A topless activist from the feminist group Femen attacked a lifesize statue of Donald Trump during an unveiling ceremony at a waxwork museum in Madrid…The woman reportedly pushed past security ropes and placed her hand on the statue’s crotch while screaming ‘grab patriarchy by the balls.’”
That the Guardian describes ol’ Chesty LaRue as an “activist” is risible. Activism is when you have a goal and a set of tactics that could actually achieve said goal. Was the goal here to raise awareness of the fact that Trump is lewd, lascivious and lecherous? That would be like trying to raise awareness of the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, or that kittens are cute. And Femen’s M.O. of demonstrating while topless is completely ineffective. Once their shirts are removed, we shareholders and employees of The Patriarchy, a limited liability corporation, are looking at boobs and completely tuning out Femen’s message. I don’t know where Femen, the Free The Nipple campaign, or groups similar to them got this idea that we men would somehow be threatened by either their respective means or ends. There has never once been a time when we men, upon seeing a bunch of parading, demonstrating, topless women have panicked, our leaders yelling, “Oh, no! Tits everywhere! Run, guys! Return to your boardrooms and await further instructions!”
***
About protests by “feminist windbags” planned for the day after the inauguration, Shikha Sood Dalmia writes:
“Demonstrations serve a useful function in a democracy — but only when they have clarity of purpose. That is not the case with the Women’s March on Washington, which will be held in Washington, D.C., the day after Donald Trump is sworn in. If anything, this particular demonstration is shaping up to be a feel-good exercise in search of a cause. But the sad thing is that if it fizzles and fails, it’ll make it harder, not easier, to fight genuine rights violations under the Trump presidency…
Everything else about the Women’s March, however, is reaching a level of absurdity worthy of the man they are protesting. Start with the fact that they are billing this event as the voice of women when 42 percent of women (and 62 percent of non-college educated white women) actually voted for Trump…
But here’s the curious thing: On women’s issues, there is a wide gulf between Trump’s character and his policy positions…
For much of his adult life, Trump claimed to be pro-choice on abortion. Now he insists he’s pro-life, and is threatening to appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court. This is a genuine problem for women (like me) who strongly believe in reproductive rights. However, in other respects, Trump has made a concerted attempt to extend an olive branch to the feminist lobby. He has embraced gender wage parity, government-mandated maternity leave, and child tax deductions in defiance of his own party. One can debate the wisdom of these ideas, but not that they are intended to help women. And then there are his three female Cabinet appointments, and a fourth woman as U.N. envoy…
Donald Trump is a danger to Americans and America itself. Opposing him will require focused vigilance, and concerted activism that is targeted, intelligent, nuanced, and appropriately calibrated (as I have argued previously). But prematurely elevating the faux concerns of a hyper-active feminist lobby will make it far more difficult to launch a serious resistance movement. It will allow Trump to depict his critics and dissenters as overwrought hysterics and dismiss the concerns of genuinely targeted groups…
Feminists are confusing the issue by making Trump’s threat about themselves. If they really wanted to help, they would have kept their powder dry for now, rather than embark on this confused and pointless march.”
I agree the march is an exercise in irony, but not that these protesters are just a bunch of Chicken Littles. This is their practice march, and they will return when Trump actually does something egregious or offensive to their ideologies, and most likely the MSM will report on it and blow it all out of proportion, though Trump and his acolytes already “depict his critics and dissenters as overwrought hysterics and dismiss the concerns of genuinely targeted groups.”
The reason why a resistance movement to Trump, the Right, the Alt-Right, or any other bogeyman of the Left can’t be formed is that the protesters don’t protest policies and businesses as much as they do concepts and social constructs that don’t exist in any substantially physical way. They protest things that were created by academics and “intellectuals” with too much time on their hands who need to publish articles so that they can be eligible for tenure, or sell books to promote an agenda. They protest white privilege, The Patriarchy, LLC, and “environments of hate and fear.” They also protest things that exist as a result of economic laws like supply and demand and scarcity, which is akin to protesting gravity.
In order to somehow fight The Patriarchy, LLC, a woman takes her shirt off and molests a wax statue of Donald Trump. A Fight For $15 fellow writes up a convoluted slogan. These pseudo-activists hamstring themselves because their tactics create a remove from their causes and goals. They are the ones developing disconnects, while lecturing everyone else about how out of touch they are. As protesters, they are often their own worst enemies, widening the distances between themselves and those people and things they are protesting, as well as the distances between themselves and those they claim to want to help.
***
Today is the last day we can say it, so, please everyone join me in saying “THANKS, OBAMA!”
***
And that’s the way it is, as far as you know.
Photo Credit: Tim Schermerhorn
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Love your writing style, the content was hysterical. I can’t wait for more ‘twat headed’ females (pardon my gender assumption) to demonstrate to the wind, while dragging their helpless children into the streets.While most may be single moms I am sure the fathers (unless the turkey baster method was used) just love this abuse of their offspring.
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