---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 19:26:55 -0500
From: Any Mouse
Reply-To: ???
To: ???
Subject: Kneel! A SUDS J20 Roundup
SUDS folks are a riot-- literally. "We love Dick! We love Bush" indeed...
Hah-larry-us mind fucking. I can just imagine the confusion in the minds and
faces of all those easily confused...
----- Original Message -----
From: Another Mouse
To:
Reclaim the Streets NYC - http://reclaimthestreetsnyc.tao.ca
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If you're baffled: http://www.freespeech.org/suds_unite
Tender comrades:
Hello to all. I was going to individually thank everyone for your contributions to our SUDS-J20 project, and then I realized that I would end up going on and on and thanking just about everybody involved in the thing. And besides, there is something hierarchical about thank-yous, especially when one considers the collective nature of this project. So if I may, I'd like to give a big, horizontal thank-you to the SUDS on behalf of the SUDS. We rocked. I'd say that we were the best affinity group there, but from the footage I saw the Black Bloc had a pretty damn good day.
Well, anyway, that was some fun, wasn't it? We started the day in front of Union Station, donning our SUDS outfits, practicing chants, and conferencing about various things, as laughing protesters and bewildered Bush supporters streamed out of the station. We performed our skit for the first time to an especially confused-looking group of Japanese tourists. For about 20 minutes a tall, middle-aged white man in a cowboy hat ranted at us about Jesus. He either wanted us to accept Jesus into our hearts or he was trying to get Jesus to fry us with a lightning bolt. Hard to tell with these guys. Eventually he left in disgust, contemptuously spitting at us, "Government's not supposed to be fun." We started chanting it: "Government's Not Supposed to Be Fun! Government's Not Supposed to Be Fun!"
Therein lies the great thing about the SUDS concept: we got some of best material from the nutty Republicans wandering around DC, yelling at us. And boy, did we confuse them. For almost four blocks two teenage Republican girls carried our signs until they caught on and threw them on the ground in disgust.
Perhaps even funnier than the reactions of the loon-right were those of the REAL centers of Republican power, the fur-coated, hair-helmeted women and their tuxed-and-cowboy booted husbands, at once arrogantly elitist and defiantly unsophisticated. They seemed to be scared shitless all weekend anyway*, but we really threw them for a loop. Kneel before Bush!
We walked off towards the Supreme Court with what seemed to be a completely random group of non-costumed high-school kids in tow who just thought we looked fun. We arrived to a thin but awaiting crowd of Loud Citizens. I think we actually saved their rally. Despite how it looked, the speakers had shown up but had taken off by the time we got there (for more info, visit http://www.loudcitizen.com/million/pics.asp. But even in these pictures the crowd looks pretty thin).
Now, these guys were something else. I was expecting a bunch of strident, maniacal brown-shirts or something, but they were more like agoraphobic, dorky AOL employees with bad teeth from suburban Virginia. One got the feeling that if they weren't really into being Republican they'd be obsessively taping Howard Stern or putting together long spreadsheet documents for their fantasy baseball leagues. Those kinds of guys. One white-haired guy had made himself this wacky paper hat that I guess was supposed to represent "hanging chads." They didn't seem to get that, even aside from the schtick, we weren't Gore supporters. In fact, they didn't seem to understand much. They would chant at us (they had some doozies: "Mean-Spirited, Arrogant, Condescending Liberals!" and that "Nah-nah-hey-hey-goodbye" song). And we would just start chanting the same thing and pretending we were with them. Occasionally we would mutate their chants: their "President Bush" became our "Emperor Bush," their "Four More Years" became our "A Thousand More Years," and so on. At one point I even hooked arms with a particularly excited LC and we did a little jig. Eventually they left Some said we drove them away, but I think they just wanted to go to the parade route and sneak a peek at the Emperor.
We proceeded to the parade route chanting "All Hail Bush," "No Justice, No Problem," "Idiot Boy-King," and other fun ditties, stopping on the way to do a show. "Kneel before Bush!" I shouted to the SUDS and the puzzled/bemused crowd. "Do we love George W. Bush with every fiber of our beings? Would we die for him? Say it!" And the SUDS started yelling, "We Love Bush!" "What about his retainer? What about Dick Cheney? Do we love him? Say it! We Love Dick!" And we goose-stepped off, chanting "We Love Bush! We Love Dick!"
We wandered through the city until we hit the checkpoint closest to the NOW rally. This is where we experienced our only real crisis of the day, when about half of us vanished (they had to pee and the back and front marshals didn't communicate about it). But this gave us the opportunity to eat breakfast and we were reunited soon enough. We did another performance on line as a gesture of good-will to all the people we had cut in front of, eventually being allowed in and putting on yet another show for the big NOW rally. At this point we picked up some random liberal dude who wanted to do his own Lt. Gen. John Holy Cleansing Fire Smith act, which was fine with me because I was starting to lose my voice, but he kept bringing the conversation back to the whole vote-count thing, and he was neither in costume nor funny. We continued along the parade route for a while, occasionally stopping and performing and trying to tailor the skit to whatever group we were performing for. At one point we met up with a bunch of lefty student types with IAC signs who played along and did a goofy "counter-protest" thing with us. They would shout real leftist slogans at us, and we would shout SUDS slogans back at them. At one point they started shouting "La Puebla Unita (etc.)" at us and we shouted "Speak English!" back at them.
Soon after this I started to lose my voice, and we decided that we didn't want to spent the whole day waiting for Bush and Dick to come down the pike (story of my life, ba-dum-bump), so we decided to squeeze out via a choke-point. Republicans and protesters alike were being crushed behind some empty bleachers and a barricade that took up most of the sidewalk, squeezing through a two-foot-wide space as cops looked on, amused at our suffering. "These protesters are so rude, taking up all this space," one hair-helmet woman said. This took us close to a half-hour, and by that time I was about ready to collapse. Then a bunch of us went to Chinatown for lunch.
Well, that's my version. I'd love to hear others'
XO Jason, aka LGJHCFS
*An aside: that morning, on the way to DC from Alexandria, we sat on a train with a bunch of these Republicans. When we got into the city, an African-American man in his 30s entered the train, seething. Finally, unable to hold himself back, he blurted out, "fuck George Bush." He paused. It felt good. He said it again. The third time, we joined him, chanting, "Fuck George Bush! Fuck George Bush!" I thought the GOPers were going to shit themselves.
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