Kneel! A SUDS J20 Roundup (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

---------- 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: <studentsforanundemocraticsociety at egroups.com>; <J20action at egroups.com>;
"NYC DAN" <NYC-DAN at topica.com>; "Reclaim Streets"
<reclaimthestreets at listbot.com>
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 4:56 PM
Subject: Kneel! A SUDS J20 Roundup


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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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