Let’s get this straight; he walked up behind a teenage girl and snapped a close-up of her ass.<\/p>\n
About this time, I flipped on my camera’s video function – catching him just as he checked out his work, slouching down the steps toward the rest of the crowd. \u00a0 Then he turned and noticed me taping him. \u00a0He flipped me two middle fingers. \u00a0“Did you get that?”, he gurgled, laughing an addled-sounding laugh. \u00a0I kept on taping; he walked up the steps, trying to look intimidating; he got directly in my face put his cell phone maybe two inches from my face, and snapped a cell shot. \u00a0He reeked of alcohol. \u00a0 He walked away, looking like every loudmouth aggressive drunk looks when they’re prancing about the pool tables at the bar, puffed up and aggressive and daring <\/em>someone to cross ’em, bellowing about the picture he’d taken.<\/p>\n Suffice to say, we reported him to the cops too.<\/p>\n There was another guy – mid-forties, with that “academic” look about him, who wandered up to the CRs and started trying to pick an argument. \u00a0 He brought up tuition costs – and while I went there intending mostly to be a fly on the wall, photographing and videotaping, I had to join in. \u00a0“Why do <\/em>you think tuition is so high?”<\/p>\n He stared into my camera.<\/p>\n I explained a little basic economics; how if you pour money into the market for a good or service that is in limited supply – like seats at the U – the prices will rise.<\/p>\n He stared some more.<\/p>\n “What do you think about that?”<\/p>\n “Don’t photograph me. \u00a0My face is copyrighted”.<\/p>\n I hadn’t heard that one before. \u00a0“You’re in a public place…”, I responded.<\/p>\n “Could you please not photograph me?”<\/p>\n And that was the best argument I heard from any of them all night – or, truth be told, from almost any liberal, on any subject, ever. \u00a0But I digress.<\/p>\n At any rate – before long, dozens of people in MAPE T-shirts crowded around the dozen or so CRs.<\/p>\n A young woman with a guitar was meandering about the place; while I placed her (correctly) as a “progressive”, she actually spent nearly as much time arguing with the union members who were, by this time, crowding around the CRs, alternately trying to obscure the view of their signs and, occasionally, to heckle them.<\/p>\n Photo courtesy Kate Paul<\/p><\/div>\n She actually wanted to know what it was that made people be <\/em>Republicans. \u00a0I gently corrected her – I’m a conservative<\/em> – but in all my years of being a hate-choked agitator, I can’t say as I’ve ever been asked to explain that, impromptu. \u00a0I told her I’d grown up very liberal; that Reagan’s prosperity was huge, and that his ending of the cold war was bigger still, and since I’ve been working in the real world I’ve found absolutely nothing about “progressive” ideology that makes any sense.<\/p>\n The conversation got harder and harder to have – the chanting around us was getting pretty intense. \u00a0The T-Shirt Crowd were chanting loudly. \u00a0And some of them seemed genuinely offended by the presence of the CRs on the Capitol steps. \u00a0 One guy – doughy, fiftysomething, with long, stringy, frizzy gray hair in dire need of a comb – kept bellowing “why don’t you all get jobs!”. \u00a0I did at one point append “…so you can work ’til you’re 75 so he can retire at 55”. \u00a0But I think it got lost in the din.<\/p>\n
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