{"id":592,"date":"2007-03-18T14:29:47","date_gmt":"2007-03-18T20:29:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/index.php\/2007\/03\/18\/start-the-demonstration-without-me\/"},"modified":"2007-03-18T15:04:50","modified_gmt":"2007-03-18T21:04:50","slug":"start-the-demonstration-without-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=592","title":{"rendered":"Start The Demonstration Without Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went down to the Dunn Brothers at Lake and Bryant this morning, and was gratified to meet some people; Amendment X from Savage Republican<\/a>, regular commenter BillH, a photographer whose name eludes me, and Mark, a charter member of “Old Friends of Mitch going back about thirty years. Fortified with Dunn’s finest, we walked over to Lake and Lyndale, by the Army Recruiting station (to the relief of the capo di tutti barristi<\/em>, who clearly was not in favor of completing the mission.<\/p>\n

There, we met Diamond Dog from Freedom Dogs<\/a> and American flag, and Doug (missed the last name), who brought signs. Finally, walking up Lake Street from the other side of the protest, of all people, James Lileks – bearing video and still cameras and the pithiest counterchants in the business.<\/p>\n

We stood in front of Greek To Me, across the street from the main body of the protest.<\/p>\n

Most of the media must have been concentrated up at Loring Park, where the protest was supposed to end; all we had at Lake and Lyndale was a single cameraman from Channel 5 who, to Stanley Hubbard’s credit, crossed the street to film and talk with us.<\/p>\n

After half an hour of highly-scripted chanting (a nice girl walked around at the beginning of the gathering, handing out a photocopied sheet of “Antiwar Chants by MN Socialist Alternative).<\/p>\n

A cute redhead with a pierced nose and a carpenters apron festooned with fascist flair walked through the crowd selling buttons. Among them were a bunch of Che Guevara buttons.<\/p>\n

“One dollar”, she said, perkily.<\/p>\n

“You do know that Guevara was a mass murderer, don’t you? He ordered the execution of children?”<\/p>\n

She grinned, looking a little dazed, and walked away to more fertile sales ground.<\/p>\n

After half an hour or so, the “protesters” began walking down Lake Street toward Hennepin. After a block or two, their organizers – equipped with bullhorns – began urging the crowd to move out onto the westbound lane of Lake Street, causing a big, carbon-guzzling traffic jam behind them.<\/p>\n

We counterprotesters, being ecologically conscious, stuck to the sidewalk.<\/p>\n

The entire mob of them walked through Calhoun Square, chanting at the top of their lungs (Lileks and I followed them), and then came out the Hennepin side, heading north . The counterprotest met them at the corner, and as the bullhorns bellowed “Who is the terrorist?” <\/em>we answered “Ahmadinejad!” over their feeble “Bush Is The Terrorist”.<\/p>\n

More observations as they return to me…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went down to the Dunn Brothers at Lake and Bryant this morning, and was gratified to meet some people; Amendment X from Savage Republican, regular commenter BillH, a photographer whose name eludes me, and Mark, a charter member of “Old Friends of Mitch going back about thirty years. Fortified with Dunn’s finest, we walked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}