Vexed Weasel has a great diary today. Here's a snippet of what he says.
The media is little more than a circus looking for sensational images and incapable of presenting and discussing the substantive issues. I say- give them somthing to look at and disseminate.
My proposition is simple. Make signs and/or T-shirts. The slogans should be something like "Stop Socialism-End Medicare Now!" or "No Socialised Medicine- Stop the VA Now!"
Resident artists par excellence, and anyone with GIMP, Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements expertise... fall in, it's time we made theater for the American public. We can inform in a funny way, and maybe (just maybe) crank the looniness all the way up to eleven.
More below the fold...
If you decided to scroll down the page, you might notice the images are taking a bit of time to load. I'll put the technical reasons in this Quote box, which you can skip for now...
The images below are in PNG format with a transparency as the background. That's how you can see the pale not-quite-white background of the web page. I've used Internet Heathen Science to make them look small on the page, but if you look at them in a separate browser tab or window, you'll see they are 3,150 by 2,400 pixels in size. Which, by sheer coincidence, just happens to be 10.5" by 8" at 300 dpi, making them perfect for printing on Letter paper, or even on larger paper without them looking like crap. The transparent background also means they can be printed on color t-shirts by websites such as CafePress. More about that later. This ends the technical stuff.
The idea is simple, and I touched on it briefly in my last diary entry...
Look: we've seen people turn up angry and ignorant as all Hell. Demanding that the government be kept out of their lives, but loving it when the government is in their lives.
The only way to defeat that kind of crazy is a gentle reminder. What a lack of socialism actually means to anyone eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc.
Senator Al Franken (D-eliciously funny) once wrote that "[the] Right's entertainment value comes from their willingness to lie and distort. Ours will have to come from being funny and attractive." This is where we get the chance to be funny and attractive for the camera, and perhaps get a few light bulbs going off above a few senior heads.
What we do is: we flood the meetings with signs that are brutally honest. First up: here's what we're fighting.
We are fighting people that want zero taxes to pay for defense. No funding for anything, and that will help us fight wars. So it's not as if Vexed Weasel was inventing something that didn't exist, we're just fulfilling a need to be a crazy attention whore with no concept of how things work. And we've heard of the occasions where people absolutely DO NOT WANT government health care, but love their government health care (Medicare). So how do you combat that kind of crazy? By being funny about it. Take it to its logical conclusion and you get these three variations on a theme.
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If you want to know why the images took so long to load, you might want to go back and read the technical stuff you skipped above the fold!
OK: once the conversation turns to the idea that taxes have to pay for the sidewalk you're standing on, and the traffic lights that people obey because regulation in measure is a good thing, people may also begin to understand they're actually campaigning to get rid of their beloved Medicare. And their Social Security checks. And the care for our brave men and women in uniform that the Republicans use as props.
If people there want to wave some of the signs, let them. Make sure you talk about how bad socialism is first, and what has socialism ever done for America, and then given them the sign and point the press in that general direction. Or take pictures and send them to newspapers yourself. They need to fill the column inches.
This final sign is a bit of fun. What with the level of political knowledge seen at many of these events (translation: I've seen sponges that know more about what Marx said historically about bourgeois/proletariat/class struggle), I give you this.
The Obama symbol complete with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. And in Russian is the well known phrase (История, я не понимаю) championed in every Freeper's heart: "history, I don't understand".
I know. I'm a cruel man. Make sure the more rabid people wave that one around.
Now a word about t-shirts. I give you all absolute carte blanche to upload these images to CafePress and have people order t-shirts and stickers and tote bags (and whatever else they do). But there is one condition: you make NOTHING on the deal. I slaved over a hot iMac to make sure they will print on ANY COLOR T-SHIRT, and I want them available all over the place. So if you're going to put them on message boards too, make sure you save it to your own computer / resize them down to manageable dimensions, and show them that way. PhotoBucket has a nasty habit of saying "you have exceeded your bandwidth" to people that have popular images all over the net, and these images take up a LOT of bandwidth (the Russian one is over 2MB, thanks to the image).
If anyone can host them somewhere else and post links to them, I would be very grateful.
Now let's go out there and make some fun!