My daughter worked her tail off for Hillary Clinton. She was only fourteen years old, so she couldn’t vote, and while part of it was her way of rebelling against her Berner parents, I think part of it was that tiny magical ember that still burns in a 14 year olds heart that maybe some day she could be President too. The HRC campaign used her picture in an online ad to illustrate what I’m talking about. You’ll see what I mean.
Needless to say, after the election she was heartbroken — even more than most — and I tried to console her by telling her that a wave of protest and resistance was going to rise up and maybe even wash the bastard away, but that either way there was going to be a new era of activism, art, comedy, writing, music… anything you can think of… and that somehow it was going to turn out great in the end. I didn’t believe it myself, but that’s the sort of thing you say when you’re a parent.
I didn’t believe it up until the airport protests against the Muslim ban, and that’s what brought me back into the game.
I saw Thorbites’ “Suffer Little Children” sign where I was going to put a “Children in Cages” sign, which was all I’d come up with to address the latest outrage. I loved “Suffer Little Children,” was even a bit jealous, and ended up putting Children in Cages (Helvetica Bold) with an upside down flag in the same place I’d put it the day before in Times New Roman.
I’m not sure how “Only animals treat people like animals “ came into my head. It was a mix of the children in cages imagery, an essay I’d read on Trump’s usage of fascist dehumanizing rhetoric for immigrants ( “animals,” “infestation” etc.) and just the natural wordplay that goes through my head when I’m driving and trying to think these things up. Much of my rhetoric and sloganeering is dictated by the proportions of cardboard rectangles, and when I first thought of it I loved it because I figured it’d fit so well on the flatscreen TV box I’d just found next to a dumpster. Three lines, each of equivalent length… perfect. That night I painted it up twice, put it on the Harbor Fwy. by downtown in a place where my last sign “Remember when treason was bad?” had stayed up over six weeks and had been seen many millions of times and then waited for the afternoon light before climbing and squirming into my favorite overpass — the Virginia St. pedestrian bridge.
Got some kickass photos, checked into a motel and tweeted it out, deciding to finally check google to see how much my efforts might boost the phrase, which I figured had to have been thought of before…
God DAMN! No Results! That sucker’s MINE!
I get way more credit than I deserve for what I do. You and I have developed a highly dysfunctional relationship where you characterize me as heroic because it absolves you of doing it yourself and as many times as I’ve said “cardboard, paint, easy, fun!” on some level I must be going along with it because, hey — who doesn’t want to be a fucking hero, right? (We’re going to have to discuss this more at length soon because we’re getting to the point where the country’s at stake.) But sometimes… every once in awhile, I do something that actually makes me proud of myself, and this afternoon’s photos, along with finding out I’d coined that phrase… that was one of those times. And I have to admit, I couldn’t have done it without that contemptible fascist bastard in the White House and his monstrous, inhuman racist policies.
Which made me think of what I’d said to my daughter after the election and how even though it was bullshit at the time, I was right. The only goddam lemonade we’re going to be able to squeeze out of this asshole is what we make out of fighting the good fight against him. So do it — whatever it is — make it loud and do it now. It’s not a protest if nobody can hear you. Don’t wait around for election day, another march or for your activist group to “organize” something. That’s how we let them steal the Presidency in 2000. That’s how we let them start an illegal war by turning Osama Bin Laden into Saddam Hussein in 2002 and 2003. That’s how we’re letting the guy who said he wouldn’t accept a loss because it’d be rigged, to be President without holding him to the same standard — especially since we all know now it WAS rigged.
The other day someone told me “We’re all doing what we can.” If that’s the case then we are all well and truly fucked and deserve everything’s that coming to us. I’m not doing all I can: I’m not even doing a third of what I can... but I promise to change that. Stealing elections and illegal wars is one thing, but I’ll be fucked if I let those bastards turn us into a fucking Russian colony.