August 28, 2004
Send In The Clowns
Some people need a reason to protest - these people just need a place...
The usual suspects and ne'er-do-wells have begun gathering in New York for politically justified nudity, disobedience, and general hooliganism.
Let's cut to the quick - most of the people getting naked on 8th Avenue aren't wilting violets who are overcoming social dogma to take a stand. They are exhibitionists who have found notoriety taking their fetish and combining it with a political issue. Is the world of AIDS research advanced by their nudity? How about the plight of the homeless? The uninsured, the poor, the hungry, precisely who is really aided by some T & A on a New York street?
Traffic is snarled by protesting bicyclists who get bonus points for braving the impatience of NYC cab drivers, business disrupted by having a sit-in - again, not protest as raising a voice, but protest as prankish stunts a frat house might do, which manifests itself in gloryhounding for cameras. It's a prank with a cause, and therefore, justifiable at least to those inclined to see traffic snarling and business disruption as matters of free speech that trump the rights of all others who have to put up with it.
The next level of protests - destruction of property, trespassing, and so forth, will also be justified by those inclined to ascribe social outrage to the same behavior you'd spank a child for.
Would 8 people holding pickets be newsworthy? No. But 8 people holding their privates are. Or are they?
Posted by MEC2 at August 28, 2004 08:32 PM