Our Intrepid Correspondent vs. the Red Menace

(From our Intrepid Correspondent, a 20 or something)

Here's my lengthy summary of the events that occured, in entertaining, Neal Stephenson-esque prose:

Today I one man counter-protested the World Can't Wait: Drive out the Bush Regime gathering in Daley Plaza. I walked there with my roommate, who was incredibly amused that I would undertake such a bizarre expedition (he's basically apolitical, but with Democratic impulses). I was armed with a megaphone, prepared to taunt the Maoists and various other protestors I hoped would be there.

When I arrived there, I first walked around, surveying the scene and snapping some photos. What I saw was a pathetic collection of perhaps a hundred people (that's optimistic), the majority of which were aged hippies / communists. There was one guy with a megaphone holding a bannner, trying to whip up the crowd in to revolutionary fervor with chants as "We Can, We Can, Stop War With Iran". He was wearing a derby hat, which looked like it was circa 1957, a huge pair of earmuffs, wool gloves, and Barry Goldwater's glasses. I wanted to get a crane to descend a glass booth over this guy and pump it full of formaldeyhde. These old school Marxists aren't going to be around much longer.

Ranging throughout the crowd were a pathetic assortment of people with fanny packs handing out flyers full of breathless socialist propaganda and crying out "Donations! Donations!". You'd figure the literature would be free, these are socialists right? However, they come with a fee, and not just any fee: five U$A (United States of AmeriKKKa) dollars! All the more reason that they need to immediately seize the means of production, I suppose. However, if these Communists had any knowledge of economics, they'd probably realize they'll have to pay me to read that crap. And it had better be a living wage, too.

I walked towards the stage, a pathetic thing that looked like it had been erected by carney folk down on their luck. A small crowd had congregated around the stage, mostly to watch the "Pirate Bloc" (which apparently seemed to be a group of ugly, smelly, left anarchist types)bang away on plastic paint buckets. One black woman holding a "BUSH STEP DOWN!" sign started grooving to the rythm. To me, this seemed hopelessly optimistic. I milled around a bit more, taking pictures of the various attendees. There was an extremely****** off looking blonde woman in her thirties who looked like some sort of militant lesbian. She had her daughter in tow, so maybe not. A short, rotund woman who reminded me of my mother urged me to congregate around the stage because they wanted to get the program started. I gave her a sour look and walked away. I wasn't about to be bossed around by Maoists!

Around this time I was getting pretty bored with the whole scene, and decided it was time to quit ****** around and kick it off with the megaphone.I stood around uncertainly for a while, screwing up my courage, and then began. I was standing in front of the old guy with the megaphone,and went in to a few lines of "Go home commies nobody cares! Go home commies nobody cares!". The guy looked surprised, and then mildly ****** off, then he tried his best to ignore me. Disappointed, I moved on to other targets. I went up to a couple of the tables where they were handing out flyers and such and did the "commie" chant a couple more times. Then, I converged on the main table, staffed by 40-60 year old Maoists in these weird yellow and black windbreakers they wear.These people can't even have fun and dress up like the People's Liberation Army! Anyway, there I repeated the same chant but substituted the more general term "Commies" with "Maoists", just to flaunt my political knowledge, as well as my specific knowledge of their organization. They all looked up at me, surprised. After this, I paced around a bit more. An old, and I mean old woman perhaps in her late fifties or early sixties approached me, getting in my face. She looked as if I had personally wounded her. Perhaps she was already feeling down about the poor turnout, wishing she had herself a nice big mob of Chinese factory workers.

"Why are you doing this?" she asks.

"Because I hate communists."

This throws her off for a minute, and she looks even more wounded.

"Do you like Bush?"

I should have said yes to **** her off more, but I was honest.

"Not really."

"Well, why can't we focus on that?"

"I'll focus on what I want."

Then I turned and stepped away, quite amused.

Enjoying myself immensely, I began to pace back and forth and adressed the general crowd (a scattering of like 20 people in the immediate vicinity) and explained the whole damn thing.

"This protest has been organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party."

At this, the assembled Maoists behind their table gave a small, ragged defiant cheer, showing proper gung ho, People's War spirit.

"But they didn't want you to know this, so they did everything through a front organization! They're cowards. You're sheep. They have a radical,revolutionary ideology. They are hard core communists!"

Immediately after completing this little soliloquy, I was approached by a police officer. He'd already identified me as trouble earlier, and walked near me when I had started off my initial "Commies go home" chant. Goldwater had been looking at me kind of hard, and I guess the cop was concerned a fight was going to break out. Now the cop came up to me and told me he wouldn't allow it.

These people had a license to protest, and if I wanted to I could go across the street and protest from there. I gave the guy a pleading look. We're on the same side, right? These people are trying to Destroy America! But this is a post cold war police officer, and he's not having any of it. He repeats himself,"I won't allow it" and I give in. Oh well, I've had my fun. I yell at the Maoists that they're damn lucky they have the capitalist pigs on their side, and leave with my roommate.

All in all, an entertaining use of an evening. I must admit I was rather disappointed,I wanted a whole mob of left wing nutcases. Perhaps it was the cold weather or the fact that no one gives a *****, but the turnout was terrible. Maybe the left just doesn't like the Maoists, I didn't even see the usual groups such as Food Not Bombs (an organization that fights the state and capitalist system by preparing vegan food and feeding homeless people with it, as they're apparently the only people who will eat it).I'd encourage anyone to do this, it's a hell of a lot of fun. I'm considering getting more people and a permit next time, so I don't get kicked out by the police.

PART 2: THERE'S MORE!!!! Well, around 8:30 I looked out the window and saw the protestors walking down the street, cop cars pulling donuts on State to mantain their defensive perimeter. So I grabbed my megaphone and scrambled on outside, personally offended at a Red invasion of the South Loop. When I exited the building they were just coming around the corner, rallying to the cause. One of them had climbed up on a tree garden thingy and was speaking to the crowd. I walked up and confronted them directly, yelling into the megaphone. "Commies go home nobody cares!" This time, the reaction was far fiercer. Several of them split off from the main group and started to move towards me, perhaps remembering me from earlier. A police officer on a bike demanded I move behind him if I wanted to continue. I agreed. The crowd cheered as I moved backwards a bit, construing this as a glorious blow on par with the Tet Offensive. The police officer is ***** off at me for making his job more difficult. "They were just about to leave until you got here. Man!" I inform him that it's a free country, and if they're here to speak, I'm here to speak as well. He shuts up and ignores me, obviously deciding that I'm just as crazy as the rest of them.

"You're lucky you've got capitalist pigs to protect you!" I yell at the mob.

I kept taunting for a while in this vein, going on. "Try protesting in North Korea or Cuba!" The crowd started chanting "Step down Bush! Step down Bush!" at the urging of the speaker. I responded with "De-moc-racy! De-moc-racy!" A couple young men tried to point out that he "stole the election". Not the second time, I wittily rejoinder. "Kerry got owned!"

One of the protesters, I assume he was a communist of some sort, was staring at me really hard during all of this. I finally turned my attention to him.

"What are you looking at?"

"You."

"What for?"

There's a pause in my exchange with him as I whip out another taunt. "Gulag gulag! Run me over with a tank!" Some young men approach with drums and stuff, trying to drown me out. But this Radio Shack megaphone is well equipped, souped up with 8 AA batteries and is ready for all out anti-communist war. "Bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie, you're all bourgeoisie! Yuppies yuppies, go home yuppies!" This puts my fellow youths off balance. They are divided into two groups: one that has no idea what the word bourgeoisie means, and the rest who know that they're bourgeoisie. I zero in on a crowd of old timers next to them and inform them that the "sixties are over". I'm not just being an *******, I was afraid these people might be actually suffering from alzheimers, and believe this is the 1968 Democratic Convention.

In a pathetic attempt at recovery they tell me to "go home", and I say "**** you, you go home! I live here!" and point theatrically at the building.

I look back to the left, and the guy is still staring at me.

"Yeah, just make sure you stay near that police officer," he says.

It takes me a while to realize this dude is totally serious. He's got Karl Marx in his head, along with Lenin, Trotsky, Mao and other members of the Communist pantheon telling him he needs to kick my ****. He must be extremely baffled and confused that he's standing next to a Seven Eleven, not a workers collective. He has the eyes of a collective farmer whose vodka ration has been cut.

"Why should I stay near the police officer? Are you threatening me?"

He doesn't say anything, just keeps looking.

"That's your response to free speech, huh communist? Yeah, you communists don't like free speech. Gonna kick my ***?"

"Those are your words, not mine. Your words."

"So, what are your thoughts on it? Want to kick my ***?"

"I don't have anything to say."

"Then shut the ***** up."

Eventually, the group decides to disperse, as they've been threatened with arrest. This is slowed by the police officers telling them they have to put their signs down before they move on. Eventually though, they get on through. Now that the police are off my back, I get closer to a group of older communists and mock them.

"Forward! Forward with the five year plan! Forward to the socialist revolution! It's happening any day now!"

One of the guys who was with the protestors came up to me, chuckling. He earlier had been laughing at my taunts of the crowd, obviously in admiration of my incredible wit. He hasn't really drunk the commie kool-aid, and gives me a nod. "You're a brave man."

Trailing behind the group was a man I recognized as one of the hardcore Maoists handing out flyers to two young black girls, who had just happened to be outside of the building. I walked up to him and confronted him. "Are you a communist?" He said yes, he was. I looked at his sweatshirt, which said MASS MURDERERS and had the faces of GW Bush, Cheney, etc. I told him, didn't he know that communists had killed way more people that George W. Bush? He replied that revolutions "aren't dinner parties", in case I was confused, and stumbled into an explanation of class warfare. I rolled my eyes.

He tried to ignore me and takes the black girls aside sort of conspiratorally. I hear only snatches, like "it's not black and white" or something. Apparently, Maoists are equal opportunity employers. Feeling ignored, I think of something to say.

"Bush regime, Bush regime?" I say. "What about the Castro regime?"

His reply was "You're a *****head. You're probably one of those puny anarchists. Not the good ones. The puny ones!" I have no idea what this means, but amazingly enough, I am an anarchist, though by puny anarchist I doubt he means anarcho-capitalists (a political 'movement' which is, I must admit, the most incredibly obscure thing ever). He's probably talking about the ones without a lust for bourgeoisie blood. I turned my attention to the black girls.

"These guys don't even believe in democracy!" (neither do I, but I'm trying to halt the Red Menace here) "They want an armed revolution and a dictatorship!"

One of them ignored me, but I get the attention of the other. She looked baffled. Absolutely nothing in her life has prepared her for this: being caught between an angry, bearded something or other and a hardcore Maoist pretending he's John Kerry. They get fliers, and leave. The Maoist walked away down the street, after reiterating that I'm a*****head.

"Forward, forward!" I yelled. "Forward to your socialist revolution! It's going to happen, really.