I had to make a quick trip up to UC Berkeley last weekend... and the Happy Fun Cameras were rolling.
"Now here'll be some grist for my mill", I thought, "a photo-essay on Flake Central." I got so excited,
I even recorded a theme song!
So that's the bad news. The worse news is: I couldn't find a friggin' bumpersticker anywhere around the
campus, or at least nothing less innocuous than "Keep Tahoe Blue". I have a number of deeply prejudiced
explanations why this was the case:
It was Saturday. Campus activists are too cool to be on campus on the weekend.
Bicycles don't have a bumper to stick to.
I was around the "science" end of the campus, populated by people who don't have time for politics 'cause they're busy learning stuff
"A bumpersticker on my Mercedes? Puh-lease!" (I'm not kidding, either. There are a lot of shiny expensive cars and SUVs around the People's Republic of Berkeley)
However, before I gave up (and after I copied the gene expression papers I needed) I hit some paydirt on the
cafeteria bulletin board. So what are they exercised about at Berkeley these days?
Yes.
They're having the G8 conference at Kananaskis? Daaay-im, there's some serious high-level
international golfing gwan git done that week. Also, Kananaskis is a bit out of town... has the G8 found an
anti-protestor strategy in holding the conference well away from the nearest "anarchosyndicalist organic
hemp collective and record store"?
Raise your fist to stop the giant black bird of capitalism from devouring the farm workers! Higher,
brothers and sisters, higher, and --- hey, is that an Eddie Bauer backpack?
The head quote is
for the anarchist, there is no difference between what we do and what
we think, but there is a continual reversing of theory into action and action into theory.
Unfortunately, what with all the constant reversing and the theory and the action and the glaven, we
haven't discovered any good anarchist desktop publishing programs.
War --- what is it good for? Not keeping the cap on the ink jar, evidently. I think this is supposed
to be a guy on horseback leading a column of soldiers and a flock of --- samoyeds? sheep? --- into a
Rorschach test.
Being an activist means never having to clean the glass on your photocopier. I wish I could tell you
what the picture is of. My best guess is a junk shop proprietrix wearing a bustle.
Endnote: I was also disappointed that the Berkeley 7-11 wasn't a little more, y'know, bohemian... some reuseable
hemp spoonstraws would've been nice. The worst I can say is that they didn't have Coke slurpees. Damn hippies.
Postscript: I feel better perpetuating stereotypes since I sent some green to help the Berkeley Republican student
group reprint an issue of their newspaper which was stolen.
Sounds like they've got enough dough to reprint it now; hopefully they have a buck or two left over to hire some
goons to deal with the newspaper theft Soprano-style.
