The abscess of petulance

Or maybe better: Whine, whine, whine.

I did a little riff, filler really, on trackers trying to sit in Mark Dayton’s lap, Chihuahuas with Flipcams. Mitch Berg got the vapors. Mitch's lament is that I made people look foolish at the Tea Party rally at the Minnesota Capitol on April 15, 2010 — and got it on video — so how could I possibly complain about trackers preventing voters from having an ordinary conversation with Mark Dayton? How dare I, indeed?

There are several videos of interviews that I did at the rally in the sidebar: The Tea Party Tapes. I didn’t say that people looked foolish, Mitch, you did. But if the shoe fits, etc. & etc. I asked straightforward questions; they’re in the videos, too. If people hung themselves, they did it on their own. And by the way, I didn’t even put up some of the best stuff. I’m a humanitarian.

But my “camera man” and I certainly never interfered with anybody trying to talk to a politician, or anyone else, for that matter. We didn’t press people to talk to us.

Mitch reports that we didn’t identify who we were, and that some people thought we were from a television station. Well, look at the videos in the sidebar and decide for yourself if I identified myself. (I even interviewed a volunteer security person.)  And a television station? I’m wearing an orange baseball cap (not BLAZE orange, but orange) with the words Yellowstone National Park on it, and (to use Mitch’s term) a wrinkled black knit shirt. My “camera man,” who hadn’t operated a video camera in forty years (since as an intern in a public television station studio in Duluth), and who kept yelling, “Wait, wait; I’m not ready yet,” had a full beard, hair half-way down his back, and was wearing shorts. Our camera was a small amateur video camera.

And people thought we were Fox News?

I rest my case.

There was a woman who came to us and hissed, “Infiltrators!” and then waddled off. If I had wanted to make somebody look foolish, I would have asked this woman how it is that we could be “infiltrators” on the most public lawn in the State of Minnesota. She had a lot of damn nerve, frankly, but I let it pass. As the apparent ringmaster of the rally, Mitch says he got “reports” about us. The impulse to call for the ejection of the “undesirables” (whoever that happens to be at the moment) runs really strong in the Tea Party.

There was even an Emmer pig there, eating the public lawn (there is some imagery in there I haven’t explored yet):

(This is, incidentally, Taylor Swine, who has made several campaign appearance for Tom Emmer. Taylor is, by all accounts, a poised and well-mannered pet pig.)

And in conclusion, as they say. If you read Mitch’s post all the way to the end, and through the comments, you will find these:

Ben Says:
August 19th, 2010 at 12:41 pm

He called the cops on me last year, pussy. The left can dish it out but they sure can’t take it.

DiscordianStooj Says:
August 19th, 2010 at 7:28 pm

Ben, he called the cops on you for video taping him at a public event?

Ben Says:
August 19th, 2010 at 11:01 pm

No DJ for sending a “death threat” email. Let the little POS explain further if you really want to know. He is a fucking loser.

Ben, I will explain further, since you brought it up. Ben is my neighbor, a twenty-something who lives at home; Ben has always been beside himself over my blogging, but it has come to a head in the last year. I’ve never written about Ben. Well, until now, that is.

At a neighborhood party for a high school graduate last spring (well, last last spring, 2009), he came up to me and my wife and started swearing in a spittle-flecked rage, and nearly worked himself up into some kind of a seizure. His mom and dad weren’t there, and some of our neighbors took him in hand and led him away.

Shortly before the Fourth of July parade in 2009, Ben sent me an email and told me not to come around to the parade, because I would get more of the same, and that he intended to clear the neighborhood of the likes of me so it would be a place for “decent folks.” (Ben had, perhaps, been watching too many old Westerns with their “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us” rhetoric.) Here’s the Tea Party impulse to eject the undesirables at work again. Well, for whatever reason, we didn’t run into Ben at the parade.

A few days after the parade, however, Ben sent me an email threatening to put my wife “in my crosshairs.” Ben has commented favorably about guns on Mitch’s site; I viewed — and view, especially considering his earlier behavior and remarks  — that comment as a terroristic threat, made against a family member. I did make a complaint to the Edina Police, and they investigated.

So, that’s it. Well, actually, there is more, but we’ll leave it at that.