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	A Protest Protest Retrospective
The Protest Protest: A retrospective I all started back sometime in 2002. I was at Portland's Pioneer Square on a Friday afternoon playing footbag, when I started hearing speakers from the north east side of the square, talking variously about the war in Afghanistan, the US government, for legalization of Marijuana (hey, why not chuck that in there too) and whatever else was on thier minds that day (who can resist a public soapbox). Now everyone has trigger words, they are words that elicit a charged emotional responce. For example the word "Nazi" is a trigger word for many people. Mention it in a converation and they have a very emotional reaction and stop listening to your arguement (see Godwin's Law) In my case my trigger words are "Mother Earth." I stood there in the square half listening to various rambling, poorly delivered speaches, but when I heard those words something happened, like a switch had been thrown in my brain. The next Friday at work I made a sign that read "Save the Gay Palestinian Trees to Stop the War for Jesus." I took it down to the now weekly protest and prowdly held it aloft. To be honest most people can't be bothered to read anything more than 3 words long so other than a few laughs I was largely ignored, but the seeds had been planted. That Sunday down at the Basement Pub's trivia night I told my friends about the sign. They all thought it was great and started thinking of other signs I could make. Some of the ideas were pretty clever. We talked about it on and off for a few months but nothing ever came of it. Finally one Friday I was sitting at home and finally thought, fuck it. I called up Ed, the conversation went something like this: ME: "Are you doing anything right now?" ED: "No, why?" ME: "Let's finally go down to Pioneer Square with those signs." ED: "Ok." Who knew history could be so borring? Ed picked up some poster board and we did up a few signs. As best I can remember our original signs by creator were, ED:"Honk if you hate protestors" ED:"This sign is: A.Ironic B. Sarcastic C. Meaningless D. All of the above" ME:"Shave the whales" ME:"Prostitute Bush for War crimes" and of course ME:"Save the Gay Palestinian Trees to Stop the War for Jesus" and ME:"Free Quebec" on the reverse. We shanghaied my brother and the three of us headed downtown. My greatest fears as we slowly walked the last few blocks with our signs we that A. people were going to physically attack us (as it turned out this did eventually happen) or B. even worse, they were going to be decent about it. If people had come up to us and said something equivelent to "ok, we get the joke, you guys aren't helping, please leave." I probably would have felt about as low as I could have. That would have said to me they were trying to make a difference, had a healthy self-awareness and in general that I had underestimated them. Fortunately I needn't have worried and people's constant honks in responce to "Honk if you hate protesters" did much to asuade my fears. By the time we got around to doing the Protest Protest, Portland's weekly anti-war/government/Republican/soap/whatever protest had grown to quite a large afair. We managed to get there right at the end of their gathering (fortunately, in retrospect I'm glad we didn't try to disturb their meeting). We let off a short rally cry of "What do we want? No more hippies! When do we want it? 1973!" to announce our presence and simply waited, they came to us. What happened next can only be described as one of the best moments of my life. No one asked us anything. If fact they didn't try to tell us anything. Mainly they just screamed. And what they screamed was beautiful because it had nothing to do with our signs. They screamed at us we were Republican stuges, pro-war, needed to kill some babies (one particularly tasteless sign I wish we had never used later read "solve overpopulation, drop babies not bombs"). At one point we actually had someone screaming at us for making fun of Republicans standing no more than 5 feet away from the guy telling us to kill babies. It took them the better part of 10 min to figure out they were accusing us of totally different things and started screaming at each other. Basically it couldn't have gone any better. We went down the next week with more people and a cameraman. In preparation I wrote down the dictionary deffinition of irony on one of my signs (this can be seen on the Protest Protest trailer). We also had to litterally carry my brother along with us. He tried to hide next door with Wil, not realizing Wil was coming with us "Wil opened the door to them." As a consolation we made him a sign which read "I'm here against my will" and on the reverse "send help." This second run of the Protest Protest even more solidified in my mind that I was doing the right thing. After that point we started putting out guidelines for our protest. Our signs had to be meaningless. I once created a sign that said "Free Tibit" When someone came up to me and pointed out the the plight of the Tibetan people was very serious I imediately got rid of the sign. I wasn't trying to make fun of their ideas, I was letting them make fun of themselves. As Ed put it, we were the funhouse mirror. We started handing out flyers, and our numbers grew. At one point we had more than 25 people to the "real" protest's 60 or so. It was at that protest, in summer now, that the whole thing kind of climaxed. The "real" protest had realised we weren't going anywhere (of course they hadn't realised that actually talking with us would have made us go away) and they had become increasingly confrontational. To be honest so had we. I can only speak for certain of my own motivation in this whole affair, but I can say that a lot of people who joined our ranks were either general trouble makers or genuinly hated the protesters. Ed to be honest was a little of A and a little of B. Now there were two signs I had thought of early on which I didn't have the courage to use. One of them which thankfully went unused was "mother earth sucks dick for crack," but the other was "Hitler was a Vegetarian." The latter is by the way an historically verrifiable fact. I finally made the sign and made Ed carry it. On this day Wil was filming and we had our biggest turnout. We stood on the ridge above Pioneer Courthouse Square and sounded our rally cry, but the protest stayed where they were, so we went to them. At this point Wil had disapeared so I went to find him. After a min I couldn't find him and didn't want to mis anything so I went back to the edge and looking down I saw that most of our counter protest members were hiding their signs or had wandered off, but what a glorious signt I did see. I saw a doghnut of people, 6 or 7 deep surriouding Ed, holding "Hitler was a Vegetarian" just as high above his head as he could and beaming. I quickly questioned whether I really wanted to get in the middle of this and went down. One currious thing about this whole process and what kept me interested was the fact that but for two exceptions, the aforementioned "Free Tibit" and "Honk if you Hate Protesters" no one ever referenced the actual signs when yelling at us. In general they just accused us of things we didn't say. In the case of "Honk if you hate Protesters" at least twice a protest we'd have the following conversation: Some idiot: "But you're a protester too." Ed: "You know I never thought about that. It doesn't make much sense huh?" Anyway as I worked my way through the crowd to within ear shot I got to hear what must be the finest thing Ed has ever done in his life. Amazingly they were actually trying to talk with him, or at least a couple were while the rest just shouted abuse at him. There were three problems with this. 1. Ed actually knows a lot about politics, and government and they didn't. Amongst other things the total look of misunderstanding when he attempted to talk about the Federalist Papers gave them away. 2. Ed is an asshole. He was mocking their lack of knowledge in the most wonderful way. Finally 3, although they were ostensibly argueing with Ed, their eyes never left the sign. They were enraged, but somehow they just couldn't bring themselves to directly address the sign. Finally after getting more and more frustrated one girl looked at Ed and said: "And don't make fun of vegetarians. If were were all vegetatians WE COULD FEED THE PLANET!" After a moment's pause Ed replied in perfect deadpan At that point I lost it and started litterally rolling on the ground laughing. But from then on the Protest Protest was basically over. I could give any number of reasons but really we just ran out of interest. With the power of retrospect I can say it's for the best, because we had made an error in disturbing their protest that day. For my mind the Protest Protest was about getting Portland's protesters to make fun of themselves with their accusations, agression and lack of understanding, but in no way did I want to stop them from gathering if they chose. Maybe I wanted them to think through their actions a little (ok a lot) better, but they have the right to assemble just like we did. As a final note to this story though I have to talk about Mike (I never learned his last name). Mike led "Portland's Peaceful Responce," aka the "real" protest. He led the songs (cringe) the walk, and gave speaches. I actually cought a few of his speaches, they were full of pupularisms, reteric, rumor and light on fact, but that's beside the point. He was posibly the first person to actually talk to us about what we were doing. But just when I thought he might have understood why we were down there, he came back after some weeks and said to us, Mike: "You've got this all wrong, Dadaism was an attack against the state." Me: "You know you're right, I'm wasting my time here." Mike" "Fuck you." At the big protest I talked about above he tore up my "Save the ..." sign (I was not holding it that rally). Now despite what you may think from reading this story I'm not a confrontational person. However tearing up something I've made is another one of my triggers and I went down the next week intending to find him durring the protest at the most public moment I could find and unleash a torrent of (verbal) abuse on him. Unfortunately I couldn't find him until the protest was over. When I finally spotted him I ran up beginning with "So is this your idea of protecting free speach? ..." when he countered with (and this is a direct quote) "If you touch me again I'll kick your ass and call the cops." Not realizing that A. it hadn't been me with the sign and B. the friend that had it hadn't touched the idiot. Anyway, at that point I really dropped the ball. In retrospect I should have tried to push him over the edge and get him to take a swing at me. Maybe it was for the best this way, he walked off and only once did I see him again. So what was it all about? Well that depends on who you ask. You might want to go back to the main article, I've alluded to a few reasons of mine, but the short version is we were there for the same reasons the protesters were, not to change anything, but to make ourselves feel better. A friend of mine told me she joined the "real" protest because it was a way to vent her frustration, better than staying at home being pissed off, and I guess that's what I was doing. I agreed with a lot of what these idiots said and the fact they had so much energy, but in the end did nothing other than have a big group think every week pissed me off. So I went down, got them to scream in the air pissed off about things I hadn't said and felt a little better. In the end, just like the "Portland Peaceful Responce" it was about nothing more than a big show.