Category: Comrades
No kings (just one royal pain)
Yes, kids, it’s almost that time again — time to hit the streets and make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lard.
More than 3,000 No Kings events had been scheduled as of a couple weeks ago, with organizers and supporters alike hoping for a mammoth turnout:
Last June, more than five million people took to the streets across more than 2,100 events during the coalition’s first day of action. Then, more than seven million people protested across more than 2,700 events last October. The March 28 mobilization is the next step in this growing movement, with organizers anticipating it will be one of the largest single-day nonviolent nationwide protests in U.S. history.
It’s not a riot going on, or at least it shouldn’t be. And with any luck at all we won’t all wind up on Cellblock No. 9, wearing bruises and zip-ties. Here in The Duck! City we’re gonna be in a park, with shade trees and music, even a march! (Cue the revolution scene from “Reds,” but without all that winter garb.)
Rallies and marches can feel a tad performative, mostly because they are. But they help you remember that you’re not alone, it’s not just you or the Voices in your head, there really is something of a problem here, and if we’re lucky, and there are enough of us intent on doing something about it, we can use ballots instead of bullets because the last game in town that needs a shot in the arm these days is the funeral racket.
A mass thumbing of the national noses may also give an atomic wedgie to a certain diapered dictator at some point during his 24 hours per diem of TV-watching, assuming the legacy media actually turns on and tunes in.
Which is always something of an assumption. So, before you head out the door to your local No Kings gathering, call a couple TV stations and invite them to join the party.
No, not that party. Whaddaya think this is, a Warren Beatty movie?
R.I.P., Gregg Bagni
Gregg Bagni was too much for this world. Possibly because he was not of this world.
Or so he said, anyway. Ack ack ack.
The former Schwinn pitchman and Dispenser of Alien Truth has returned to the Mothership after a snowboarding accident in British Columbia, according to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. He may have been 72, but it’s so hard to tell with these extraterrestrial types. I mean, just look at Doctor Who.
Like the Doctor, Bagni had been known to get around and about. In November 2009 he emailed to mention, among other things, being fresh off a little spin through the Dolomites — 650 miles with nearly 68,000 (!) feet of climbing — in the company of Clif Bar’s Gary Erickson.
I had skipped Interbike that year, so I don’t know what Bagni might’ve been up to in Sin City. But if he had been there, it would’ve been something. That was the one sure thing at Interbike, year in and year out. The Bagman would be up to something, and his act was always worth the price of admission.
For Schwinn’s 100th anniversary he hired 100 Elvis impersonators to march down the Strip, led by Fr. Guido Sarducci.
In 2003 he was stalking the show with what I described in BRAIN as “a large, garishly painted wrestler who will be delighted to tie you into a granny knot while the Bagman snaps away with his Polaroid.”
And way back in 1999 — I think it was 1999, anyway — he drove a herd of cheerleaders to the VeloPress booth, where I was to be signing copies of my freshly minted collection of VeloNews cartoons, “The Season Starts When?”
I have no idea whether I was on his schedule. I do know that I didn’t want to be doing any goddamn book-signing, in public, unarmed, where all my many enemies could relish my humiliation, because I was certain that precisely nobody would want the book, especially if they had to deal with me to get one.
But I wound up signing a ton of books and people were pleasant and appreciative and I can only attribute it to extraterrestrial intervention.
Bagni was a prolific correspondent, and wrote in the manner of Archy from Don Marquis’s column in the New York Sun of the 1900s. Archy was a defunct vers libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach who borrowed the columnist’s typewriter from time to time. He had to dive head-first onto the keys to work them, but couldn’t operate the shift key, and thus Archy’s works were all sans capital letters.
In April 2021 Bagni wrote on Medium, in lowercase, about a few “great lessons” he’d learned and been able to put into play after having had a gun shoved in his face— twice — deciding he would not live past the age of 30, and “living [his] life accordingly.”
“frankly … been pretty lucky being able to ride this crazy blue ball this long.
If you read it you’ll get a good idea of how he turned out. And if you never met him, you’ll wish you had.
Peace to Gregg Bagni, his family, friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators. Ack ack ack.
Forward sprung
Daylight Saving Time is stupid.
Still, this year’s “spring forward” meant we spent one less hour today stacking sandbags against the tide of bullshit flowing downstream from the Orange House.
So, winning? Maybe. We must take these little victories wherever we find them.
This morning I burned a little of my saved daylight by reading an essay in The New York Times, in which the daughter of two former American revolutionaries found the Oscar-nominated “One Battle After Another” to be “nothing more than entertainment” rather than “a battle cry for a generation.”
Huh. Hollywood veterano Paul Thomas Anderson cranks out a rapid-fire rom-com inspired by a rambling mythical history by Thomas Pynchon, and Hope Reeves — who herself is working on a comic memoir of being raised by retired Weatherpersons James H. Reeves and Susan Hagedorn — finds it regrettably unserious.
Well. Shit. Can’t have that. Can we?
Why not?
• • •
I myself have been regrettably unserious since — well, since forever — and, like the thought of suicide, it has gotten me successfully through many a bad night. And a few fairly grim days, too, whether shortened or lengthened by government fiat.
My upbringing was unremarkably middle-class — Catholic Republican father, Presbyterian Democrat mother — and yet somehow I came to cast myself in the role of atheist radical son.
A diet rich in Warner Brothers cartoons, Marx Brothers movies and Mad magazine will give a kid a taste for anarchy. Who do you root for? Not The Man, that’s for sure. It was one battle after another and Elmer Fudd lost every one of them.
So while I would eventually become interested in Weatherman, and personally sample various flavors of Marxism — Socialist Workers Party, October League, Communist Party (M-L) — these last two, like Weatherman, offspring of the Students for a Democratic Society — my first real political infatuation was with the Yippies.
• • •
Elmer wanted to cut off my lovely hair and send me to Vietnam. I wanted to Bugs Bunny his ass. And so did the Yippies, whose regrettably serious alias was the Youth International Party.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were probably the most famous of these Groucho Marxists, whose theater was the street. Levitating the Pentagon. Throwing money at traders at the New York Stock Exchange. Running an actual pig — Pigasus the Immortal — for president.
The Yippies invaded Disneyland, taking over Tom Sawyer’s Island, threw pies, and applied for a permit to blow up the General Motors building. When it was denied, the Yippies shrugged and said it only proved that it was impossible to work within the system to change the system.
Alas, that old system sure proved durable, resisting change from within and without.
Some Yippies became yuppies. Rubin traded his Viet Cong flag shirt for the suit and tie of a businessman. He died in 1994 after being hit by a car while crossing Wilshire Boulevard, in front of his penthouse apartment. He was 56, well past the 30th birthday after which nobody was to be trusted.
Hoffman jumped bail after a dope bust and went underground. He eventually resurfaced, did some light time, and returned to activism.
But it was the Eighties — remember those fabulous Eighties, kids? — and the old act didn’t seem to be going over so well with a new audience. Hoffman died, reportedly by his own hand, in 1989. He was 52.
• • •
By then, mockery had already begun infiltrating (or was being co-opted by) The Establishment. “Saturday Night Live,” which debuted in 1975 with guest host George Carlin, somehow remains relevant in an aw-shucks-just-kiddin’ sort of way. David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had their innings, and Jimmy Kimmel is still in there pitching despite some booing from the luxury box at Fudd Stadium.
But there’s something about old-school, street-level mockery that really gets The Man’s dander up. The reigning Man, Elmer Befuddled, who hires out his shotgunning of critters at home and abroad because bone spurs, watches a shit-ton of TV. And if he sees yuuuuge crowds from coast to coast rocking the next No Kings rallies on March 28, giving him the old Warner Bros.’ sendoff — “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”— he might just do a John Belushi, spin right out of his chair, and hit the deck in a slobbering, shitting sayonara.
It comforts me to think back to one of Gilbert Shelton’s “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” cartoons, in which political candidate Rodney Richpigge commits suicide by proxy, ordering his chauffeur to drive off a bridge because he thinks people are laughing at him (a half pint of amyl nitrite getting an unexpected wash in Fat Freddy’s jeans was the actual giggle-trigger).
Hope, as they say, springs eternal. No matter what time it is.
‘Thank you for this new day. …’
Looking back over some old training logs I was smugly congratulating myself on what I thought was a strong start to this, the Year of Our Lard 2026.
“366 miles for January,” sez I to myself, no one else being handy. “Wrapped it up with the first 100-mile week of the New Year. Not bad; not bad at all.”
And then I checked in with a couple old velo-newsie bros. No, not fellow refugees from that once-storied journal of competitive cycling — rather, fellow refugees from the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. Like Your Humble Narrator, they also ride bicycles.
The Supervisor and the M-Dogg both live in Northern California now, and it’s been nearly 20 years since the three of us last saddled up together. I’m the only one who’s fully retired, in part because I’m the only one who has a wife with a job of work, which for an old slacker keen to skip his pulls into the wind is like drafting a UPS truck on a summer day.
Anyway, there we were, chatting away via text, and the M-Dogg mentions that he just wrapped a 49.6-mile ride with 2,020 feet of vertical.
Yow.
I mentioned having done a leisurely 3-mile trail run, explaining that I got a late start and didn’t feel like kitting up for a ride.
“And here the M-Dogg is already cranking out the half-centuries,” I added.
“Mo, tell him your January mileage,” says The Supe.
“760 in January,” replies the M-Dogg, “only possible in a very dry January.”
That’s 760 miles. Not kilometers, furlongs, cubits, rods, or whatever the hell it is that Californicators use to measure the distance between organic vineyards and fair-trade java shops. And here I was, cackling over the little 366-mile egg I laid last month, which was even drier here in the Duck! City desert.
“Comparisons are odious,” they say. Ho, ho. When When John Fortescue wrote that shit he was probably on the short end of a miles-gobbling contest with Henry VI, who covered a lot of ground during the Wars of the Roses.
“Better luck next year, Forty old chum! Oh, dear, here comes Edward, with that ‘Oo’ d’ye think is the bloody king around here, mate?’ look on his face. Right, I’m off. …”
Which brings us to this poem from James Crews, “Winter Morning,” from which our headline comes. Unwrap your gift and be grateful for whatever it is you find inside.
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