Some Seattle crosswalks are playing a tune you can dance to. | KUOW Photo/Monica Nickelsburg
As all old comrades know, the political mantra around here is, “Remember, kids, when you’re smashing the State, keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart.”
So, today’s Hero of the Revolution medal goes to whoever hacked a few Seattle crosswalk signals to play a deepfake of Jeff Bezos’ voice urging caution … not when crossing the street, but when taxing the rich.
Instead of the little robotic voice that tells you to wait until it’s safe to cross, at least five intersections in Seattle last week played something like this: “Hi, I’m Jeff Bezos. This crosswalk is sponsored by Amazon Prime with an important message. Please don’t tax the rich, otherwise all the other billionaires will move to Florida, too.”
Too bad there isn’t a video component to these easily-hacked signals. Someone could add a clip from Monty Python’s sketch “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” with deepfakes of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, et al., screeching about how they’ll all goosestep off to Epstein’s Island, submarine bunkers, or Mars if they’re not left unmolested to use all us little people as household help and/or fuck-puppets.
It’s not the infamous “writer’s block.” The problem is that the only thing I want to write about is all the you-know-what coming from you-know-where.
And isn’t there enough of that sort of thing available pretty much everywhere? Every day? Every second?
I find myself belatedly having some sympathy for the mouth-breathers who squealed like maladjusted brakes whenever my columns would veer off the course laid out in the race bible and careen into the real world. Which, if we’re being brutally honest here, was pretty much all the time.
“Stick to cycling!” they’d wail.
“Everything is political!” I’d bark.
Now I’m just a blogger and don’t have to meet a regular deadline or wrestle with nervous editors, penny-pinching publishers, and illiterate critics.
Too harsh? Hey, I read the letters.
“Go back to waxing your chain, Spanky,” I’d grumble. “Leave writing to the pros.”
These days I write for free, because I like it. Anyone who doesn’t like it is likewise free, to fuck off.
Still, I’m not entirely sociopathic. I have you hardcores, my small, deeply disturbed audience, to consider. And I don’t want every single brain-dump here to be of the rancid, greasy, orange variety. There are only so many different ways to say ‘BOHICA!'”
Thing is, to write about anything else feels vaguely criminal. Borderline treasonous. Anyone with a voice, however small, should be sounding off like they have a pair.
What’s a poor mad dog to do?
Well, you may imagine my delight when I stumbled across another scribbler in similar straits. Chuck Wendig is a published author — like, of actual books, an’ shit — and he has a new one due out April 29, “The Staircase in the Woods.”
I first noticed him when The New York Times included “Staircase” in a roundup of 24 new works of fiction to read. Then his name came up again over at Daring Fireball, the free-ranging blog by John Gruber, who promoted this “crackerjack essay” Wendig had written while trying to write about other stuff and promote the new book and basically just live his fucking life.
It’s titled “What It Feels Like, Right Now.” Here’s a sample:
Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.
Top-shelf stuff here, folks. Rage and comedy, despair and hope, the whole ball of wax. Writing as an escape and an act of resistance. Inspirational.
In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately ordered up his new book from my favorite local bookstore, Page 1 Books.
Shit, I’d have given him the $32.29 just for the essay.
Herself and I were part of a crowd guesstimated in the thousands that piled into Civic Plaza for our local Hands Off! rally, taking a raucous stand against fascism.
We carpooled with two friends to the thing, and met up with a few others at the plaza. Frankly, I was not expecting a big turnout — the “high” temperature of 43° just missed the record low, set in 1983, by a single degree — but I was delighted to be proven unsmart as per usual.
In Bibleburg it was easy to think we were the only libtards in town, though we knew better; it just felt that way sometimes. As in almost always, especially during election years.
In Duck!Burg, we’re surrounded by fellow travelers — but even here, with the endless cascade of caca pouring out of DeeCee, some days it seems that no umbrella, no matter how all-encompassing, can keep the stink off you.
So, yeah — even I, Captain Cynicism, was moved to see the throng hooting and hollering along with emcee Robert Luke, legendary activist Dolores Huerta, Mayor Tim Keller, former Interior Secretary turned gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland, state Attorney General Raúl Torrez, former Albuquerque poet laureate Mary Oishi, and others.
Better than nothing, but only barely.
There were so many excellent, creative, handmade signs in evidence that I regretted dogging it and downloading prefabs from the Hands Off! people. My faves included “Shut Your Heil Hole,” the ever-popular “Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus,” and “Deport This Pendejo,” with an image of everyone’s favorite Swasticar salesman. There was even an excellent “Chingatumaga” placard, which we praised to its grinning creator.
So, props to Hands Off! and their partners for pulling off this nationwide dance party, which grabbed a whole lot of headlines. Now, the question is … where do we go from here? Or as that old troublemaker V.I. Lenin put it, “What is to be done?”
“Is this how you’re spending your retirement money?” asks my old velo-comrade Charles Pelkey. “Check the sponsor at the bottom of the sign. Bwah ha ha ha.”
Apparently it’s a billboard in Michigan, though it looks like a Photoshop/A.I. kind of thing to me. Wasn’t my doing. Hmm, lemme think here … who do we know in Michigan?
Man, they really do it in the road at their West Gomorrah location. Let’s just look at the extras on this fabulous car! Wire-wheel spoke fenders, two-way sneeze-through wind vent, star-studded mudguards, sponge-coated edible steering column, chrome fender dents, and factory air-conditioned air from our fully factory-equipped air-conditioned factory. It’s a beautiful car, friend, with doors to match! Birch’s Blacklist says this automobile was stolen, but for you, friends, the complete price, only two-ninety-five hundred dollars, in easy monthly payments of twenty-five dollars a week, twice a week, and never on Sundays. …
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