“No.”

“What if I do?”

“If you do, I break your camera.”

“I’ll sue you if you do that.”

“Sue me.”

There was a Tea Party protest not far off and I thought immediately of joining them, of recounting this sordid tale of governmental oppression. Down with tyrants!

I thought also of snapping his photo just to see what happens, but he was a real thug–hunched shoulders, snarly, short.  

His partner came over. “Can I take your picture?” I asked his partner. “I prefer you didn’t.” “All right,” I said. “Because you said it nicely.” “Okay,” he said, smiling.

Then the thug says, “I’m willing to let it go. Get lost. Get lost!”

My water was boiling and my bag was ready to drop: Fear no tyrant! I leveled the camera.

But the kettle lifted before the whistle began. 

I went back to the hotel and ranted to my wife over the phone, the poor girl. I went on for a while.

Meanwhile, you’re on camera everywhere you go in D.C. Did anyone ever ask you how you felt about that?

Questions: Tyranny on their part? Or puerile frustration on my part? Or both? It’s always others who are tyrants, isn’t it?

I know! I’ll show that bastard. I’ll blog about it! It’s what Thomas Paine would have done.

Maybe I’m missing something. I thought the prize was that you didn’t die.

I’ve lost several family members to cancer. It sucks. Maybe that’s what the park is for: the people who were left behind.

But I do know that when I was loosing them, when I knew they were really going, or, worse yet, when I got off a plane from a funeral and drove past it on Harbor Dr., that park pissed me off. How smug–me or it?

But for some reason all those dicks get out of the drip and peel on a nice brand-name hoodie. They think nothing of the bumper stickers on the back of their truck. Or where their shiny stick was shaped–or even whether it was shaped. They never consider that they are walking bilboards for the “surf industry.” In essence, they are unpaid whores.  

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal a while back about the CEO of Calloway golf clubs, who basically said that as a publicly traded company, Calloway must create a certain number of golfers every year to remain profitable. So they support easier greens and promote irons that make the game easier: Apparently, difficulty keeps many people out of golfing (I would have guessed hayfever or fear of lightning).

The surf industry is similar. Their wares–mostly t-shirts, shitty sunglasses, etc.–also include a commodified form of surfing. They sponsor the contests and promote the tours and prop up the magazines and in general promote surfing as one thing in order to convert as many non-surfers as possible to a simple stereotype. These converts in most cases should be golfing, not surfing. Put another way: These are the deuchebags who will make your break more crowded with deuchebags.

So, surfers, next time you see a guy in a pair of shiny new name-brand sunglasses and a sweet name-brand hoody and some of those awesome sandals that have bottle openers on the sole and the super-hyper-flex board shorts, tell him, nicely but firmly, ”You sir are a whore. Unpaid.”

I’m passive-aggressively kidding about that last part.

He’s the best blogger out there that I’ve been able to find. Maybe that’s because I don’t like blogs (hey, wait a second …). I find the medium tiresome–bitchy, gabby, like they’re shrieking in my ear, and totally self-referential. For the most part.

Greenwald embraces all of my favorite attributes in a political writer: he’s logically consistent, errudite, and humble. He’s neither a liberal nor a conservative. He doesn’t like Obama’s policies and he’s worked for the ACLU and the Cato Institute. His politics: libertarian-liberal. Something like that. He is above all objective and critical. 

So yes, it can be depressing to read him. Sometimes he seems routinely angry. There’s nothing fun, or short, about the way he writes. It reads like an argument from a well-read and opinionated lawyer. 

I sometimes disagree with him. But unlike other bloggers who wrap you up in the web of their pajamas and keyboard cords and foul breath, he makes you think about the issue. The drivel we routinely encounter in the NY Times, see on Fox News and hear on NPR, he takes this to task. You are reminded that Republicans and Democrats are on the important issues indistinguishable. You are reminded that war is death and calls for war come from politicians and scribes who skulk away far from the front. You are reminded that anti-Muslim sentiment is becoming accepted among political class in America. Etc.

You are in essence reminded of the reality that hides behind the shimmering curtain of the status quo. What more can you ask for?

This trend also dangerous. Andrew Cohen in the Atlantic said that it’s fueling a new kind of domestic terrorist–ala Tim McVeigh. I think there’s a fundamental difference betweent the guy who flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin and McVeigh.  

Here’s why. Nobody likes taxes. Some are more mature about it than others, but liberals hire tax attorneys to pay the minimum too. When you act like a baby and get called on it, you adopt the rhetoric around you, just like you did in the sandbox. No fair!

McVeigh developed his thinking over time. He did a lot of reading and plotting. I think a lot of the Tea Partiers, on the other hand, are conveniently outraged. “Taxes are fucking bullshit, bro, you know.” So you opposed the Iraq war, right? You oppose farm subsidies, right? Close down Gitmo? McVeigh had a consistent answer for all of these questions.

A few days back I saw a crazy homeless guy who stood in the middle of the downtown sidewalk yelling, “The constitution of the United States of America says in god we trust. In god we trust police state. Police man violates–violates my rights. My rights! I’m a citizen of the United States of America. In god we trust! A free Christian nation!”  

This is telling to me. Could some of these people have more sustained attention spans? No doubt. Some may even be dangerous. But I don’t think this guy had thought his stance out too much. He just wanted to shout something like the guy on the AM radio.

I never thought I’d see the day when the homeless insane rallied against global climate change science. That day has come. Remember those crazy Little League dads? Pretty soon they’re going to yelling at the ump, “I’ll water the tree of liberty with your blood!!!!” Hockey mom: “Don’t tread on me!!!!”

Who’s responsible for all this? We all are. You and me and Breitbart the Frothy and Nacy Pelosi and  Billy Baldwin, etc. This is our sandbox. We need to listen and reconcile and address issues as a body politic, like adults worthy of a vote. It’s called democracy and it’s a form of–oh my!–government.