We were downtown last night, taking our son to visit with the USC Marching Band who are in town for the CU game this evening. As it turned out we spent an hour in a small v.i.p. setting with Dr. Bartner, his wife, and a dozen or so leaders of the USC program, who gave us a presentation of the amazing history of the USC band and Dr. Bartner’s career, with the experience capped by hearing some warm up routines with a contingent of senior players brought here for the game. All in all, a superlative experience we had not expected – we looked through a window into a truly amazing world that any kid would give his eye teeth to join.
So, it was a rare occasion for us downtown and coincidently the occupation is the subject of probably half of the broadcast TV news and talk radio shows. Michael Moore was in town today to pump up the faithful, and we decided to cruise Broadway in front of the capitol on our way home to see what all the fuss is about.
We saw thirty or forty people huddled around each other on the sidewalk directly across the street from the capitol, and about a half a block of various sized piles of messy human belongings, and a fair amount of trash. It looked like a refugee camp, very sad, even pathetic. The righteous democratic outpouring we’re bombarded with by the media is rooted in a fiction, a delusion of grandeur.
The tea party had significant numbers in the streets across the country and in Washington and the media all but ignored them. This scamming bunch of several dozen pathological malcontents is getting enough media coverage to make it look like the second coming. Go see for yourself. As Gertrude Stein once wrote about Oakland, “there is no there there.”