Highway 1A, or “The Free Speech Freeway” is an eighteen mile section of Interstates 580 and 80 that’s been hosting a fluid exhibition of protest signs and artwork continuously since mid June. Numbering over 500 separate pieces so far, with an average of 25 to 40 appearing at any given time, sometimes more and rarely less, between Mills College and San Pablo Dam Rd.
Apart from being more focussed in terms of geography and message, H1A/FSF differs from my usual modus operandi in being less overpass-intensive and using more of the roadsides and landscape. Also, I’m doing a lot more small signs placed closer to the roadway, and incorporating found items like wood scraps and broken furniture for structural display. Turns out there’s a veritable cornucopia of building materials lining our roadways — conveniently located anywhere you look.
Although it began as a solo effort, Highway 1A/FSF has been joined by a few others, most notably local Communists and Republicans in a rare show of unity between the two groups, demonstrating the power of art to bring together even the most disparate elements of society. Their spontaneous participation could uncover potentially exploitable points of commonality and highlights the nurturing role of the Artist-as-Provider, bestowing upon both the Communist and Republican parties the Healing Gift of a common enemy.
This is the first of what will be a multi-part diary. I’m rushing rushing rushing this part out because today is so special special special…
What I Did This Summer, Part One:
Where I Draw The Line
“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”
— Oscar Wilde
By the sheerest of coincidences, the earliest roots of this project can be traced back to an event which occurred 50 years ago today - November 17th, 1971 - with the premiere airing of “Her Sister’s Shadow”, otherwise known as “That Episode of The Brady Bunch Where Jan Says ‘Marcia Marcia Marcia.” When 12 year old actress Eve Plumb first unleashed that verbal triptych on the world, there was no way of knowing the kind of socio-cultural impact it would go on to have. But if you had hazarded a guess of “not very much” you would’ve been right. I don’t actually remember if I saw it myself, but I should point out this one uncanny aspect of my research: Literally everyone I’ve spoken to who did hear Ms. Plumb speak the line knew exactly what they were doing when it happened.
Trying to downplay uncomfortable facts like trying to surreptitiously remove sanctions his 2nd day in office, lying about 170 meetings/phone calls with Russian officials by his campaign staff and transition team, both sons boasting in interviews that they had so much money coming in from Russia and his own painfully obvious lickspittle subservience to Vladimir Putin, TFG first enlisted Sean Spicer who, when asked about the investigation launched the dressing defense:
“If the president put Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight somehow that’s a Russia connection…”
Brilliant response if in fact the reporter had been asking about salad dressing rather than an FBI investigation. But since she wasn’t, I think Spicer may have come up with the ultimate in straw man arguments.
It was this tweet (May 30, 2018) that first utilized the Jan Brady line from 1971. By replacing “Marcia” with “Russia” the phrase was transformed, at least for Republicans, into a magical incantation of partisan defense, giving any of the faithful who pronounced it an almost Christlike ability to absolve.
As a non-believer, I never quite understood this, but I did notice something interesting. “Russia Russia Russia,” used as it is manages to either embody or reflect a stunning number of things that are wrong with the Republican Party today: it’s smug, dismissive and condescending. It’s non-cooperative, incurious, whiny and complaining. It’s a juvenile, parroted, side-stepping non-answer that conflates veracity and political merit with entertainment value. It’s willfully and even proudly ignorant and self-absorbed in both the scope of its concern and by dint of being functionally useless to anyone else. It’s un-American in the historical sense that it absolutely ignores, if not directly opposes the Founders’ wishes to avoid and be ever-vigilant against foreign interference, and in the current, functional sense for exactly the same reasons. It seeks to stifle, rather than promote debate or further inquiry and adopts the mantle of victimhood in order to cover its own crimes, and more specifically the crimes of Donald Trump and his family, directly putting both the man and party before country. It is also stupid and wrong.
I’m sure there are other ways as well, and if anyone ever uses R3 in the course of a political discussion it might be fun to point some of this out. The one time anyone ever said it to me in earnest as a dismissal I think my response was something like “Yeah, whatever...” rolling my eyes and ending the conversation. It still pains me to think of it because we were right by Fisherman’s Wharf and only about 50 feet from unobstructed access to the San Francisco Bay. He was not a large man and it would’ve been relatively easy to pick him up and literally cast him from our shores. (Although I realize any actual attempt would play out far more awkwardly in real life than it does in my mind.)
But of course we’re not like that: We don’t use violence, we use words. Unfortunately, we haven’t been using them enough to counteract the right wing noise machine, and that’s what brought us to where we are today. That “liberal media” they talk about, for every minute America hears a liberal defining the liberal agenda, how many minutes do you suppose they hear a conservative defining it?
Me neither, but it’s a fuck of a lot. And it’s been going on for a long time.
I’ll end this with a rant. It started coming to me once the customary ten minute wait time had passed after talking to the gentleman at Fisherman’s Wharf. There’s some language. And it could’ve gone on for way, way longer. But it should clarify why I’m doing so many of those GOP signs with the hammer and sickle, as I’ve been taken to task by friends for that, as well as the Communists and Republicans. And why I think the dismissal “Russia Russia Russia” represents the very apex of human achievement in the fiercely competitive field of hypocrisy.
How To Respond When A Republican Uses The Phrase “Russia Russia Russia”
(NOT APPROPRIATE FOR USE IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. PLEASE USE DISCRETION. DO NOT USE WHILE ATTENDING YOUNG CHILDREN’S BIRTHDAY PARTIES OR WHILE UNDERGOING PSYCHIATRIC OBSERVATION.)
“Aw, Hey, I’m sorry about that man. I didn’t mean to annoy you. If that’s what you meant... I was just using the Mueller Report as an example. But all I was asking was for you to listen for a sec. I wasn’t gonna go on for years about it, or like, ask for all your tax money — and everybody else’s tax money - for Russia, I mean. ‘Cuz you wanna hear annoying? That’s annoying. When someone goes on and on about Russia and takes all the tax money and buys nuclear weapons and aims a bunch of fuckin’ missiles at Moscow.
You’re pretty young so maybe you don’t know about it, so just let me tell you, ok? Let me tell you about ‘annoying.’ Annoying is when you hear about fucking Russia for Years! Annoying is seeing all the fucking money go to nuclear weapons, ok? Shit that that doesn’t do anything except scare the shit out of everybody, And I’m trying to remember what the fucking reason was… Or the excuse... and I’m pretty sure it was the invasion of Afghanistan. You know, cuz every fucking person living in Moscow, they must’ve been in on it. Right? And then wouldn’t ya know it? They start pointing more missiles back at us! And there was so much of this shit that NOBODY was immune. So everybody’s trying to live their lives here on the planet — and life’s pretty good y’know?Except now there’s just one extra problem — you could get fucking VAPORIZED any second! Any time you walked into a room you could look at the other people and wonder ‘ Are these the people I’m going to die with?” So hey, you wanna talk about annoying? How’s THAT sound? Pretty Fucking Annoying — DOESN’T IT? ‘’Cuz that’s the kind of shit we had to put up with when Reagan was President and you guys were the assholes who wouldn’t shut-the-fuck-up about Russia!
And just a minute ago, what was I asking for? Your fucking attention. That’s all.
So how about you and me we get one thing straight okay? Until you’ve spent a couple of YEARS waiting to be VAPORIZED along with everybody you’ve ever known, and waved goodbye to a trillion fucking dollars for the privilege, YOU don’t get to say SHIT to ME about RUSSIA! And go tell the rest of the miserable little traitors in that viper’s nest you call a party there’s still some goddam rules in this world and one of them is you don’t get to pretend something’s meaningless after saying it meant everything in the world. Maybe under normal circumstances you could because under normal circumstances ‘everything in the world’ is a GODDAM FIGURE OF SPEECH! But Thanks to you fucking IDIOTS it meant LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE GODDAM THING ON THE PLANET RIGHT DOWN TO THE LAST FUCKING KOALA BEAR!
“I’ve watched you bastards drag this country down my whole goddam life. I’ve watched you start fucking wars like it was nothing and then go apeshit over a blowjob. I watched you try to pretend September 11th was done by some different guy, okay? Do you even have any idea of how fucking stupid that is? While the whole goddam world’s watching and going WHAT THE FUCK? Because changing bad guys — apparently you all thought that was something you could actually do! Y’know, there’s some of us who still LIKE this country! And we’re sick of constantly being embarrassed by you fucks! And just because we don’t go around sticking the flag in everybody’s face and yelling out ‘USA is Number One’ — That doesn’t mean we’re not patriotic okay? It just means we aren’t a bunch of fucking assholes! We’ve had to listen to you spout your Holier-Than-Thou-Family-Values God-and-Country Bullshit year-after-goddam-year and then go and elect a human punchline. We listened to you yelling about ‘Four Dead Americans’ for three fucking years and then when your guy wastes four hundred thousand you didn’t say a goddam WORD!
I thought you’d finally reached your limit — that it wasn’t even mathematically possible to be more hypocritical than that. But no… Y’all actually managed to do it. ‘Cuz after spending all that money and scaring the shit outta everybody for fuckin’ Years... After having us risk Every Single Thing in the Whole Goddam World to fight against this terrible fucking threat and then you turn around and wanna pretend everything’s all hunky-fuckin’-dory and give me this mincing little Russia Russia Russia shit like I’M the asshole for even bringing it up? Then THAT’S IT you miserable little fuck, WE’RE FUCKING DONE. Every Single Thing In The Whole Goddam World is where I draw the fucking line!
And one more thing. Just because we didn’t all get nuked, don’t think there wasn’t a fucking holocaust! ‘Cause for the sake of anticommunism you stupid fucks backed up every bloodthirsty tyrant and murdering asshole in the third world so you can go ahead and add about two million bodies and a whole fucking river of blood to the Trillions of Dollars and jeopardizing Every Single Thing in the Whole Goddam World to the LIST OF FUCKING ANNOYANCES we’ve all had to put up with for no fucking reason other than you stupid, spineless, whiny-ass little Republican bastards just couldn’t stop shitting yourselves over GODDAM FUCKING
RUSSIA! RUSSIA RUSSIA!”