A great sticky roiling tsunami of bland
Have y’all ever heard of the Great Molasses Disaster of 1919? On January 15, 1919 in Boston, Massachusetts a two-and-a-half million gallon tank of of crude molasses fifty feet above street level went bust, sending a 15-foot wall of goo down Commercial Street at 35 miles an hour. It utterly fucking flattened everything it passed over. Twenty-one dead, 150 wounded.
It’s true. It’s famous in Boston engineering circles. They’ve never really worked out what went wrong. (I’ll link to the story on this lady’s blog. She seems like a nice lady).
It came to mind because I’ve been browsing the Coffee Party USA‘s website tonight, and paddling around in their forums.
The Coffee Party — as I’m sure you know but I have to tell posterity — is the Obamanauts’ answer to the Tea Party movement. They’re trying to recapture the vague but thrilling sense of promise they got from the One’s candidacy, by letting loose a tsunami of meaningless rhetorical butterscotch. From their About Us page:
No lobbyists here. No pundits. And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a culture of civic engagement that is solution-oriented, not blame-oriented.
[…]
We want a society in which democracy is treated as sacrosanct and ordinary citizens participate out of a sense of civic duty, civic pride, and a desire to contribute to society. The Coffee Party is a call to action. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us an enduring gift — Democracy — and we must use it to meet the challenges that we face as a nation.
They hope to revive Obama’s campaign promise of relentless niceness and post-partisan happy-clappy nothingness, and it’s failing beautifully. Hopenchange is like The Blair Witch Project — a brilliant gimmick, but only works once.
But it’s high-larious to watch them try (especially the rank-and-file lefties in the forums, who aren’t very good at the new vanilla-speak). It isn’t easy to talk about substantial issues without ever saying anything substantial, revealing a political bias, proposing a solution, getting passionate or sending out any negative vibes, man. In fact, it isn’t possible.
Go — watch them try!
March 5, 2010 — 10:54 pm
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