There has been some controversy creaming up in the purlieus. We sent our guest reporter, Cadge (he prefers, 80’s pop-star-like, to remain surname-less) to milk some info.
Melting Under the Sun
I had an unequaled experience over the weekend attending a protest organized by the brilliantly perplexing intellects behind All Things Being Equal (All Equal for short; At-Be, for shorter)1.
The quasi-intellectual leadership and the gaggle of impressionable youth they call their “citizens’ army” conglomerated outside Abe & Ann’s Ice Cream Parlor & Cream-Soda Bar, in Rottingdale. Why the raging ado gainst this local mom-&-pop’s favorite, catering frozen sweet delights to syrup-glazed children? Walking amongst the strewn flyers and placards, the cups (the sign above the kiosk: “because water should be free”), which some eco-criminals apparently were too distracted to recycle, and other various detritus of a dirty, hot, sticky protest five-hours long and overcrowded, I reflected on all that I learned after a full afternoon engaged in active social justice. The indignation and self-righteousness of justice and rebellion still lingered exhaustingly in the thick, mid-summer air.
The chalk board above the display at Abe’s Parlor reads off a bevy of fanstastic tongue-twisters: Stravinksy’s Strawberry Strange; Fudga-wudga-whaaa; Choco-Coco Loco; Whatu’ boutu’ butter? Some flavours, like Lady Lucy’s Lover’s Magic Philtre, are house staples. Otherwise the flavors vary according to season or whim. One such feature, Mighty Whitey (Vanilla bean Ice cream, White chocolate chips, coconut) has been the catalyst to a hyperbolic fit by students from the nearest college. I needn’t elucidate why. The rumble and rage has caused a landslip of enraged people of varying levels of probity from the surrounding cities to tumble into this small, hitherto quiet townlet. The demonstration was soon appropriated by At-Be. A date for a more formal protest was set, news-mongers and other documenting outlets were alerted to the forthcoming festivities, and the outrage was set off with all the choreography and formality of a professional organizing insurrectionist group. An issue was turned into a cause, and the cause is now a national scandal.
Many of the attendees at the protest were college-students, or college-age, and— it would not hold by the criteria of any other era— college-educated. Susanna, sophomore year student of Feminist Studies, was breathily interruptive, a carpy harpy, always on vigil for sins of syntax. While you spoke— when you spoke— her face reverted automatically to a scrutinizing scrunch (its default physiognomy when conversing with the enemy) that stared at your moving lips anticipating a hive of moths to fly out. She was ever jumping onto the slightest excuse to demonstrate your psycho-sexual masochistic tendencies. Now, I readily admit to retaining those in heaps, but to Susan’s average, non-freak interlocutor this unbidden charge of latent psychological fetishes must come as a disarming surprise. Susanna’s cohorts were more or less versions of her. An interesting observatory note: those males in attendance, who were, as far as can be gleaned, not pansexual or gender fluid but of the category of straight, boring male, were very much in the position of attendee. They vented tacit or verbal agreement to the female leaderships’ assertions, but never initiated or broached a subject on their own. They shouted phrases severally, but never singly. They were the stimulated, but not the stumulii. Make of that what you will.
The wake of destruction is left for the townspeople to pay for and hapless volunteers to clean up. When gathering in a crowd to protest, ATBE and their minions run devastation through a city like a schizophrenic through a relationship, or an epileptic through a family; but singly, they are no more threatening than a child dependent who makes threats on his parents for denying him his deserts. Together they have the strength and uncontrolled fury of a manic epileptic in a fit; singly they are about as menacing as an anemic invalid.
Their collective rage was pent up and then discharged on the proprietors of A&A’s Ice Cream Parlor. It was unspeakably uncanny to see this freshet of rage unleashed against Abe, an anodyne joy-harbinger and Ann, his doddering Philippine wife. The fresh white faces of this bespectacled student body showed pockmarks of red caused by the vexation of all the screaming. Racist! they shout at Ming Lung, Mrs Abe. Down with Colonialism! As if this pastoral neighbourhood kiosk with the cream awning, painted zoo animals on the walls, and pied plastic seating was a military base for the launching of predatory battleships across the globe.
Maybe we can pull a fresh ice cream name from all this. Millenial’s Outrage Showgurt (contains: Milktoast).
At-Be, for those in ignorance, is that recent phenomenon in protestant activity which seeks, through fierce centralization, bureaucratization, anti-Free Speech laws, etc.—i.e., the governmental control by terror of the private spheres, otherwise known as a Fascism—to prevent against…Fascism. (Which, in their view, may result of a harmful word or misapplied pronoun.)