A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
the protest industry


Last Sunday night thousands gathered in Kennedy Hall on the Cornell campus to celebrate the Grady Awards. For those political shut-ins, Papist die-hards, right-wing dodos who don't know very much about the local protest scene, the Grady Awards happen to be Ithaca's equivilant of the Oscars, the Emmys and the People's Choice Awards all squeezed together in one glittering gala night of song, liberal chest-thumping and self-promotion.

Of course, the Grady Awards wouldn't be the Grady Awards without the Grady's. All 575 of them, to be exact, Ithaca's be-freckled, redhaired socially relevant hordes, filling the front rows, the back rows, the balconies, the restrooms, the parking lot. There were more freckles in Kennedy Hall that night than in all of Kilkenny. A couple of graduate students in the back rows were furiously scribbling equations on their programs, trying to calculate mathematically the number of freckles in attendance. Enough freckles to fill the Super Bowl. At some point you felt that you were really at a measles convention.

The truth is that your very own roving curmudgeon couldn't make it that night. Sunday night is autopsy night on tv. Ez wouldn't give up autopsy night even for a chance to marry Britney Spears. Anyway, all that liberal chest thumping gives him a bad case of shingles. So the information he's passing along is second hand.

On to the Awards. Clare Grady won for best performance in an anti-war demonstration, for her blood-hurdling, flag-defacing role at the Triphammer Recruiting Station. Oona O'Neill Grady won for best juvenile protestor at the same event. Dan Burns, the filmmaker who recently toured the Iraq war zone, won for best protest in a bell tower. Dan is not technically a member of the extended Grady clan, never having dated a Grady daughter and having few feckles, but his heart is in the right place. He showed a lot of film clips of himself ringing the bells atop Immaculate Conception, hugging Iraqi kids, marching in every demonstration going back to the Catonsville Nine when Dan was only a fetus. Some viewers thought that Dan was stumping for a Life Time Achievement Award.

The program notes for the evening were rather interesting in their own right. Besides the usual self-promoting, peace sign flashing advertisers like Autumn Leaves, you had to wonder why a Volvo repair shop and a massage studio would be advertising in the liner notes for a protest concert. Not to worry. The Grady's run businesses on the side.

Fact of the matter, the Ithaca protest industry doesn't pay all that well. This ain't Hollywood. Nicole Kidman doesn't have to give massages, Bruce Willis doesn't have to fix Hondas, but, then again, they don't have to get arrested and go to jail to get noticed.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:55 AM