the timboucher experience

I came across a local news item from Akron, Ohio, about a couple of men who were caught on videotape “urinating” on a Bush/Cheney campaign sign in somebody’s yard. Apparently, the night before, a fellow in the neighborhood had installed a night vision camera in his yard:

The videotape shows the men sneaking into the yard of a West Market Street home and bending the sign to the ground. The men struggled to rip the sign out of the ground by shaking it and pulling it but couldn’t get it off the posts, so they knocked it down. Sounds heard on the tape suggest the men urinated on the sign. They were white males, about 30 to 35 years old, well-dressed and well-groomed. They parked across the street in what police think was a foreign car, a Toyota or Honda.

My favorite quote from the above is the way they emphasize that these men were in a “foreign car,” to help play up the fact that they were engaging in un-American activities. Because everybody knows that Ford-drivers would never do such an unseemly thing.

In any event, the fellow whose blog I found this on went so far as to suggest that “…this is very close to terrorism.” But this is where I have to draw the line. Because despite how many dictionary definitions are thrown at me, peeing on a sign is extremely, radically, totally different than blowing up a building, beheading hostages or murdering children.

Yes, I understand the free-speech and personal property issues here. Of course I do. But to me, this should most likely be categorized as drunken tomfoolery or cheesy misguided activism, but not as terrorism. I believe that this symptom of running around calling everything and everyone terrorist is a direct product of the Bush media fear machine. Terrorism is a word that is now used almost ubiquitously to describe anything that we feel threatened by. Things like the Patriot Act drastically expanded both the legal definitions of terrorism, and the legal steps which can now be taken against people who are branded as terrorist. Except there is no real definition of terrorist anymore. Anybody can and will be called a terrorist, and then sent to Guantanamo Bay without a trial or lawyer. Quite possibly even these two guys who pissed on that sign.

Come on now. These guys are just pissing on a sign. They are taking an extremely childish (not to mention hilarious) inneffective route to express their views. They are not terrorists. It is not a threat to anybody. It’s stupid. But you know what? At a local bar over the weekend, I discovered in the toilet bowl in one of the bathrooms a sticker plastered inside it of Bush’s face, and a target drawn around it. In big letters, it said:

GO AHEAD! PISS ON ME! I’M PISSING ON YOU!

And I did, and it felt great.

• No one tells the President what to do
• Disabling comments
• Miserable success
• Pat Robertson does something right for once
• Pissing in Public in Seattle