GPW: Self-Tempered Anarchy since 2009


Your GPW Editor-on-Occasion is Petra Fried in the City.
Send us your stories, ideas, and information. Insiders welcome - confidentiality guaranteed.



stories along The Way

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

With Strategists Like These, Who Needs Opposition?

I will happily grant you that, had Prop. 23 passed, I would have joined a boycott of oil companies Valero and Tesoro along with all the other elderly, white environmentalists like myself.

Thankfully, Prop. 23 got squished like a bug in the baby’s room. However, if it had won, given the scope of these multi-billion dollar Texas oil companies and the depth of my personal bitterness, I really don’t think I’d direct a boycott letter to the local Valero gas station cashier who sells me chips and diet soda and asks me if I want my car washed on an overcast day.

Not so for the strategists of the failed Prop 23 campaign. Got this email today. Here they go, a-organizin’.....


"Dear Mr. Cameron:

I am one of the millions of taxpayers who supported Proposition 23.

I will NOT be purchasing your extended version of 'Avatar' because of your $1 million donation to the campaign opposing the Prop. 23 effort to relieve our economy of the costly AB 32 global warming tax.

You have stated that, 'we're going to have to live with less,' while you yourself own three houses in Malibu totaling 24,000 square feet, a 100 acre Santa Barbara ranch, a stable of exotic cars, a fleet of submarines, a yacht and a Humvee firetruck.

I am NOT willing to live with less. But I will be living WITHOUT your extended version of 'Avatar' thanks to your support of imposing job losses and higher prices on the rest of us."

Whew, I’m sure glad I’m not James Cameron!

Have to imagine that a protest of this size against purchasing a third Blu-Ray edition of the director’s cut with additional minutes served up with a computer chip to attach to your frontal lobe for a true 3-D experience is really gonna impact somebody’s bottom line.

Probably not Jim Cameron’s.

Maybe his dry cleaners.

A couple questions for the grassroots organizers here:

“Have you seen Avatar?”

"If so, who did you root for?"

“You do realize that, in the Avatar movie, the tall blue fangy people are fighting for their lives against a Military Industrial Complex only interested in money, right? I mean, it’s not like they’re interested in inter-galactic job creation or anything.”

“Have you heard of Jim Cameron before? Perhaps you've heard of his ego? What about any of the other small, personal movies he’s made like, say, ‘Titanic’ or ‘The Terminator’?”

And finally...

“Aren’t you a little embarrassed?”

Ah, well....