This week's big cover article in the Bay Guardian is about a group of women who occasionally meet, dress up in funny outfits, and roller skate around San Francisco. It's a scene, man. According to the article, the group is going world-wide and has at least sixty members to it. Sixty. And this is the article that merits the cover.

This is actually a pretty typical cover story for the Bay Guardian. They all folllow the same pattern:

1)Said writer considers themselves really, really cool.
2)Said writer joins a group of people who are even more really, really cool than said writer and do really, really cool things. (It, of course, goes without saying that the group of really, really cool people are usually neither straight, white, nor male. Because you can never ever really be cool if you are straight, white and male)
3)Said writer is so convinced that they and their new, really, really cool friends are so cool, that they write a big story about them and their friends in the Bay Guardian to let everyone in the world know how cool they are.

And there you have it.

Actually, I have no problem with the people in the story or the idea behind it. I think the idea of a bunch of people dressing funny and roller skating around the city is a great idea. Go nuts. It actually sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. If I wasn't over thirty, wracked with a bad back, out of shape- not to mention a straight white male- I'd be into it.

But, of course, because this is San Francisco, the whole roller skating thing isn't really about just dressing up all crazy and roller skating around the city. It’s more than that. It's also a political thing. Not to mention art.

According to the writer, the group's mission is "a desire to come out in numbers, to be a visible part of the landscape so they can have a say in what the city looks like." It's inspiration it is something called "Reclaim the Streets, a direct-action network bent on social and ecological change through strikes and street parties and other fun non-state-sponsored activities." So roller skating, then, is an attempt to bring social and ecological change. Somehow.

"We share the same vision," (a member of the group says) . "That revolution can be beautiful and sparkly and furry and striped."


But wait, it's also art, performance art that makes a stand. It's a way of "enriching the community." Their roller-skating around decorates "the city the way the most generous, high-spirited kind of art does – like murals and the wheat-paste chronicles of midnight marauders, like bands playing on top of buildings and site-specific performances that use the walls of the city as their set design." Wheat-paste chronicles of midnight marauders?

In a dramatic conclusion, the author sums up the entire theme behind the skaters and the reason why she joined, because they "have found ways to deliver their revolutionary messages through outbursts of performance and unauthorized street parties."

Whatever.

Why oh why can't people just call something for what it is- something really fun. Why does everything people do have to be "revolutionary" or "artistic."

I swear, somewhere out there, there's probably a group of people who make shitting into a political action. Like a group out there that purposely shits on the streets to protest the arresting of homeless people for similar crimes. Or, maybe, there's an artist out there who just wanders through SF shitting everywhere as part of some performance art.

There's also probably someone out there who only uses environmentally, economically correct toilet paper because the toilet paper industry is an evil, globalizing, corporation. That they destroy the environment and is made by 5 year old Bolivian children fed only gruel as sustenance (which could be entirely true- I'm just not an expert on the politics of toilet paper). Maybe they protest the toilet paper companies and picket outside Charmin? Who knows, maybe the toilet paper industry is really behind Mumia's imprisonment? Or, there's probably someone out there who does something different when they shit, like women going into men's room, or not squatting or what have you just because it's empowering.

Hmmmm…..maybe I've just stumbled onto a whole new political movement.