A Reportback from the HRC Sweatshop Playland Action

What is the rainbow world fund? True, I'm writing this on a computer that is internet-capable, yet I have no vibrant interest in really knowing, so consider this opening sentence as purely rhetorical, an image if you will, a jpeg to provide you with some regional flavor to curry your interest, and invite you perhaps similarly with the same sick carcrash curiousity which drew us, a multigenerational coalition of put-upon activists to the delightful annual Castro Street Fair.

Rainbow world fund. Hmm. It's on a bus with pictures of little children on it. What is it with the Castro and strollers? What is it with the Human Rights Campaign and the exploitation of child workers around the world? San Francisco is a city where brutal and irreconcilable extremes are married under the familiar magnanimous west coast coinage, "Can't we all just get along?" My political career has been prefaced on the condensed assertion that, "Naw, 'we,' in fact, cannot." I quite honestly don't need tranny-hating congressmen, who just so coincidentally suck an occasional cock, and won't flinch at putting a plastic HRC groom-groom standee made in China on the top tier of their vanilla wedding cake, rolling with me. Granted I tend to be antisocial by default, but I think this personal practice is not entirely unjustifiable, even in the city of love. What kind of city has the "left establishment" (a phrase stolen from a friend) built? One where gross-out gag-me compromises appear to be accepted, promoted, rewarded. The HRC are, as this pared-down Wikipedia entry describes, "supplying gay help for the democrats on the hill," and the embodiment of compromise.

Is it greed that cripples this fair, as it does the Human Rights Campaign? (I seem to be fatally incapable of spouting anything other than rhetorical questions this writing.) My memories from this day will be dappled by buses-cum-wrap-ads espousing the thrill of Parkmerced fully-furnished apartments and the HRC's color-coded pamphlet of which multi-national multi-billion-dollar corporations just so happen to have gay hiring practices. When the rhetorical-questioning rabble of us came to the set location of our action outside the doors of the HRC's election-happy action center and strung our banner with Hindering Real Change (I've never heard that explosion of the acronym before! Have you?) festooned with the essential yellow and blue, I slunked away to the crown of a garbage can with a sign reading, "I$ GENDER ON THE MENU?" kind of not wanting to get bashed by any irate over-excited Hollister-shoppers. There was a bull horn. All of us sort of just looked at it.

My fellow direct actioner egged me over to pin an oppressive tail on the sweatshop donkey, which resulted in some blindfolded black-on-black disturbance, when I got community policed by the store's manager. If you would be so kind as to permit me this, I would like to hypothesize that the trendy reasoning apparatus propelling liberal compromise is a slew of incomplete syllogisms: e.g., inputting my statement "They support sweatshops," returns the manager's output "Look at you! You're black too! This is America!" His statement epitomizes the startling inversive and perversive (in the reverse) nature of the liberal compromise establishment (my revision of a friend's phrase) itself, using the oppressed themselves as the raw materials for the new oppressor, in one gargantuan ideological maquilladora, if you will. As I see it, the task that day was to identify sweatshops and their profiteers to destroy them, but I was characteristically unable to call out, signify and define the one our fair manager labored wherein.