Saturday morning, the stretch of SE Belmont from Muddy Waters to Pine State Biscuits was littered with these neon green stickers:
The stickers come from a West Virginia-based white supremacy organization that believes “our Founding Fathers had the vision that America would be — and stay — a White nation.” In the National Alliance’s online store the sticker cozies up against a terrifying listing of how-to munitions handbooks and bizarre list of racist-approved fiction (Tom Wolfe, Anne of Greene Gables).
What’s the best reaction to these? Should people scrape them off the road signs, alter them to be something hilarious or should we leave them as is to remind everyone that hateful racists can reside even on Belmont? It’s the kind of thing Harvey Milk would stick this on his fridge if he received one in the mail.
Pretty sure they hit lower Morrison as well, as that would explain why I saw two people in a bus shelter yesterday methodically scraping a green sticker off the shelter’s glass.
They were up on NW 23rd as well. I’ve taken them off before when they had different messages, someone tried to take the one off the bus stop yesterday but they are really on there good.
I don’t think they should stay.
I checked out their “racist approved fiction” as you call it and you have to wonder if they have actually read the books they sell. They’ve got famous socialists Steinbeck and Jack London, and they sell Huckleberry Finn, which lampoons racists.
Call them and tell them you want to order stickers. When it comes time to give them your CC number REALLY SLOW. One number at a time. And fake.
True fact: Virginia is not West Virginia.
Quick and easy way to take these off is to put a piece of tape over the sticker then rip the tape off. The white backing will remain, but the message will be gone, and that doesn’t damage whatever the sticker was stuck on.
Good catch, cawcaw. smirk to the rescue with a lack of geographical-knowledge.
Reading the sticker, it sounds perfectly ok to fuck the gays though. As long as they’re not IV drug users or black.
As to what to do with the stickers? Scrape ’em off.
But only because they’re unsightly. Make ’em come back with a nicer looking sticker next time.
For the love of god, Virginny went blue last election. Please don’t misrep my home-state’s good name.
If they are attached to things like street signs, I’d call the city, tell them that they have a graffiti problem that is going to cost thousands of dollars to fix, and that they should subpoena the company for who they sold the stickers to so they can bill the people that put them up…
That sort of plan doesn’t actually work, Matthew. I’ve been, uh, involved with a superficially similar situation.
Yes it does, the city has billed people for graffiti before, including such “harmless” things as chalk on sidewalks:
http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/07/chalk_…
No, I meant the “whole subpoena the records, arrest the closest people on the list”. That’s scary sloppy legal work, and we should be really fucking worried if it works.
1) You are a troll. And I’m feeding you by responding to you, which makes me an idiot. Moving on:
2) I don’t think they should automatically arrest the person that lives closest to Belmont that has bought stuff from this company, you are right, they’d never get a conviction that way. But I wasn’t talking about a criminal case anyways, I was thinking a civil case instead, which has a lower burden of proof. (And I suspect that not very many people in the US have bought these stickers, let alone Portland.) However, more importantly, if they used that information to narrow down the list of suspects, and then started to asked those people a few questions, pulled some camera footage from places nearby that had cameras, etc, etc, they’d figure out where to send the bill pretty dang quick…
Matthew, the amount of time and resources you seem to want to devote to tracking down some dudes who put up stickers is ridiculous.
Really the best plan is ignoring them and/or just scraping them off.
Even on Belmont.
Believe it or not, there used to be a time when you couldn’t swing a dead cat in that part of town without hitting a member of East Side White Pride or their predecessors in interest the Eastside Fists. The whole alterna-prog washing of SE is a more recent development.
{{{NEOB}}}
Matthew, these people are scum, but your approach doesn’t leave you with much of a moral high ground. There are a lot of nuances that we could explore here, but I honestly thinks that anyone that wants to pursue the most vindictive/quasi-legal recourse really just needs to go read some fucking Stan Lee.
on that note: Graham, I got to the Wolvie: 0rigins thread late. Are my fears of the writers messing with logan’s “knife–>knife–>potato peeler” past unfounded? I’m so ready to rage.
CAT, eh… if you go into movie caring about plot and canon… well… you get what you deserve. But lots of shit blows up and they pretty much gloss over everything till the Weapon X Project.
But you will rage at Cyclops.
Man, I love Pine State Biscuits. Yum. Stickers? Wha?
graham, I spent all my non-canon-give-a-fuckage on Watchmen. It was awesome, but I’m so, so tired. Where my trans-dimensional squids at??? Anyway, I haven’t even seen X3. Until they start picking up the Morrison story lines, I’m hella hella hella nervous.
CAT, did you see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer?
It was better than that. The Wolverine print was hella unfinished. I enjoyed it and I wasn’t even drunk.
However, go watch the Russian movie Night Watch.
Night Watch was rad. I refuse to watch Day Watch until they make an animated subbie-track (if they exist, someone send me a torrent). I’m super excited about 9. Coraline has made me sort of cracky about all the new 3-d stuff.
When is wulvie-0 coming out? maybe we could do a blacked out blogtown ultra-meet-up for it.
Oh, also: haven’t watched f4. My comics knowledge is kinda spotty and late-blooming, the result of an art school lady-friend that got me into dan clowes and X-statix while discovering the tail end of the invisbles and all the resulting morrison. Yeah, I’m one of those kids…
“It’s the kind of thing Harvey Milk would stick this on his fridge if he received one in the mail.”
Says the person who thought HM died of AIDS.
Interesting that these garnered notice, while every single telephone pole on both Hawthorne and Belmont being tagged and flyered and stickered with anti-semitic slogans and emblems didn’t.
Just sayin’.