My mother sent me an article from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (state paper, article not online) about Michael Moore’s appearance in her town of Conway. The Billionaires for Bush have an Arkansas chapter now! Article excerpt:
During his speech on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway on Sunday night, filmmaker and Bush antagonizer Michael Moore encountered so warm a reception that even the onstage deaf interpreter clapped along at the more robust applause lines. The only opposition encountered by Moore – who had been roundly booed a month earlier in his press seat at the Republican National Convention – came preshow, from a mass of young protesters gathered outside Reynolds Performance Hall. The group was dressed though it was bound for the gilded box of an opera hall. The sentiments of their protest signs were over the top, even for the farthest reaches of political activism: “Four More Wars!” demanded one, waving out from the dust cloud of pearls, crushed velvet and cufflinks. “It’s a Culture War,” sneered another, “And We’re Winning.” Besides the incongruous extremism of the messages – garish, decoded and impolite slogans delivered in the noblesse obligest of packages – there were other clues that these protesters were not as out of step with Moore’s incredulous liberalism as they seemed on the surface. For one thing, the protesters were awfully young to be seriously going around dressed like Thurston Howell and his wife, Lovey, from Gilligan’s Island. And then there were the hairstyles: a fauxhawk here, a rockabilly pompadour there, to tip the groups’ whitegloved hands.
In fact, the protesters were Hendrix College and UCA students who had taken up the banner of Billionaires for Bush, a group that first came to notice during the Republican National Convention, when they staged a mock tea party in Central Park. Satirizing what they see as President Bush’s favoritism to corporations and the super-rich, the Billionaires show support for John Kerry by espousing their interpretations of the most craven and policy-embroidered positions of conservatives : Irony as activism – which, when you think about it, might be the natural evolution of dissent in an age when collegians trust Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s Daily Show more than Dan Rather.
“With the straightforward protests, you get these grimaces and it’s unapproachable,” Michael Inscoe said later. Inscoe, a navy-suited Billionaire, is also a 22-year-old English major from Maumelle. “The entertainment factor of this makes people pay attention to it.”
“Each one of us has a different target audience we’re going for,” explained Nick Stinson, a 19-year-old economics and business major from Houston. “My role is some sort of CEO, or an executive at Halliburton or Enron.” Before becoming a Billionaire for Bush, Stinson organized a similar protest of what he perceived as the crass consumerism driving MTV’s Rock the Vote bus tour, which made a stop on the Hendrix campus last month and, in addition to registering new voters, set up an expo of booths with marketing promotions. “They don’t care whether you vote,” said Stinson. “They care whether you buy Cingular or Ben & Jerry’s.” To get his point across, Stinson and some friends dressed in suits and staged a “business luncheon” in the Hendrix cafeteria. “We just went in and sort of made a ruckus,” he said.
Afterward, they realized their movement was similar to the approach of Billionaires for Bush, and Stinson and several like-minded friends spent the Thursday before Moore’s visit brainstorming caricatures of right-wing values and scrawling them on cardboard placards.
Then, there was the wardrobe wrangling. How do you affect Brooks Brothers polish on a Gap budget? You do what movers in the counterculture have always done, which is to subvert and co-opt the style of the mainstream by using what’s on hand, then augmenting your resources with thriftstore finds. “It was definitely easier for some people than others,” said Seth Baldy, a 22-yearold environmental studies major whose previous act of political protest was organizing STARC, Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations. “One guy had a full tuxedo,” he marveled. “He even had… what are those things that wrap around your stomach?” We ventured that he was perhaps describing a cummerbund. “That’s it,” he said. “A cummerbund. All I had was this raggedy old blazer and this tie.”
“I was nervous that people weren’t going to get the irony,” said Kate Lloyd, 19, a philosophy major from Huntsville, Ala. Lloyd wore a button-front shirt with a necktie and a big Hello! My Name Is name tag, on which she had written “Prescott.” “I’m a trust fund kid,” she explained. For the protest, Lloyd brandished a sign that read “Warning : Affordable Health Care May Result in Dangerously Low Profits.” “A lot of the girls are supposed to be trophy wives,” she said of her sisters-in-arms, many of whom had zipped themselves into satiny evening gowns. Then Lloyd sighed the universal lament of the underwardrobed college girl. “I didn’t have a formal dress.”
Emboldened by the response Sunday night – Moore’s camera crew told them they were the best Billionaires for Bush they’d seen – the group will be reconvening for weekly demonstrations outside Conway’s City Hall at 5 p.m. every Friday until the election. The Billionaires realize that the move will place them before a possibly less supportive audience than was gathered for the Moore event, and one with an extra layer of insulation from the group’s irony: their cars. “We’ll have to make bigger signs,” Stinson said. “And the slogans will have to be shorter and more precise.”
