The Battle For Los Angeles

On one side you have the entire corporate media machine: Every Billboard, print ad, TV and Radio Spot. On the other you have Our Man in LA, armed with cardboard, paint and the ability to use them. It's become obvious by his placement and consistancy, that this is a guy who Gets It.



Getting It means the understanding that free speech is not just something to applaud and protect, it's something you have to DO. And once you've done it a few times, familiarized yourself with the rules of the game, you realize three things: 1.) It's Fun. 2.) It's Easy. and 3.) If you're reasonably smart about it, you could do it forever and never get caught.


"If I had ten divisions of such men, our troubles here would be over very quickly."
-Kurtz



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TN, NY, CA, MD

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Live Free or Die

I've started hanging these around the Bay Area as a challenge to the people who've been ripping up my signs: let's see them do the same to a piece of their own country's history.




For those of you who've been wanting to do this yourselves but were nervous about the legality, consider "Live Free or Die." Let's face it, the day that hanging up signs that say "Live Free or Die." becomes illegal in this country, that's the day that America dies.
For me it's a protest against everything we've just given away: the right to a trial, to be able to face your accuser... the right to say that you come from a country that doesn't commit torture. Although I doubt much of my audience will read any of that into it, I think the freeways look a hell of a lot better with them than without.



If nothing else, people will see that somebody felt they had the right to do this. I figure if I keep hanging signs and people keep seeing them, eventually some of them will start doing it too.

I had a brief appearance on Hannity and Colmes last week. They showed some of my signs, summarized the project and then Hannity said what I'm doing is illegal, costing the taxpayers money and that I was (get this) "trespassing on public property." I said it might be illegal in North Korea or someplace like that but that in America when it comes to political speech, public property means my property and I'm free to do as I please. Then he said I was wrong, I said I was right, Colmes tried to say something but failed and then Hannity finished off by saying I was "too cheap to buy a billboard." Not really what you'd call a stirring debate, but it did result in an inbox full of hate mail from Fox viewers.

One of the letters was so succinct and, in its way, beautiful, it could've passed for poetry:



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Sonoma County

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They Call Me "Mungen Cakes"

Dear Freewayblogger,
I blog around the outskirts of Portland Oregon. I was inspired to start up by seeing your work, that and the fact that I'm so pissed at what's happening to my country I can hardly see straight.

I pretty much use the technique described in your how-to video except I use a digital projector instead of an overhead, which makes it easy to resize and transfer graphics. Whatever's on my laptop I can trace onto cardboard... and I can make it HUGE. I do a lot of small signs too:(see attached) and while they're not as impressive visually, they do stay up a lot longer. Whatever gets the message out...

Whenever I head out to blog I think about that little girl covered in her family's blood, crying by flashlight, her parents murdered by mistake at a US checkpoint in Iraq. I think about Abu-Ghraib and all the others who've been tortured. All the others who will be tortured. I think about my nephew in Baghdad.

I was a little nervous about this at first, but when I think about what's at stake, having to face the cops or the wingnuts over my blogging doesn't seem like such a big deal. (As if they could ever catch me...) Thanks again for the inspiration man... if nothing else at least I don't feel so damn helpless in all of this. Even so, I still feel like I'm not doing enough, that I can do more.
We all can.

They call me Mungen_Cakes

Letter From Kevin Tillman

"Somehow America has become a country

that projects everything that it is not

and condemns everything that it is."

Our Man in Atlanta

Hey Freewayblogger, Here's some pix of signs I put up last night in Atlanta. You're right: it's a blast. Any good ideas on how to stick signs up to concrete walls? special tape? Liquid nails maybe? I've got a 6' x 9' image of the Abu-Ghraib figure I want to put up and have just the right place for it...

Thanks for turning me on to this. It feels damn good to be able to reach so many people, and it is a hell of a rush, but at the same time I can't help feeling like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon: "Man, I'm getting too old for this s__t."
- Atlanta


Dear Atlanta, Great Work, and thanks for having the guts to do it. Here are my thoughts on walls: if it's a retaining wall set way back from traffic, just keep the top flaps on the cardboard and hold it down with bricks/rocks etc. Forget glue, Liquid Nails, etc.: it's not worth the effort and could be considered vandalism. Blogs should be able to be removed without a trace or damage to property.

Remember that anything you can see while driving is a place you can put a sign and people are going to read it. You have hundreds of miles of trees, fencing and infrastructure to work with, so attempting tricky stuff like concrete walls is unnecessary. Your greatest strength is being able to strike anywhere, quickly, and at anytime. Any postings that make you feel like Danny Glover should be avoided.

Once you've posted a few more times and found a couple of good spots, you'll find it's pretty easy to cover a couple major freeways in just a few minutes time. The key to successful freewayblogging is economy of effort: striving to reach the very highest number of people with the least amount of effort on your part. Like Zen: Conserve your strength.

Whatever you do, Don't Burn Out: You're now the most widely-read political commentator in Atlanta that hasn't been bought-and-paid-for... so until others start doing it, that makes you the Voice of the People. So be proud, conserve your energy and above all, have fun. That might seem a bit superficial, but trust me, it's important. I've hung over three thousand of these things now, and there's no way I could've kept doing it if it wasn't a fuck of a lot of fun.

Skip the wall, use a fence, and if you want Sparky (my name for the Abu-Ghraib figure) to stay up, place him somewhere off to the side of the freeway, not directly on an overpass.

Don't stop.

-Scarlet P.



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