Tag Archives: Loudoun GOP

Symptoms of Discontent

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OCTOBERFEST – PAST CHEER & BONHOMIE

OCTOBERFEST – PAST CHEER & BONHOMIE

Lovettsville, the Town of Love and community, is suffering the stress of the pull and push of a political climate that challenges the most stoic to retain composure and respect and dignity.

It’s a feeling and challenge experienced more widely than this old German-Irish settlement in Western Loudoun.  But there are lessons to learn from recent events.

In the last few weeks, first, one individual altered a business sign to insist on a Trumpian view of a Town Plaza.

After that, a woman shouted and cursed in a local restaurant, Andy’s, that a Guatemalan family visiting a friend and family member should show their passports, leave the country, there were obscenities, get the #%@& outa here, telling the family including a 7 year old, they should not speak in any language but English in this country.  The cell phone video has since been widely reported on local nbc tv, Buzzfeed and found its way onto other national news and social media outlets.

There have been various defenses for those offending individuals, corrective steps have been taken, fixing the sign, banning the cursing finger-pointing woman from Andy’s Restaurant, but these remedies only go so far, and they do not alter the offending incidents themselves, no matter how promptly these incidents were corrected by other responsible citizens. Continue reading →

Take down those signs

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blackKingSignsWestern Loudoun was and still is mostly a garden of delight. And other sections of the County have their special and distinctive charms.

I can’t say from observation what’s going on in the East but I suspect it’s about the same, as I’ve been told it is, especially along Sterling Boulevard.

In the West, I can tell you, the rolling green fields and three board horse fences are punctuated, awfully close to the road, with offensively large, in-your-face, self-adoring, political signs, at many turns in our local highways and dirt roads, the letters as tall as a small child, and thick in their indecent calligraphic display.

These monster signs have been posted by Republican pols who, for the most part, are characteristically comfortable with any development, almost no matter how it compromises or may ultimately destroy our marvelous countryside.

These signs are “the medium” for their “message.” (This is a nodding adaptation of Marshall McLuhan’s oft-quoted sentiment that – the “medium is the message.”

If President Reagan had a bipartisan sense of humor, he might say, “Take down those signs.”

As an old hand at this political business, I know that pols believe that 85% of a vote in an election is name recognition. So these signs don’t say anything but the candidate’s name and office.

I strongly suggest that you note the names on these signs and recoil from pulling the lever on any one of them – if you find their postings in as off-puttingly bad taste as I do.

We judge character by a person’s actions – and publishing these obnoxious larger than life, narcissistic nudges to our memory lobes, and leaving these monster signs out there as a persistent eyesore for months before the election, squatting on the good taste of the community, plainly suggests that these wannabe electables, view any objection to their signs, like Rhett Butler might in “Gone with the Wind” – “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”

Those hosting the signs no doubt make the lame protest – we can do what we want with our property, or with the consent of the property owner. Well, there really are some things one should not do. And maybe there should be a law about this – if the current freedom comes unrestrained by responsibility. Continue reading →