The Wreck of the George W. Bush Pants-On-Fire-Mobile
In October of ought-four, Ben Cohen organized a national tour for his George W. Bush Pants-on-Fire-Mobile. The “rig” consisted of a comfy Crown Vic sedan and a flat bed trailer with a 10 foot tall statue of lyin’ George W. Bush. The pants-flames were simulated with orange triangular flags of nylon flapping in the breeze of an on-board blower powered by a gas generator that also powered an LED scroll-board enumerating many dozens of lies from the Dubya’s first term in office. At that time the sheer number of lies was unquestionably a Presidential all-time record.
Ah, the good-old-days.
Ben sent out an e-mail to some e-mail group I subscribed to asking for drivers. I volunteered and, without anything resembling a background check that I can recall (was I well-versed in Presidential lying? Did I have a healthy disapproval of the current POTUS? Have you ever been arrested for littering or had to sit on the Group-W bench? It seemed to be enough that I had a driver’s license and spare time) I was awarded the Eugene-to-Reno leg of the trip. But how could I resist an overnight stop in Berkeley?
I treated some friends and relatives to an evening of driving around Berkeley and Oakland, being photographed by people on the street and waving joyfully to other lie-despisers out for an evening stroll.
Little did I know that overnight someone (presumably a rare Berkeley conservative) would sabotage the trailer hitch by pulling out a crucial cotter-pin so the trailer came off the hitch at 55 mph in 3 lanes of rush hour traffic on northbound I-880 in the East Bay the next morning.
It was singularly nerve-wracking to hear the loud clunk as the trailer hitch hit the pavement and to see sparks flying up in the rear-view mirror. I barely stopped myself from hitting the brakes, because, had I done so, the trailer would just have hit the back end of the Crown-Vic and stopped in the middle of I-880.
I got over a lane and pulled off onto the shoulder just after going under an overpass. I looked back.
The trailer was nowhere to be seen.
All three lanes of traffic were just swooshing by as if nothing had happened.
I waited a minute, as if the trailer might come by any second — it just needed a little time to catch up with me.
I got out and walked back and found the trailer had veered to the right, off the freeway, barely missing two freeway signs steel posts, run over some shrubbery and come to rest along a vine-covered chain-link fence. The AAA guy was expert-level cool. No damages so no accident report. No harm, no foul.
George was still perched atop the trailer as if to say, “This your first rodeo, son?”
The AAA guy (let’s call him AAAmbrose) pulled the trailer back out onto the shoulder with about 6" to spare between trailer and freeway signs, turned it around, re-hitched it to the Crown-Vic and I was on my way.
I bought a locking hitch to prevent further sabotage.
The drive to Reno helped me relax. The stretch from Sacramento through the granite mountains and into the desert was quiet, except for George flapping his jaw in the wind back on the trailer.
I handed over the keys to Ben at the Reno airport over beer and fries. I had called him from the trailer hitch store and told about the mishap, but given beer I was able to work up more of a four-part harmony version. He was just glad everyone and everything was still in one piece and George who live to lie another day.
I wish someone had gotten a dash-cam video of the “wreck”, okay, technically just a near-miss, but this was still ought-four, a few weeks before the theft of the 2004 election by Ken Blackwell in Ohio and my subsequent activism around election reform that eventually led to many other discoveries about government cover-ups and abuses of power that ultimately totaled my world-view.
But that is another story. Or two. Or maybe quite a few more than that.