Torch

You know how some people can just be a dick? I mean a real asshole. Someone that annoys you, and annoys you, and annoys you NONSTOP. This is the kind of guy that goes out of his way to be a royal douche bag at all times. He does things not because he wants to do them, but because he knows doing them will just piss you off more. This guy also thinks he knows everything. That’s right, there is nothing in the world that you could possibly know that he doesn’t. And god forbid he’s wrong, because then he’ll just tell you that wherever you got the facts was actually wrong, and his made up reality is in fact the truth. Yeah this guy is an asshole, and I know you know him; you probably went to High School with a guy just like this. This guy makes you shake with rage with the mere mention of his massive douche-baggery. There is no reasoning with this guy, he doesn’t reason. He is a fucking DICK and his name is China.

I was in Paris last week on a trip with friends, but the highlight of my stay was protesting the Olympic Torch Relay. When I found out about the relay I made sure that my stay would overlap the protest. It was worth it. I don’t know much about protests, I’ve only been to one before this, but that was as researcher and not as a participant. This time I got to get in the trenches and lob some verbal grenades at those “gooks” the way my grandfather did in Korea. As an aside, he loves telling stories about all the “gooks” he killed.


I got there a little late, I had to switch hostels from one side of town to the other (I’ll talk about that another day), but I got there. When I showed up I came from underneath the Eiffel Tower where some protestors had just hung a surprisingly small banner. Maybe it looked bigger when they made it, but hanging from the Eiffel Tower it was tiny.

Fast Forward an hour or so, and the Olympic flame is nowhere in sight. The police have done a good job keeping the two sides separate from each other. On one side you have the Chinese, and I don’t just mean the pro-Dick, ermm, pro-China supporters, the China side was literally nothing but the Yellow Menace himself. The pro-Tibet (because at this point it wasn’t much more than a Free Tibet rally) side was multi-ethnic and multi-cultural and multi-lingual. Most of the chanting was done in Engrish, but there was Tibetan and Chinese shouted. The only French I heard was something about “Liberté Tibet”. This rally was like a free pass to be as racist as you want. I’m not saying I’m a racist, but I hate assholes, and China is an asshole, so I took advantage of this. I think Monday April 7th, 2008 will go down in history as the most racist day of my life.



Eventually my friend Wes (name not changed, because I don’t give a shit about his wellbeing) and I came upon a small commie red Chinese flag. Great lets burn this motherfucker. Well not so fast. It turns out burning a flag is really hard. Those Arabs on TV make it look so easy when they burn flags and effigies of President Bush or Danish Cartoonists, but it’s not. I don’t know if it is the fact they live in the desert or is maybe they rub it in camel shit first, all I know If they make it look easy. It isn’t. It took us a while to get that flag burning. But when we did we felt good. It was nice watching a flag burn for once than wasn’t American. In fact it was nice that it wasn’t America getting booed this time.


We had enough of the pro-Tibet side so we decided to go check out the people sitting in the street in an attempt to block the incoming flame. That was really boring, so we went to pretend we supported China. Yeah, because 3 white Americans are going to fit in with a sea of short black haired Chinese waving their retarded flag in support of their retarded country. Actually my main goal was to try to find another flag to burn, but none of the Chinese believed me when I said I supported them. They must’ve seen me switch sides. There were two other white people on the China side, they had snuck in behind the short sea in front of them and were waving a Tibetan flag over their heads. That’s one of the benefits of growing up in a first world nation, having the nutrition necessary to stand up and over the Yellow Menace. And boy were they a menace today. Some tall ass Yao Ming wannabe came and stole their flag and then he and a group of his cronies took it and ran down the street and started to stomp it. I stole it back from them and then taunted them, which was probably stupid, there were about 10 of them and I was alone. I got the flag back to its rightful owner and was turning around to go back to my, cowardly, friends when one of them assaulted me. Ok, it wasn’t that bad, they just threw water at me. But still, if I had seen which one of those little egg rolls had thrown water down my neck on a day where it had been snowing I would have been showing them a little Kung Pow chicken action.


When the flame did pass by us it was in the ‘safety’ of a bus. I guess they knew we meant business. An hour or so later I was walking down the Champs Élysées when a mob of people came running at me, it turns out I had happened upon the torch a second time. This time I got to see it pass by me, it wasn’t worth writing home about.

(these guys were all over the place, they looked like RoboCop, and some of them were on roller blades)
Overall it was a good day. I enjoyed all of it. I hope to do it again some day, and if the Torch comes to your town or city go tell China’s he’s a dick and you’re sick of his bullshit.