The Graveyard of Zombietime Flops

One might get the impression, from reading zombietime, that I put together a photo essay about every single political event I go to.

Well: one might be wrong.

The truth is, what you see on zombietime are only the successful events I attend. I find myself at all sorts of rallies, meetings, protests, art exhibits, and other public (and private) political shindigs, and often as not come away disappointed. There was either nothing there worth photographing, or I couldn’t take pictures without looking suspicious, or (most often) the resulting photos of the event in question were pretty uninteresting once I looked at them after the fact.

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view), I’ve saved some of these flops, and I’ve decided to rescue them from complete obscurity by presenting here a selection of “the ones that got away” — the worst, least interesting and most pointless zombietime reports that never got published. And so I present:

The Graveyard of Zombietime Flops

Voting at the Venezuelan Consulate: December 2, 2007


The nation of Venezuela held a national referendum on December 2, 2007 over the issue of whether to grant dictatorial powers to Hugo Chavez. The referendum barely lost, which was considered a huge victory for Chavez’s opponents. A little-known aspect of the vote was that overseas Venezuelans were allowed to vote as well — and the only place in the entire United States where they could vote was at the Venezuelan consulate on California Street in San Francisco. I decided to go check it out, in case pro-Chavez thugs tried to disrupt the voting with violence. But when I got there — not much was happening at all, aside from what you see in the photo: dozens of expatriate Venezuelans milling around on the sidewalk, talking about politics, as the cable cars rumbled by. From what I could tell in my attempted eavesdropping, they seemed mostly anti-Chavez — so the people you here here may very well be the ones who pushed the “No” vote over the top and stopped Chavez from ruining the country forever.

Dennis Prager Appearance at U.C. Berkeley: May 5, 2008


Radio talk-show host and pundit Dennis Prager gave a speech at U.C. Berkeley on May 5, 2008. I went to it, expecting to see the same kind of protests that had earlier greeted Daniel Pipes, Michelle Malkin and Alan Dershowitz. But nothing happened at all. Prager came in, posed for pictures with members of various campus Jewish groups, and then started to give a speech that didn’t sound much different from one of his radio shows. To top it off, I brought the wrong camera and couldn’t get a decent picture of him in the dimly-lit lecture hall. There wasn’t a single protester in sight, so I left early.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby in a Toilet: August 31, 2007

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s egregious book The Israel Lobby was scheduled to be released in early September 2007. By sheer happenstance I obtained a pre-release copy of the book, and decided, as a parody of the many rumored “Koran flushing” incidents that had been reported around then, to put it in a non-functioning toilet at an undisclosed location and take a picture of it there. Although this was an obviously artificial scene, I had never before or since “staged” a picture, and because of that I felt a little uncomfortable putting it online. Although this picture was all by itself featured in a post at Little Green Footballs, I never uploaded it as part of any zombietime report, since I had no other pictures to go with it. (And no, the picture is not Photoshopped — the book really is in a toilet.) Finally, “Mearsheimer and Walt in the Toilet” earns a spot on zomblog here.


Later, I visualized what the book would have looked like if it had been released in the 1930s, and created this satirical version of the cover (based on this infamous book).

[UPDATE:]
         
zomblog reader “gegenkritik” sends the two images shown above, first reported on the Lizas Welt blog, along with the following explanation:

Sadly, reality once again is ahead of satire:

On the left you can see the cover of the German edition of Mearsheimer/Walt’s “The Israel Lobby”.
And on the right is the cover of a book from 1942, written by Johann v. Leers, an influential Nazi-ideologist, who emigrated to Egypt after WWII and continued his anti-semitic struggle there, supported by the Egyptian government and his friend, Mufti Amin al-Husseini.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Note that both the Mearsheimer & Walt book and the Nazi book share the same cover design: An American flag sprinkled with Stars of David. So my parody-cover ended up being quite true-to-life.


There — I think that’s the maximum dosage of fizzled zombietime reports that a person can take at any one time. I’ve got plenty more, but I’ll leave it at that, and save the rest of the flops in case I want to torment you in the future.

25 Responses to “The Graveyard of Zombietime Flops”