Hey, remember this?

I'm taking a bit of a mini-vacation from the blog this week. To tide you over, here's an old (1997) clip from WFXT about a Marilyn Manson concert that local idiots treated as if it were a huge scandal.

I particularly love the totally unbiased way this starts off. TV news hasn't changed a bit...



I was actually there as part of the counter-protest, though I don't spot myself in that footage. Honestly, it's sort of odd that this clip even exists, because the whole thing was a total non-event.

For one thing, the anti-free expression protesters were apparently too frightened of those scary Satanists to cross the street, even though the vast majority of concertgoers looked perfectly normal. The elaborately made-up goths in the clip were an almost insignificant minority.

Instead, the protesters gathered in front of what used to be the old RMV, barely visible from the Civic Center. There really weren't many of them either (the "handful" mentioned in the clip is being generous), despite constant ranting from the newspaper and local church groups prior to the concert.

The counter-protest actually took place in front of the Civic Center, near the attendees but far from the pro-censorship nuts. It was also small, not to mention totally disorganized. But it didn't really matter, because the protest itself was just so incredibly lame.

Anyway, you can view this as evidence that Fitchburg has had a core population of whiny idiots for quite awhile. They may be ranting about different things now than they did twelve years ago, but it's the same principle at work.

And they're just as ridiculous and impotent now as they were back then.