When I read about bicyclists going out for a night ride in nothing but their underthings, it did not occur initially to me that the United Nations was behind it. That was before Dan Maes convinced me it was so.
Forces of darkness and one-worldness are behind these night riders in their BVDs. Maes, whom Republicans have nominated for governor, surely would say as much. He has John Hickenlooper pegged, for instance, as a one-world plotter over Denver’s quest to encourage bicycling.
The “well-disguised” idea is “converting Denver into a United Nations community.” This is part and parcel of Denver’s participation in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. Maes says it all spells a threat to our freedoms.
How so? Well, look at where I live, Fort Collins, which, like Denver, is one of 600 U.S. communities that thought the international sustainability effort a great thing, locally and globally. Fort Collins is also where a local bike club staged its Buck Moon Underwear Ride last month.
How does this bear on our liberties? Except for control by outside forces, or the full moon, why would barely garbed bike riders cast off into the Colorado night? Consider us all warned: Without vigilance, all shall be stripped (almost) bare of their liberties.
All the while, I’ve been admiring how Fort Collins people love their bicycles, how the city has bike paths galore. It turns out that ours is a city pedaling oppression, and Dan Maes is not alone on this.
A local woman affiliated with the so-called 9/12 movement challenged Fort Collins and Loveland for joining the U.N.-linked green effort. She passed petitions to recall Fort Collins City Councilwoman Lisa Poppaw, alleging Poppaw violated her oath by ceding free will to U.N. environmentalists and global warming theorists. (The effort came up a few signatures short.)
Back to Denver, which, under Hickenlooper, Maes’ Democratic rival in November, has arrayed 400 red bikes around town for rent. Yes, red. Moscow red. Beijing red. Better-off-dead red.
Here you were thinking: It’s a great idea — less pollution, less gas guzzled, healthier people. Well, it’s just what the forces of one-world earthiness and near nakedness want you to think.
And here I was thinking: In Fort Collins, it’s great to see average people get on bicycles just to get somewhere. (No offense to enthusiasts in Day-Glo Spandex and wind-tunnel helmets, but I like the notion of a new motto: “Bicycling: Not just for torture.”)
But that’s Maes’ department, along with adherents of the Tea Party movement, from which he arose out of total and wholly deserved obscurity.
You may think it’s nutty that Maes calls Denver’s bicycles a harbinger of oppression. Whatever the case, it is the kind of talk that’s becoming the GOP party line. The Tea Party in 2010 is what the Christian Coalition was for Republicans in the 1980s and ’90s: the life force. Remember that Pat Robertson, who says prayer can reroute hurricanes, won one GOP presidential primary and outpolled George H.W. Bush in the 1988 Iowa caucuses.
Now we have people stirring the GOP’s cocktail like Tea Party heroine Michelle Bachman. She wonders why swine flu outbreaks seem confined to Democratic presidencies. And Sarah Palin, whose endorsement has become the party’s most dear currency.
Mark their words. If the Obamas and Hickenloopers have their way, we’ll all be chafing on our bicycle seats, in our skivvies, in the dark, under a full moon.
Don’t laugh. It happened right where I live.
John Young (jyoungcolumn@gmail.com) teaches at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins.
