Freeway Blogger:

Censorship Can’t Stop Me

 

By Joshua B. Good

Saturday, February 24, 2007

     

    A former teacher with the alias “Freeway Blogger” wants to teach Americans a new way to protest:

    Decorating freeways with home-made signs.

    He has posted nearly 4,000 signs in three years, the 45-year-old San Francisco Bay resident says. Most of the cardboard signs are posted in California, though he makes occasional trips to Oregon and Washington in his Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. He recently clocked 245,915 miles on his truck. His usual targets are overpasses and fences, though he occasionally nails a sign to a tree. He demands anonymity and refused to give his name to www.bannedmagazine.com.

      The Freeway Blogger's signs include messages such as “Bush Lied,” “Impeach,” “The War Is a Lie,” and “Osama Bin Forgotten.”

      The Freeway Blogger has no steady job. He says he is living off his savings and the thrill of getting his message out to thousands of motorists.

      “I’m protesting for people putting signs on the freeways. It almost doesn’t matter what the signs says,” the Freeway Blogger said during a telephone interview. “The other reason I do this is it is so damn effective. If you

want to reach a lot of people, this is the way you do it. The other protest is where we all get together and hold up little signs for each other and hope the local TV news covers you. That just doesn’t make sense.”

      The Freeway Blogger got started putting up a few signs after President George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. But he really increased his guerilla tactics after July 2003 when former ambassador Joseph Wilson revealed Bush lied about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium from Niger. In retaliation, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office revealed Wilson was married to CIA employee Valerie Plame.

      The Freeway Blogger wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times that read, in part, “When Clinton lied, nobody died.” The Times didn’t publish the letter.

      “I said ‘Screw it, I’ll publish it myself,’” he says.

      He makes the signs at home using cardboard he picks out of garbage Dumpsters and slathers them with white and black paint. He loads the signs into the back of his pickup and heads out on the highway.

      “Even if you have driven this road a thousand times before, it becomes like this canvas. It becomes something you can do almost anything with,” he says.

      He has been stopped by police six or seven times, but never arrested. He was once handcuffed, driven to a police station and questioned, but they let him go without booking him into jail or ticketing him, the Freeway Blogger says. If the police ask him to take down the sign, he does.

      Caltrans highway workers also tear down his signs, though they seem to let pro-Bush signs stay up longer. And he suspects the police rip down his signs, too. But he doesn’t see that as effective censorship.

      “They really can’t stop you. You pick the time and place,” he says.

      He kind of admires the people who paint over his signs. One such sign was changed from an anti-Bush message to “Shut Up Hippy!” The people he worries about are the ones who tear up his signs into little pieces.

      “The thing is if someone tried to find me, and I’ve gotten plenty of death threats believe me, they wouldn’t find me they would probably find my mom. And she doesn’t need that,” he says.

 

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The Freeway Blogger web site is at www.freewayblogger.com.

Joshua B. Good can be reached at editor@bannedmagazine.com.