Shannon Bartlett’s knee started aching after the first mile. As she pushed farther into the AIDS Run/Walk Chicago, the pain migrated to the outside of the joint, then arrowed up her thigh. Bartlett persisted, though. She was running for a cause she desperately wants to promote: the defeat of George W. Bush.
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“When he was in Iraq it was absolutely brutal,” Bartlett said. “I wasn’t reading the papers, I wasn’t watching the news. When I heard two helicopters from the 101st Airborne went down I was terrified something had happened to him.”
Not since Richard Nixon has a president been loathed so deeply by so many. But Nixon’s enemies never jogged through parks in T-shirts demanding his removal. Bush’s divisive personality has helped Run Against Bush grow into a movement. So has the Internet, which in some ways has become to the left what talk radio was to the right during the Clinton administration.
Since it hit the Internet in February, Run Against Bush has spun off Bike Against Bush, whose members rode in Sunday’s North Shore Century from Evanston to Kenosha and back. Today there seems to be an anti-Bush group for every social niche: Babes Against Bush, Bands Against Bush, Republicans Against Bush, even Knitters Against Bush.
The men were part of a cheerleading squad that greets marathoners in Boys Town every October. The shirts were a double entendre–“a double double entendre,” one guy explained. “No Bush for U.S. in 2005.”
“My family is very, very pro-Bush, and they criticize me for running against something,” Kotynski said. “I had a Dittohead T-shirt when I was 12. I was homeschooled, and I was told to fear going to college because I’d get brainwashed. I guess I did.”
