For 25 years, anarchist, "psy-ops clown," and former Baltimore club promoter Vermin Supreme has occupied the narrowing gap between the candidates and the cops.
by Eric Ericson, Jr. (City Paper, 2/1/2012) 
Vermin Supreme is a meme, according to his music video for his song “I Am a Meme”, which I am watching on my office computer while talking on the phone to Vermin Supreme, who says he is in a “secure, undisclosed location.”
“Where did you get that pony?” I ask.
“That pony belongs to a friend,” Supreme replies. “He let me use it.”
“You have a friend who will lend you a pony? That is totally awesome.”
“Get that lyric?” Supreme asks, repeating it for emphasis: “I will be gone like yesterday’s trash, but here I am—in the pan I flash.” He laughs.
The Democratic candidate for president of the United States has an honest, hearty laugh. He amuses himself with his own absurdity, which is refreshing during this particular campaign season. In 2012, Republicans are seriously asking whether former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who collects $57,000 every day of the year for doing no work at all, might be too rich for the presidency. As such, they are actively contemplating electing a man so hilariously megalomaniacal and demonstrably venal that sincere attempts at parody seem merely to prefigure his actual views. Supreme has long advocated waterboarding schoolchildren as part of his platform. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, by contrast, speaking at Harvard in November, declared this nation’s child labor laws “truly stupid” and proposed that unionized school janitors be dismissed wholesale and replaced by poor children in order to instill in them a proper work ethic. He later reassured voters that he was not advocating that children work in coal mines.
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Supreme continued to promise that his longtime push for mandatory tooth-brushing laws has nothing to do with “secret dental police kicking down your door at 3 a.m. to make sure you’ve brushed” and is, furthermore, absolutely “not about DNA gene splicing to create a race of winged monkeys to act as tooth fairies.”
Thing is, Supreme has been saying these things for decades. Far from a flash in the pan, he has been a fringe political mainstay since 1992, when he first hit the road campaigning to become mayor of the United States of America. His campaign paraphernalia was left over from an early run for mayor of Baltimore.
Continue reading Vermin Supremacy at Baltimore City Paper.
