Sippi the Clown, one of the Tier One Wild Hobo Clown Tramps of Charleston featured in this year’s Best of Charleston issue, has officially weighed in on the debate over regulation of late-night downtown bars. He is, as we suspected, a committed libertarian.
Now, Sippi’s diatribe is a little out of date. The option of forcing new bars to close at midnight appears to be off the table, and the mayor and the Planning Department are now pushing a temporary moratorium on new late-night bars. But a lot of Sippi’s arguments still apply to the debate at hand. They are also fine approximations of early-20th-century campaign catchphrases, like when he shares his suspicion of the “innocuously powerful — ahem, no, I’m sorry, innocuously provocative, there ya go — powerfully perverse, perpetually persuasive pull of some unseen fiscally funded special interest lobby group.”
We’ll leave you with this hobotarian gem from Sippi, who, by the look of the campaign poster behind him, appears to be running for some sort of elected office:
Now, it’s been proven time and again that people prosper the most when freedom is afoot. Now when we got some bureaucratic blowhard lookin’ over our shoulder here, waitin’ to jackboot our spine into some form of serfian submission ’cause they know what’s best for us? No, this isn’t about bars and businesses being told to close at either 2 a.m. or midnight. Hey, to me, in my drunken trampian opinion, it’s about freedom. Yeah. This ordinance, to me, is just one step closer to givin’ those bastards total control through the means of more bureaucratic red tape, and to me, that’s not what this country stands for, no.
(Hat tip to ex-City Paper staff writer Corey Hutchins for cluing us in on the new video. As he said on Facebook, “Not that often you see your local intellectual libertarianism coming from a drunken tramp clown.”)
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