Watch ignorant Mummers and Joey Vento make an ill-conceived half-argument on immigration

This is just hard to believe, the B. Love Strutters' 2009 Mummers Parade entry, which somehow escaped my attention until now. What's a parade without fanning the fires of hatred?



I should point out that although Ray's Happy Birthday Bar is the official meeting point for B. Love, I have never seen a single person I know to be a member in the bar when doing the quiz on three different nights over the past two years and change. They just appear to have meetings there. I suspect like most Mummers these days - and Joey Vento for that matter - many of these guys actually live in the 'burbs and come into Philadelphia only when the city can do something convenient for them.

Yes, that's a guy in an Obama mask - blackface having been struck from the parade only within my lifetime - throwing green cards (which in reality are any number of colors) to the heathen A-rabs, filthy Mexicans and sneaky Chinamen who want to steal your jobs, make babies and order cheesestakes in Uighur, Tamil, Albanian... basically anything but English. This isn't "satire", it's the way these skinheads-with-hair see the world.

This gutter bigot asshole gave the parade $40,000 in a public way in exchange for a platform for his divisive politics of hate, which is his marketing plan. I'm going to puke if I hear one more moron talk about how much "charity" money Vento gives. All this sick fuck does is use the deaths of cops and soldiers for his marketing purposes. There's a big white racist market out there, and Vento taps into it with relish. He rolls in it and carries around the smell. A cop shooting must make Joey jizz his pants; he can buy $50,000 worth of advertising in the local press with a $5,000 donation to a widow.

Hundreds of thousands of Philadelphia area small business owners quietly give tens of millions to causes that help people without dividing the community. There's not combined coverage on that to equal Vento's self-generated legend.

Vento simply hates Mexicans, the people who do Philadelphia's shitwork, actually live in the city and have saved the goddamn "Italian" Market - which provides Vento with a living - from being an empty ghetto. Joey Vento hates that La Lupe is on the same block as him and that their Mexican food kicks his Johnny-come-lately cheesesteak stand's ass in quality. Vento lives in New Jersey. If he really loved the city he'd live here, and be paying property tax on his residence.

Here's proof that Vento doesn't give a flying fuck about immigrants learning English. I attempted contacting Geno's about a donation to the ESL program at the Nationalities Service Center where I used to volunteer as a teacher. (I also kicked some anti-immigrant ass at a Johnny Goodtimes quizzo for this purpose.) I never received any response whatever from them, not even the courtesy of a "no." This charity works to solve a problem that Vento makes money from complaining about loudly. Solving that problem takes an issue away from him, and wouldn't sell well with his racist customer base. "Wait... help the Mexicans learn English?!" Does... not... compute.

Fuck Joey Vento, fuck B. Love and fuck Geno's, the poxy little overpriced tourist trap stand where neon goes to die. Here's something you can do for us, Vento, how 'bout you put out some porta-potties so that your drunken customers stop peeing on your neighbors' steps? And you know what, Joey? I've heard you speak what you call English, and you're not very good at it. If we made citizenship dependent upon an English test, Vento would be the first deported. Problem is, what other country would take him? For starters Joey needs to learn when to use quote marks. There is no reason whatever to throw quotes around "Speak English" unless you mean that ironically.