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April 10, 2004

Accidental Tourism in Protest Culture.

Banks close at noon on Good Friday, which didn't occur to me for even a second on the four-block walk to mine yesterday afternoon around 3:45. But that's okay. On the way home, a demonstration ate me.

I'm not a protest sort of person. I'm aware of politics, I vote, I read the newspaper. But chanting slogans in front of the post office isn't really my idea of influential law and policy reform, unless it's A) The 1960s, B) I'm in Selma, C) A police dog is trying to devour me, and D) I can reasonably expect that a good-sized chunk of the nation will actually see this police dog trying to devour me tonight on the news and be thoroughly appalled.

Things have changed. A lot. But not enough that I could ignore the high-pitched mewling sound in my hindbrain urging me to join the herd and mill aimlessly.

How things kicked off. This mob marched in off of an intersection, banging time on a snare drum and brandishing the Spanish anarchist's flag and dabbling in a bit of light cross-dressing.

I find it a little weird that all of the self-proclaimed anarchists, even just the ones in Spain, would hold still long enough to agree on an official flag. That much organization doesn't strike me as very anarchistic. If I were an anarchist, my flag would be a green bath towel with huge, throbbing gentials drawn on in orange house paint. Seriously huge. Not even gentials, more like fractions of genitals. The idea of genitals. Genitals so enormous and abstracted that everyone would have to ask me what they were. And whenever they would ask, I'd bite them in the eyeball. ANARCHY NOW.

The meet n' greet. It was pretty obvious that protesting was the hub of the social lives of a lot of the people here.

"Oh hey Barb, how ya been? Ya goin' t' that gathering against the privatization of the university's janitorial staff on Tuesday?"

"Wouldn't miss it for the world! Ya gonna be on the state capitol steps this fifteenth for the gay marriage visibility project?"

"You bet! Cliff's organizing! See ya there!"

This guy was golden. Total attention whore. He spent the twenty minutes before the speeches began standing on a bench, strumming his guitar and ad-libbing an Engrish-y little tune with "Bring troops home now!" as the bridge. He was eventually drowned out when the drummer in the ski mask began parading up and down the block, pounding out something I vaguely remembered from marching band.

Also golden: This guy. He didn't say anything, he just stood quietly on the edge of the crowd, holding up this picture of the Pope. He was wearing anti-Bush buttons, so I'm assuming he agreed with the general sentiment, but cognative dissonance ahoy. Later on, when a representative of a local mosque stepped off the stage, Pope Man ensnared him in a converation that I would have paid admission to experience.

Especially golden: Hispanic Anarchist. He spoke in Spanish, so I only caught bits and pieces of his contribution, but he mentioned las fascistas a lot and pushed for socialized health care. Such energy. If felt like the build-up to a chorus. I bet he listens to a lot of Rage Against the Machine.

I probably would have spoken, actually. I'd have loved the attention. I even thought of something slightly clever to say. But I had a Clutch show to catch at the Bottom Lounge at 9:00, and I had a line to stand in.

Bye bye, protest.

More on the Clutch show later.

Posted by Spike at April 10, 2004 10:28 AM

Comments

Your bit about the bath towel and the genitals is going in my quote file.

Posted by Wagner at April 10, 2004 10:46 AM
24.28.87.101

You are my hero!

Did I ever tell you that Clayton Bailey was my ceramics intructor at CSUH?

Posted by Lisa Jonte at April 10, 2004 12:27 PM
69.42.3.13

haha! genitals. that's awesome.

Posted by Jenn at April 10, 2004 01:10 PM
69.4.150.44

Hooray for Genitals!

Posted by Rich at April 10, 2004 05:03 PM
151.197.225.231

Heheh, anarchists. That special combination of right-wing and social liberal. They allways seem to be organizing stuff, and I always have to point out the irony.

Wow, a random protest. We don't get those in the south. I have to drive north if I want to get beaten up... at a protest, that is...

Just got "A Naturalist's Guide to Art School," by the way... I love it. It's dead on. I'm going to piss of so many professors with it as I urge students to buy it...

Posted by spookable at April 10, 2004 07:21 PM
152.163.252.198

I want to organize an anti-protest protest; get a giant banner that says 'GO HOME, YOU LOSERS' or somesuch stirring statement, and a couple cans o' Mace. Ah, yes. That's the stuff.

Posted by The Bloated Camel at April 10, 2004 09:53 PM
205.188.116.146

Hey spookable, ever seen the movie "SLC Punk?" It's got a pretty good scene about the inherent absurdity of anarchy as a viable state.

Me, I put it in the same box as Marxist communism. Pretty on paper, but doesn't really consider human nature as a variable. It would be really neat and cool and gosh-darn super if we could all co-exist and share and be nice to each other, but, that's not going to happen until they start putting thorazine in the tap water. And probably not even then.

Posted by spike at April 11, 2004 12:30 AM
68.20.182.1

Exactly. The most active political group on my campus is the International Socialist Organization. They like to rant at me about why Democrates are absolutly no better than Republicans, so I shouldn't vote. "If we protest loud enough, Bush will listen! Nixon got us out of Vietnam!"

I then have to go into a bathroom and laugh until I dry-heave. We all know how much attention politicians pay to people who don't vote.

But hey, maybe we're just too cynical, and all the massive world-wide protest just wasn't loud enough to keep Bush outta Iraq... Nope, dry heaving again.

"SLC Punk" has a lot of great moments like that. I think that movie sums up counter-cultures in general pretty well... not that they're all bad, but they are all amusing in their own way... And you can eventually buy each one on a baby-shirt from Belks...

Posted by spookable at April 11, 2004 07:16 PM
152.163.252.198

OK, I am posting an angry retort to a mild political conversation in a thread no one but Spike is likely to look at ever again. I.e. I am a tool. Shut up.

[pedantic toolery]
I am always annoyed by jokes which rely on popular misconceptions. So even if the original post's "omg ORGANIZED ANARCHISTS lol" was _intentionally_ inaccurate, it still totally ruined my chance to laugh at an otherwise masterful use of the word "genitals." What the hell.

And then in the comments section spookable repeats this sentiment, seemingly in earnest. (Precisely why such jokes piss me off so much.)

So, OK: "anarchism" is not "being all iconoclastic and shit." It is not "the theory or doctrine that ka0s r00lz." It is the rejection of *coercive authority,* and includes many theories on how orderly (omg!) societies might exist in the absence of such coercion.

Whether humans could actually pull this off on a large scale is, as Spike notes, highly questionable. A pretty okay introduction to anarchist thought can be found here:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/

Also, Spike: Which scene was that? Been a while since I've seen SLC Punk, and it's completely weird that I'd forget its actually discrediting anarchism (rather than making fun of teens who don't know shit about shit.)
[/tool]

(p.s. big fan <3 <3)

Posted by echeneida at May 24, 2004 05:43 AM
209.214.102.196

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