hydrarchist writes: This essay was published recently in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.

"Absurd Responses vs. Earnest Politics:

Global Justice vs. Anti-War Movements; Guerrilla Theater and
Aesthetic Solutions"

by Ben Shepard

“Start the bombing now!!!!!” “Start the bombing
now!!!! “Two four six eight, we are people who hate, hate,
hate!!!!” A cacophonous block of church ladies in drag
calling themselves ‘Perms for Perma-War” screamed
with the formally earnest crowds throughout the anti-war march
in Washington DC on October 27th. What was going on? Different
people had different explanations. But for most involved, the
feeling was the world was witnessing an absurd situation – a “war on terrorism” a sitting vice president predicted
could last 50 years – which required an absurd response.
1984 slogans, “war is peace” and “freedom
is slavery,” had skipped from civics lessons to the front
and center of a national political consciousness. The notion
that ‘ignorance is strength’ had ceased to be seen
as a cautionary tale but was now considered an asset. “When
I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly
who they were… it was us vs. them and it was clear who
them was,” the future president explained on the campaign
trail back in 2000, continuing, “Today, we are not sure
who they are, but we know they are there.”

9/11 was his salvation; the threat was clear. For here on pesky
problems could be blamed on the new national enemy. For Orwell,
it was Goldstein; for Bush it was Osama bin Laden and Saddham
Hussein. Arguments about social democracy, increased social
control and other pesky problems could be dismissed with the
mere reminder, “Don’t forget, Osama bin Laden,” (Pilger, 2002). “Remember, Saddham Hussein’s Weapons
of Mass Destruction.” “Weapons of mass destruction” the National Security Secretary Condolezza Rice repeated over
and over, plugging her case like the Madison Ave marketing guru.
There was a product to sell: Perma-War.

The job of activists is to spell out the logic of the nation’s
movement toward Perma-War. For many, the best way to do this
is with guerilla theatre that illustrates the buffoonery. There
have been absurd wars before, yet unlike the Gulf War, this
conflict began with a mobilized movement already on the ground
and running. At the same time, there are different movements.
As the global justice movement flirts with becoming an anti-war
movement, questions about theater and aesthetics have everything
to do with political strategy and movement building. Politics
of didactic authenticity have to contend with the defiant absurdity
of the carnival of the Seattle era protest model. The following
offers a series of impressions and examples of the increased
utility of street theatre; shifts in its plot structure from
global justice to anti-war and back again, and how they effect
the activist stage. In the current activist climate righteous
confrontation with police translates to almost certain political
repression. As such, the need for colorful festive revolutionary
theater, full of earthy vitality, joy, humor and carnival, has
never been more essential.



Why Absurd Responses?

The enduring strength of the post-Seattle activist project involves
the joy and vitality of the Bakhtin (1965) model of protest
as carnival. The point of this model is to create a festive
energy that dismantles social hierarchies. We’ve all laughed
along with a great joke. Everybody wants to be at a party where
everyone is free to have a good time. The point of a really
good joke is to punch holes in social pretensions. When all
else is lost we have our sense of humor. After a whole year
of the politics of mind numbing seriousness, the possibility
of a joke’s capacity for catharsis was considerable. The
first 9/11 anniversary marked this. Somewhere within our public
life, some of the sentiment of the better to laugh than cry
spoofs as witnessed on Saturday Night Live and the John Stewart
Show, had to be unleashed. The liberating daring of satire had
to become part of movement work. The point of such a brand of
protest would be to re-link protest with optimism and a feeling
of possibility or rejuvenation. The festive atmosphere of a
great action could be bridged with the transformative aspirations
of the carnival. Beyond the

status-quo ceremony of the usual protest, the carnival could
create the liminal in between spaces, the communitas generated
within rituals capable of shifting power hierarchies. We’d
seen images of those protests during the anti-war movements
of the past as well as the extreme costume balls which reclaimed
streets throughout the previous five years (see Boyd, 2002).

The aim of an absurd response would be to create a brand of
protest which merged the joyous ecstatic spirit of exhilarating
entertainment with a political agenda aimed toward progressive
political change. Within this festive revolutionary theater,
progressive elements of political change would be linked with
notions of social renewal. Moving spectators to join the fun,
to become part of the concrete action of social change. Spectacle
is linked to practical shifts in people’s lives (Ornstein,
1998, xiv-xv,6-9). Party as protest thus becomes an invitation
to a possibility. From the IWW dictum that, “Direct Action
Gets the Goods” to ACT UP’s righteous anger, when
activists took the streets without asking for permission, they
produced results in peoples’ lives. The lesson became
that well-timed creative street theatre could re shape power
structures. And along the road, ACT UP brought the dramaturgical
lesson that to be successful good actions had to be good theatre.



In the years after Seattle, activists had worked to build upon
this insight. While dramatic, the macho, quasi-militaristic
posturing of the black block did not appear to be a long-term
solution. Faced with force, police tend to use more force. “My
weapon is bigger than your weapon.” In the months after
the confrontational Quebec protests, spring 2001, activists
planned to stage a silly block to pump a little more color into
the movement during the IMF/World Bank meetings scheduled for
the end of September 2001 (see Herbst, 2002). That was until
two planes crashed into the world trade center.

Anti-War vs. Global Justice Strategies.

In the months after 9/11 the
dullness of hierarchical protest re-reared its tired head. Instead
of a silly block at the IMF protests, the International Action
Center planned their own action, which few attended. The following
year, I watched one of the International Socialist Organization
speakers pull out a bullhorn and scream for everyone to get
in order as activists began the International Monetary Fund
“Drop the Dept March” in Washington in September
2002. The I.S.O.ers, who had been busy selling their cardboard
signs and newspapers, lined up and marched off in a quasi-militaristic
single-file. In a moment, what had been merely tacky became
a replica of the worst kind of militaristic protest theatre.
It seemed a marked contrast to the global justice movement’s
carnivalesque coalition actions, in which the participants were
all free to be the leaders, not somebody’s designated
speaker. Once again sectarian organizations (IAC, Answer etc)
were barking orders and protest was becoming shrill. The year
after 9/11 (with the exemption of the January ’02 World
Economic Forum Protests) actions seemed reminiscent of the 1980’s
anti-nukes or Latin American solidarity protests, with staged
acts of civil disobedience that felt like stagnant ceremony.
Old chants were repeated at anti-war rallies. Again speakers
not seen in years droned on to the converted. Again members
of the crowd were separated from leaders. Heavy-handed one size
fits all anti-imperialist analysis overshadowed pragmatism.
And along the way, protest stopped being fun. Many of those
who had hit the streets over the previous two or three years,
left the activist stage. Frustrated resignation re-entered the
fray.


After 9/11, the challenge remained just how far to
take the movement for global justice as it intersected with
the aesthetics of the anti-war movement. There were many who
had little interest in reacting to a war. Local struggles required
attention, war or no war. In October of 2001 Steve Duncombe
of Reclaim the Streets New York wrote a short manifesto on the
rhetorical implications of the global justice movement’s
evolution into an anti-war movement. Duncombe explained that
in the days after the bombing movement activists mourned for
victims of the terrorist attacks at home, for the victims of
the US military retaliation, for eroding civil liberties, and
most certainly “for the movement for global economic justice
that many of us have been building over the past few years.” Following the attacks activists put all of their energy into
preventing George “This is a Crusade” Bush from
following out bin Laden’s wishes and starting World War
III. Duncombe continued, along the road global justice activists
“built a peace movement. But the Peace Movement we’ve
built is very different than the movement we had before. For
all its faults – and there were many – the Global
Justice Movement was flexible, anti-authoritarian, creative,
fun, increasingly popular and hence effective. The current Peace
Movement is none of these things.”

Despite itself, activism continued. The World Economic Forum
protests of January 2002 succeeded in part because activists
choose to create a mega samba band instead of confronting police.
A focus on local actions took precedent as activists concentrated
on the global components of the local struggles. By fall 2002
the Global Justice Movement re-flexed it muscles with a successful
series of marches during the IMF/World Bank protests in September.
Having lost the possibility of insurgent surprise in the days
after the Seattle, the Global Justice Movement’s cacophony
of voices was able to bring its message to the world through
the theater of righteous protest. The evening news/war pep rally
was constantly interrupted in September with countless images
of activists willing to be arrested to fight corporate globalization.
One news segment showed a group of smiling activists stripping
down to their skivvies in front of a GAP store accused of selling
products made in a sweatshop. Crowds of Georgetown students
chanted, “Take it off” in a back and forth with
protestors. The media was offered a good-natured theatrical
display that highlighted a major problem of human rights. This
they faithfully recorded during their evening news. “It
must be spring,” one commentator noted. People around
the world saw the image of a group of light hearted activists
make an important point as well as produce a positive representation
of movement work to a mass public.


Shortly after the September IMF protests, the president won
support from the Senate for a preemptive attack on Iraq. Just
when protesters had successfully placed global justice issues
back on the public’s agenda the call for war eclipsed
their substantive advances. While the administration was prepared
to spend $100 billion to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction,
it was unwilling to spend more than 0.2% of that ($200m) on
a Global Fund to Fight AIDS among other issues. There would
be no room for “weapons of mass salvation” to fight
for global justice if the administration’s war plans were
successful (Sachs (2002). For many in the Globalization Movement,
priorities became clear: the struggles against war had to be
successful if activists hoped to push other issues back on a
public agenda. The question remained how?

Speaking to Multiple Publics

In the days after the September IMF protests, anti-war
rallies in European cities witnessed hundreds of thousands of
protestors. Of 400,000 protestors in London, only two activists
were arrested. This is in stark contrast to the 650 of 5,000
arrested in Washington, D.C. on September 27th (their offense,
standing in a public park). These activists had made the message
clear that they intended to engage in a street blockade. While
certainly the police counter acted, if not upstaged anarchic
protest with a massive display of fascistic theater, the arrests
should not have been a surprise. Since Seattle, RTS, and Carnival
against Capital had regularly been talked about as "terrorist
groups.” A movement whose hallmark was creative approaches
to protest had re-used tactics which have already been mediated,
massively criminalized, and upstaged by cops. In the current
activist climate, righteous confrontation with police translates
to almost certain political repression.


Part of what movement players were seeing was a strangle hold
on public space, a rigid segmentation of the street corners,
the parks, and by extension the public commons for debate. This
made it harder to get that message out there. The challenge
remained how to creatively speak to multiple publics. If one
of the strengths of the global justice movement was reclaiming
public space through their burlesque of DIY activism, these
qualities appeared particularly necessary for an anti-war message
in its struggle to find its footing. With mounting rhetoric
of war, in the first week in October 2002 thousands converged
in Central Park for a quiet day of speeches with little drama.
The urgency of the anti-war struggle was lost within the long
speeches. For a number of us, the call for a less structured
theater of protest was becoming paramount.

As Irving Goffman instructs, an underlying point of the presentation
of self is to make a point. The same sentiment takes place within
social protest. Movements are essentially constructions of countless
performances. If the protest is sterile, it gets bad reviews.
The gestures involved within protest can be understood as a
means to influence other participants. To achieve a given goal,
movements present themselves to at least six specific publics,
all which are capable of accepting or rejecting a given message.
They are:

1) Potential recruits

2) Those already working within the movement

3) Movement fellow travelers, allies, and potential coalition
partners

4) Over-saturated media outlets

5) Public opinion and good will as opposed to calls for restriction
of public space

6) Public policy makers controlling state action (McAdam, 1996,
339-40).

Successful movement strategy involves retaining the allegiances
of those already involved as well as working to attract those
who may want to join or serve as coalition partners. In order
to appeal to the rank and file as well as begin to make a dent
in the policy public (understood as politicians, the media,
and by extension the democratic public), an effective anti-war
response would need to appeal to outsiders as well as be media
friendly. For many of us, the best way to speak to so many publics
was to cultivate a far more festive brand of protest than we’d
seen in recent years. A protest with a sense of joy that could
be seen on the faces of all those involved.



Forms of Protest

In the days after the staid Central Park rally, activists
from the old Lower East Side Collective, Reclaim the Streets
New York, and the NYC Direct Action Network began quietly meeting
to discuss ways to foster the possibility of just such a politics.
The time seemed right for a shift in movement direction. A national
rally was scheduled for October 26th. Many of us from this forming
coalition would usually skip an action organized by ANSWER,
a post-9/11 formation of the International Action Center; their
leadership had after all supported the Chinese Government during
the Tianamen Square democracy protests of 1989, held rallies
for Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, and supported Slobodon
Milosovich (Goldstein, 2002). The IAC embodied everything wrong
with an American left supportive of any government willing to
stand up to American “imperialism.” Yet, a movement
wedge was unfolding. Our thinking was we could create a joyous,
less righteous, even ironic response – an alternative
to the IAC’s wingnut response.

Our first meeting produced a simple commitment for us to organize
a festive ironic feeder march to join the larger Answer anti-war
march. By the end of our second meeting our ad-hoc coalition
had agreed to create “An Absurd Response to an Absurd
War” to counter the potentially alienating ANSWER march.
Two years prior, in the days after Bush succeeded with his supreme
court 5/4 shuffle, Reclaim the Streets New York had formed the
Students for Undemocratic Society (SUDS), a satirical play off
of the sixties SDS. Dressed as campus preppies wearing “W” hats, we drove down to Washington on January 20th, 2001. “Tell
Us What to Think - Obey!” was our slogan. As we chanted
we offered both a lampoon of the old left slogans as well as
commentary on the new plutocratic regime, “Whose Street?
Wall Street? No Justice, No Problem,” and the crowd pleaser
“What do we want – fur coats? How do we want them
– full length!!!” When a counter protestor chanted
at us we would counter or agree with them. When a group of actual
collegiate right-wing preppies sang “Nah nah nah, nah
nah nah, hey hey hey goodbye …President Clinton,” we interjected with “democracy.” At the time, we
stole a lot of the media coverage from these right-wing groups.

Instead of campus preppies our October 26, 2002 action would
highlight the movement of a group of patriotic ladies with bouffant
permanents whom supported the war. “Perms for Perma-War” would be the slogan. In the spirit of SUDS, our collective drafted
a call to action. It stated

“The
Jaded and Converted and Dicks For Dick invite you to Washington:
October 26, 2002.” It continued: Break
out your beehive, your two-tone shoes, your cardigans! Too

hip and cynical to pin a flower in your hair and hold hands
with strangers? Well then, you are invited to join A.B.S.U.R.D.

Response and Party for Perma-War for a festive, ironic, theatrical
march that will eventually feed into the

anti-war rally in DC. For the real fun, assemble with DICKS
FOR DICK at the

BIG DICK (aka the Washington Monument) at 11 am on Saturday,
October 26.

Because everyone from James Baker III, to Nelson Mandela, to
CIA director

George Tenet has said this war is absurd. In the tradition of
the first

Absurdists we will create our own Theater of the Absurd as our
Idiot Boy

King continues his relentless drive to pitch the world into
a state of

permanent warfare. The festivities will commence with a ritual
"Bowing Down To The Mighty Phallus," followed by a
"hoisting of the balls of war" presided over by

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Bombing Gospel Choir.

Bring costumes, Bring INSTRUMENTS, Bring posters and banners.
Bring lots of

friends. Be prepared to mock the Axis of Oil and Defense Funding
without

mercy. Please do not bring "No Blood for Oil" signs
or Mimes. NO MIMES.

Party for a Perma-War is brought to you by LESC, SUDS, RTS-NYC,
OPP, The

Converted & Jaded, Billionaire Liberation Front, Future
Veterans for War,

and You!

Spoofing the practice of legitimizing protests through organizational
co-sponsorships, every time we offered a new draft call we would
add on group names. The suggested slogans built on themes from
Orwell’s 1984 and a lampoon of bad anti-war theatrics.
We began with the old John and Yoko street billboard:


War is Here, If You Want It (signed
by Blood and Iron, Dick & W)

Exxon Mobil: These Colors Don't Run!

War Is Globalization

We (heart) Harkens

God Bless Boeing

Pre-empt The UN

Ignorance Is Strength

Our final slogan “OBEY” embodied much of what the
group felt was being said by the current administration. Our
message was simple and silly enough. I explained to one reporter,
“Basically, this war frenzy is so blatantly short sighted,
so focused on supporting the narrow ends of Lockheed and the
General Dynamics Corporation and other defense contractors profiting
on the war. Very few in power are considering alternative ways
of creating energy or sustainable development without raping
the environment. War is the answer, war is the answer. Twisted
times, deserve twisted responses. Yet, after a year of memorials,
many of us felt it was time to get a

sense of humor back. War is not going to get my sense of joy.
An absurd war deserves an absurd response, a response capable
of shifting power hierarchies. We have to be effective at drawing
attention to alternative ways of building sustainable communities.
The carnival is a great way to do that..."

Limits of Play

The question was exactly how far we should go with our silliness.
The feeling that many in the current administration were thinking
with their little heads instead of their big ones inspired the
ironic calls for “Dickheads for War!” A friend had
just held a party in which he handed out a bunch of dildos he’d
recently liberated from a garbage dumpster outside of a sex
shop in San Francisco. The idea was for activists to show up
in Washington dressed in corporate drag, a suit and tie, with
a plastic dildo on their head. Like the US military does with
its missiles, prominently painted on the side would be the words
such as “USA” or “Fuck You Saddam”.
For those not familiar with the tradition of the clown and its
buffoon-like confrontations with social and economic oppression
(Ornstein, 1998, P. 3) the message was confusing and even off-putting.
For others, the phallus has been a source of oppression; understandably
not something that is fun.

For us the point was to offend the banal. Kate Crane, a local
media activist, drafted our first press release. It concluded:
“Also on hand will be the Dickheads, a posse of gender-bending
miscreants best known for parading about with dildos for head-gear.
“What’s this war if it’s not about the size
of the Bush-family dick? When will this country stop fucking
the rest of the world and learn that size doesn’t matter?” cried P. Neil Emplante, a Dickhead member.


Theatrical protest has many detractors who see its goal as not
political, but as artistic. Abbie Hoffman was accused of developing
a fan base as opposed to a coherent political stance and structure.
Yet ACT UP helped us learn that with good media work, research,
and a coherent organized message, guerilla theatre can play
an effective role in promoting a political message. Scenes are
staged so as to be media friendly; characters learn their sound
bites around particular policies in question, and audiences
gravitate to good performances. People want to write about and
interview the cast members,

regardless of whether they are stars or not. Everyone has his
or her lines.

The group spent the final days before the action pulling together
slogans, making signs, and working on language for the press
release. The issue over the possible offense nature of the Dick
Heads forced us to struggle with a conflict between a lowest
common denominator activism that was supposed to appeal to a
mythic “people” vs. targeted protests that would
generate strong emotions either for or against us. Crane’s
second press release was a little less silly:

The Bush Administration is drawing the U.S. and the world ever
closer to a state of permanent war. Dubya’s doctrine of
preemption and expanding empire, outlined in the recently released
"National Security Strategy of the United States," does away with strategies of deterrence and cooperation with
other nations—not to mention the notion that war is a
last resort. These strategies have formed the cornerstone of
U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s. As the U.S. courts war
without end, citizens are conveniently distracted from the tanking
economy and the continuing exposés of corporate scandal.

Leading Saturday’s procession will be the Bombshells in
Beehives, a group of 1950s housewives who continue to cling
to the bouffant and floral housedress even in 2002. Together,
their bouffant's will spell out "PERMA-WAR."

"It’ll take weeks to get the glue and felt out of
my hair," Myrtle Nejedlik, a 67-year-old housewife from
Dayton said ruefully. "But what the hell! It’s ‘Perms
for Perma-War!’ The idiot boy king is out for blood (and
oil), and we’ve all got to give what we’ve got to
throw a wrench in the works. Me, I’ve got great hair.

By the third release Myrtle had been edited from the
release. After three meetings in just over as many weeks, we
were ready to converge on DC. In the end, only a few actually
wore the dildos as props. However a whole other contingent calling
themselves the “Missledicks,” seen waving their
deadly phalluses around to cheers throughout the day, gravitated
to the Absurd Response convergence.

Play vs. Political Rhetoric

We arrived late, donned our Perma-War wigs, and some worshiped
at the phallus, the Washington Monument. We bowed down, a few
even put on the dickhead gear. As we marched and chanted we
passed out our palm cards to explain the point of theater: “Are
you ready for Perma-War?” it began. “Iraq is only
the beginning. The Bush Administration is drawing the United
States and the world ever closer to a state of permanent military
engagement, So what do we do?” the front of the card asked.

The back explained: “Throw a party!!! Activism doesn’t
have to mean droning speeches, dull chants, and tired slogans.
To sustain the growing movement over the long haul, we need
humor, theater, music, flamboyance, irony, and fun.” The
card helped bring a little order to the confused day.



Joined by Reverent Billy and Church of Stop Bombing Choir and
calling ourselves the Spirit of 1976 Gone Wrong, our rag tag
group of anarchist clowns jugglers, fire-eaters, strippers,
puppeteers, drag queens, kings, and missile dicks marched from
the Washington Monument to the Vietnam Memorial to feed into
the larger march of disgruntled citizens. We were armed with
our message, another great product to sell, like the pump hair
spray we used for our perms.



Two clowns dressed in red white and blue cheered and danced
spastically to the call for war, screaming tee hee, bouncing
to and from, calling for the crowd to join them.

When confronted with counter protestors, the clowns joined the
other side where they started yelling at us. Joining the other
side is a particularly effective ploy for disarming counter
protests and the media coverage of them (we’d first used
this tactic as SUDs at the Bush coronation). In this case however
the counter protests of pro-war Iraqis actually charged us.
It incited not a playful theatrical scene but an agitated screaming
and shoving match which could have turned violent. Having had
our fun, we marched backward and onward toward another joke.
The scene was more reminiscent of the old Monty Python, “RUN
AWAY” schtick. There were other protestors out there who
would appreciate the message.



Amidst hoards of earnest protestors, with their “How Many
Iraqi Children Will Die Signs,” we chanted: “We
love bush, we love dick, all you peaceniks make us sick.” To the drums introducing our Perma-War kick line we cried “All
war, all the time, Perma-War is peace,” and sang the old
anthems, “We Shall Overbomb” and “All we are
saying is give War a Chance.” There were chants of “Start
the Bombing Now” on the verge of offending the sensibilities
of the larger crowd of 100,000. The day was full of rhetorical
shuffles with groups like the dour sectarian International Socialist
Organization with their reified chants of “Hey George
Bush, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” To these we replied, "We need oil, we need gas, watch out
world we'll kick your ass!" We directly lampooned the old
lefty slogan “the people united will never be defeated” with “The people who chant this will never be creative.
The people, bad slogans, will always be defeated” and
“Power to power”

Throughout the day more and more people sang along and applauded
to, “We shall over bomb,” joining us for the chorus,
“Deep in our hearts, we do believe, we shall live in war
forever.” The “W” stands for WIMP” chant
calling for the war to begin ASAP proved to be a crowd pleaser.
“War is good for children, it builds strong bones,” followed “Bomb Iraq, start the war, we don't need no peace
no more.” With the crowd swelling, we were joined by a

group of George Washington Students and members of Reclaim the
Streets Washington who led the crowd in a rendition of Perma-War
hokey pokey. “You put the money in, you put the money
out, you put the sanctions in and you shake it all about” and everyone danced. “What do we want – Perm-War!
Why do we want it – for higher ratings!” and with
the drums and the improvisation there ensued thousands of variations,
we had become jazz inspired.

After three hours of this our nonsensical tone was only becoming
more so as we literally deconstructed the old chants to their
bare bones. The George Washington University crowd lampooned
the age old, “hey, hey, ho, ho" proclaiming, “Hey,
ho, ho, ‘hey, hey, ho, ho’ has got to go!” Later this was modified to “Hey, hey, ho, ho, he, heeee” with a quiet squeal. At some point we stopped adding new variations,
we riffed, “3 word chant! 3 word chant! 4 words are better!
4 words are better!” and “March, march, chant, chant,
rhetoric, rhetoric, rant, rant!!!” Finally the simple
words, “da, da, da, da, da, da, da.”

In the End

In the end, we got a 10 to 30 second news reports on most
of the networks, a predictably sarcastic story in the NY Times
and a cover story in the Washington Post. It declared “100,000
Rally, March Against War in Iraq.” In addition, we got
our picture on the cover of the Post. Is it a good thing if
this ironic theatrical protest is the only representation of
the movement that the public sees? Certainly the message was
confused. At one point, a person came up to me and asked if
we were right-wing drag performers. Yet from the voices of the
crowd, the embrace of our signs & slogans, and the media
coverage, we had to assume that three of the six publics needed
for a protest to be deemed a success, were achieved. We won
over our fellow travelers, recruits, and the media. The word
“OBEY” and “Perma-War” made it onto
the front pages of the Washington Post, and will perhaps become
part of the larger cultural consciousness. Andrew Boyd (2002)
describes the process of planting such infectious messages as
meme warfare. It remains to be seen whether the crowd who celebrated
along with our spectacle by speaking out against the injustices
of the right and banality of the left will continue to destroy
the stage directions received from protest’s past

In the weeks after the protest more positive coverage of the
anti-war movement followed. The New York Times changed their
tune and followed the Post’s line that the October event
was perhaps the largest anti-war protest since the Vietnam Era.
“Rally in Washington Is Said to Invigorate the Anti-War
Movement,” read the times headline of October 30, 2002.
Later in the week, I worked with ACT UP to bring the message
to a visiting dignitary from the Bush Administration. "Money
for AIDS, not for War " we chanted as we disrupted the
speech of Tommy Thompson's under secretary. The room of poverty
beurocrats stood up to applaud. That same evening, we took the
Perma-War message to the West Village Halloween Parade where
the anti-war humor drew wide spread cheer.



Humor may be our greatest response to this strange convergence
of events. We put up a small website calling for new recruits,
highlighting our antics, and calling for new members to join
our weekly anti-war events list (http://www.mobilize-ny.com/
and http://www.absurdresponse.com/). For now, the crowd has
been invited to continue to challenge the elite’s engineered
hysteria (Ornstein, 1998, p. 3).

Whether we shift dynamics within the grand mystification is
another question. But for today, we brought a bit of lightheartedness
back to a theater of protest. They say imitation is the best
form of flattery. In the weeks after Absurd Response started
we signed up hundreds to join our anti-war direct action list.
Members of ACT UP Philly, the nation’s strongest ACT UP
chapter, even started their own Absurd Response group for anti-war
rallies. They came up with their own chants:



This is what aristocracy looks like. Surrender Now.

Support Our Elites.

Shut Up Already.

In MY Name Baby.

Aint' no power like the people in power cause the people in
power don't stop

Say CASH.

No Justice, No Peace, No Shit.

Give Up.

Peace is Very Scary.

Free, Free the Military.

Whose Fucking Cops? Our Fucking Cops!



Throughout the country, the anti-war message is taking off.
As for Absurd Response, the group continues to shift the ways
that energy is brought to the intersecting global justice and
anti-war movements. Perhaps the core message is that fun and
freedom are essential tools for activists working to create

a better world. Back in 1965, in the face of threats of violence
from the Hells Angels during a rally, Allen Ginsberg wrote a
pre-action call on how to handle a potentially disruptive situation:
Demonstration or Spectacle As Example, As Communication or How
to Make a March Spectacle. In his surprisingly still contemporary
call he offered a mind-body view of keeping cool and creating
a theater of protest. His little essay, which suggests putting
the Beatles’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand on the loudspeakers
if you are being attacked, serves as an outline for the transformative
potential that protest offers when we are critical of ourselves
and joyful at the same time. “If imaginative, pragmatic,
fun, gay, happy, secure propaganda is issued to mass media in
advance…” the essay begins, “the parade can
be made into an exemplary of spectacle on how to handle situations
of anxiety and fear/threat to manifest by concrete example,
namely the parade itself, how to change war psychology and surpass,
go over, the habit image reaction of fear/ violence... This

is, the parade can embody an example of peaceable health which
is the reverse of fighting back blindly.” Perhaps that’s
just it, the parade can be an example of another way of being
right with others and ourselves. Attacks from the Hells Angels
need not bring out the worst in us..

References

Bakhtin, M. 1965. Rabelais and his world. Bloomington:
Indiana Press.


Boyd, Andrew. 2002. IRONY, MEME WARFARE, AND THE EXTREME COSTUME
BALL, ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest And Community-Building
in the Era of Globalization, Eds. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald
Hayduk. Verso Press: New York.


Ginsberg, Allen. 1965. Demonstration or Spectacle As Example,
As Communication or How to Make a March Spectacle, Deliberate
Prose: Selected Essays 1952-95, Ed. Edward Sanders. Perennial/HarperCollins:
New York.


Goffman, Erving.1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Anchor Books: New York.

Goldstein, Manny. 2002. THE MYSTERIOUS RAMSEY CLARK: STALINIST
DUPE OR RULING-CLASS SPOOK? The Shadow. http://shadow.autono.net/sin001/clark.htm

(Accessed November 22, 2002).


Herbst, Marc. 2002. The Masquerade Project. Journal of Aesthetics
and Protest. July.

http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/mas querade/index.html


McAdam, Doug. 1996. The framing function of movement tactics:
Strategic dramaturgy in the American civil rights movement.
Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements.

Eds. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald. Cambridge
University

Press.


Ornstein, Claudia. 1998. Festive Revolutions. University of
Mississippi Press.


Pilger, John. 2002. The New Rulers of the World. New York: Verso.



Sachs, Jeffrey. 2002. Weapons of mass salvation. The Economist
(24 October).

Benjamin Shepard is an active member of the Absurd
Response and Reclaim the Streets New York. He is co-editor of
From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building
in the Era of Globalization (Verso, 2002). He’d like to
thank Kate Crane, Steve Duncombe, and most of all Mark and Robert
Herbst for their insightful comments on this essay.