Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Feb. 15, 2003: Duct Tape Bush!

What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? Plenty, as I found out when I attended the Peace March in Philadelphia on Saturday.

Despite bitter cold and the threat of snow, the protesters were in high spirits. Drifting through the crowd, I heard again and again the mantra, "I can't believe there's so many people who feel the way I do."

And there were thousands. Ten thousand, to be exact.

That's why, I believe, there was such an air of festivity. People were mingling, joking about the cold and keeping up each other's spirits. We listened respectfully to the speakers, who rallied us by talking about the issues. We joined in with the chants, such as:

What do you want?   Peace!
When do you want it?   Now!

And:      The people united will never be defeated!

In between the chanting we engaged in excited discussions about the Bush Administration's skillful media spin for its ill-planned foreign policy, about the groundless fear instilled by things such as the Orange Alert, about the Orwellian nature of terms such as Homeland Security and Axis of Evil, and about how all of the above have led to the steady erosion of civil rights in this country since 9/11.

The march gathered at the state building at Broad Street and Spring Garden and marched to the federal building, near the Liberty Bell. On the way, the flatbed truck at the front of the march stopped periodically to allow new speakers a chance to address the crowd.

And yes, we protesters got silly sometimes, caught up in the high of discovering thousands of people believe strongly enough to take a stand. It was an amazing revelation, when all the pollsters and the pundits have done everything in their power to make us believe otherwise.

So when, for example, a gray-haired man held up his orange and yelled, "Oh, no! It's a Code Orange!" and those around him recoiled in mock terror, it wasn't because we didn't understand the gravity of the situation.

And when one of the speakers punctuated her powerful address with satire -- howling out at one point, "Duct tape this!" -- it wasn't because she thought it was all a joke.

I guess I feel a need to explain this, because when I told one friend about the experience, he couldn't understand the joking. He couldn't understand the power of humor as an activist tool.

Posters with messages such as "Frodo failed; George Bush has the ring" made a statement with humor. Those of us who fear, as many of us did, that a president who didn't even win the popular vote is a political opportunist trying to bully the rest of the world into military action that could, in fact, further unsettle the Middle East and endanger us all -- well, humor is a positive way to deal with such fears.

Which is a long-winded way of explaining why, by the end of the march, some of us had picked up "Duct tape this!" and morphed it into "Duct tape Bush!" It reminded me of the playful slogans such as "Make love not war" that characterized protests against Vietnam, largely understood as a call to "free love" instead of as a playful turn on words, designed to make a point.

The 11 p.m. news seemed to understand we were serious.

They did their canned "protest" story, which starts out with some footage of the group marching and chanting, tells how many people showed up, gives a few protesters some camera time to say why they're there, provides footage of five pro-war demonstrators who were so vastly outnumbered I don't recall seeing them (why is it that an opposing viewpoint is always "news" in the case of a protest, and yet they don't feel compelled to provide an opposing viewpoint to every story about Bush's latest soundbite?), and wraps up with the ambiguous statement, "The protest was relatively peaceful; there were no arrests."

Then they want back to their top story, about the upcoming storm.

Is it any wonder you have to have a sense of humor if you're going to speak out?

Moral:
Invest in duct tape.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson
Philadelphia protest photos by the Associated Press

Previous writings about Iraq: Would-Be Pundit

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