Marvin is in the House!

MY GUIDE ON HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL PROTESTER (By Marvin Moonbat)

Protesting is a very serious business. You have to really want it to be successful. And by successful, I mean carrying out your protest so that you’re able to look in a mirror and say “Wow…I really made a difference today! What I did was important! I’m changing the world!

And let me tell you, changing the world can be a lot of work.

For instance, last weekend our campus chapter of PAWPER (People Against War, Profits, and Environmental Rape) held a protest against the Iraq war. Or maybe it was against Iraq war profiteers. Or maybe it was against war profiteers who are raping the environment. I kinda wasn’t paying attention at the strategy session we held the night before because I was too busy making my sign for the protest.

That’s one of the first rules of being a good protester. You’ve got to have a decent sign. Bells, whistles, drums, horns, and other noisemakers are important. But if you don’t have a good sign, you might as well turn in your membership card for the Reality Based Community.

First, you have to start with a theme. My theme at the protest was “No blood for Oil.” So Chloe (who’s really a good artist) drew this picture of an Iraqi getting shot by one of our “heroic” soldiers with blood kind of spurting out of his head and the soldier with a big grin on his face saying “HALIBURTON SAYS HELLO!” with the letters in “Haliburton” dripping blood. Blood is very important in protests. The protest leader, my friend and mentor Jacques (he’s a foreign student from France) says that all the good European protests show a lot of blood. He says whenever they make a sign using a picture of Bushitler, they always show blood dripping from his mouth. Pretty cool, huh? And since the Europeans are always right and know things that we Americans don’t have a clue about, it just stands to reason that we should copy them whenever possible.

So to really make our sign stand out, Chloe drew a picture of the American flag with blood dripping from the red stripes. And for the stars, she drew tiny pictures of naked Iraqis like the ones from the Abu Gharaib thing. It was a masterpiece! Chloe got mad when some huffy woman from the Girls Against Guns (GAG) group complained that all the blood would encourage violence. She told her to bugger off, in so many words. And then some gay guy complained that the stars with the naked Iraqis weren’t big enough, that he couldn’t see them. I told him it wasn’t important that people see the naked Iraqis it was important that we knew they were on there! After all, protesting is as much about making a statement about yourself as it is about trying to change people’s minds. So what if people can’t see naked men, piled on top of each other. The point is that it reinforces your belief that torture is bad, unlike the wingnuts who believe that torture is good and our faux President who likes to torture people.

I mentioned noisemakers before. It’s important that you choose a noisemaker that matches your personality. Kind of like a zen thing; you must become the noisemaker. Chloe prefers more subtle noisemakers like wind chimes or banging two pieces of wood together. She says it helps her commune with the forest spirits. For myself, I wanted to use a drum but Chloe wouldn’t let me. She said since indigenous people thought that drums were sacred that I couldn’t defame their religion by using them, even for a good cause. So I ended up using a kazoo. It sounded pretty good too. The only thing was by the end of the protest I was so out of breath from humming I almost fainted.

Next time, I think I’ll use a cowbell.

One guy had a glockenspiel. The problem was, he couldn’t play a note so he ended up just banging away like crazy on the damn thing making quite a discordant racket. One of the protest leaders finally couldn’t stand it any longer and told him to put the stupid thing down and just yell a lot. Pretty embarrassing.

So anyway, there were about 50 of us that showed up for the protest in front of the campus administration building. There were quite a few professors who joined us. I hear one prof actually made it part of a class assignment and that he’d fail anyone who didn’t show up. I wish he had a bigger class. As it was, we had a good group. There were a few members of “Code Pink” who showed up in pink underwear. I was kind of disappointed because, no offense to those people, but none of them looked good enough that they should have been dressed only in underwear. I mean there was this really enormous hairy guy with a beard and weighing close to 300 pounds. He was dressed in pink tights and a pink bra. It kind of distracted from the point they were trying to make.

The highlight of the protest was the “die-in.” About 20 of us lay on the ground while a couple of people poured red stuff all over us. The media ate it up! The local TV station sent a camera crew and they took pictures of us lying on the ground with this fake blood and it was great. They even had a shot of me lying there. It was only for a couple of seconds but I got on TV! I got a tape of the program. I’m the one lying on my stomach, face down 3rd from the right in the second row. I looked pretty good too except all of that fake blood was really messy. And I wish they’d told us it wouldn’t come out in the wash. I ended up ruining my best Bruce Springsteen tee shirt.

After the die in, Jacques got up and made a speech. He talked about how the war was bad and that Haliburton and other big corporations were making a fortune. I couldn’t understand a lot of what Jacques was saying because he really doesn’t speak English very well and my French could use some work. I think he said something about we should try and be more like the French and other European countries by letting the United Nations run the world. I agreed with that 100%. Considering what the UN has been able to accomplish in places like Darfur, the Congo, and other trouble spots around the world, it just makes sense to have the UN run things.

The protest ended with everyone singing the Internationale. Chloe and I both choked up at that point. Thinking of all the people who’d given their lives for socialism – voluntarily or not – made us feel part of a very special movement. It was truly inspiring.

So that was our protest for peace. I just wish more people had shown up to watch. I think there were more members of the media there than onlookers and protesters. It just goes to show how hard it is to be a member of the Reality Based Community.