From the Old Gray Lady (the NYTimes)
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/protesters-fail-to-bring-down-global-capitalism-with-costumes-puppets/
(http://img.wonkette.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/capitalism.jpg)
QuoteProtesters Fail to Bring Down Global Capitalism With Costumes and Puppets
By Robert Mackey
Whatever the lasting economic impact of the recently struck deal among world leaders at the Group of 20 summit in London, the fact that the world’s news media and a diverse array of anti-globalization protesters converged in England this week did stimulate the Web â€" which was suddenly alive with thousands of new images of outlandishly dressed demonstrators, many of whom would not have seemed out of place at a rave. Parsing what, exactly, these outfits and props were meant to achieve, besides drawing the attention of people with cameras, was not always easy.
In fact, a look at the small sample of those many, many images, published in the slide show above raises a question: Are anti-globalization activists succeeding in their aim of capturing the attention of the world’s visual journalists â€" with their costumes and puppets and burning effigies â€" but in the process failing to communicate much more than could be gleaned from watching an Ionesco play performed in, say, Old English?
The Guardian in London has been providing saturation coverage of the G-20 summit â€" including a live blog and text, Twitter and video reports on Wednesday’s protests, in which one man died, of what was suspected to be a heart attack.
The newspaper’s green-technology correspondent, Alok Jha, filed an audio report on Thursday morning in which he tried to get to the bottom of what the protesters were thinking. Mr. Jha’s report included interviews with two protesters â€" one dressed as the grim reaper, and another who helped carry a huge puppet of a dead canary through the streets â€" and he asked them what their acts of street theater were all about.
A man named Harry explained that he was dressed as Death to represent “the death of the economy†and “the death of the English pound.†He was also concerned with the micro-economic problem that he was in danger of losing the deposit he’d left on the grim reaper costume he’d rented, since the police had confiscated the mask that went with it, arguing that people with covered faces were trouble.
One of the people carrying the canary (see the slide show above) said that he had brought the huge bird effigy to the demonstration “to symbolize the death of Canary Wharf,†a former dockyard area that was redeveloped to become a center of London’s financial industry, and also the death of “the current financial system.â€
After giving an articulate analysis of the problems with the current global economic system, the canary-bearer told Mr. Jha that the demonstrators were all gathered “in the service of finding a new system that puts people before profit.†While he had thus succeeded in getting his message out by way of The Guardian â€" and perhaps validated the strategy of using an outlandish visual as catnip for the media â€" he then acknowledged that the rest of his day would consist largely of carrying the bird around, getting it photographed, and then storing it away until another economic summit meeting later this year.
The singer and political activist Billy Bragg â€" who made an appearance at the protest outside the Bank of England yesterday, as he tweeted he would â€" once sang that just pinning on peace buttons was not going to get the job done. As Mr. Bragg noted, “wearing badges is not enough†to effect political change. After this latest round of anti-globalization protests, it seems fair to ask if marches that draw attention mainly to men bearing symbolic canaries, or dressed like pink storm troopers, are really helping to advance the cause of those who want to fundamentally change the world’s economic system.
What do readers think, is the media to blame for focusing so much on what is most visually arresting, or are the protesters at fault for spending too much energy attracting attention and not enough articulating practical steps that might actually change the system?