How the Uprising can be most effective.
I admire and applaud all the people who protested Bush at Monticello, but the one image that undermined the whole thing and that I keep seeing the media and critics on the right pointing to is the one guy who was dressed like Uncle Sam reminiscent of Carl Weathers in Rocky.
Why do people keep doing that at protests? Who thought that was a good idea?
In David Sirota's new book, The Uprising, he makes a very good point about the public protest movement and some of the things they do that hurt their message and their causes. He talks about the WTO protests in 1999 and the antiwar protests before and after the Iraq invasion and how fringe elements were used by the media to frame the entire story to the public. He also talks about the use of protest as an instrument of power and how it can be used most effectively. Yes, protest is mostly theater, but the point of that particular theater is to make the audience empathize with the protesters and I am sorry but nobody is going to empathize with a guy dressed in a gaudy Uncle Sam costume. Quite the opposite. It made many viewers empathize with the people in the audience who yelled back at the guy to shut up and sit down.
The most effective protests in modern times have been the civil rights protests and if you watch films of those you will notice something about them... all the protesters are dressed in normal clothes. Many of them are even dressed up in suits, like Dr. King usually was. You don't see anybody on stilts. You don't see anybody naked and you don't see anybody dressed up as a gaudy clown version of Uncle Sam.
The leaders of the public protest movement would do themselves a favor by distancing themselves from the most fringe elements that only tarnish their credibility and by adopting a much more mainstream look. The Average American is going to have an easier time identifying with protesters yelling "War Criminal" and "Impeach" when they look like the average American than when they look like performers in costumes.