Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Sanctioned Town Parades

Marches and Parades 34°

It's not hard to reserve a section in most town parades, and participation is often free. Usually you just need to obtain a form from the city and fiU it out with a (fabricated?) name and contact for your organization?^all yourselves the [name of your city] Buccaneers, if you can't think of anything else. Such events, just like street fairs, are excellent opportunities to make the anarchist presence visible and welcome in communities. If people have seen you waving and giving out free food at every public event for a few

years, they're less likely to feel intimidated when they see you masked up in an unpermitted march?or to think you deserve it when the police beat you for marching and then charge you with assault.

If you already have banners from other marches, you can bring them out on these occasions (don't forget, also, that these banners can hang on the walls at every punk show, speaker event, and independent video night you put on)?^but make sure you're not needlessly alienating your audience. Better yet, put together something fun and tailored to the specific event?make a pirate ship float complete with eye-patched pirates flying the black flag, or, for the Christmas parade, put together a Santa Glaus bloc of white-bearded, red-clad anarcho-communists distributing gifts and advocating the redistribution of wealth. Consider what you can give out to folks watching the parade?the fortune cookie model is hard to beat for combining sweet sustenance and information?and what kind of spectacle you can put on for their entertainment.

For the July 4th parade mentioned in the Banner Drops account (pg. 75), we reserved spaces for two groups: a peace march with the usual signs and chants, and an anarchist contingent featuring a marching band, crazy home-engineered circus bicycles, two fire-breathers, our flying circle-A with the 2 3-foot wingspan, and people giving out fortune cookies {in this case, vegan chocolate chip cookies in plastic baggies, each with a quote of subversive implications from some "founding father" of the American revolution) and little fliers explicating anarchism. The peace march, being the only contingent in the entire parade to take the year's theme "celebrating our heroes" seriously, actually won a prize ("Best Use of Theme") for their posters of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Emma Goldman. On the other hand, we anarchists unexpectedly turned out to be one of the most popular sections in the march, thanks to the liveliness of our approach. At one point, when I was carrying the pipe holding aloft one of its wings, a man in conservative

Account

Marches and Parades 34^

dress there with his wife and child asked what the big A was for. "Anarchy," I replied, and he nodded approvingly. After the parade, a street festival began at which we manned a table, giving out literature and recruiting for Food Not Bombs for the rest of the day. The next year, we participated again?and this time won "Best in Show," of course.

Appendix When you're not interacting with an official city parade or a march called for by other Noise Parades activists, but you're also not looking to provoke a confrontation with the powers that Instructions be, you can organize an event that isn't illegal, strictly speaking, but still falls outside the bounds of the permissible and predictable. One of the models for such an event is the "noise parade": rather than fighting for the street, a group accepts the scant public space set aside for it, but transforms this space by means of entertaining or challenging sounds, visuals, theater, and so on. Such an action is bound to be fun at the very least, and can be good for starting conversations, achieving visibility, and startling slumberers from their ennui-induced sleep.

If such an event isn't closed to outside participation, it can engage passersby in transfiguring their own oppressive environments?e.g., a parade that goes up and down a boring teenage hang-out street until everyone has joined in. The absence of an explicitly political message can often be a good thing?not everything we do has to be topical or reactive: it's also important to be consistently present as a welcomed source of entertainment and good cheer.

Account

Marches and Parades 342