Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

There are a variety of other approaches to bannering. If you can toss a weight vrith a string attached from one rooftop to another across a street, and your friend on the other side ties a rope to the string for you to reel back and secure, you could then pull a banner across the rope to hang in the middle of the street on carabineers or shower curtain loops; some hardware stores stock a little dart-gun device that electricians use for getting wires across cramped spaces, which might be useful for such situations. There is a banner-dropping technique in which people are suspended in the air with the barm^er, as a form of civil disobedience to ensure the banner will remain up for as long as the individuals are willing to hang there; this has been applied, among other places, in Seatde just before the W.T.O. meeting in November 1999. Such a technique is dangerous enough that it should only be taught in person. For another application of banners?^launching them with hot air balloons^see Corporate Downsizing (pg. 205).

For our final test run before composing this recipe, we dropped a 27' long by i8' wide banner fourteen stolen tablecloths triple-stitched together by sewing machine, a gallon and a halt of house pamf 100 feet of rope, two water bottles, and four metal cHps which were &e on^y iterns we had to pay for) ofFthe top of a six-story parking garage in the middle of a tourth of July parade in downtown Greensboro, North CaroHna. The banner could be seen from down two streets along which the parade proceeded, on one of them up to a distance of many blocks. We tailored our message to be accessible to an audience attending a patriotic event an audience composed largely of white and African-American working parents and their hds, while responding clearly to recent government propaganda encouraging people to accept curtailed freedom in return for "protection" from the "terrorist threat-Those who trade liberty for secunty mill end up with neither, wilb Ben Franklin's name (as the dubious author of an earlier version of this quote) and a circled A at the bottom That same government propaganda had made us quite nervous in the days leading up to the event: every time the radio was on, it was some announcer talking about how police and plainclothes F.B J. agents would be out in force and on fUU alert this Independence Day to prevent terrorist strikes. We were afraid that, running up to the railing above the crowd and dropping a great bundle toward them, we could look even more dangerous than we were Ihe parking garage was dosed, ofFlimits to the public (police line do mot cross) on the day of the parade, but we had noted in advance that some vehicles were left parked there for many days at a time, and parked a car witii the banner in the trunk on the top deck there the preceding day When the parade began, two of us. dressed in our nicest clothes snuck past security and walked up the first couple of decks; a man drove past us in a staff vehicle, but for some reason did not stop us (our story would have been that we had left something m our car, which was parked there before the area was closed off but I'm glad we didn't have to tell it). We then took the elevator, which we hadn't been expecting to work, to the top deck, which was-amazingly-unguarded, took out the banner lost pre-

Account

Banner Drops 79

cious instants debating which side was the front and struggling to lock a car trunk neither of us had ever locked before, clipped the ropes around a metal pipe, threw the banner over the side, and realized that it hadn't unrolled all the way. We had rolled it far too tightly, especially since it hadn't needed to be all that compact, waiting in the car trunk! We had to pull it back over the edge, having already made our presence known on the street below as well as on the security cameras, and unroll all twenty-seven feet of it into the parking lot, before struggUng to throw the banner, bunch by bunch, back over the edge, with great difficulty (and more than a litde vertigo, as a vertical shaft opened between us and the wall). All this induced feelings of panic, but there would have been no reason to leave then and render all the work we had done and risks we had taken for naught; we got it right, finally, and made for the stairs. We took these to the second floor, but, on opening them, saw police; we ran back up to the third floor, walked across one length of the garage and took a single flight of stairs we had scouted out in advance, and managed, against the odds, to escape without even being questioned. One of us changed clothes immediately after the banner dropped, but still in front of the security cameras, the other after we reached the street and the safety of the crowd, which was perhaps a better strategy.