Creative direct action ideas

[Moorlock]

A San Diegan who calls himself "Monte" has distributed pictures of himself  dancing on Ronald Reagan's grave and urinating on Richard Nixon's.

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45663

[Moorlock]

One of the techniques used by the Nazi invaders of Poland to stamp out resistance was to demolish statues and monuments dedicated to Polish patriotism or heroes. Many Poles adopted the practice of pretending that the monuments still existed, for instance walking around the empty spaces where they had been as if they were still there.

http://sniggle.net/perfart.php

[Moorlock]

Three men were arrested for throwing paper airplanes  through the airspace of the U.S.  embassy in Norway, while the U.S.  was bombing Afghanistan.

http://sniggle.net/perfart.php

[Moorlock]

In 1987, a teenager from West Germany flew a small, single-engine Cessna 450 miles through Soviet airspace and landed in Red Square in Moscow. The reds threw Mathias Rust  in prison, but Gorbachev let him out soon after — and Gorby took advantage of the incident to can his defense minister and purge the military command, hastening the fall of the U.S.S.R.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021123124925/http://www.mathiasrust.com/

[Moorlock]

A man in Berkeley, California has been circulating petitions to try to get the city to put on the ballot a proposition to make Aristotle's first law of logic ("A=A") an official city ordinance.

http://sniggle.net/perfart.php

[Moorlock]

Danah Boyd has a delightful story about spontanous group performance art:

    Last night, I attended a renegade party buried in San Francisco. We could see the road from our location, but the road could not see us. When we saw cop car after cop car drive by, we knew it was over. But still, as they stopped, we crouched down, climbed trees, hid behind bushes. The officer climbed the hill with his flashlight, shining it on people. He got to the top where he realized there were at least 150 people there.

    "Oh. My. God." was the only thing he could mutter. And he kept repeating it.

    In response, someone jumped up and yelled "Surprise!" at which point everyone jumped into singing "Happy Birthday" to the officer. His eyes were wide with shock, jaw still slack...

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/14/danah_boyd_on_a_rece.html

[Moorlock]

Apparently, in Virginia, all you gotta do to get a new driver's license photo is go to the department of motor vehicles and ask. So a couple of pranksters drove from one to the next, getting their photos taken at one after another, wearing ridiculous clothes, wigs, fake beards, and mugging for the camera with grotesque expressions. Oh yeah, then they made a movie about it:

http://laughingsquid.com/virginia-dmv-drivers-license-prank/

[Moorlock]

A nice parody of pseudoscientific doomsaying is the ongoing tongue-in-cheek campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide. In 2004, a city council in California almost fell for it  and had on its agenda a law against H2O.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/12/people_happily_sign_.html

[Moorlock]

"Dick Tuck" is a legend based on the antics of a man named Dick Tuck who worked for Democratic Party on election campaigns in the United States. The other Tricky Dick, Richard Nixon, was up to his own mischief, but more noteworthy here are the stunts that Dick Tuck pulled to derail Nixon's campaigns for senator, governor and president.

I say that "Dick Tuck" is a legend because the stories of many of Dick Tuck's tricks have been exaggerated and embellished over the years (often with Tuck's help), and some that never happened or that were perpetrated by others have been attributed to him.

Among the "Dick Tuck" performances:

• During one of Nixon's "whistle-stop" train tours, at a stop in San Luis Obispo, California, Tuck dressed up in a brakeman's uniform and signalled the engineer to start moving the train in the middle of Nixon's speech.
• After the Nixon/Kennedy television debate, Tuck coached an grandmotherly woman to go up to Nixon in front of the press with a Nixon campaign button on, and give him a hug, saying "That's all right, Mr. Nixon. Kennedy beat you last night, but don't worry, you'll get him next time!"
• At an appearance Nixon made in the Chinatown of Los Angeles, Tuck had a banner made that read "Welcome Nixon" in English, but in Chinese "What about the Hughes loan?" (referring to a potential scandal involving a loan that Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother). None of the Nixon representatives could read Chinese, so the banner stayed as a backdrop to the photo-op. (Fortune cookies in the meal that followed also included the Chinese question).
• Before he became well-known to Nixon's campaign team, Tuck once took charge of organizing a rally for Nixon at a large venue, but he carefully failed to publicize it. Nixon ended up speaking to a mostly-empty auditorium. Introducing the candidate, Tuck said, "Richard Nixon will now tell us about the World Monetary Fund," which of course, was not the subject Nixon was planning to address.
• Tuck hired a number of very pregnant women to carry signs at Nixon rallies that bore the Nixon campaign slogan "Nixon's the One."
• Tuck would masquerade as a fire marshall, tallying up the number of people in the audience at Nixon's indoor rallies. When members of the press asked for his numbers, he gave the lowest plausible figure.

Some folks suspect that the Watergate scandal arose because the Republicans were feeling out-gunned by the Dick Tuck tactics of the opposition. Nixon created his own "dirty tricks" squad for his campaigns, which was more mean-spirited but less successful than Tuck. "Shows what a master Dick Tuck is," said the prez.

"We're up against an enemy, a conspiracy," Nixon said. "They're using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?"

Among the means Nixon's dirty tricks crew used:

• Pat Buchanan, who was then working for Nixon, arranged for a gay liberation group to donate money to the competing campaign of Republican Pete McCloskey (this in 1972, when gay lib was much less politically acceptable than today), then leaked news of the donation to the Manchester Union-Leader just before the New Hampshire primary.
• The Nixon campaign sent out letters on stationery stolen from the Democratic campaign of Edmund Muskie that accused Muskie's Democratic rivals Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson of sexual improprieties.
• Those tricky dicksters sent out formal invitations to various Ambassadors from African governments to dinners that Muskie was supposedly holding. Muskie of course knew nothing of it.
• Outdoing perhaps the "Nixon's the One" prank of Tuck's, Nixon's crew hired a woman to run along a hotel corridor where Muskie was staying, butt naked, yelling "I love Muskie!"
• Still desperate to get Muskie, they forged another letter from him that used the misspelled slur "Cannocks" to refer to French Canadians. Don't know if all of this amounted to much, but Muskie did go from front-runner to also-ran after New Hampshire...
• In another campaign, postcards from a non-existant "Communist League of Negro Women" were sent to conservative white voters in California urging them to vote for Nixon's opponent. "We are with her 100%," the cards read.

http://sniggle.net/tuck.php

[Moorlock]

"Voting is not only useless, it actually undermines genuine democracy by legitimizing an inherently undemocratic process. During this election we are encouraging people to eat their ballots," say the folks at The Edible Ballot Society. Criminally charged with violations of Canada's elections laws, which prohibit the mutilation (and presumably the mastication) of ballots, members of the group vowed to eat their subpoenas.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030804081529/http://edibleballot.tao.ca/news_sep_25_01.html

[Moorlock]

 The Youth International Party, U.S.A. (Yippies) produced a voter's guide in 1968 that read, in part:

   1. Vote. Bring some spare underwear with you, preferably that of the opposite sex, and fling it over the top of the booth while you're voting.
   2. Help others vote. Stand outside the polls silently handing out sharpened pencils to voters on their way in. If you feel this is insufficiently militant, hand out kitchen matches...
   3. Get out the vote. Volunteer for Election Day precinct work. Cover a precinct for Nixon. Cover the same precinct for Humphrey and Wallace. Once they've signed you up for a precinct, they're counting on you to get out the vote there. You may want to do more than one precinct.

http://sniggle.net/election.php

[Moorlock]

The group Billionaires for Bush  puts on ostensibly pro-Dubya protests, yelling "buy your own president!" at anti-Dubya protesters. Formerly known as "Billionaires for Bush (or Gore),"  the group started to franchise into dozens of groups around the United States as the 2004 presidential elections approached.

In May of 2004 I heard a wonderful interview with members of Billionaires for Bush on the radio station KPFA. Everybody played it straight, and the show got a number of calls from enraged listeners who didn't get the joke. An amazing piece of performance art on many levels. Congratulations!

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0219-01.htm

[Moorlock]

In the United States, librarians can be forced to reveal to the government the book-browsing habits of any member of the library-going public. Furthermore those same librarians are forbidden by law from revealing that they've received a request for information from the government. At librarian.net, they've come up with a set of possible loopholes:

http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html

[Moorlock]

In San Francisco, there's a government body called "LAFCO" — I kid you not. It stands for the "Local Agency Formation Commission," which to me sounded like the name you'd give to the seed of a tumor. A commission designed to form agencies! What a wonderful distillation of bureaucracy.

My response was to create a series of announcements promoting the meetings of LAFCO as if they were an experimental form of drama or performance art. I then sent these out to local hipster culture forums and mailing lists. I don't know how many people attended LAFCO meetings expecting theater, or if any of them left disappointed.

http://sniggle.net/lafco.php

[Moorlock]

A security company came up with a way to keep youths from hanging out in places where they aren't wanted — an annoying high-pitched buzz that's played at a frequency that people generally lose the ability to hear soon after adolescence.

But youthful ingenuity being what it is, schoolkids learned to use the same frequency as a ringtone so they could continue to use their cellphones and other electronic messenging devices where they are forbidden and would otherwise be detected by the grown-up authorities.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/24/kids_turn_teen_repel.html