These Clowns Remind Me of the Raging Grannies

We Are Insurgent

The Rebel Clown Army Manifesto   (found on Adbusters)

we are insurgent because we have risen up from nowhere and are everywhere. Because ideas can be ignored but not suppressed and an insurrection of the imagination is irresistible. Because whenever we fall over we rise up again and again and again, knowing that nothing is lost for history, that nothing is final. Because history doesn’t move in straight lines but surges like water, sometimes swirling, sometimes dripping, flowing, flooding–always unknowable, unexpected, uncertain. Because the key to insurgency is brilliant improvisation, not perfect blueprints. 

we are rebels because we love life and happiness more than ‘revolution.’ Because no revolution is ever complete and rebellions continues forever. Because we will dismantle the ghost-machine of abstraction with means that are indistinguishable from ends. Because we don’t want to change ‘the’ world, but ‘our’ world. Because we will always desert and disobey those who abuse and accumulate power. Because rebels transform everything–the way they live, create, love, eat, laugh, play, learn, trade, listen, think and most of all the way they rebel. 

we are an army because we live on a planet in permanent war–a war of money against life, of profit against dignity, of progress against the future. Because a war that gorges itself on death and blood and shits money and toxins, deserves an obscene body of deviant soldiers. Because only an army can declare absurd war on absurd war. Because combat requires solidarity, discipline and commitment. Because alone clowns are pathetic figures, but in groups and gaggles, brigades and battalions, they are extremely dangerous. We are an army because we are angry and where bombs fail we might succeed with mocking laughter. And laughter needs an echo. 

We are approximate and ambivalent, in the most powerful of all places, the place in-between order and chaos.

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From the Raging Grannies site / raginggrannies.org/herstory/:

The Grannies have daringly crashed parties, receptions, commissions and hearings of all kinds to give visibility to issues or events that some wanted secret. The organisers of the first trade show of high-tech military products in Victoria wanted to keep protesters away because their presence would make US uniformed officers in attendance ill at ease (Stewart, 1989, p. 4). To their chagrin the Grannies showed up. The entrance being free for those wearing military uniforms the Grannies got out their veterans’ uniforms or made them with things like cellophane and all kinds of gaudy baubles. Predictably refused entrance, they haggled long enough to allow cameras to reveal the little secret on the evening news. A year later, they resurrected the uniforms and trotted down to the Armed Forces Recruitment Office to sign up as volunteers as the threat of war in the Gulf increased: “unable by law to ask the Grannies their age, the baffled recruiters ploughed through the necessary paper work straight-faced; one Granny was even invited back for a math test! Back they were a week later with knitting needles and wool” (McClaren and Brown, 1993, p. 7). The granny invited back for a chance to qualify as a maritime officer displayed typical Grannies’ humour: “I’m certainly prepared to go in any capacity they send me, . . . I wanted to go as a person who is experienced in conflict resolution. I qualify because I lived with a man for 40 years and brought up children” (Meissner, 1990).