Speaking Mirth to Power: An Interview Part Three

Speaking Mirth to Power: An Interview Part Three

L.M. Bogad

– Artist’s Website –
If we can get creative on the picket line, we can attract a crowd and win their support, or at least tell our story in a compelling, charismatic way to the media and passersby.

This is something I focus on when doing workshops with unions and other action groups. Protest is an art form, a performance. If you don’t think of it that way you just end up doing a bad performance. So if we can get creative on the picket line, we can attract a crowd and win their support, or at least tell our story in a compelling, charismatic way to the media and passersby. It’s also more entertaining for our own “troops” when the picket line action is clever and fun and participatory, so that makes the whole thing less tedious and exhausting and more sustainable.

So yes, as “Saint Francis” I joined the hotel workers who were locked out of the St. Francis hotel and we turned the picket line into an “exorcism of the demons of greed from the hotel.” We brought in Father Louis Vitale, an actual radical Franciscan monk, to join in on the fun, and he was amazing. We all had a great time and eventually the hotel gave in — though of course not just because of our “divine intervention.”

The Angry Banker was another fun one — you can see that here.

That was for the blockade of Wells Fargo’s global HQ in San Francisco in protest of their local policies re: avoiding taxes in Oakland, turning down small business loans and evicting and foreclosing mercilessly in the wake of the bank-induced collapse and recession… The picket line is one of those great opportunities to tell our side of the story.

MayDay protests, San Francisco, 2008. (Credit: Xago Juarez)

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