Oh no no no no no! Contrary to your wildest hopes and dreams, I am not going to let today go by without expressing my profound dismay at the second illegal coronation of the monster called Dubya. Out of hope for some solidarity, I walked downtown to a local protest but left feeling even more hopeless than ever. Amid anemic street theater and speech after speech about putting power in the hands of the people, I realized that I have heard all of this before. “Power to the people” has been a leftist catchphrase for forty years, but every protest I attend has less power and fewer people to claim it.

There is a great deal of debate regarding the utility of public protest. In my opinion, this should be the greatest weapon in our arsenal: it should energize the participants, capture the interest of passers-by, and terrify the opposition. Instead, the art of protest has degenerated into a bunch of crazy-looking people standing around with outdated signs, holding side conversations through the inevitable posturing speeches.

I’m reading a marketing book that advises a business to polish to a high shine all of its “points of contact” with the public. This, after all, is where people who have had no experience with your organization receive their first impressions and are educated about what you stand for in by what you say, how you say it, and how much attention you give to the details. As much as I appreciate the impulse of the grass roots to “do something,” I humbly suggest that the first thing they do is polish their message, work on their delivery, and come up with something more meaningful to do than standing around, listening to the organizers preach their forty-year-old homilies to the choir.

That said, here are some photos I took: