Clowns, puppets, songs and street drama are no longer effective means of protest, at least not when the purpose is to mobilize public opinion against a war. Their effectiveness depends upon media coverage and the reactionary powers that presently command our media have learned to ignore not only the public spectacles but also the thuggery the demonstrators frequently experience at the hands of the police. In the '60s, the protesters manipulated the media; now the media make demonstrations look more like civil unrest by broadcasting only unfavorable video coverage and by refusing to inform its audience what the demonstration is all about.

Television, radio and newspapers are very profitable. Profits require scarcity. A television or cable franchise is valuable precisely because both air and cable channels are limited, and until the growth of the Internet, there were no electronic alternatives. Now that there is an alternative, the issue of net neutrality has become one of the most important issues of our times, since the outcome of the battle will determine whether the owners of the physical network will either be common carriers, like the phone companies, or gatekeepers, like the media networks.

The mainstream media and the political elite have been implacably hostile to the independent web-based news organizations that have arisen since the advent of the Internet and the Worldwide Web, and have used every stratagem in their arsenal to limit and even destroy their power and independence. One of the best-known of these web-based news organizations, the Indymedia Network, has been the target of police raids, government harassment, and criminal prosecutions as a result of its broadcasting news, audio and video that governments and multinational corporations want to suppress.

Once the Internet can handle full-screen video, channel scarcity will cease to exist, and an independent media, provided with news contributed by both volunteer and professional reporters, will reach into the vast majority of the nation's homes. This will not only diminish the profitability of the networks, which will be faced with serious competition, but the Corporatocracy that secretly controls our nation and much of the world—deriving much of its power by virtue of the public's ignorance of what is really going on—will find itself directly threatened, much as the medieval church found itself threatened by the invention of the printing press and the rapid spread of literacy spawned by the availability of inexpensive books written in the vernacular.

These corporate media folks take the matter of net neutrality very, very seriously, and have consequently spent many millions, both in campaign contributions and media advertising, to wrest control of the Internet away from the public and concentrate it into the same hands that now control the mass media. In an nation already being seduced and frightened into authoritarianism and all the evils that invariably accompany an authoritarian regime, a neutral Internet, protected by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, may be one of our last opportunities to arrest what is increasingly looking like a slow-motion coup by the extreme right-wing.

So it's time to put away the clown suits, the puppets and the street theatre. In the early Sixties, protesters wore suits and dresses. They looked serious and respectable. They made an impact. They changed the nation.

The media couldn't make them into hoodlums, communists or wild-eyed radicals because they looked and dressed like the viewers, or, even more significantly, their children. Respectable clothes may or may not be the answer today, but the current approach isn't working most of the time. Now that the Bush administration appears to be set on a course to attack Iran, the stakes have become too high not to rethink our approach. If Bush paid no attention to the millions of demonstrators around the world who opposed the invasion of Iraq there is no reason to believe that ten times as many demonstrators will make the slightest difference in his plans to invade Iran.

Here is an IndyMedia NewsPaper. No wonder the powers-that-be oppose them.

Update: Clowns can have a powerful impact, under the right circumstances: