The serious reasons for wearing silly costumes to protests

Bring plenty of flowers and musical instruments, such as bongos and tambourines. Don’t forget the sweets and paper halos to give to the police. In the event of trouble, start dancing or intoning “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. If a fight breaks out, send in trained seducers to charm the enemy mid-battle.

That last bit was a joke by Allen Ginsberg. But the other ideas were among the poet’s suggestions for turning a protest—in this case an anti-war march in Berkeley in 1965—into a spectacle. The event should embody an alternative psychology, Ginsberg argued, and be “an example of peaceable health”. He was onto something. At its best, protest is a kind of art, framing its messages in street theatre and visual tableaux. This art form has its own motifs and canonical images—and it is flourishing, as the frogs of Portland, Oregon, show.

Earlier this year a shrewd protester there donned an inflatable frog costume for a demo at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. Others in the city followed suit. Before long the frog spawned the menagerie of inflatable animals, from unicorns to axolotls, who paraded at the recent “No Kings” marches held across America.

The frog-marcher is an image with a rich impact and lineage. It is a species of what is sometimes referred to as “laughtivism”, which infuses protest with photogenic mockery, and of what Srdja Popovic, a Serbian activist, calls “dilemma actions”. These give the authorities lose-lose problems. Collaring an inflatable animal—or pepper-spraying the costume’s air-vent, as a cop did in Portland—seems heavy-handed. But restraint can look like a concession. Russians who held blank placards at anti-war protests posed a similar conundrum.

These absurdist sketches cast the enforcers as stooges in the protesters’ joke. Just as important, people in inflatable outfits are ostentatiously harmless—cuddly rebuffs to claims that today’s demonstrators are maniacs and terrorists, whose rampages justify the use of troops and emergency powers. The quirky pictures from Portland and elsewhere are thus part of another iconography of protest: scenes in which the peaceful face down the mighty, often alone.

For the most influential images of protest are not of vast crowds in, say, Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 or at the March on Washington of 1963. They are of a solo high-school student being mauled by a police dog in Alabama, or a man putting a flower in a rifle’s barrel pointed at his head. More recent classics include snaps of a young woman in Tbilisi, Georgia, using the reflection in a riot shield to apply her lipstick, and a lady in a red dress being sprayed with tear-gas in Istanbul. The greatest may be the shot of a lone figure blocking a column of tanks in Beijing, armed only with his shopping bags.

Rationally, you might expect pictures of such lopsided stand-offs to nurture obedience to the overlords, rather than solidarity with dissident underdogs. Besides the threat of grievous harm, the teenager kneeling before a phalanx of riot police, and the inflatable amphibian dicing with armoured feds, risk seeming foolhardy and doomed.

Yet such images evoke primitive instincts that hijack the viewer’s sympathy. One is a natural fellow-feeling with those in adversity. “By changing places in fancy with the sufferer”, Adam Smith wrote in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, observers perforce “enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him”, and so “tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels”. Then there is an ingrained respect for physical bravery and a belief in fair play that seems to be hard-wired (witness the fact that a child’s first sentences typically include “It’s not fair!”).

Crafting such meme-worthy scenes requires ingenuity. It takes imagination to be funny on the streets; when the skull-crackers muster, it takes discipline to remain “hip, calm and tranquil”, as Ginsberg enjoined. Even so, mastering the art of protest can boost the assets on which all movements for change depend: numbers, momentum and morale.

Artful protest transmutes the state’s might into a liability, its power into bullying paranoia, fear of it into ridicule. It converts the vulnerability of a peaceful crowd into courage and charisma. And it simplifies the moral choices of onlookers. Do they back the serene woman in a summer frock or the visored robocops who are arresting her? When it comes down to it, whose side are they really on: the guy dancing in a carnival costume or the one wielding a truncheon? ■