This week I was wandering
around my local supermarket when I spotted something very unusual for Central Texas . A young woman was wearing a shocking pink
T-shirt that read FREE PUSSY RIOT. Wow,
I thought, they’re megastars now! And
yet, although I more or less agreed with the sentiment on the T-shirt, I did
wonder why these young women receive so much attention, when their protest was
so asinine, and there are so many more causes in the world deserving of
attention.
For instance, that little
girl who got shot in the head in Afghanistan earlier this week- where
are the T-shirts demanding justice for her? Nowhere. Or what about Mali , overrun by
radical Islamists who are busy destroying ancient Sufi shrines? When is Paul
McCartney going to tell them to stop? Never. And then there’s Nato member Turkey , which
imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world: when is Sean
Penn going to speak up for them? He isn’t.
What’s going on here?
Well, first of all Russia
is very easy to understand. Russians are always the baddies in Hollywood movies, and Putin is ex- KGB, so the Pussy Riot
case is an incredibly easy narrative to frame. However that’s not the complete
explanation because many people in Russia ’s
opposition are much more coherent and intelligent than Pussy Riot, but nobody
in Texas is
wearing hot pink T shirts in support of Alexei Navalny or Sergei Udaltsov.
Is it because Pussy
Riot consists of young women and mothers? Certainly that increases sympathy for
them, but I still don’t think that’s the core of the matter. Rather, I think
it’s because their protest was extremely Western in style, as if designed to
trigger a massive nostalgic response in Europe and America .
You see, punk music,
feminists with attitude, irreverence for church and state- once upon a time,
all that stuff was very exciting for us. But now it’s incredibly boring. Punk
music? In the 1970s it was a bit shocking, what with all that spitting and
saying rude things about the Queen. Today the most famous punks are
millionaires in their 40s or late 50s who live in mansions. As for blasphemy,
you can dunk a crucifix in urine or incorporate elephant dung into your picture
of the Virgin Mary and most people will yawn, while the artist will be
handsomely rewarded.
See how boring that
is? The ennui is terrible, there’s no risk involved. You need to go back 30 or
40 years for any of it to have meaning. In Russia , however, you will still get
bashed on the head if you irritate the wrong people, and as we have seen- singing
a rotten song in a church can land you in jail. As the writer Zinovy Zinik once
said, Russia
is a vast erogenous zone for bored Westerners, close enough to provide a
vicarious thrill but sufficiently distant that it poses no risk of infection.
Russians will not protest in their thousands in front of Google’s offices in London if you say rude
things about them on Youtube, for instance.
This meanwhile leads
to an interesting question- how can you become an international celebrity
protestor? Well, if you live in the Middle East, or Africa ,
tough luck. Those places are too exotic, and much too dangerous. The best you
can hope for is that a celebrity mediator might stop by and pick up your cause-
like George Clooney in Darfur , or Sting
wherever it is he hangs out these days.
No, you need to live
in a country that can be easily encapsulated as authoritarian, and preferably
ex-communist. Thus the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has managed to achieve some
renown, although he is much less successful than Pussy Riot. Retro youth
culture is the way to go; you have to appeal to Western nostalgia. The problem
is that punk has been done, and protesting in a church has been done, so what’s
left? I think you have to go further back in time, to the 1960s. None of that
Black Panther, Weather Underground terror stuff, though- it’s not fashionable
any more. No, the protest has to be really asinine- like getting naked in
public for instance. Ah wait- Femen in Ukraine have already
done that (and scored decent media coverage.)
Wait, I’ve got it! Here’s
the height of pointlessness, the most ridiculous protest of all. Stage a bed-in,
like John and Yoko! Decades afterward and people still remember that the
ex-Beatle and his under talented wife slept in late one day for the sake of…
world peace, was it? Or were they raising our consciousness? Maybe Garry
Kasparov could lie in bed with Eduard Limonov and refuse to get up until Russia changes.
Of course, I think President Putin would be perfectly happy if they did just
that.
17/10/2012