The Secret Order of Sacred Clowns
Culture jamming, and effective protesting.
When I lived in Atlanta, I had a mentor of sorts. He slept on people’s couches and rummaged around in garbage cans. He was a writer. I can tell you for a fact that most writers are not this destitute, but he was and he did it on purpose. This is part of why I admired him — he showed me the value in taking your ideals to the extreme. His name was Kerry Thornley.
Kerry was not your average writer. He was under surveillance by the government. He would tell you it was the CIA, but I doubt that. I definitely think he was under government surveillance though because of a singular fact. When Kerry was in the US Marines during the 1950s, he was bunkmates with Lee Harvey Oswald. I hope I don’t have to explain to you who that dude was. Kerry actually wrote an entire book with a character based on Oswald called The Idle Warriors. Because of this book, he was hauled up in front of the Warren Commision and spent the rest of his life in fear of the CIA. They killed Kennedy, you know. Actually Kerry thought Oswald shot at Kennedy but there was a whole lot more to it involving the CIA…
Kerry was a dedicated Marxist. It was because of Kerry that I learned there are different nuanced flavors of communism, and socialism as it existed at the time was not the same as Marxism. When you hear some ignorant yokel railing about how socialism is going to result in everyone’s property being taken and given to the state, etc. — this is basically Marxism, an ideal that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. Kerry believed in it so fervently that he collected welfare, and donated most of the money he made from his writing to charity. I do have some of my “extreme” views from him, such as the view that healthcare ought to be freely available. But I could never aspire to be as extreme as the dude who handed out Marxist Fair Play For Cuba flyers with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans the summer before President Kennedy was assassinated. Kerry was a singular individual, who was probably under government surveillance. Is it really paranoia if people are watching you?
I met Kerry living in Little Five Points in Atlanta. I had a sweet apartment behind the Zesto’s there, and he crashed on various couches (including mine) periodically. He said things that made me think, which was pretty hard to find in Atlanta at the time. One of the things Kerry taught me was the importance of culture jamming, especially in protest. We formed a group that did protests around Atlanta via performance art pranks called the Secret Order of Sacred Clowns. Kerry had experience with ridiculous religions. He and his friends had made one up by writing a book called the Principia Discordia. Clowns are sacred, Kerry said. Even cops look like assholes if they hit a clown.
The most effective protest comes from a place of humor, Kerry told me. And if you look at protests today, you see the proof of this. From swamp creatures invading confirmation hearings to Baby Trump balloons, there’s hilarious stuff being thrown out in protest over the current regime in Washington. And this was the difference between Thornley and Oswald — Kerry chose to protest peacefully. His bunkmate chose violence.
I have thought about Kerry a lot these days — he died in 1998. I believe he’d be very popular among the kids right now. But I really thought about Kerry this week when hearing about a bit of culture jamming that featured no less than Miley Cyrus’ dad versus the Billboard music charts. I’m talking about Lil Nas X’s song, “Old Town Road”.
It’s no secret that the Billboard music chart is set up along outdated racist lines drawn in the 1950s, when Kerry was writing the Principia. Today there are several charts that songs can trend on. What Lil Nas X did was take a song created the way songs for the hip hop charts are (and he sampled Nine Inch Nails!), filled it with country lyrics, and created a catchy tune that climbed the Billboard country music chart until Billboard removed it last week for no other reason than it was made by a black person with hip hop roots.
Culture jamming, is the act of using existing media to point out hypocrisies in commercial industry. In this case, the Billboard music chart is being used to point out how racist the Billboard music chart is. Kerry and others started this form of protest, and they’d be proud to see people using corporate tools against the corporations like this.
Lil Nas X is my new culture jamming hero. Not only did this go viral and get him some scratch from the Streisand effect, no less than Billy Ray Cyrus remixed it and overnight it shot to #1 on the Billboard charts. I am not sure he knew how extensively it would blow up in Billboard’s faces but I am sure he knew they’d pull it. I also have to say I haven’t heard any of my white friends talking about this — it seems to be exclusively something black folks I went to high school are talking about, which makes sense because Lil Nas X is from Atlanta.
This is the essence of how to protest something. Give it a little thought and you too can make the object of your protest look like an idiot. It’s easy to do with cultural relics like the Billboard music chart and its baked in racism. There are literally thousands of these “cultural institutions” that desperately need tearing down. The way to start is by undermining how seriously people take them. I encourage you all to pick a target and fire away.
If you need any inspiration in your own personal protests, keep it to this — lighthearted protests are the most effective. I know it’s hard to keep this in mind when there are children being held in cages, and cops shooting people in the back. But keep focused on what you are protesting, and remember that making fun of it is far more effective than getting justifiably angry about it.
