Wed Mar 28, 2007

I want to thank the Monkees for giving me the best belly-laugh I've enjoyed in ages! I laughed so hard I almost did myself a mischief.

The pic of the Lone Demonstrator with the black blockhead ... (I'm sorry, I'll read that again) ... with the black-block head is an almighty crackup on so many different levels. They would have looked only marginally sillier with paper bags over their heads, or perhaps wearing Natalee masks and long blond wigs.

The homeless Monkey baglady panhandling next to the dustbins (or are they mailboxes?) was another great moment in photo-journalism.

I look at pics seeking "the story", and taken individually and collectively the story here is of people who don't really have the faintest idea what they are doing - from photography through media to social action - these guys couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

This demo is so typical of those middle class "silent majority" who have only ever seen demo's on TV and think they're easy to organise and automatically highly effective. It also directly relates to The Original Boycott and now Boycott II - Ignominy Revisited.

Both demos and boycotts are a show of strength, but the big gamble is that they can give the whole game of bluff away as a show of weakness too. SIX people? (if you include the one behind the camera). Brave for sure, but an utterly pathetic proof of their powerlessness, and better left un-done.

And that is exactly what the original boycott demonstrated - their weakness and lack of any real power outside Alabama, that Jug's threat to "burn Aruba down" was baseless bluster.

The *threat* of a boycott was effective because nobody knew if they could deliver, but when the 'gun' in their pocket was fired and turned out to be a carrot, they were sunk. HMI continue to mistake the intensity of their own feelings for effective power, and their mutual back-slapping shows they still have no idea of their abject failure in Boston.

Purely from a campaign point-of-view The Boycott was a really misdirected idea that was clearly counter-productive, and attempting another is a serious case of dumb and dumber - HMI would manage to cut themselves with anything sharper than a bowling ball.

American can-do single-mindedness put a man on the moon, but in Vietnam, Iraq, and Aruba this same single-mindness has been blinkers (blinders) that hide the fact that if "this" isn't working, more of "this" isn't going to either. There are a class of problems that brute force isn't the answer to, and this is one of them.

Like Vietnam and Iraq, rather than stepping back and taking stock of results, recognising failure, and trying a different approach to more force, HMI collectively have created their own little fantasy "reality" where the FBI is envolved in the big cover-up (Deech) and the Aruban tourism and economy has "collapsed" (Monkees). Even if Natalee turned up alive and well tomorrow there would still be a few who would continue to believe that Joran "did it".

The handouts are also collectables for how not to do it, the content and links more likely to alienate than co-opt. As bloggers like Deech and Zoltan depart the known universe they are still the best thing that happened for a skeptical and rational consideration of this case.

So the Boston demo shows the *weakness* of HMI, and how FEW people are using the force magnification factor of the net. This is not to deny that an armed paranoid is dangerous, just that many of them injuns are only the cigar store kind.