The Rebel Clown Army Manifesto
We are insurgent
because we have risen up from nowhere and are everywhere. Because ideas can be
ignored but not suppressed and an insurrection of the imagination is
irresistible. Because whenever we fall over we rise up again and again and
again, knowing that nothing is lost for history, that nothing is final. Because
history doesn’t move in straight lines but surges like water, sometimes
swirling, sometimes dripping, flowing, flooding–always unknowable, unexpected,
uncertain. Because the key to insurgency is brilliant improvisation, not
perfect blueprints.
We are rebels
because we love life and happiness more than ‘revolution.’ Because no
revolution is ever complete and rebellions continues forever. Because we will
dismantle the ghost-machine of abstraction with means that are
indistinguishable from ends. Because we don’t want to change ‘the’ world, but
‘our’ world. Because we will always desert and disobey those who abuse and
accumulate power. Because rebels transform everything–the way they live,
create, love, eat, laugh, play, learn, trade, listen, think and most of all the
way they rebel.
We are an army
because we live on a planet in permanent war–a war of money against life, of
profit against dignity, of progress against the future. Because a war that
gorges itself on death and blood and shits money and toxins, deserves an
obscene body of deviant soldiers. Because only an army can declare absurd war
on absurd war. Because combat requires solidarity, discipline and commitment.
Because alone clowns are pathetic figures, but in groups and gaggles, brigades
and battalions, they are extremely dangerous. We are an army because we are
angry and where bombs fail we might succeed with mocking laughter. And laughter
needs an echo.
We are approximate
and ambivalent, in the most powerful of all places, the place in-between order
and chaos.
