CHAPTER V Laugh Your Way to Victory want you to take a moment and play one of my favorite I games. It’s called “Pretend Police.” It’s fun. Here goes. Pretend you’re the police in Ankara, Turkey. A few days ago, security guards in one of the busiest subway stations in town spotted a couple making out on the platform. Strict Muslims, the guards were bugged by such immodest behavior in public, so they did the only thing they could really do, 98 Blueprint for Revolution which was get on the subway’s PA system and ask all passen- gers to behave themselves and stop kissing each other. Be- cause everyone in Ankara has smartphones, this little incident was leaked to the press within minutes; by the afternoon, politicians opposed to the ruling Islamist-based party realized that they had gold on their hands and started encouraging their supporters to stage huge demonstrations to protest this silly anti- smooching bias. This is where you come in. On Sat- urday, the day of the demonstration, you show up in uni- form, baton at hand, ready to keep the peace. Walking into the subway station, you see more than a hundred young men and women chanting anti-government slogans and provoking your colleagues. Someone shoves someone. Someone loses their cool. Soon it’s a full- blown riot. If you’re seriously playing along, it’s probably not hard to figure out what to do. You’re a police officer, and you’ve probably spent a whole week at the academy training for situ- ations just like this. It’s what police all over the world do. You move in, you get in formation, you put on your riot gear, and you start to thump your baton on your shield to intimidate the crowd. You probably don’t feel too bad about it, either; you’re only doing your job. Besides, you’re just protecting yourself and your fellow cops from flying stones or whatever else the people decide to throw your way. You move in. It takes you an hour, maybe two, before thirty or forty of the protestors are in jail, ten or twenty are in the hospital, and the rest have run away. You return to the precinct house, drink a Laugh Your Way to Victory 99 coffee with your buddies, and go to bed feeling content with a day’s work. That was easy. Now, let’s play again. It’s Saturday morning. You arrive at the subway station. There are more than a hundred people there, protesting against the censorious announcement from the day before. But they’re not saying anything against the government. They’re not shouting or chanting. They’re kissing each other loudly, making these gross slurpy sounds nobody likes, drool- ing and giggling. There are almost no signs to be seen, but the ones you do notice have little pink hearts on them and read “Kiss me” or “Free hugs.” The women are in short- sleeved, low- cut blouses. The men have their button- downs on. No one seems to notice you— they’re too busy holding each oth- er’s heads as they suck face. What do you do now? Go ahead and game it out if you’d like, but let me save you the trouble. The answer is that there’s nothing you can do. It’s not only that the amorous demon- strators aren’t breaking any laws; it’s also their attitude that makes a world of difference. If you’re a cop, you spend a lot of time thinking about how to deal with people who are vio- lent. But nothing in your training prepares you for dealing with people who are funny. This is the genius of laughtivism. I know, the name is stu- pid; my friends who are native English-speakers tell me so all the time. But the principle is solid, and like many things, I stumbled upon it completely by mistake. 100 Blueprint for Revolution It was early on in our efforts to take down Miloševic´, and like all novice activists, we had a moment of reckoning. Look- ing around the room at one of our meetings, we realized that we were kids, and rather than focus on what we had going for us, we began obsessing about everything we didn’t have. We didn’t have an army. We didn’t have a lot of money. We had no access to media, which was virtually all state- run. The dic- tator, we realized, had both a vision and the means to make it come true; his means involved instilling fear. We had a much better vision, but, we thought on that grim evening, no way of turning it into a reality. It was then that we came up with the smiling barrel. The idea was really very simple. As we chatted, someone kept talking about how Miloševic´ only won because he made people afraid, and someone else said that the only thing that could trump fear was laughter. It was one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard. As Monty Python skits have always been up there right with Tolkien for me, I knew very well that humor doesn’t just make you chuckle— it makes you think. We started telling jokes. Within the hour, it seemed to us entirely possible that all we really needed to bring down the regime were a few healthy laughs. And we were eager to start laugh- ing. We retrieved an old and battered barrel from a nearby con- struction site and delivered it to our movement’s “official” designer— my best friend, Duda, designer of the Otpor! clenched- fist symbol— and asked him to draw a realistic por- Laugh Your Way to Victory 101 trait of the fearsome leader’s face. Duda was delighted to comply. When we came back a day or two later, we had our- selves Miloševic´-on- a- barrel, grinning an evil grin, his fore- head marked by the barrel’s numerous rust spots. It was a face so comical that even a two-year- old would have found it amusing. But we weren’t done. We asked Duda to paint a big, pretty sign that read “Smash his face for just a dinar.” That was about two cents at the time, so it was a pretty good deal. Then we took the sign, the barrel, and a baseball bat to Knez Mihailova Street, the main pedestrian boulevard in Belgrade. Right off Republic Square, Knez Mihailova Street is always filled with shoppers and strollers, as this is where everyone comes to check out the latest fashions and meet their friends for drinks in the afternoons. We placed the inanimate objects smack in the middle of the street— right at the center of all the action— and hastily retreated to a nearby coffee shop, the Russian Emperor. The first few passersby who noticed the barrel and the sign seemed confused, unsure what to make of the brazen display of dissidence right there in the open. The following ten people who checked it out were more relaxed; some even smiled, and one went as far as picking up the bat and holding it for a few moments before putting it down and quickly walking away. Then, the moment we’d been waiting for: a young man, just a few years younger than us, laughed out loud, searched his pockets, took out a dinar, plopped it into a hole on top of the barrel, picked up the bat, and with a gigantic swing smashed 102 Blueprint for Revolution Miloševic´’s face. You could hear the solid thud reverberate five blocks in each direction. He must have realized that with the few remaining independent radio and newspapers of Bel- grade criticizing the government all the time, one dent in a barrel wasn’t going to land him a prison sentence. To him, the risk of action was acceptably low. And once he took his first crack at Miloševic´’s face, others started to realize that they too could get away with it. It was something between peer pressure and a mob mentality. Soon curious bystanders lined up for a turn at bat and took their own swings. People started to stare, then to point, then to laugh. Before long some par- ents were encouraging their children who were too small for the bat to kick the barrel instead with their tiny legs. Every- body was having fun, and the sound of this barrel being smashed was echoing all the way down to Kalemegdan Park. It didn’t take long for dinars to pour into the barrel and for poor Duda’s artistic masterpiece— the stern and serious mug of Mr. Miloševic´— to get beaten into unrecognizability by an enthusiastic and cheerful crowd. As this was happening, my friends and I were sitting out- side at the café, sipping double espressos, smoking Marlbo- ros, and cracking up. It was fun to see all these people blowing off steam with our barrel. But the best part, we knew, still lay ahead. It came when the police arrived. It took ten or fifteen min- utes. A patrol car stopped nearby and two pudgy policemen stepped out and surveyed the scene. This is when I came up with my beloved “Pretend Police” game. I played it for the Laugh Your Way to Victory 103 first time at the café that day. The police’s first instinct, I knew, would be to arrest people. Ordinarily, of course, they’d arrest the demonstration’s organizers, but we were nowhere to be found.