The Clan of the Porpoise Heads

Peering out of the rubber mouth, the woman wearing the big porpoise head expressed frustration that her objections to free trade were not being taken seriously.

She and her cohorts, all similarly attired, were on a Miami street outside a meeting of the North American Free Trade Commission, complaining that the police were preventing them from fully expressing their views.

The anti-free-traders were many and varied, though not so many and quite a bit more varied than had been expected. That is, the crowds were smaller than anticipated, but the deviations from the subject at hand were many, like the woman from the Clan of the Porpoise Heads.

Maybe all the protesters should have carried little reminder cards with them, with "FREE TRADE BAD" written on them, so they could remind themselves why they were there.

Then again, maybe a lot of them were there just for giggles. Some things are just more fun when the press is watching. "WHAT DO WE WANT?" "SOMETHING!" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT?" "SOON!"

Not one of the protesters made a lick of sense when explaining their views, or why (or even if) they take exception to the exercise of free trade.

Many wore gas masks. There was not a clue available as to why. Did the gas masks signify that free trade stinks? Some wore gas masks and capes, like refugees from a Darth Vader look-alike contest.

One chap did manage to express his conviction that "big corporations" were going to make bunches of money, while somehow taking jobs away from everybody, too. He was unable to explain how the corporations were going to manage to make lots of money appear, while simultaneously making every job in two hemispheres disappear. (Some corporations with labor problems might like to know.)

Another enthusiastic participant, quite pleased with himself, announced that he was "for peace and freedom," and who can argue with that? What a splendid fellow! Although in his case, it turned out that he wanted to smash the front window of the place and barge into the meeting to express his enthusiasms more forcefully. He wanted the freedom to literally crash the party, and to be left in peace while he did it.

But of course it isn't free trade that these ersatz street philosophers object to; it's capitalism, which is a word to describe people buying and selling what they want, to and from other people who want to buy or sell it.

Communism still blights the landscape of three or four isolated outposts of human misery; but it wheezes with every breath and is slumping toward the graveyard of gruesome experiments. Socialism lives on, but mostly only in the hearts of people like those observed on the streets.

So with communism withering away, and socialism so widely discredited that even Marx, were he to come back to life, would whack himself on the forehead and cry, "What was I THINKING? THAT won't work!" - there isn't much left for your average free-range activist except to wear silly costumes and try to latch onto something to complain about.

Either that, or go get a job, before the big corporations somehow take them all away.