Yesterday, I posted the video of Thomas Friedman getting pied. Many of you found the clip unsettling, and an interesting debate unfolded in the comments as to whether these sorts of tactics were permissible. From my vantage point, the problem was not the pie throwing, but the pie throwers. What unsettled was the instant of fear that Friedman clearly experienced, the flash of bodies rushing towards him when he was vulnerable and alone on a stage. It's the intimidation and the terror that folks -- including myself, when I watched the video -- reacted to. Had the protesters massed in the back and then used some big exercise bands to accurately catapult some pies onto the stage while a hidden, circular banner unfurled saying "THESE PIES ARE FLAT, AND DELICIOUS. BUT THE WORLD IS STILL ROUND," that would have been sort of awesome. Dive bombing at Friedman was, I agree, not. So I guess I want to separate two things here. The first is that this sort of protest-through-buffoonery has no place in public life. It's obviously not my chosen mode of political communication, but there are no end of disempowered folks out there, and if some avante garde protesters occasionally want to make public figures look ridiculous, I'm fine with that. The problem is, it has to be creative, message-driven, and non-threatening. This was a protest driven by the self-satisfaction of the protesters, not the content of their argument. There are lots of ways to make fun of the world being flat, and I could imagine whip cream -- delicious, delicious whip cream -- being involved in some of them. But the implicit threat of physical violence -- even if it's an unintended threat -- should not be.
