An ever-watchful member of the International Bicycle Conspiracy apprised us of the following exchange (found here):
Seems an advertising company in the UK thought they could hire the folks at CIRCA (the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army) to film a TV commercial where the clowns, dressed as chauffer and car owner, fight for the driver’s seat of a new Citroen [rhymes with “pitted groin,” from the PONG of the same name–ed.].
Standard stuff of clowns, would be very funny, etc. Can you see it?
But wait a minute. Who or what is CIRCA? What is the “Clown Army”?
We saw them on the front page of the newspaper not long ago battling for attention at the G-8 summit in Edinburgh. They’re not the hired clowns you’re looking for, Lucy. In fact, we rather think you’ve missed the point.
The Clown Army response (from one “Kolonel Klepto” [shurely not the Klepto of Suharto regime fame–no, that’s Colonel with a “C”–ed.]) to the ad agency’s request is so stunningly beautiful we reproduce it below in full.
dear lucy
thank you for your wonderful offer to get us to help promote the motor car —
we at circa are so excited–you see clowns love cars–especially little ones which we can all squeeze into and then fall out of–again and again–normally our cars are made of badly painted cardboard that falls apart in the rain…..
But you seem to be wanting us to help sell beautiful shiny metal cars ooohhh ahhhhh —big hard ones that drive very fast and need special tarmac roads ( rather than circus rings).
So exciting–so glamorous these beautiful stylish cars that run children over splitting their skulls, or breaking their spines in two!
Are we really going to help sell Big BIG important sexy cars that hit other cars and bicycles and cause huge bloody accidents with guts and brains splattered in very un-clownlike ways across the tarmac?
We are always surprised at CIRCA that despite the fact that cars kill over a million people every year, they are not seen as terrorising our communities like those horrible people that you see on the TV all the time with planes and rucksacks as weapons!
We are also always perturbed at the fact that cars are still promoted by lovely “arty” advertisers as desirable and fashionable objects –despite the fact that they are major contributors to global warming which (as we are seeing with the hurricanes, heat waves and floods) is going to kill and destroy more and more things every year–even our lovely government has claimed (and never acted on) that global warming is “a greater global threat than terrorism.”
But maybe you like droughts and deserts and watching the flood waters rise and maybe you think these are beautiful things, dramatic and powerful images of modernity— just like the cars you work so so so hard to sell to people who are mostly in debt and can’t even afford them.
Maybe it’s the fact that cars need so much oil that you like–that glistening shiny black stuff, all slippery and sexy and sensual, that gushes out of the ground like a huge explosive orgasmic torrent… to us clowns it reminds us of those wonderful cream pie fights all dripping and gooieeeee — it’s just such a shame that with oil comes more pollution, indigenous people getting cancer, jungles turned to toxic waste, lots of lakes dying and river and sea life disappearing and of course oil’s favourite partner in crime WAR !!
It’s such a shame that those lovely American soldiers killed 140,000 people in Iraq and still can’t get the oil (they went for in the first place) flowing faster than the blood.
OH dear what are we going to put in our nice shiny cars with less and less oil around….
Maybe its just that you hate local shops and want more and more malls and out of town supermarkets to ravage our countryside all especially designed for the great car economy (we clowns despite our big shoes spend most of our time walking and on bicycles, which are so energy efficient and a lot more sexy than those silly death machines that will one day be laughed at by history for being the most ridiculous way to go from a to b and the most destructive bits of metal every invented ( apart from missiles and bullets of course which do tend to be friendly with cars as they more often than not are involved in oil wars !) ).
Maybe, lucy, this is all a joke and you really do care about the future of the planet and our (or maybe even your) children ( I hope they don’t have asthma–another lovely gift that cars bring them).
Once upon a time there was the slave trade; many people refused to work for companies that supported it. They believed that human rights were more important than profit and they realised that to work for what is wrong is wrong and to support violence is not a nice thing at all..
Please think about all this. Please go home tonight and do some research into the effect of cars and oil on our lives and please look in the mirror in the morning–look deep into your eyes (eye contact is key for clowning) and try to say to yourself: “I’m doing the right thing…”
Dear lucy–thanks for the offer but we would never help promote such a stupid thing–we love to be stupid but our stupidity is based on dignity and love and a deep respect for human beings and the planet; unfortunately being part of the advertising industry does not seem to match up to our desires.
yours, kolonel Klepto
[...] be an overstatement, but in fact the distraction, early on, took a predictable turn. Much like the “Clown Army” role in distracting the police at the G8 events (to allow hard-core protesters to get closer to the [...]