On the morning of Oct. 18, after giving a reading at the University of Chicago, I decided to take a cab up to Grant Park to attend Chicago’s No Kings march. The two-hour demonstration took place beneath the city’s downtown skyscrapers on a slightly overcast day. The city has been one of the focal points of Trump’s ire.
There I met a middle-aged white woman in an inflatable shark costume. She held up a sign reading: “This is not right or left. It is right or wrong— Senator Cory Booker.” The shark costume had fierce-looking inflatable teeth, but the words on the placard were not going to rip anyone to shreds. Mr. Booker seemed a mild reference, given how poorly the Democrats as a whole have stood up to authoritarianism. The shark lady represented a part of the movement that drew inspiration from the people protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement dressed in silly inflatable costumes in Portland, Ore.
Wearing a shark costume while quoting a senator seemed sweet and suburban. Maybe that was the point of the silly costumes: It was a small island of old norms within a national emergency. There were a small number of scowling dudes bullhorning loudly about their love of communism, as the First Amendment entitles them to do. But most of the other Chicagoans exercised their right to amble on by in, for example, inflatable corn costumes, without so much as a nod in the dudes’ direction.
This humorous form of protest, known as tactical frivolity, shows the absurdity of the charge that all the protesters are armed militants. In contravention of the Trump administration’s claims that the protesters were all Hamas agents or antifa interns, the protest in Chicago was wholesome, nonaggressive and almost shockingly middle-of-the-road. It’s hard to call an inflatable chicken dangerous.
Frivolity and absurdity are kryptonite to authoritarians who project the stern-father archetype to their followers. Once the pants are lowered and the undies of the despot are glimpsed, there is no point of return.
“My dad’s in the National Guard, and they’re the people who are actually out to protect us,” a 36-year-old woman dressed as a cowgirl riding an inflatable horse told me. She was bearing a sign that read, “No more cosplay cowboys.” Of ICE, she said, “People without training are given authority just because they were bullied in high school and their dads never told them they loved them.”
I finally found a middle-aged man dressed as a frog, in homage to the most familiar of the inflatable costumes at the Portland protests. “We are middle-of-the-road,” he confirmed. “We’re not cosmopolitan like New York. We’re just regular folks who have had enough.” He told me that the frog costume had been back-ordered on Amazon. “They jacked up the price,” he complained. “We got to thank Portland for that.” He wore a red cape over his green body that read, “Amphifa.”
I stopped to get a free Nature Valley oat bar from a woman distributing them. “Thank you for bringing your kids here,” one woman said to another. Indeed, the event seemed as family friendly as a day care. Every time anyone bumped into someone by accident, those hit were the ones to say “sorry” in their best Midwestern politesse.
I met a lifelong Chicagoan in her 50s dressed as a giant green and yellow stalk of corn. She explained that the corn “goes back to Obama and our vibrant Mexican community.” Her sign read, “The tamale lady isn’t a criminal, but the president is.” The sign was a reference to Laura Murillo, a tamale vendor and beloved local fixture in Chicago who was arrested by ICE.
“There’s no one here who hasn’t been at a bar late at night waiting for the tamale lady to show up,” she said, gesturing at what might have been the biggest protest crowd I have seen in my life (and I have seen quite a few). “They’re working-class people helping the community,” she said of the tamale vendors.
Many of the inflatable costumes I encountered were homages to popular culture that were previously unknown to me. “The axolotl salamander is native to Mexico,” a bearded, bespectacled middle-aged man explained to me from within his inflatable costume. “He’s on the endangered species list and on Minecraft. My daughter is obsessed with him.”
A woman who had emigrated from China 10 years ago was wearing a nun’s costume and ringing a bell. She explained that the bell and costume were a nod to a “Game of Thrones” scene in which one of the main characters has to walk down a street naked while bells are rung and the citizens of the city chant “Shame! Shame! Shame!” “ICE is messing up my community,” she said, using stronger language. Her friend was wearing a green Power Rangers costume. The two attend cosplaying conventions together.
Toward the end of the protest, around 2 p.m., I met two Jesus impersonators. “He’s more classical, and I’m the more modern Jesus,” one of the Sons of God told me. He was wearing a crown of barbed wire instead of thorns, which is what made him more modern. “We want to present a mirror to our white brothers who were led astray,” modern Jesus said. Of ICE’s tactics, such as denying due process, he said, “This is not love of your neighbor.”
“U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” a chant went up around us.
American flags, often hung or carried upside down to indicate distress, were everywhere, as were Mexican flags, often accompanied by signs. One read: “Raised by immigrants. The children of those who turned nothing into something.” The flag of Chicago could be spotted just as often.
After the parade, I met some Chicagoan friends I had made at the reading for a volley of Gibsons and Vespers at a bistro in the Loop. They guided me through some of the uniquely Chicagoan signs they had seen at the protest. “No Chicago handshake for you,” a sign addressed to the federal forces terrorizing the city read. My new friends explained that the Chicago handshake was a frightening-sounding combination of Swedish-style Malort liqueur, a Chicago specialty, and Old Style beer, also popular in the city. A man dressed as a Chicago hot dog carried a sign reading, “Chicago says, No ketchup, no kings.”
I left the parade full of the pleasure of being a part of a vast humanity. It’s a feeling that may soon be extinguished if we do not exercise our power of free assembly and free speech. The people of Chicago showed up in vast numbers. They demonstrated their love of country, their love of a particular handshake-drinking, tamale-eating, mostly mild-mannered, ketchup-shunning place, and they demonstrated what one version of unity against oppression can look like. What is happening to us is as serious as a guillotine. We must harness our best creative, humorous and frivolous selves in order to keep it from falling.
Gary Shteyngart is the author of a memoir and “Vera, or Faith” and other novels.
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