[This week's Life of Riley column defers to this profile of one of the great puppeteers of our time. Gepeto was among 280 protestors arrested by police outside the US Republican Party convention in Philadelphia last week. — Dave Riley.]
The arrest of Gepeto took many by surprise. The famous puppet-maker is perhaps best known for creating Pinnochio in the Disney movie of the same name.
This former Disney employee is now taking a stand against what he calls "corporate globalisation". He said in a recent interview, "I got involved with the movement about six years ago. I was an employee of Disney at the time.
"Pinnochio was over at UCLA and it was around the time of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]. He was getting more and more involved with trade issues and the Zapatista uprising had just occurred and he was real excited about that too.
"They were having some talk on trade and globalisation and Pinnochio invited me. I was a little reluctant, but ... decided to humour him.
"I went to this talk and was really taken in by the issue ... there were several workers from the US, from Mexico and also several from Haiti who told stories about their working conditions while making T-shirts for Disney ...
"The next day I approached my boss at Disney, Michael Eisner, and asked him if the stories were true. He kind of fumbled around, made some flimsy remarks about their wages being higher than they were before Disney got there and so on. It's the same line everyone is using ...
"I started to organise workers at Disney into a group around sweatshop issues."
At this point, relates Gepeto, Disney started to put pressure on him to cease his organising. "Eisner brought me into his office ... and told me I was betraying the legacy of Walt Disney and so I shot back at him that Disney was a tyrant anyway. I don't know what happened first, if I got fired or I quit, but I haven't been back there since."
Gepeto's political education developed as he "got involved with several unions and organisations working on different issues, like the sweatshop issue, Latin America, union democracy and some others. I went on a caravan down to Chiapas, but my natural inclination was towards art still.
"I was a decent organiser, but I was a much better puppet-maker, so I got a hold of the folks over at Art and Revolution and started to work with them. We've worked on a number of different campaigns with them ... on public housing and against the war in Kosovo."
Protesting outside the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle last November, Gepeto was arrested "after they issued the ordinance that one couldn't even walk around with 'political' signs. I was arrested because me and some other people were walking around with these puppets we made", he said.
"One of the puppets was this bureaucratic looking fellow, sort of non-descript looking in a dark suit. The others were workers and students and artists, and they were all very colourful, holding their signs in their hands.
"Attached to this bureaucratic looking guy were these long sheets of paper with data written on them and the stock phrases you hear coming from these guys mouths whenever they're put on the spot.
"The script for the puppets was pretty simple. You would have the guy alone with his paperwork and then the artists and workers and students would approach him and he would naturally try to dash off, but the workers would step on his paper trail, prohibiting him from leaving and would begin to mark up the paper with messages of solidarity and colourful drawings. The bureaucratic guy would then have to walk around with this paper. We did this script some 50 times a day."
Gepeto and the other puppeteers were arrested in one of the police sweeps throughout Seattle. "I was in jail quite a few days ... what I saw in there was oftentimes pretty horrifying. The injustice system is something I plan on working on in the future."
The repression was worse in Philadelphia, he said. "I was at the convergence centre constructing some puppets and all of a sudden a bunch of cops were surrounding the place. We negotiated with them for a while and then were arrested.
"I grew up in Eastern Europe [and] had the occasion to be swept up and imprisoned there on a couple of occasions for saying this or that about the government and, frankly, it didn't feel any different here ... Luckily, I had Pinnochio there with me and he's an energetic kid and we did some of our old routines for everybody to keep their spirits up."
Gepeto's bail was originally set at $1 billion for charges that included conspiracy, disturbing the peace and intent to use a puppet to make a political message. The bail was lowered to $500,000.
Despite authorities' efforts to silence the old puppeteer, he remains undeterred. "I feel like this is the right fight. I feel like we're reaching the public, that we're tapping into some serious sentiment of people out there that something is wrong and it needs to be fixed. Those politicians and CEOs you see out there, their noses are growing long from too much lying."
[Abridged from the blackeye collective Updates. Visit <http://www.phillyimc.org> or <http://www.thepartysover.org>.]