Rubber duck becomes potent protest symbol
Rubber ducks as international protest symbol
• Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic was in Moscow Monday when protesters carrying images of a yellow rubber duck marched against top-level corruption. What he saw was a global ducky conspiracy.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Vucic said, according to the Serbian newspaper Novosti. “If someone tells me that different people have thought of the same symbol in Belgrade, Brazil and Moscow, don’t expect me to believe it.”
Vucic’s skepticism is misplaced. The rubber duck has become an unlikely protest symbol in diverse countries, for diverse reasons.
In September, Russian corruption fighter and would-be presidential candidate Alexei Navalny published the first episode of his investigation into the palaces and estates used by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. A video filmed from a drone showed an expensively renovated 18th century manor, featuring a pond complete with a duck house. Navalny recalled the scandal of Sir Peter Wiggers, the U.K. legislator who had tried to claim the cost of installing a waterfowl lodge as part of his parliamentary expenses. The Medvedev case, Navalny claimed, was far more outrageous.
Russian social networks picked up the duck house story.
Memes placed Medvedev’s ducky on the Forbes list of the richest Russians; people expressed their willingness to quack and dive for bugs on the pond for a chance to live in the house. Over time, Medvedev’s duck morphed into the floating yellow toy Vucic saw on the Moscow protest signs.
Thousands of demonstrators noted this alleged opulence by carrying ducks and sneakers during Sunday’s marches across Russia. More than 700 people were arrested during the protest, some for carrying the ducks.
When a young man held up a pair of yellow rubber ducks, he was immediately dragged off. “Shame, shame!” screamed the demonstrators.
The protest ducks must have been a jarring sight to Vucic. In 2015, residents of Belgrade opposed a Vucicbacked $3.8 billion riverfront development that would block some of the city’s best views. The protesters, carrying yellow rubber ducks, said they didn’t want the riverfront taken over by the rich and the river turned into their private pond. In Serbian slang, patka, or “duck,” also means “fraud.” “Let’s show them the duck,” the protesters said. “Let’s not allow Belgrade to drown.” Sure enough, the yellow duck became a major irritant to the authorities, reappearing at demonstrations and city festivities.
Last year, the yellow rubber duck became a symbol of protest against the corrupt administration of President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. “Enough paying the duck,” angry Brazilians said. In local slang, “to pay the duck” means to pay for someone else’s mistakes, in this case those of Rousseff — especially the new taxes she tried to introduce to compensate for falling government revenues.
The ducky has even become a symbol of protest in China. A doctored version of the famous photo of a lone man in front of a column of tanks during the 1988 Tiananmen Square protests went viral, with giant ducks
LET’S SHOW THEM THE DUCK. LET’S NOT ALLOW BELGRADE TO DROWN.
replacing the tanks. Chinese microblogging service Weibo responded by banning searches for “big yellow duck.”
This use of the image enraged Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, who has floated giant rubber ducks in harbours and rivers around the world as a message of goodwill, turning bodies of water into giant baths with a toy for everyone. Hofman objected to Brazilians exploiting the ducky (which was patented by U.S. sculptor Peter Ganine in 1947) for political purposes. Hofman’s team told the BBC the Brazilian replica constitutes copyright infringement.
“It is exactly our design and our specific technical patterns,” Hofman’s team told BBC Brasil, demanding the protesters stop using the duck.
But protesters say the absurdity of a yellow rubber duck on a placard, on a city square filled with angry demonstrators, on a boat trying to dodge Serbian police, in place of a tank on Tiananmen Square suits them just fine. What they’re opposing is typically at least as absurd as enlisting a yellow rubber duck as a revolutionary icon.