Strategery
My amiable senior editor is south of the border for a couple weeks, which doesn’t mean I can blow off my day job work exactly, just be a bit more flexible, shall we say. I’m planning a trip up to Devon Street to eat at Bahbi’s Kitchen, and organize some other lunch hour hangs with friends downtown. I will exercise my freedom to lunch.

One thing that’s been occurring to me lately in a lot of discussions with friends is that I’m noticing people are completely clueless when it comes to various levels of politics and “being political.” People don’t seem to have any idea that there are huge differences between being interested in politics and international affairs and being informed, being politically active, being an activist, believing in an alternative political system or significant reform of our own, being hardcore dedicated to radical politics and being an out there on the fringe total wacko. Being a political artist in its pure, romantic idealistic form, is quite wonderful I’m sure (“this one really makes a statement about where we are at,” yeah dude) but it’s more about the style of politics than the actual politics, isn’t it? And it’s also a bit like walking into a mine-field if you don’t really have your act together. Everyone wants to be Bobby Dylan, but what exactly is the answer blowing in the wind and how does it relate to NAFTA, nuclear proliferation and The Dharfour region of Sudan? Get me, Mr. Jones?

Fugazi often pulled it off because there stuff is/was arty and generally about a worldview and personal politics. Their stuff is inspired, but not didactic, or reasonably so. They came from a time (the ‘80s) when (much like now), it appeared the country was being taken over by social conservatives and jingoism and a inspired response was not only needed, but required for any intelligent creative member of the youth culture. That band had an effect on who I am today and in general I felt like they had it right most of the time and were tremendously successful in raising a certain kind of awareness.

But I think the internet’s alternative news sources have further confused people a bit. For example, a newly politicized friend sent me some links to a news website a few years ago that was pretty radical, kind of interesting but at the same disturbing in little ways. They were standing up for Slobodan Milosevic as some kind of anti-imperialist hero, which showed the whole enterprise to be a bit more knee-jerk than I was comfortable with. I was left wondering, does my friend think Milosevic is a hero, to anyone really?

Standing up with a very significant minority, the anti-war, anti-Bush crowd, etc. is not in the least a radical stance, and that’s okay, good in fact. You don’t need to be advocating democratic socialism to take those positions, or even know or care much about how the country is really run. In fact, you can take those positions from such old-school isolationist points-of-view, which I’m sure is quite tempting for many.

A lot of this uneasiness about rock politics comes from my experience of rubbing shoulders with and seeing punk rockers play benefits for some fairly radical organizations (none advocating violence of course) when I was a teenager. There were a lot of out-there lefty, anti-war, anti-war machine groups in the DC area growing up. The mid to late ‘80s probably saw a dramatic increase in politic radical activism in reaction to Reaganism. Lots of people got involved with causes through benefits that they only had a passing interest in, but hell, they were fun shows. There were plenty of worthy endeavors to get behind – anti-Apartheid, environmental movement, Sane-Freeze, women’s shelters, homeless activists that got proper benefits. I must note that lots of young fans were uncomfortable with the pro-choice benefits back in the day. For me, what was educational, was seeing bands play a benefit for conscientious objectors or something like that and see another benefit for a group opposed to nuclear power (a kind of questionable in my point of view when you consider that burning coal is polluting the atmosphere and killing people right this minute, isn’t it?). I learned a heck of a lot about under-funded interest groups. Anyway, all these little organizations on the left would come together or get lumped together because they represented an alternative viewpoint, even though in many ways they didn’t have a whole lot in common. It was romantic and inspiring to think that they did, that there was a social movement blossoming. It was an innocent time, it was “Meese is a Pig” posters when the left didn’t have a chance in hell of affecting anything on the national stage.

I watched this documentary “Horns and Halos” this weekend which features the story of a high school and college friend now indie publisher, Sander Hicks as he was re-issuing the controversial Bush biography “Fortunate Son” on his Soft Skull Press in 1999-2000. It’s an incredible story, unfortunately told somewhat slowly and with too much detail by Mike Galinsky and Suki Hawley, who probably could have edited it down to something electrifying. I won’t spoil it for you or bore you with the story. But I couldn’t help thinking that Hicks reliance on tying his high school idealism with politicized punk rock was a bit of a nostalgia trip. There are a few moments when Hicks is talking to interviewers when he just sounds like he’s not thinking about what is actually happening, but relying a bit too much on radical punk-rock publisher rhetoric. It's like being given a chance to fight the big dogs and sort of blowing it because you're stuck in rut. I like the guy, but I really wished he was ready to go to battle when he knew he was charging into it. Supposedly, he’s been working on a biography of Karl Rove.

Perhaps what we have seen with the electoral results is that the alternative political world that has grown in recent years is still holding on to some of the romanticism of the apst but not the hard lessons of organization. We still love our individuality, our freedom to vote or not for whomever we want, but when it comes to electoral politics, exercising you individuality doesn’t mean much. What the left or the opposition really needs is the means to exercise some loyalty and some people that can spread a very simple message on a few issues and get people to vote accordingly. The Democrats used to be able to call on certain constituencies to vote with them every time, folks had the New Deal in their political memory and they knew who was looking after their interests. These days, Evangelicals (somewhat mistakenly according to Tom Frank in his Kansas book), have been activated and will be loyal to the bad guys as long as they believe their agenda is being forwarded that way. To start beating these guys, it may be necessary to lose the “vote your conscience” or “just vote” crap (I know it’s all about non-profit status) and do the long, tedious, boring task of building coalitions of people that live in the cultural-vacuum parts of the country and hitting them with simple but powerful truths about the future of the country and then marching them to the polls en masse.

These coalitions might not involve as many groups of nubile college age women giving each other henna tattoos and griping about the man during pre-protest slumber parties (though that sounds great for sure), but more groups of soccer dads and NASCAR moms wondering about their social security, their kids health care and education and the economic and social welfare of their fellow Americans rather than carrying out the will of literalist Bible-thumpers. It’s gonna be a bitch to get that coalition together.

I’ve heard some incredible stories from people arrested in protests in NYC during the concention, mind-blowing stuff about how the cops are treating people and violating our rights. But at the same time, I can’t help wondering if making the most creative sign or effigies of Bush and Rumsfeld is really worth a lot of attention. Does that alternative spirit really translate into political awareness? After all, the political legacy of the ‘60s, street-fighting man was ultimately apathy, a weakened Democratic party and eventually mainstream assimilation, and you can bet that lots of hippies are now born-agains voting the wrong way. Politics are somewhat fashionable right now, but for how long when it’s clear that the pink-haired vote doesn’t tip the scales? And also, is it possible that folks may get swept up in the anti-war fervor that really have not internalized a progressive viewpoint?

Here’s an example. Do you have a vociferously anti-war friend? Now, say that friend always seems to find ways out of paying any taxes, year after year. Anything fishy there? Think about it, it doesn’t matter how controversial the copy on your t-shirt reads, if you pride yourself on excuses for not paying taxes (I’ve yet to hear a good one), you’re one of them, you’re a Republican, on one issue at least, in terms of how you live your life.

And so it’s about values, there’s a value, a civic pride in paying your taxes and seeing them in action, doing good to hold society together, getting things right, nice roads, good schools, social safety net, the things we want our society to have. That’s a real value, a real alternative to the “values” being foisted on us by the right which are about controlling the personal decisions that reasonable adults should be able to make on their own. But why couldn’t the left make a mainstream case for these values during this campaign?

Of course what I would like to see has even less chance of working. Give folks an honest offer. Can you really sell the message that higher taxes are worth it for a government that can take care of the disenfranchised before it does favors for profitable corporations? That our society is better off if we hold on to a lot of the skilled manufacturing sector jobs that produced our middle-class last century? That our country should have a foreign policy that fights oppression rather than one that just fights to keep markets open? It sounds like fantasy, I know.

The gist of my rambling is that we progressives really want our political change to be organic and come in the form of spontaneous social movements (we love us some grass roots), but I’m certainly not the first to notice that that’s kind of (academic-inspired) romanticism that leaves you a loser when the election results (however flawed) roll in. We’re desperately in need of a strong party with a strategy that’s about winning.