> That's true. Which isn't a bad quality for dealing with american
> audiences. The contract with america worked, didn't it? It's totally easy
> to make people switch sides at the drop of a hat, based on some clever
> slogan.
On the whole I don't particularly like Audre Lourde's claim that you can't fight the master with the master's tools, but here I think it applies. Let's examine further this matter of audiences.
On the subject of the "contract with america," it unfortunately for the Democrats did *not* work, for if it had, the Dems would still control Congress. Polls at the time showed that a very small proportion of voters had ever even heard of the Contract. The same polls showed that had they heard of it, most voters would have opposed most of its specific proposals. It was, in fact, a textbook case of "preaching to the converted," for its only effects, if any, were to fire up the troops, not to gain "converts."
"It's totally easy to make people switch sides at the drop of a hat, based ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ on some clever slogan." ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is clearly not true if by "switch[ing] sides" you mean anything more that the 10 second period in which a *voter* (not a human being: voters, like characters in Dickens, are caricatures of humans) decides where to make his/her mark. But, at least at the present time, progressive politics has no particular use to make of this particular kind of decision, any more than we have any particular use to make of a general "anti-corporation" or "anti-boss" sentiments. If such sentiments (at the level of an "audience" responding to a particular speech, movie, song, etc.) were of any use the revolution would have happened a century or so ago.
But for any significant political activity at the present time (and increasingly, even for the achievement of relatively trivial but needed reforms) what we need is not such "changes of opinion" but protracted commitment to struggle, and to struggle often of the most concretely unrewarding activities: knocking on doors, running off leaflets, attendance at one boring *but unavoidable and essential* meeting after another, over months and years.
Let me recount some most frustrating experiences from the late 70s and early 80s, which are analogous, I believe, to what is being discussed here.
Two local political-science professors wangled the money to bring a whole series of anti-imperialist speakers to campus. Many of these speakers would be young people from areas suffering deeply from the effects of imperialism. Most of them were good speakers, and often extremely effective in swaying "opinion" as discussed in this thread. But what would happen time after time is that after about 20 to 30 minutes they really would have reached a number of the students in the audience. But they would all be obsessed with the injustice of it all and they would plunge on, and on, and on. (Now, I'm only speaking of the *better* speakers among them, those who *as speakers* only, as, shall we say, mere entertainers, could probably have held an audience for one to two hours.) And as they continued on and on, I would begin to squirm in my chair from frustration. I wanted them to *stop*, so one of us (the already "converted") could speak to the "audience," not about the horrors of Zionist aggression but about what *they* could *do* about it. (And I knew *from* experience that such opportunities, though rare, did usually end up with the recruitment of a student or three to continuing activity in CISPES or Students for a Free Palestine.)
The speakers were NOT lacking in a sense of humor; they were lacking in POLITICAL JUDGMENT. They thought of themselves only as "delivering a message" to the world in general, of "persuading" or "reaching" an audience. (I am thinking in particular of a really fine speaker, a young man from Palestine.) It simply could not occur to them that it was useless to reach an audience, to persuade an audience, unless in the process one somehow established, through that persuasion, at least a few who would in effect volunteer to turn themselves into megaphones, to carry that particular speaker's voice beyond the confines of the room or auditorium or theatre. That in fact their primary function had to be the preaching to the "converted," to transform the mere believer's into activists. And because they lacked political judgment, it never even occurred to them to shut up before the audience (having papers to write or night jobs to go to, and also believing, like the speaker, that the evening's only point was its useless impact on their "Opinions") trickled away one by one, until there was no audience to recruit, or even to invite to further discussions at another time.
The problem was, in fact, that these speakers assumed that their only function was to "reach" an audience, to persuade an audience to switch their opinions. In itself a very useless procedure.
They reached an audience through eloquence and earnestness, through the sheer power of the facts they had to (and did) convey. Moore, as I understand from his admirers on this list, reaches his audience through the power of the comic. ("Sense of Humor" has little to do with it, being a phrase best reserved for freshman themes: I stopped using the phrase myself, except by accident, after only three semesters of reading freshman themes at the University of Michigan back in the late 50s.) Many great comedians had little or no sense of humor, in most of the senses that phrase seems to carry. Comic power, like earnestness or eloquence, is merely one tool among many for "reaching" an audience, but by itself can do nothing to turn that reaching into any political reality.
Someone mentions Mark Twain. Mark Twain never had any intention of having any sort of political effect, and when realization of the horrors or imperialism actually reached him, it turned him into "Mark Twain in Eruption," expressed as fully in imagining obscene conversation among the ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court as in the superb "To the Person Sitting in Darkness." Neither essay ever persuaded one of its readers to invite a few friends to supper to discuss what they might to to stop the ongoing genocide in the Philippines.
Now a film, unlike a book or newspaper, reaches a number of persons at once, and also, unlike a speech, is in principle indefinitely reusable, a spear rather than a cartridge. Others can throw it. So, hypothetically, if Moore's films are as impressive as they are said to be, and if they are not longer than 20 to 30 minutes, they could be of considerable political use (whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Moore's own politics). It would require only that videotapes of them be made available to all politically active leftists at cost or for free. Then one could invite just a few people at a time to one's home for a showing. One might be able to persuade some of them to get their own free copy and invite a few people *they* knew over to their home. One could prepare brief introductions and brief follow-ups for each showing, with perhaps a one page memo of the content of the evening. And so on. That is serious politics. Impressing an audience in a movie theatre for an hour or two is quite fine, as are city parks and homemixed egg milkshakes with Breyer's ice cream, but it is not politics, whether the film be comic or an account of a miner's strike. (The latter is "political" only in its continuing impact on the "converted" for several generations now. Will *The Big One* be a continuing energizer and source of inspiration for the converted ( as is and as will continue to be *The Salt of the Earth*) when, in just a few years now, no one gives a damn about the particular villains it portrays?)
I have a good deal more to say along these lines, but I will leave it for another day.
Carrol Cox