[lbo-talk] O'Reilly v. Moore - 2

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Jul 28 10:35:46 PDT 2004


snit snat wrote:
>
> >


> People like Lila Lipscomb listen to people like Michale Moore. Remember
> what I said about Lila's inarticulateness at the end of F9/11? She's just
> finding her voice. She needs to hear people speak out and engage with the
> O'Reilly's of the world so she can learn how to do it too. I'm sure you
> think this is a hoot, but that's exactly how I learned. I read other people
> making arguments. I listened to other people making arguments. It helped me
> learn how to articulate a budding, albeit inchoate, left consciousness.
>
> Poo Poo it all you like.

I'm not poo-pooing it, and you've made an impressive argument in this post. But I think you are wrong. [Qualification: Anything that's ever been tried politically has produced anecdotal evidence of its effectiveness. But some techniques are just too energy intensive for the results they produce.] What inarticulate people (who probably in small group conversation are not all that inarticulate) most need is not to listen to someone like Moore (it doesn't hurt; it doesn't help) but to have someone listen to _them_. All the various techniques and maneuvers of organizing are, essentially, aimed at only one thing: to create the situations in which the organizer can use his/her ears to agitate. And if you can listen to people enough, they become anxious to listen to you.

The difficulties you describe re Lila Lipscomb, incidentally, are _exactly_ of the same sort the village CP of Long Bow found, _after_ liberation with the Nationalist army driven out, to get villagers to speak about the wrongs they had suffered at the hands of various Japanese collaborators, landlords, etc. I have yet to find any 'manual' on organizing (organizing on either a university campus or a public housing project) than Hinton's _Fanshen_.

What you are talking about comes under the heading of giving a voice to the voiceless. Someone interviewed by Michael Moore, of course, _has_ participated in a political act (far more so than anyone who merely sees F9/11 or who merely sees O'Reilly get answered on a tv show). But the number of people who can talk to Moore on a tv camera is not great. And as soon as they do, they are not "ordinary people" anymore.

And of course it took a shock of some sort to get her in that position. Shocks come in all varieties (and they influence different people differently). This is the merest commonplace. And I still think that knowing "how to deal with these blowhards" is for the most part more recreation than politics.


> People like Lila Lipscomb listen to people like Michale Moore.

So? How many millions can Moore interview on film?


> Remember
> what I said about Lila's inarticulateness at the end of F9/11? She's just
> finding her voice. She needs to hear people speak out and engage with the
> O'Reilly's of the world so she can learn how to do it too.

People like her need to speak out, but not with the O'Reilly's of the world but with others like herself. If you listen to him* I suppose you get enraged. And when you are enraged you lust to have that rage satisfied. Fine. The nearest I came to getting fired was when someone in a faculty meeting (called to consider a proposal to name the new student union after Malcolm) used as an argument against it that ISU had always named buildings after alumni or former employees. The Grandfather Clause comes to the University! I blew up and in such colorful language that one bunch of faculty walked out of the meeting in a huff. (This was also not long after the murder of Fred Hamptom, which still had me in a state!)

Carrol

*I'm not seriously hoping for more than about 5 more years of vigor, & I'll be damned if I waste a minute of it listening either to O'Reilly or the finks at the Democratic Convention. Jan came home in a huff last night because the people in the (computer) command center at State Farm had the convention on tv. And just as I was dozing off I had to jump up to turn down the radio in the bedroom because the pricks switched from music to the DP.



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