> [Regrettably, a lot of truth here.]
Actually, this is a bunch of garbage. It may not be too late for the New York Press to cancel the check for this piece, because this author pulled a fast one on that newspaper. Hopefully, most of the readers of this piece of crap will see through the lazy journalism and outright lies.
Let face it, Taibbi mailed in your standard boilerplate alt weekly piece which dismissed protesters as all being stuck in the 1960s.
>>We are raising a group of people whose only ideas about protest and opposition come from televised images of 40 years ago, when large public demonstrations could shake the foundations of society. There has been no organized effort of any kind to recognize that we now live in a completely different era, operating according to a completely different political dynamic. What worked then not only doesn't work now, it doesn't even make superficial sense now.
What a bunch of ignorant bullshit about the recent history of dissent in America. This asshole should pick up a copy of The People's History of the United States to bone up on the fact that dissent was never limited to the 1960s.
> ... Let's just start with a simple, seemingly inconsequential facet of
> the protests: appearance. If you read the bulletins by United for Peace
> and Justice ahead of the protests, you knew that the marchers were
> encouraged to "show their creativity" and dress outlandishly. The
> marchers complied, turning 7th Ave. into a lake of midriffs, Billabong,
> bandanas and "Buck Fush" t-shirts. There were facial studs and funny
> hair and man-sandals and papier-mache masks and plenty of chicks in
> their skivvies all jousting to be the next young Heather Taylor
> inspiring the next Jimi Hendrix to write the next "Foxy Lady."
Let me start with some actual pictures from the protests: http://www.infoshop.org/rnc2004_ap_photos.php
While there were plenty of people in creative costumes, the UFPJ march was one of the most straightlaced protest marches I have ever been too. Taibbi obviously didn't set foot in that march, because the reality contradicts his lazy characterization. Most of the people were dressed casually, with many wearing t-shirts and baseball caps.
Baseball caps, not birkenstocks, tie die, and peasant dresses.
Look at the pictures. Most of the men are sporting short hair. Not very 60s if you ask me. The demographic of the UFPJ march was very suburban.
> And the New York Post and Fox were standing on the sidelines greedily
> recording all of this unbowed individuality for posterity, understanding
> instinctively that each successive t-shirt and goatee was just more
> fresh red meat for mean Middle America looking for good news from the
> front.
What Middle America saw was not a freak show, but tens of thousands of average Americans who hate Bush and want him out of office. Even the freakier activists were pretty conservative last week.
> Back in the 60s, dressing crazy and letting your hair down really was a
> form of defiance. It was a giant, raised middle finger to a ruling class
> that until that point had insisted on a kind of suffocating, static
> conformity in all things—in sexual mores, in professional ambitions, in
> life goals and expectations, and even in dress and speech.
This is, of course, 2004 and people who go to protests dress sensibly for the weather conditions. The fashion was pretty boring actually--the signs weren't as crazy as they usually are--these facts don't make for interesting copy for a lazy journalist who wants to use the "those protesters are stuck in the 1960s" boilerplate.
> Publicly refusing to wear your hair like an Omega-house towel-boy wasn't
> just a meaningless gesture then. It was an important step in refusing
> later to go to war, join the corporate workforce and commit yourself to
> the long, soulless life of political amnesia and periodic consumer drama
> that was the inflexible expectation of the time.
Look at the pictures, Matt. We can tell you didn't go to the protests, so how about examining some visual evidence. Hippies? I didn't see one all of last week.
> That conformist expectation still exists, and the same corporate class
> still imposes it. But conformity looks a lot different now than it did
> then. Outlandish dress is now for sale in a thousand flavors, and
> absolutely no one is threatened by it: not your parents, not the
> government, not even our most prehistoric brand of fundamentalist
> Christianity. The vision of hundreds of thousands of people dressed in
> every color of the rainbow and marching their diverse selves past
> Madison Square Garden is, on the contrary, a great relief to the other
> side—because it means that the opposition is composed of individuals,
> not a Force In Concert.
Actually, it looks like many people were wearing khaki shorts, light-colored t-shirts, and baseball caps. A crowd of average Americans of the leftist persuasion who dressed sensibly for the hot, humid weather.
> In the conformist atmosphere of the late 50s and early 60s, the
> individual was a threat. Like communist Russia, the system then was so
> weak that it was actually threatened by a single person standing up and
> saying, "This is bullshit!"
Who's living in the 1960s?
> That is not the case anymore. This current American juggernaut is the
> mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and it is absolutely immune to
> the individual. Short of violent crime, it has assimilated the
> individual's every conceivable political action into mainstream
> commercial activity. It fears only one thing: organization.
>
> That's why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America
> last week wasn't "creativity." It was something else: uniforms. Three
> hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an
> Oliver Stone movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in
> slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the
> direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new
> cabinet-level domestic security agency.
No, it wouldn't have changed anything, because people were actually dressed pretty conservatively. If people watching TV had seen tens of thousands of people wearing slacks and white button-down shirts on a VERY HOT DAY, they would conclude that we were crazy masochists.
> Why? Because 300,000 people who are capable of showing the unity and
> discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just
> march. Which is important, because marching, as we have seen in the last
> few years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war,
> Washington and New York saw the largest protests this country has seen
> since the 60s—and this not only did not stop the war, it didn't even
> motivate the opposition political party to nominate an antiwar candidate.
No quibble from me here, although large protests like the UFPJ march have some limited effect. But yes, large protest marches by themselves won't stop the war. This is one fact that International ANSWER taught a new generation again.
> There was a time when mass protests were enough to cause Johnson to give
> up the Oval Office and cause Richard Nixon to spend his nights staring
> out his window in panic. No more. We have a different media now,
> different and more sophisticated law-enforcement techniques and, most
> importantly, a different brand of protestor.
>
> Protests can now be ignored because our media has learned how to dismiss
> them,
Wrong. The protests got lots of media coverage, with those of us who prefer more radical protests reaping the reward of our past actions. The protests did not dominate national news, but they weren't ignored by the media.
> because our police know how to contain them,
Ha! That's what the police think. It's fucking easy to contain protesters who aren't interested in causing a ruckus. I was not impressed by the NYPD. It would have been incredibly easy to repeat Seattle if people had wanted to do that.
and because our
> leaders now know that once a protest is peacefully held and concluded,
> the protestors simply go home and sit on their asses until the next
> protest or the next election.
That's wishful, yet muddle-headed thinking. Most of those people who go to those marches are activists. The leaders understand this. They respect the fact that there are more dissidents now than back int he 1960s. Why was the FBI poking around the Midwest, trying to scare activists? (This backfired in their faces, as it didn't dissuade anybody from not going to the RNC).
> They are not going to go home and bomb
> draft offices, take over campuses, riot in the streets.
Patience, grasshopper, patience.
Instead,
> although there are many earnest, involved political activists among
> them, the majority will simply go back to their lives, surf the net and
> wait for the ballot. Which to our leaders means that, in most cases, if
> you allow a protest to happen… Nothing happens.
That may be true of many of them, but these days it looks like more and more people are activists on some level. Perhaps it's just on the level of Moveon.org, but even people who march in some UFPJ march aren't passive. I saw lots of angry liberals last week. I think that the anarchists were more laid back than some of those angry liberals.
> The people who run this country are not afraid of much when it comes to
> the population, but there are a few things that do worry them. They are
> afraid we will stop working, afraid we will stop buying, and afraid we
> will break things. Interruption of commerce and any rattling of the cage
> of profit—that is where this system is vulnerable. That means boycotts
> and strikes at the very least, and these things require vision,
> discipline and organization.
I'm all for rattling the cage. If Taibbi hates boring protest marches, he should say so. Dissing people for the wrong reasons is a weak way to get this point across. The problem with stuff like UFPJ marches is the timid liberal politics of nonviolence, not the spectre of a few protesters looking like they used the Time Tunnel to get there from the 60s.
> The 60s were an historical anomaly. It was an era when political power
> could also be an acid party, a felicitous situation in which fun also
> happened to be a threat. We still listen to that old fun on the radio,
> we buy it reconstituted in clothing stores, we watch it in countless
> movies and documentaries. Society has kept the "fun" alive, or at least
> a dubious facsimile of it.
Anomaly? Tie dies and drugs, yes. For dissent, no.
> But no one anywhere is teaching us about how to be a threat. That is
> something we have to learn all over again for ourselves, from scratch,
> with new rules. The 60s are gone. The Republican Convention isn't the
> only party that's over.
The New York Press is a free paper, right? Readers will at least get what they are paying for with this column.
Chuck0