Liza
> From: Chuck0 <chuck at mutualaid.org>
> Organization: Infoshop News
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 21:07:35 -0500
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Matt Taibbi on RNC protests
>
> Carl Remick wrote:
>
>> [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 happenŠ 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
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