----- Original Message ----- From: "// ravi" <ravi at platosbeard.org>
"At the same time, I think it is a mistake to underestimate the power of calling names and throwing fists."
I have been an indefatigable contributor to the Oakland Unified School District Parent/Teacher discussion mail list for three years. (And a volunteer in the school district for fourteen years.) I try to do my best writing for that list: I send my clearest, most articulate, best researched writing that I am capable of. Passionate but level. Pointed but calm. I do this consciously because I think of my writing as a tool that can serve to help those who are struggling with the same problems that I am, and many of these are looking for words and arguments that are not featured in the papers. Many parents and teachers have written thanking me for what I write, urging me to send letters to newspapers etc. A few months ago, the woman who runs the teachers' union in Oakland contacted me and asked me to a three-hour cup of tea because she liked my writing and wanted for us to work on framing the issues faced by the public schools, so that she could be more effective in communicating these issues to parents and teachers.
I would never send the "cunt" email to that list. I needed to get rid of a little steam because I had just heard Rhee is headed for California and because my daughter will be graduating HS in a few days which has pressed me to think about my experience with education in California -- mine and my children's -- since 1963. I figured it was safe to let off a little steam with my lbo buddies. Mostly it was. Thank you everyone for the support.
"Michelle Rhee wages no different, and no less unsubtle a war. To call such enemies names gives flesh to feelings, serves as a way to gather and magnify emotions, and work up the will to hit back."
I agree. There is a point where a visceral reaction can act as a catalyst...where the most eloquent argument might not. But I suspect you need an actual public space. I saw this in action once. A super corporate meeting involving a few hundred people, which followed the aquisition of my company by one of the largest computer companies in the world. The coked up asshole who ran the big corp came to speak, and was, well... visibly coked up and clueless. He gave some long, rambling, pointless, high handed speech about corporate plans and world class this and world class that....and on and on it went, completely irrelevant to any person sitting in that room. At the end he called for comments, and my office buddy, a seasoned, experienced union activist and socialist (who ran the writers union on the west coast for a while) got up and well, raved and raged incoherently for a few minutes, basically telling the CEO he was full of shit. It was like he was "bearing witness" as they do in some churches. When he finished everyone applauded passionately and then many people also spoke and complained about the high handed way that the aquisition had gone and about the rudeness of the CEO. Now, my buddy was extremely bright (Ph.D. Physics from Harvard), extremely articulate, and as experienced in behaving in a gathering as anyone I've ever known....and yet, he had resorted to something like histrionics...and it was very clear that it worked better than any thing else he might have said or done. I'll never forget that. This is not what I was doing when sending the sputtering email to lbo, and it is not something I think I have the competence to do in public, but I did want to support ravi's point, that given the right circumstances this can be an effective way of emotionally mobilizing people.
I think it's in 1984 that Orwell suggests that as effective and totalizing as agitprop might be it cannot cancel the nausea that rises at the smell of rotting cabbage as you climb the stairs to your apartment after a long day at work. People do earn their faces as it were. One of the most striking things about "Inside Job" was how revolting Paulson, Bernanke, Summers and all their underlings looked. Many people might not understand collaterized debt obligations, but they would have no problem recognizing that look that says "I have the god-given right to do anything I fucking feel like and fuck anyone else's needs." Or that odious look of "my shit smells like ice cream" that Obama gets, or that malevolent simpering sneer of Bush's. Our bodies are often more honest than our minds.
Joanna
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