Naeem — March To Irrelevance: Why Protest Doesn't Work In America
Topic(s): Resistance? | Comments Off on Naeem — March To Irrelevance: Why Protest Doesn't Work In AmericaCompliments of Shobak
“March To Irrelevance” is an important article on the protests by Matt
Taibbi. Taibbi is one of the Bush admin’s fiercest critics, and a sharp
brain. As such, his critique of the protest movement is worth listening to.
-Naeem
Excerpt:”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 protester. Protests can now be ignored because our media
has learned how to dismiss them, because our police know how to contain
them, and because our leaders now know that once a protest is peacefully
held and concluded, the protesters simply go home and sit on their asses
until the next protest or the next election.”
A March To Irrelevance By Matt Taibbi, New York Press Posted on September
11, 2004, http://www.alternet.org/story/19840/
Hey, you assholes: The `60s are over!
I’m not talking about your white-guy fros, mutton-chops and beads. I’m not
talking about your Che t-shirts or that wan, concerned, young Joanie Baez
look on the faces of half of your women. I’m not even talking about skinny
young potheads carrying wood puppets and joyously dancing in druid circles
during a march to protest a bloody war.
I’m not harping on any of that. I could, but I won’t. Because the protests
of the last week in New York were more than a silly, off-key exercise in
irrelevant chest-puffing. It was a colossal waste of political energy by a
group of people with no sense of history, mission or tactics, a group of
people so atomized and inured to its own powerlessness that it no longer
even considers seeking anything beyond a fleeting helping of that worthless
and disgusting media currency known as play.
I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I admire young people with
political passion, and am enormously heartened by the sheer numbers of
people who time after time turn out to protest this idiot president of ours.
But at the same time, I think it is time that some responsible person in the
progressive movement recognize that we have a serious problem our hands.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.
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.”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.
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.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.
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
.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!”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.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 anti-war candidate.
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 protester.Protests can now be ignored because our media has learned
how to dismiss them, because our police know how to contain them, and
because our leaders now know that once a protest is peacefully held and
concluded, the protesters simply go home and sit on their asses until the
next protest or the next election. They are not going to go home and bomb
draft offices, take over campuses, riot in the streets. 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.
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.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.
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. © 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View
this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/19840/