Why the hell not? I figured. The worst that could happen: I waste hours of time reading through hundreds of largely short, largely sweet, and occasionally grammatically incorrect postings on a wide variety of issues. And do…what exactly?
Nothing. Except reading and writing, posting back. I feel like I’m fifteen again, when the Internet was green a good, before the Millennium came and went without bang or whimper and the crystal cracked.
The Internet is a glorious thing. James Burke saw it coming, and like so many voices other voices throughout history his was lost in the wilderness. Drowned out by the sound of timber company chainsaws. Because who watches BBC, anyway? And even if they do, who takes something they can use from the experience?
Apart from me, that is. I’ve gone out and got myself a shinny new world view, complete with its own overarching socio-political philosophy. It is an anarcho-radicalist vision of the present backed by a real politick understanding of the past. Unfortunately I am no Karl Marx and cannot offer some glorious utopian vision of the future. Our old friend Karl (and this is one of those statements that’s so idiotically obvious it seems almost a waste to mention) was a product of his particular time and place, and according to the reality he made for himself, History was the glorious story of the proletariat’s inevitable rise to power.
We saw what came of that. We saw what Mao, a century later, made of it. Their little red books glare out from my bookshelf, along with dozens of others, and mock me in my literary impotence.
I am not Karl, or Father Mao, and do what they have done. Nor do I want to. Their ideas have killed more people than Hitler’s. I read the words inside those books and see the gulags of Siberia, the closed universities of Manchuria. I see young men and women torturing their college professors. I see writers dying for daring to critique the words inside these little red books and I know I cannot be Karl, or Mao, or Ho Chi Minh. I won’t have others killing for me…more than likely, I’ll be killed myself. Purged like Trotsky and barely remembered, found face-up in some ditch by the side of the road.
And besides, the world has moved on, as Roland of Gilead says. Books no longer have the power they once held. Since when have you seen the disheveled youth of this or any country rallying en masse with books over their heads? The Cultural Revolution only worked because, back in the sixties, people actually read. More importantly, they carried the words with them, into the streets. The same is true for the American nineteenth century Labor movement, and for its twentieth century protégés: Civil Rights, Feminism, Environmentalism…every –ism under the sun.
Yet, that was then. This is now, and this is the year of Yearly Kos. Thousands of bloggers gathering in Las Vegas meet, greet, chat and (of course) blog their way into forging a distinct, organized political movement.
And it appears to have worked, oddly enough.
Yet, as abysses go, this one’s gaze is mighty arresting, particularly at times when it appears to degenerate into a dialectical (or, worse, ideological) circle jerk. In my lurking and my thinking I’ve come to the (admittedly unoriginal) conclusion that political debate in this country is a dead road to nowhere, on both sides of the isle.
In case you haven’t noticed, Mid-term elections are coming. And so far everywhere, from Montana to Virginia, California to Kansas, Vermont to Rode Island to my own adopted home, the story is the same. Low voter turnout. Apathy. Greed. Corruption and misuse of power. No hope. We hear that the American public has woken (as if they’d been sleeping for six years) to discover the horrible ineptitude of those who hold sway over the government. Presidential and congressional approval ratings have tanked in the high thirties. Congress has responded in a glorious display of total ineptitude by giving themselves raises and more vacation time. This Congress will be in session fewer days than the famous Do-Nothing Congress of 1948. They’ll add insult to injury by wasting our time (for we are the ones paying them) debating gay marriage, flag burning, and other red-meat, froth-at-the-mouth non-issues of our day.
Meanwhile, Democratic Party strategists and concerned citizens across the net are scratching various body parts, trying once again to debate and define the stances, philosophy and coherent narrative of “our” party. As if it is, somehow, “ours”.
Yet, it can be, in a way. Thanks to this “glorious” technology real live direct democracy is actually possible for the first time in human history. Any citizen of with computer access (that is, access to a library) can waltz in, sign up for a blog, and send their voice into the digital wilderness. They can sign up for free email and fire off correspondence to all four hundred and thirty-six Congresspeople in minutes (or hours if, like me, you are easily distracted).
It’s not too radical to say this internet is the best tool for democracy since the invention of the printing press. Like Guttenberg’s gold letters, this Internet provides an open forum for the continuous discussion and dissemination of ideas. Ideas that spark action, that spark movement and organization. Indeed, it seems a lot of this country’s problems stem from the replacement of actual political organizing with cocktail party gossip mongering by the same (increasingly smaller) group of people with disposable incomes and pretensions of a social conscious.
They (like the rest of us) are too busy caught up in the day-to-day rat race to really care about politics. Their social action is a veiled attempt at social climbing, smoozing and boozing. They are the campaign consultants and their rich friends, the contributors. We’ll get nowhere waiting for that cavalry to come and save us from the proto-fascist mess we’re in…or, worse, we’ll get what George Custer got while he waited in vain, that is, we’ll get dead.
Yet I’m depressed. As I said, Mid-term elections are coming (already here in some cases, see California’s 50th District) and the great debates of the most often generate (or de-generate, depending my mood) into discussions of tactics. Most specifically, the tactical question of Karl Rove. More specifically still, a tactical question that comes down to one phrase so insidious it cannot even be countenanced: That is, how many of our enemy’s tactics can we used? How do we “win” (which, in these times, amounts to “how do we game shattered, debased, poisoned political system”) without becoming what we hate?
The simple answer is, We don’t. We can’t. We are too moral, too conscientious, and too damn poor to do what our nemesis Turdblossm has done. Nor should we want to. His divisive, debased tactics have only piled shit upon the already fragrant compost heap that is our political discourse. And they work. They (combined with selective gerrymandering and the occasional outright fraud) win elections, as they will again this November.
I do not write that without some pause, for it is an ugly fact, and I will do my best to change it. That is, I’ll vote, and knock on every piece of wood I can find in the hope it will be counted.
And in the mean time, I’ll suggest that the great debates of Daily Kos be realigned, brought outside the box of everyday politricks. We, like the conservatives who so despise us, do not need to waste time defining ourselves for the American public. We have a wide and varied history of political writers (mostly from the last century) who’ve already done the hard work for us. We hear about Lee Atwater, George Will, and William Buckley. But fuck them. We’ve got JFK (Profiles in Courage) John Dewy, George Lakoff, John Rawls…hell, we’ve even got Noam Chomsky if none of those can sate your palette.
We also have the harsh fact of a disaffected, unmotivated, apathetic populous that considers itself “too busy” or (worse) too stupid to get involved in the political process. As Chris Hayes says in his excellent article on Yearly Kos,
YearlyKos made it clear that the netroots is a vanguard—a smart, savvy, compassionate and courageous vanguard, but a vanguard nonetheless. There's nothing wrong with vanguards, but they do not a majority make.
But as I explained to the man I buy my cigarettes from yesterday, “You can understand anything, so long as it’s explained well enough for you to understand.”
We must go out unto the people, just like Jesus told his homies, and explain the situation to them. We must do it without spin, without rationalization, without sloganeering or unabashed bullshitting. We must do it to as many people as possible. Our friends. Our neighbors. Our fellow citizens and human beings. We will get nowhere waiting for some “charismatic” leader to pop out of the woodwork and save us all. If we are a movement we must move, and it can be as simple and as easy as moving two steps down my sidewalk to knock on my neighbor’s door and ask, Hey, how ‘bout a beer and little chin wag about politics. That is the key to any form of victory. It is the glue that’s held together every mass movement in history. It also the only thing that has ever really changed the world.
Think about it. Then do it.
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