Recreate 68, the DNC and the Urgent Need to Reinvent Our Political Language

Recreate 68, the DNC and the Urgent Need to Reinvent Our Political Language

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/08/10196/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roberto-lovato/recreate-68-the-dnc-and-t_b_111186.html

by Roberto Lovato
Published on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 by The Huffington Post

Recent reports about the protests and other activities planned for
next month's Democratic National Convention (DNC) make me want to
throw on a tie dye, smoke some sin semilla and blare the the song,
Times They Are NOT a-Changin'.

My point is that, rather than frame the protests as a response to the
unique confluence of issues that constitute our crisis ­ war,
declining empire, worldwide starvation, the death of the American
Dream and the rapid decimation of the planet itself, to name a few ­
the writers and editors at major media outlets simply cut story lines
and even images(!) from the 60's protests and paste them onto the
present. But most problematic is not so much the reporting as the
fact that DNC protest organizers themselves provided the frame. They
did so from the moment they chose the unhappy name for the
coordinated protest effort in Denver: Recreate 68.

Sources in Denver told me last year of plans to call the event
Recreate 68 and my initial reaction was, "Have they no political
imagination?" Asked how they came to this decision, my sources, who
didn't want to be identified because of their need to coordinate with
the protest organizers, told me that a most deadly combination was
largely responsible for coming up the Recreate 68 tag: aging white
leftists and young people anxious for history and change. Those who
say that the language matters less than the real life issues being
discussed have zero sense of how language and framing can completely
block and deaden your main message.

While the motivations of both the young people and the aging white
leftists are understandable, their political logic is not. By framing
things in this way, they are basically denying the uniqueness of the
political moment, the specificity of specific struggles. Also, local
activists and their activities, their language will be beamed out to
a country and a planet unable to distinguish the Colorado political
accent from that of the rest of us who do not wax as nostalgic for 1968.

Some will argue that the mainstream media will inevitably spin
against protesters anyway. Maybe, but we don't need to do the work
for them and, more importantly, we ourselves, especially young
people, must forge a political identity and create language unique to
current challenges, something made exponentially more difficult by
the deadening nostalgic mediocrity of the Recreate 68 frame.

Keeping a line of political tradition constitutes a necessary part of
any good movement-building-but not at the expense of eliding the
burning issues or our time. I can already hear the deployment in
Denver of political language so dead and compromised that even
presidential candidates are using it: "Yes we can", "Si Se Puede",
etc. Denver points to the urgent need to reinvent and reinvigorate
our language and political framing.

More than ever, we need to focus national and global attention on the
unique and daunting problems we face. "Recreate 68 sounds more like
something more appropriate for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion
concert than for a movement of our troubled times.
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Roberto Lovato is a New York-based contributing Associate Editor with
New America Media and a frequent contributor to The Nation Magazine.

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