http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/08/25/beyond_finger-pointing_take_a_look_back_--_and_ahe/
By Jim Sleeper
August 25, 2009
Is town-meeting craziness genetic and exclusive to right-wingers? The
left-activist historian Rick Perlstein implied so recently in an
engaging summary of their eruptions over the years. But to really
unpack the orchestrated, perverse passion we've just seen, analyze this:
As New York Mayor Ed Koch rose to address the American Public Health
Association in 1979, demonstrators chanted, "Racist Koch, you can't
hide. We charge you with genocide." As they pelted him with eggs,
Nayvin Gordon, M.D., 31, and two other doctors emerged onstage and
grabbed him before being wrestled down by Koch and others.
An isolated incident? Progressive "boomers" who disrupted public
meetings and goosed sensation-hungry media in youth are having senior
moments about it all and complaining that journalists now dignify
political insanity as never before.
Not quite! To see how current protesters miss the real causes and
proper targets of their misspent rage, start with a glance in the
mirror. It'll show that while progressives got some things right that
the right gets wrong, those differences weren't always very clear.
I'm not urging some leftist mea culpa that would give ammunition to
Rush Limbaugh or set up false moral equivalencies of left and right.
I'm suggesting that only the whole truth can set us free.
• Google "Bright College Years" and "video" and watch a painful but
riveting color documentary of Jerry Rubin's, Abbie Hoffman's, and
other white radicals' descent upon Yale in 1970 to protest the murder
trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale.
No voice-overs in this film obscure the amazingly vacuous, violent
mediocrity of rants that will embarrass anyone who's nostalgic about
disruptions at Yale and other campuses. These often preceded and
sometimes all-but provoked (without provocateurs!) police crackdowns,
such as those at Harvard and Columbia, that still sanctify the
students' follies in some boomers' memories.
Watching the film, I understood why Dwight Macdonald, the social
critic, uproarious iconoclast, and descendant of two early Yale
presidents, cautioned Columbia student rebels of 1968, whom he
largely supported, that trashing universities would only deepen
everyone's oppression.
• Read about understandable but misdirected black rage in my The
Closest of Strangers -- about how, for example, in Brooklyn in 1967,
Rhody McCoy, a tweedy, pipe-puffing disciple of Malcolm X and
chairman of a predominantly black school board, set a precedent for
racial mau-mauing by orchestrating menacing appearances by what board
minutes call "the community," in the form of the thuggish militant
Sonny Carson and his retinue to intimidate white teachers' union
representatives and other liberals.
This kind of protest, claiming the mantle of nobler, more effective
civil disobedience, trashed democratic deliberation about race for
years. Justifications for bad strategies and premises were debated
earnestly in The New York Review of Books, and, later, charges like
Tawana Brawley's or myths like the black-church arson epidemic were
treated with great deference by mainstream journalists.
• Writing in the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix in 1973, I
promoted a "tea party" protest designed to disrupt an official
bicentennial commemoration of the original Boston Tea Party. A worthy
goal, perhaps: Jeremy Rifkin, leader of a radical "People's
Bicentennial Commission" funded by the National Council of Churches,
said, "It's going to be a physical confrontation, obviously, on the
docks, How the hell can they arrest people for being revolutionary at
a commemoration of the Boston Tea Party?"
Not much came of that effort or of the "Days of Rage" following the
police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
But many such disruptions shocked and briefly paralyzed ordinary,
middle-aged Americans, liberal as well as conservative, who weren't
wielding police batons or wearing hard hats but were merely fingering
Roberts' Rules of Order in town-hall rooms where no one had ever
called them "Motherfucker" before.
Many of us thought that Roberts Rules was just a bourgeois
mystification of oppressive social relations, but, watching the
movement spin out of control, TPM contributor Todd Gitlin, an early
SDS president, wrote in his book The Sixties of widespread
assumptions that -- as a Weatherman communiqué put it -- "Smashing
the pig means smashing the pig inside ourselves, destroying our own
honkiness.... We are against everything that's 'good and decent' in
honky America...."
"No alternative theory or action crystallized from the murk of the
collective despair," Todd lamented. "They're crazy, one heard [of the
worst militants], but you have to admit they've got guts. Anyway, are
you so sure they're wrong? And what is going to bring down American
imperialism? And what are you, we, going to do about it? It was hard
to summon up the standing to criticize."
I'll leave aside here the lethal symmetries between leftist
terrorists, black or white, and right-wing white militias and
segregationist killers, because a politics of death signals only the
death of politics. But note Todd's estimate that between September
1969 and May 1970 there were some 250 "bombings and attempts linkable
with the white left.... the explosions amplified, as usual, by the
mass media."
And note the broad atmospherics that incubated violence by crazies
such as the 1993 Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson, a man
steeped racial demagoguery whose incredible indulgence by
progressives I described at the time. (Scroll to the second pdf on this link.)
We now pretend it wasn't so. Yet we're alarmed by the rhetorical
violence at Sarah Palin rallies, the GOP 2008 convention, and
health-care forums partly because it turns our senior moments about
past indulgences into nightmares from a buried or sanitized past.
True enough, while today's right-wing demonstrators want to block
public health care (and, weirdly, to trust vast, bureaucratic engines
such as insurance companies and HMOs), most enraged demonstrators in
the 1960s were trying to stop mass butchery by a military-industrial
juggernaut whose "mad rationalists" were crazier than we. And it
can't surprise us that as the slaughter deepened, anti-war
demonstrators succumbed at times -- some terminally -- to helpless rage.
But many of today's raging demonstrators feel helpless, too, and
betrayed, for reasons that progressives, of all people, should understand.
Most of us who rightly assailed "the corporate state" were young and
relatively well-educated. We lived, as SDS' Port Huron statement put
it, "in at least modest comfort" in a society where "going
underground" could mean taking a readily available factory job.
Today's demonstrators are older and more vulnerable than we were when
the draft no longer hung over our heads. Today's 55-year-old former
auto or steel worker who has just become a stock clerk or burger
flipper with no health insurance isn't having any senior moments
about the high-paying manufacturing or managerial job with full
benefits and pensions that he lost, along with a manageable mortgage.
He still feels it slipping away.
Can it surprise us if he's raging at the wrong targets? We did that,
too, sometimes -- at university scholars, deans, liberal public
functionaries, even anyone, including our parents, who was over 30,
paying taxes, and therefore as complicit as a "good German" in
"fascist Amerika." Not only that: We didn't trust government much
more than the right does now.
But acknowledging all this only clarifies the two big, instructive
differences.
First, while our tactics became terrible, we were right to arraign
corporations for wrongs that conservatives still blame almost wholly
on the state and "liberals". We knew then what recent events have
confirmed: that conservative and moderate Americans can't reconcile
their yearnings for ordered, almost sacred liberty with their
obeisance to every whim and riptide of corporate and finance capital,
which mock the capitalism envisioned by a John Locke or an Ayn Rand.
Second, our protests weren't backed by any big corporations or major
political parties. That 1973 "People's Bicentennial" effort to
disrupt the official Boston Tea Party exposed a plastic,
corporate-funded simulation of a 1773 rebellion against the true
progenitor of the tea tax - the multinational corporate East India
Company -- and a mercantile, imperial regime.
"'Tis time to part," Tom Paine wrote then, as Americans faced the
daunting prospect of replacing the only regime they'd ever known with
new, untried arrangements. We aren't yet ready to part with the
current regime of finance and big-corporate capital that has arisen
to consume our republic.
When push does come to shove, I'll commend the coercive non-violence
I've discussed here before, the kind pioneered in the best of the
last century by a new politics, from that of Gandhi and the early
American Civil Rights movement to that of dissidents of the Soviet
bloc, and, we can still hope, in Iran.
Our best responses to the enraged American victims of today's
profiteers would be in this spirit, which takes a lot of discipline,
organizing, and courage to sustain. It involves civic-republican
vigilance against the corporate state, mobilized public persuasion,
and disciplined moral witness -- no matter how inadequate and, yes,
sometimes maddening, such responses may seem to the young rebels, the
ideologues, and the most desperate among us.
About these responses, this summer's conservative provocateurs
haven't a clue, but they're the responses that will work best in our
time -- at least outside of Washington.
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