Affinity group radicals. Creative graffiti. Ritualized destruction of
property.
Yes, May Day is coming. Can you feel the revolution in the air?
Foul Movement
<http://www.ironminds.com/ironminds/issues/010420/dispatch.shtml>
By Andrew L. Giarelli
04/20/01
At 15, on the night Chicago cops whacked longhair head at the 1968
Democratic National Convention, I cried myself to sleep for our lost
democracy and its noble defenders; four years later, when my chance came to
join the Volunteers of America, I deserted. A bunch of us radicals had
cornered some Marine recruiters in a building on the outskirts of Yale, and
though it was a beautiful collective thing, the lead Marxist in the bunch
assumed command. This guy, Josh, who'd later become a Wall Street lawyer,
stalked the line of New Haven police protecting the building, spitting in
their faces and occasionally pushing a young woman into them.
"C'mon pig! I know you want some of this hippie ass! C'mon, why doncha grab
her hair and throw her down!" Some of the pigs, young working-class guys
like me, looked hurt and shocked. So when the asshole Marxist announced
that it was time to show whether you were with the Revolution or against it
by liberating the corner of College and Chapel at rush hour, I switched sides.
Oh, I spent the rest of the '70s and early '80s occasionally pretending
otherwise, but in truth each wave of self-serving, manipulative,
hypocritical "progressives" I encountered sickened me more than the last:
from the subpoenaed feminist protectors of Weatherwoman-on-the-lam
Katherine Ann Powers who lectured me on how to report their grand jury
case, to the Marxists who commandeered my graduate teaching assistants'
union and issued orders about talking to the press, to some of my NYU
journalism students who kissed Sandinista and Fidelista ass in print while
real journalists there were harassed and imprisoned. Thus I mistrust the
current "affinity groups" gathering in the Northwest to overturn world
corporate hegemony this spring.
What are affinity groups, anyway? That's when someone who despises China
for enslaving political prisoners gets convinced to join supporters of
Mumia Abu-Jamal and agrees not to mention how the latter boasted about
killing that cop, and they agree not to praise China's one-party rule
specifically but still get to spout Chinese-style Marxist rhetoric
generally because, after all, you wouldn't want to disrespect Leonard
Peltier's supporters, right? From my vantage, it's when hell freezes over.
My only problem is that some of my younger friends here in progressive
Puddletown are affinity group radicals, and while I do admire their
malcontent creativity, I despise their dainty identity politics. What do I
mean by each, you ask? Here are two examples. On North Interstate Avenue,
the desolate North Portland strip spotted with faux-tropical no-tell motels
and the so-faux-it's-real Alibi Lounge, a big sign for a Dodge sport
utility vehicle displays the monster alongside the brand new word
"Baditude." Just one more non-word the corporate philologists have foisted
upon us and denied us the right to use at will, except that there's another
word beneath it, bigger, badder, in the kind of graffiti-esque scrawl
advertising uses now to lure maturing Gen-Xers. The word is "KILLS." Yes,
"Baditude^ KILLS."
It looks like it belongs, like just another incremental push of the
marketing envelope that innocently overshadows the verb's literal
nastiness. "Baditude^ KILLS" yeah, maybe Dodge is just so down with you
still-daring yet financially stabilized X-ers that but wait a minute, look
at that SUV, the part of the ad that's definitely the product of Dodge's
advertising division. It's almost careening up on two wheels, not careering
on all four, and that might have spelled "freedom" a year ago, but now it
spells "Firestone."
What mimic genius it took to monkey-wrench that billboard at just the right
anti-marketing micro-moment, none too soon and none too late, for all to
see how Dodge might have actually considered boasting that "Baditude
KILLS"; how unnerving the words must be now to anyone driving by! I like that.
I don't like this: It's lunchtime on the Park Blocks, the genteelly
democratic green space abutting Portland State University, the same space
where the Oregon Ballet holds open-air rehearsals and where you can buy
absolutist organic spinach for $5 a pound at the Farmers' Market. A
singer-guitarist with electronic accompanist is performing some chant-like
stuff. She introduces her next piece, struggling for the words. "I, like,
come from so many different cultures," she begins. "I'm Asian-American,"
she says forthrightly, "and supposedly Native American," she adds in a
cutesy rushed half-whisper, "and I'm bisexual, so " She leaves the rest,
whatever it could possibly be, ineffably unsaid.
Now in New York, all that might tote up to one culture, if you actually had
anything to sell with it, but here it's at least six, all demanding
tax-free status too. How much time the poor young
woman must take unwrapping and examining and re-wrapping those cultural
threads, how many memoirs needing release, how many memoir-writing course
credits I and my sleazy cronies at Portland State University might sell her!
So, about those May Day plans. "It's going to be a fiasco," my favorite
radical (all mimic subversiveness, no identity politics) announced proudly
last weekend at a cupping he hosted. Right, what's a cupping? That's when
a coffee roaster (both professionals and adept amateurs abound here)
invites people over to blow on and slurp up and vote for cups of his new
roasts; in my friend's case, he's busting a move to professional, hoping to
sell at Saturday Market. Please don't make me tell you what Saturday
Market is. Just imagine the nation's biggest conglomeration of legitimate
old and new hippie craftspeople, and across the street from them an
illegitimate appendage of drum-circlin', bud-dealin' gutterpunks who make
it possible for Junior to sneak over and cop a forty-bag while Mom compares
crystals.
Anyway, by "fiasco," my friend who was busted during a demonstration last
fall wearing a Ronald McDonald suit and who also insisted on being booked
as said character, and continues to tie up the courts with his disorderly
conduct case means "failure in communication to the movement's benefit," I
think.
"The police still don't realize that they're a part of it all," he
explains. By that I think he means that the cops' only choice is to let
things happen.
What will happen? According to infoshop.org, "your online anarchist
community," May 1 is going to be a "Planetary Carnival Against Capitalism
and the State." To warm things up, affinity groups opposing the Free Trade
Agreement of the Americas Ministerial Meeting in Quebec City (April 17-21)
will rally here and up on the Canadian border to support their brothers and
sisters trying to shut down the event. "FTAA will mean the increased
oppression of indigenous communities abroad and of people of color at
home," argues the local anti-FTAA coalition's Web site. "It will expand the
wealth gap between rich and poor countries as well as between the rich and
poor in our own country. And the environmental degradation caused by 'free
trade' affects the air we all breathe and the water we all drink."
Of course, like the old movement, this one promises fun and danger too.
Calling on the spirit of Seattle, it urges: "Get ready for the next
festival of resistance!" In Quebec City, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence
(April 18-22) will culminate in a Day of Action on May 20 that will
include, of course, "direct action." Here on campus, talk and posters I
mean, just posters, because actually, I haven't heard any students talk
about this are of anti-FTAA demonstrations, a pena (Marxist co-opting of
traditional culture) and May Day ramblings. Meanwhile, the Peace Arch
Coalition, another network of affinity groups, will try a "major
cross-border No Way FTAA Rally" on April 21 at Peace Arch Park on the
Washington-British Columbia border, which will surely allow Customs and
Immigration on both sides to try out their latest crowd control
tactics. The spring hasn't felt this crackly with the giddy scent of
revolution since David Crosby preferred pot.
The real deal, though, is May Day. According to the publicity for the
Planetary Carnival ("nothing ever burns down by itself every fire needs a
little help"), "global resistance to capitalism is finally on the rise
again!" Citing anarchist holy days of obligation like N30 (the 1999 Seattle
anti-WTO protests), A16 (2000 anti-IMF protests in D.C.) and the primordial
start to the revolution, J18 (the 1999 date when Eugene anarchists first
smashed and looted en masse), the online anarchists conclude: "momentum is
growing to overthrow the corporations and start building a better planet."
Clearing the terrain for this better planet, another group called The
International Network of Night Workers (INNW) is calling for a night of P-D
("property destruction") on April 30. "They want to remind people that
capitalism cannot be reformed, it can only be resisted through direct
action," infoshop.org tells us. Their suggested target list includes
McDonald's, Nike, Monsanto, Citibank, Shell and the Gap. Oddly, no
Starbucks, which is something else I'd like to ask them about.
But who are they? The friendly affinitists at infoshop.org don't link to
them. And who are the folks at infoshop.org, anyway? Their main page
connects me to anarchafeminism.com, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Institute
for Anarchist Studies, the Internet Anarchist University, the San Francisco
Mission Yuppie Eradication Project, Smash Giulianism, and of course, the
Eugene anarchist community. But they don't really identify themselves.
Direct Action Network is just a linker too: I have all these messages in to
DAN "contacts," because I want to ask if they support "P-D," but nobody
answers. It's like I'm this old fart nobody wants to acknowledge or something.
Who coordinates all this fun? Are the anarchists mixing it up with the
Marxists? Does Direct Action Network, which acts like it coordinates
everything, run the show? If you've got to ask that, you don't get it. The
primary organizer in Quebec is La Convergence des Luttes Anti-Capitalistes,
who sound rather proudly Marxist. The world of Web site links is a
wonderful new improvement on our old movement selective denial of
responsibility (i.e., those subpoenaed Katherine Ann Powers supporters all
those years ago wouldn't talk about her; they wanted to talk about the FBI
harassing women's communities). So is the world of "affinity groups."
Which brings me back home to Portland and Craig Rosebraugh. He's the
self-announced spokesman for Earth Liberation Front, which took
responsibility for burning down luxury condos in Aspen last year but says
it didn't burn up the SUVs in Eugene the other night. At least, Rosebraugh
says that ELF denies responsibility.
Who, where, what, how and especially why are not really Rosebraugh's
concerns, which makes him kind of different from most media spokespeople,
as the local alternative rag The Portland Mercury noted this week when it
named him a finalist for its "Stupid Fucking Hippie" Award. Alas, he lost
to Tre Arrow, the young hero who sat and shat on the federal building ledge
in downtown Portland last year for more than a week to support the Eagle
Creek tree-sit up there in the Cascades, then ran, or more appropriately
hung out, for Congress on the Green Party ticket before getting busted last
month for shoplifting at Nature's, a yuppified organic grocery chain.
Things are getting ugly here. A kind of ritualized cycle of property
destruction has begun. Poor Mayor Vera Katz, who thought she'd got tough on
young street graffitists with varieties of public humiliation over the last
two years, now faces an assault wave. Storefronts in the freshly painted,
city-supported Alberta Arts District got spray-painted last week with "Soup
kitchens not bistros" and "Yuppies Go Home," along with the anarchy fist.
"This is a crime" was spray-painted on one sport utility vehicle (why just
that one?) and dollar signs sprayed onto Wall Street Journal newsstands on
trendy Northwest 23rd. A few days later, the counter-assault on the enemy's
key assault vehicle began in earnest: A million bucks' worth of sport
utility vehicles were torched at a Eugene dealership. That fire sounds a
little like the suspicious fire that burned more than a dozen police cars
in a Southeast Portland parking lot last June. "No Justice No Peace" was
written on sidewalk in front of the lot. It happened a week before the
first anniversary of the original Eugene anarchist "action," and the cops
are still investigating.
A couple of films are making the rounds of Northwest campuses to rev up the
action. One is This Is What Democracy Looks Like, produced by Independent
Media (how independent are they if they're linked all over the place to the
anti-FTAA and May Day web sites?). I especially like the poster for this
film by Whitman Insurgency, a student group at otherwise conservative
Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.
The movie, from Indy Media, retells the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization
demonstrations in Seattle, which have been sanctified into the equivalent
of the 1967 March on the Pentagon or the Russian sailors' revolt on the
Potemkin. In the drawing, proud young rebels march down a path cleared of
riot cops, the last couple of whom scurry fearfully into foreground. The
revolutionaries are holding maybe flags, maybe truncheons; watching the new
order take shape from the sides are representatives of "affinity groups": a
rather mistrustful looking young African-American, a green-kerchief-masked
white radical, a proud and hirsute young woman and the blurred masses
holding red flags. Notice that the flags aren't black, the color of the
anarchist movement. That tells you right there who'll be running the firing
squads when the revolution comes. Those Eugene anarchists ought to read
their revolutionary history. It's always the dangerous allies like
anarchists whom successful Marxists execute first; there's plenty of time
later for reactionaries.
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Andrew L. Giarelli was the founding editor of Edging West, a regional
magazine that ran from 1995-98. He teaches nonfiction writing at Portland
State University.
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