Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?: Responses
Neumann, Rachel
IT' S DIFFICULT to cook without a recipe. Marshall Berman offers a three part one: powerful and provocative ideas, smart and imaginative people, and experimental neighborhoods where these...
...Either people were against us, like the cops, and then they were ignorant, stupid or, at best, misguided, or they were for us, and then they were good, rational, reasonable, and thought about things pretty much as I did...
...Maybe I'm going to be sitting alone in front of the television again...
...I live in one of those "experimental neighborhoods," full of young, creative, intelligent people...
...It's not that there's nothing to protest against (the ever-widening chasm between rich and poor, the prison industrial complex, the lack of affordable health care, corporate takeover of public life), or that times are significantly better than at any other moment of mass uprising in the United States...
...And then, if these movements do coalesce, what shape will their collaboration take...
...This is the time for wondering who cares and what to do about it...
...It sounds good, and I think Berman is right about some of the basic ingredients, but I've tried it, and somehow my cake still falls flat...
...But resistance isn't coalescing into anything like the protests in the sixties...
...Political discussions in every caf...
...I could deal with an angry opposition, but didn't know what to do if the world just didn't care...
...Cambridge's Central Square comes in a close third...
...For three hours every network repeated the same shot of the couple walking out of the church...
...That was the day Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer (I still wince at the thought of her awkward, timid smile, his underdeveloped grin...
...This could be the beginning of the first global revolution...
...Finally, at midnight, I turned off the television...
...What's so cool about it...
...It's harder and harder to act as if we believe it...
...Is it possible to have a world without rampant exploitation, consumerism, and imperialism...
...The only other neighborhood where local culture has been so quickly prettied up, smoothed over, and sold to the young petite bourgeoisie is, surprise, the Mission District in San Francisco...
...It's a survival mechanism that makes us act and, when our life is in danger, keeps us alive...
...I wonder if these separate, small movements that characterize what there is of late twentieth-century activism will coalesce into something of greater weight...
...Can't you get it together and start a movement...
...members of the Earth Liberation Front are climbing out of the trees...
...The ingredient missing in Berman's recipe is the belief that one's ideas, one's beliefs, can have some genuine ef fect and are worth the risks of action...
...We're having a harder and harder time creating a collective imagination of what the world could be like, what we think it should be like...
...Everyone else had long gone to bed and I stared DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 41 SYMPOSIUM at the cold screen for a while, feeling numb and defeated...
...Marshall Berman offers a three part one: powerful and provocative ideas, smart and imaginative people, and experimental neighborhoods where these people and ideas can interact...
...people are guided by the same mixed-up mess of altruism, compassion, desire, rebellion, and personal anger, but that energy is scattered and going different places...
...People still act, but they keep the goals smaller, the end result somewhere in sight...
...Despite record wealth in this country (based on record debt, speculation, and exploitation), there's no sense of security that lets people stop focusing on survival and start fighting for something more...
...And it's not that people are too oversaturated with corporate appropriation of counterculture to care, though that certainly makes organizing harder...
...People in my neighborhood do sit in cafés having long discussions, and occasionally even mention Freud and Marx, but there is little connection between ideas and action...
...How about one of the quickest onslaughts of gentrification you'll ever find...
...The first time I got arrested for civil disobedience was in July of 1981...
...Energy gets converted, right...
...Often, this belief is most powerful when it comes out of the melding of the two, the privileged and the desperate meeting with a similar vision...
...Every major television station was at the protest and I stared into the cameras while I shouted...
...Maybe the focus, the organization, the commitment, or the international mobilization will tilt the balance...
...Not one...
...Not even close...
...What political activist energy there is goes toward fights for a livable wage, for a warm place for homeless people to sleep, for a death penalty appeal, for access to basic education...
...And it's never going to have the same kind of naive optimism again...
...p p EOPLE HAVE a natural tendency to hope...
...More than twenty thousand members of U.S...
...University students strike throughout Mexico demanding a return to accessible public education, Reclaim the Streets throws a party on Broadway in New York City to protest the commercialization and excessive regulation of public space, the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops causes massive PR disasters for Nike and the Gap, the day of action against Mumia Abu-Jamal's death sentence brings out artists and performers around the country...
...People of all ages and ethnicities mixing and mingling, talking together about the things they care about most...
...Gentrification is the coolest thing happening...
...By the time this goes to print, an international community of thousands (I would like to say hundreds of thousands) will have marched on the Seattle Convention Center to protest the convention of the World Trade Organization as it meets to remove the last barriers to free trade for multinational corporations...
...Or it can come out of luxury, as it did in the United States in the sixties, when many people had a base of economic security from which to rebel against the status quo...
...In fact my neighborhood, Williamsburg, was made famous a few years ago when the Utne Reader dubbed it one of the coolest neighborhoods in America, second only to the Mission District of San Francisco...
...Food coops, cheap housing...
...That night, after a lecture and citation from juvenile hall, I sat on the edge of the couch watching the evening news...
...My belief is stretched thin, but it still holds me: time will come, maybe this time, maybe next, when the whole world will be watching and the whole world's going to be turned upside down...
...Mostly, people would shrug, they just thought it was important to register their opposition...
...It doesn't disappear...
...RACHEL NEUMANN is an assistant editor of Dissent...
...So the question becomes not just where you live, but more important, how you live once you're there...
...Or maybe this time I won't need the television to tell me that things are changing...
...people are flying or driving in from every state in the union...
...A culture of resistance...
...Average rents have tripled...
...I see the signs of a few people getting rich, but I don't see the signs of people getting happy...
...When people trudged out to protest the Gulf War, no one I spoke to thought protesting would actually stop the bombing, even less did I hear reference to a viable alternative...
...The whole world was watching that night, but they were watching something else...
...Zapatistas are coming to Seattle from Mexico...
...I sat down in front of the gate to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, locked arms with some older kids, locked eyes with the cops, and chanted: The whole world is watching...
...Because people don't have any idea of what they're protesting for...
...Smart and disillusioned young hipsters need cheap places to live, no problem there...
...It's 42 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 not that there's less energy than in the sixties...
...Within a year, six clothing stores have opened in a two-block radius, not one selling pants for under eighty dollars...
...Nope...
...labor unions and delegations from India, Bangladesh, Chile, and Pakistan are traveling across the United States...
...This belief can come out of necessity—as it did in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Algeria, among many other places...
...I was ten years old and convinced of two things: (1) If I didn't do something drastic, there was going to be a nuclear war before I even got to high school (before I got a chance to write a novel, become president, or even have a first kiss) and (2) The whole word was watching, and the whole world cared...
...Only in the minds of the die-hard romantics...
...Older activists, nostalgic for their pasts and genuinely concerned, ask, What's the problem, people...
...I wish...
...Community spaces and info shops...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
