Ethan Zuckerman has posted a beautiful piece that stitches together many of the ideas we deal with in How To Win and the Center for Artistic Activism. I can’t recommend it enough:
Overcoming political polarization… but not through facts
It ties together polarization, confirmation bias, the media, David Simon and The Wire, and the need for addressing values and narrative before facts.
I’ll post it here for the sake of archiving: Continue reading
We thought: culture is much more important than politics. Let’s just start getting people living the way they wanna live.
You wanna live in a world where you don’t have to work? Let’s make it.
You wanna live in a world where you can get food for free? Let’s make it.
You wanna live in a house with lots of women and men and live the way you want? Let’s do it.
Let’s make the world that you imagine real by acting it out.
And if you can act it out, it’s real.
– Peter Coyote on The Diggers
From a PBS documentary on The Diggers.
Duncombe and I have said more than once “you can change the laws, but it won’t matter if the culture doesn’t change with it.” For lack of a better term, I’m going to call this – for now – a Culture Gap.
A change may be “the right thing,” environmentally, economically, socially, for justice, but if people aren’t ready for it the change wont happen. Worse, you may see a backlash against the policy or enforcement.
Sadly, this may be what’s happening in the argument over New York City bike lanes. An extensive New York Magazine article today dives into these ideas:
The DOT can put in bike lanes by the thousands, but the more important transformation will be internal: We are going to have to learn to accept a decrease, however minuscule, in our individual freedoms. For bike lanes to really work, New Yorkers are going to have to learn to share.
Sharing, however, will first require a commitment by all New Yorkers—and especially bikers—to abide by the rules of the road. “If you’re going to put more cyclists on the street, you have to make sure there’s more enforcement,” says Nancy Gruskin, a music teacher and activist based in New Jersey. And until recently, that hadn’t happened. “It feels very haphazard: You throw something out there and expect that the structure is going to build itself, and what happens is that you have civil war.”
Luckily, I think the cultural shift is already underway. Anti-bikelane activists will lose, eventually. They have to. There is a “teething process,” as a transportation advocate in the article put it – and I like the image of a cry baby it evokes – but the bike lane process could be smoother, more efficient, and more effective with some cultural work.
The next question is what kind?
Attempts by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gases are highly unpopular here because of opposition to large-scale government intervention. Some are skeptical that humans might fundamentally alter a world that was created by God.
If the heartland is to seriously reduce its dependence on coal and oil, Ms. Jackson and others decided, the issues must be separated. So the project ran an experiment to see if by focusing on thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction and economic prosperity, it could rally residents of six Kansas towns to take meaningful steps to conserve energy and consider renewable fuels.
via In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Green Energy – NYTimes.com.
A smart lefty is frustrated that the right is getting ahead by asserting lies and the left sticks to the truth. We know the answer here don’t we? Use the truth but tap into the same outrage? Or?
An excerpt from the folks at Poplicks:
I know that there will always be fierce opposition to any American president, regardless of his or her ideology. Dissent is an American tradition. Undoubtedly, the anti-Bush rallies were an even larger assembly of angry people with the same passion as the people interviewed above.
But what shocks me about these oft-repeated wingnut talking points is how much they depend on lies.
In expressing their views, these teabaggers rely on “facts” with no credible support. Obama is not an American citizen. Obama is a Communist. Obama is the first president to have “czars.” Obama wants to kill my grandma. Obama is Muslim. Obama is raising my taxes (said a person who is probably not making more than $250,000). Obama is taking my doctor away.
In contrast, most anti-Bush protesters never needed to lie. They either chanted pure opinions (e.g., “The war on Iraq is wrong,” “Bush is the worst president in US history,” etc.) or expressed beliefs stemming from undisputed facts (e.g., “No Tax Dollars to Halliburton”, “How can the White House defend torture?,” etc.).
Granted, there were many leftists who passionately believed unproven assertions. For example, thousands (including me) believed that the White House was raising the terror alert levels during the 2004 presidential campaign just to skew support towards President Bush. Sure enough, it turned out to be true. But even if it wasn’t true, most Bush critics could articulate their opposition to President Bush’s policies without lying (or repeating lies that they believed to be true).
Consider the “You Lie” controversy. Personally, I am not outraged with Rep. Joe Wilson for merely interrupting Pres. Obama’s speech and violating so-called rules of etiquette. If he blurted out “Shame!” during one of Pres. Bush’s speeches defending the Iraqi invasion, I would have praised him. Instead, what outrages me about Rep. Wilson’s statement is that it’s a patently false assertion. He’s not expressing an opinion. He’s stating that Obama’s proposed bill would apply to illegal immigrants, when it clearly does not.
Have No Fear the Community Avengers are Here!
As the right wing mob mobilizes to shut down democratic debate on health care reform; as Van Jones is forced from the White House through distortions of the truth and plays on racial and political fears; as the recession deepens – the masked marauders known as the Community Avengers are swooping in to save the day.
The Community Avengers are a team of residents from Miami who are standing up in these trying times, calling out the criminal bankers, and inspiring action. They have been spotted tumbling out of a van at a recent Miami Dade County budget hearing, moving into the seething crowd and taking to task politicians with their lively chants and street theater. After mixing with all those malcontented with proposed cuts to the Miami Dade County budget, the Community Avengers did a double header and headed over to a health care town hall for a show down with the riled up right wing.
Just this week the Community Avengers joined forces with residents and pastors from Miami Gardens to fight back against banks bent on eviction rather than loan modification.
Always on call to do battle with the villains of bad government and corporate greed, the Community Avengers rallied to support an ordinance that would sanction foreclosing banks.
Click here to read more about this action: http://tinyurl.com/Communityavengers
It is time for progressive people everywhere to learn a lesson from the Community Avengers. Let’s creatively mobilize and call out the culprits across the country. Where right wing pundits play on irrational fears, we will be there. Where greedy bankers rob our people, we will be there. Where government bows to a marginal and maniac minority, we will be there.
You too can be a Community Avenger!
- Joseph Phelan, Miami Workers Center
apparently I added the wrong video the last time I tried to do this, so let me try again.
Mainly for Jay and Duncombe. I think at the core, one of the things he’s talking about, is if all that work getting Obama elected actually mattered…
Not everyone has much faith in art-activism, but you can’t please ‘em all. Do symbolic protests accomplish anything more than raising morale for the protesters? If not is it enough to simply raise morale? Or do actions like this War prank create temporary autonomous zones and manifest, albeit briefly, the type of reality the activists desire to live in? Maybe today’s protesters just don’t believe violent resistance is a viable strategy and it’s better to moon the oligarchy than throw bombs at their carriages. Maybe Laser Tag is the new moltov.
Also where were the parliment guards when this went down? You shoot a laser beam at Congress and it’s Guantanamo time here in the good ol’ USA. Nice to know there’s still some Dukes of Hazard style parity in Russia.
via: Exiled Online
Last weekend (Nov. 7 actually–ed), a Russian anarchist revolutionary art group called War pulled a fast one on Prime Minister Putin. Or at least they thought they did. Russian revolutionaries sure do fall far from the tree these days.
On the night of November 7, a group of them set up a laser on top of a building across the river from the Russian White House — that’s the place where the prime minister carries out daily his business — and projected a 150-ft. wide toxic green skull and bones on its facade. But the protest didn’t end there. While a laser was sweeping across the building, a half-dozen people were scaling the building’s 20-ft. front gate. But they revolutionaries didn’t linger, staying on hostile territory long enough to pose for a few photos and a quick Rocky victory jog up the stairs. They were in and out so fast, the cops didn’t have enought time arrive at the scene. Take that Vladimir Vladimirovich! (More pictures below.)
The stunt was meant to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, with the laser beam symbolically standing in for the revolutionary signal shot fired from the Aurora cruiser. My first thought was, “Cool!” But then I thought, “Whoa! Are Russian revolutionaries going candy raver?” I mean, this was one of those non-violent and non-confrontational attempts at political change through art. Laser art, probably to techno. It really put Russia’s rich history of revolutionary violence to shame.
Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win.
Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that only a young person would do?
Ayers: Absolutely.
Gross: What fits into that category?
Ayers: Well I think that you’re caught up in a street demonstration and you are young and full of fire and you just spontaneously find yourself spilling onto the streets. Leaving the line of march. And deciding to throw a rock at the window of a military recruiter. That’s spontaneous opposition. It’s not well thought out, um, but it makes a certain amount of sense but it’s not part of a larger strategy that’s thought through.
Gross: Is there a level of doubt that you feel when you were young you didn’t allow yourself to entertain because you had to feel so committed to the cause and what your plan was that you couldn’t allow certain doubts to enter your mind?
Ayers: Yeah I think that I live with doubt today, every day, all the time. And it is different than being young and certain and jacking yourself up to do certain things. I argue to my students, I argue to young people all the time that you cannot live a political life – you can’t live a moral life – if you’re not willing top open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world.
And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.
And when you act, you have a responsibility to doubt.
And when you doubt, you can’t get paralyzed. You have to use that doubt to act again. And that then becomes the cycle. You open your eyes, you act, you doubt, you act, you doubt.
Without doubt you become dogmatic and shrill and stupid.
But without action, you become cynical and passive and a victim of history. And that should never happen.
P.S. If you haven’t seen the Academy Award nominated Weather Underground documentary, I highly recommend it. You can watch it in its entirety below:
In recent weeks, I’ve ended up more than once amid marketing executives discussing, with apparent seriousness, what the purveyors of ordinary products can learn from the campaign that sold America on Barack Obama. To which my response is, well, they can learn lots. As long as they, too, sell something that makes people cry when they see it giving an acceptance speech.
…
Hate to tell you, Mr. Marketer, but your yogurt isn’t going to turn those who eat it a few times a month into heroes. Because—duh!—yogurt, like virtually all other products, won’t generate intense identification and loyalty and participation among the citizenry. Those who pontificate on marketing matters already are prattling on about how Obama created a wiki campaign, in which thousands, if not millions, both influenced and sold the brand. But what’s left obscure is how impossible it is for almost anything else to generate such a response. And it overlooks how disciplined the Obama campaign was in driving its one-word message of “change” from the top down. The genius was not in the wiki. It was in launching a simple-themed campaign that participants flocked to.