When Was Your Last Movement?

(Originally written in May 2004)

The meeting, the purpose of which was to demonstrate to the world that there existed a progressive peace movement in America that was huge and organized and poised for revolution, began with the collapsing of all the empty chairs.

It happened at the community center in Korea Town on a Tuesday night at one of the very first Los Angeles meetings of the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition in 2002.  It was about a year before the invasion of Iraq, eighteen months before I would become a father of twin girls and two years before I would begin receiving daily death threats in my email from people completely pissed off by the notion that an editorial cartoonist such as myself might sometimes editorialize using cartoons.

Having spent the previous seven months since 9/11 closing myself off in my room every night so that I could freebase the nearly fatal cocktail of Noam Chomsky, John Coltrane and enough ferociously black coffee to convince my colon that it might actually possess the right muscles to become an accomplished yodeler, I decided that, for sanity’s sake, I needed to follow the basic instruction of what I was reading and participate, with real people, in the communalizing of humanity; the idea being that a community, like a mass of cells comprising a living organism, that is able to remain aware of its own biology will tend to make decisions about its healthcare more likely to preserve it’s cohesion.

The idea of collapsing the chairs came from one of the three A.N.S.W.E.R. event organizers, a woman so excruciatingly plain and bone crushingly sexless that one might’ve assumed that the only passion known to her loins must’ve come from whatever her vagina could glean from listening hard through the body of a cat to re-runs of thirtysomething and Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman.  In fact, contrary to the stereotype, she appeared as likely to burn her bra in protest of the patriarch as she was to refuse a gift of lingerie from any member of the patriarch willing to do her the cruel favor of objectifying her.

Everybody pitched in with the chairs, everybody being a total of five sleepy people, everybody except for me and the other two event organizers, two gawky social studies teacher-types who were busy walking around the room with a gigantic banner that read Protest the REAL Axis of Evil – WAR, RACISM, POVERTY, followed by a phone number which was the phone number to the room that we were all in.  The banner was being held up in various locations in an attempt to find a spot that might provide maximum visibility to the audience, at one point ending up on the front portion of the table facing the dwindling graveyard of chairs.  “No, not here,” said one of the organizers, letting down his corner of the banner.  “It’ll be too hard for the people in the back to see.”  I turned around to see what he had failed to notice about the back, namely that it was presently being stacked loudly against the wall in clumsy rows.  The banner ended up being suspended from the hot metal shade of one of the ceiling light fixtures behind the table, only to slowly unhinge itself steadily throughout the course of the meeting until finally, after hanging by a single piece of masking tape for ten minutes like a white surrender flag, it fell in a heap to the floor, the whole process as thrilling to watch as a striptease choreographed to reveal the pornography of wasted time.  It was Samuel Beckett at his best.

Meeting adjourned, I saw the lady organizer stand and, in her NIKE sneakers and FILA sweatshirt (two companies that I imagined any day would be announcing a new perfume line made from pheromones extracted from the perspiration produced cheaply and gleefully by their sweatshop workers) stretch her back and exhale the sigh of an exhausted champion and say to the other two organizers, “Not too shabby.”  The two organizers, still sitting on ass cracks whose significance they imagined rivaled the one set in the Liberty Bell, not to mention the trillions set through the logic of their wanting to be deputy Jesuses to the world’s downtrodden when neither one of them appeared willing to sacrifice his armpits to a soapy sponge let alone his life to the spiritual problems of the wretched majority, looked at her inquisitively, refusing to verbalize even a monosyllabic huh?, having practiced all through their middle age a poker face suggesting that they had all the answers.  “Not an empty seat in the house!” said the lady, gesturing to the room.

“Oh, right,” they each said in turn, looking out at the fifteen people who eventually did show up and who were now clumped together like hyenas scavenging the final remnants of their own self-approbation.  Standing back from the pack I watch them signing each other’s petitions and buying each other’s newsletters and realized that most of them already knew each other, either from previous meetings or from the hulls of any number of geek ingesting flying saucers where, while laying prone on examination tables to have their balls and ovaries drained, they talked with one another about upcoming Star Trek conventions and which cast members would be showing up drunk and indifferent to their costumes.  I left wondering how soon it would be before Klingonese became the official language of the progressive left movement.

Indeed, what had attracted me to attend this particular meeting of purported likeminded nihilists and haters of what the United States was turning into in the first place was an email that I’d received announcing a march on Washington D.C. (with a corresponding march to be held in San Francisco to accommodate west coast complainers, primarily, I imagined, those in Los Angeles like me) to protest both the existing unjust wars that America the Beautiful was, at that time, engaged in and the anticipated unjust wars that all her cowardice and paranoia would force her into fighting upon realizing more and more that the rest of the world was in terrified, yet unrepentant, opposition to her.  In previous months my wife and I, in an effort to provide our political disgust with some constructive application, had agreed to host several meetings for the local chapter of the Green Party and, as a result, went from believing that if all the liberals across the United States organized at the local level then responsive pluralistic politics might have a real chance of affecting domestic and foreign policy in this country to believing that if all the liberals across the United States organized at the local level then we could see what happened to all the high school Dungeons and Dragons clubs after graduation disbanded them:  they became anti-monarchists hell-bent on toppling the thrones and laying waste to the immense armies of every Prom King and Queen this side of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Following the removal of all the sofa pillows which, as discovered after the first meeting, only served as tepid referees officiating a dirty fist fight that went on inside the laps of some of the older revolutionaries between pee and perfume, our Green meetings would begin with the choosing of somebody to take the minutes, then somebody to keep the time as a way of preventing a filibuster, and then the naming of all the topics of discussion in order of their importance and, specifically, what political pressures we could affect on a local level through letter writing, leafleting, picketing, etcetera.  Five minutes after setting our parameters we were ignoring them and, instead, talking about how Queen Elizabeth had Lady Di killed or how the FBI had murdered Martin Luther King because they wanted to steal the glory from the CIA who was planning to murder him themselves in May, around Memorial Day, when Fidel Castro would be unavailable to pose for any more assassination attempts because he would be too busy with the parade.

Then, invariably, the meeting would end with announcements of upcoming demonstrations planned against mostly unprosecuted corporate malpractice suits going on in the area with each demonstration usually talking place somewhere between the hours of 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., thereby excluding the participation of anybody who wasn’t either retired, disabled, unemployed, or actually working at the location where the demonstration happened to be taking place.  In other words, these were demonstrations that effectively marginalized absolutely everybody but the oddest and least respected 1% of the population who, by marching up and down on sidewalks in mom jeans and braided belts, only ended up putting a face on a stereotype that nobody in their right mind – or, more precisely, that nobody interested in ever getting laid again in their lives – would want to emulate, much less support.

Now lest anybody think that my only concept of the left wing of the big dodo bird that makes up the political infrastructure of this country is one of utter contempt and apathetic folly, let me just say that when it comes to crediting any group with the overwhelming majority of all the social movements proven most beneficial to humanity as a whole over the last two hundred years the prize most definitely must go to the left wing, without which there never would’ve been an Abolitionist Movement, a Civil Rights Movement, an environmental movement, a women’s movement, a Gay Movement, a poor people’s movement, a freedom of speech movement, a peace movement, an anti-globalization movement, nor a labor movement to provide us with, minimally, a living wage and something less backbreaking than a seven day work week.  What worries me is the speed in which the maintenance of such liberal attitudes seems to be losing momentum and how little the great majority of people, including most of the liberals themselves, seem to care.  Then again, why should they care?  What historical proof is there that anything but violent clashes and ugly confrontations between the ruling class and the proletariat can alter the political trajectory of a nation?

For the last twenty-five years all that would allow liberal attitudes to thrive, namely a culture able to provide a context for its free expression outside of politics (referred to cynically by previous generations as the counterculture), has almost disappeared entirely, partially by neglect of the liberal element yet largely by design of the actively anti-liberal element, otherwise known, particularly by members of the political elite and the corporate aristocracy, both of whom are jointly responsible for controlling the movement of capital in this country thereby determining the content of our collective perception of ourselves by seeing to it that only certain kinds of ideas, as they are propagated by advertising and books and television shows and art exhibits and movies and news outlets, receive funding and public exposure, as Americans.  (Even the liberal press has had to soften its critique of mainstream culture in order to maintain its readership, transforming such magazines as Mother Jones, at one time a true hell-raiser of political significance, into the MSNBC of progressive journalism and the Utne Reader into little more than a products catalogue for hemp hammocks and natural posture toilet seats that you crouch over.)  And lest anybody think that my ability to make such a hackneyed paranoid statement pigeonholing the political elite and corporate aristocracy as evil manipulators of our national identity is some indication that I believe that those in power are inexplicably subhuman, let me just say that, on the contrary, I believe that the opposite is true.

Considering the fact that a human being, rather than perceiving the world directly, is biologically predisposed to use the world to substantiate his or her abstract ideas about the world (the shortest distance between two points is an imaginary line), it is quintessentially human for there to be a value system self-imposed upon our consciousness which is configured to simplify our judgment of one another based upon a quantitative formula of numbers that we call our economic system.  In fact, ever since the first coin was minted somewhere around 400 B.C., the worth of a human being, above and beyond all other discriminatory practices, has ultimately been based upon, not the content of his character, but rather upon his ability to generate an income either for himself or for somebody else.  And in accordance with the rules of a quantitative value system, the more money a person has the more power and importance he has and the less money he has the less power and importance he has.  Thus, the executive branch of a huge multinational corporation, for example, will always be considered a much more important group of people than say a group of farmers or teachers or, at the far end of the riffraff spectrum, sick or unemployed or homeless people, simply because those executive members of a huge multinational corporation are representative of a larger abstract number than the farmers are or the teachers are or, in particular, the sick or unemployed or homeless are, who, by relying on the financial support of various social programs, are actually representative of negative numbers.

Therefore, given the morality of capitalism, which is nothing more moral than a hierarchy of ascending or descending numbers, depending upon your role as either exploiter or cheerful and unwitting consumer of exploitation, isn’t it in the interest of the richest and most powerful members of society to do everything that they can to protect their wealth against those much poorer and much less important than themselves, especially when it’s precisely poorness and unimportance that they must live contrary to in order to define themselves as wealthy and important?  Answer:  Yes.  Is it fair?  Answer, and here’s the shocker:  of course it is, as long as humanity continues to acknowledge any meaning whatsoever in a viable exchange rate between food and capital, shelter and capital, medicine and capitol,  and dignity and capital.  Under such circumstances life can be no more meaningful than it is for a plastic game piece set around the squares of a game board by dice and an artificial urge implanted by the manufacturers of the game to collect and hoard as much play money as possible while trying to screw the other game pieces out of moving ahead and collecting and hoarding their own, all in the name of hoping to claim the bizarre victory of most narcissistic at the game’s finale, which is a victory marked by the truly sinister joy of having attained as much play money as possible while showing the least amount of compassion to the other players.

After all, just as the inventors of God are the Chosen People, the inventors of the concept of wealth are the ruling class.  And just as those fanatics sworn to protect the absolute power of every dominant religion throughout history have done, frequently to the point of literally banishing or murdering anyone with an opposing point of view until irreligious interpretations of the world eventually emerged as skepticism and atheism and replaced much of the superstitious buffoonery of religion with rational thought, thereby allowing for a lessening of prejudice between man and nature, so too does the ruling class wish to discourage the formation of a similar movement based on a rigorous disbelief of the value of capital, for such a movement would surely lessen the prejudice between man and man which is precisely the prejudice that keeps the ruling class in business, literally.

In the meantime, of course, while the promise (threat?) of a pro-humanitarian/anti-economic reformation comes and goes, given the frivolity of the idea that there could even exist a manmade currency invested potentially with enough conceptual value as to influence the way humanity arranges its principle code of ethics (frivolous for the simple reason that economics exist as a social philosophy merely because everyone collectively pretends that it has to, making its demise as easy as everyone suddenly choosing not to pretend anymore and to define their purpose once freed from the shackles of economic slavery that once bound them), it’s important for those people with the most money to control all public discourse on the subject of privilege and the hierarchical power structure of the economic system – which, of course, is the very system that defines them as superhuman – so as to discourage the sort of critical thinking that might one day lead to actions by the growing number of people with the least amount of money of dismantling the current social paradigm that suggests an authentic inequality between people by proving an inauthentic one based on income levels.

In fact, one of the most terrifying protections built into the design of corporate America (corporate America, of course, being a euphemism for the huge conglomerate of multinational money launderers established to bankroll political thuggery and elitist dominance over the consumer class worldwide) was established in an 1886 Supreme Court decision called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., which ruled that a corporation was a person and was free to enjoy all the protections offered by the Constitution.  Of course, what this legislation ended up doing, besides legitimizing corporate propagation of private power into the public sector, which was simply a way of preventing the larger community from becoming self-sufficient and self determinate of their own futures, was to create a race of so-deemed honorary people who, by controlling the vast majority of the planet’s wealth and effectively wielding not the power of only one vote but hundreds or even thousands, have been able to exercise their Constitutional rights, particularly their right to free speech, governmental representation, and their right to petition their golf buddies for a redress of grievances, at a level unavailable to the average citizen.  Add to that, of course, the understanding that it is in the interest of every corporation to only invest money into a community that will return more money than was invested, which, besides being an effective way of guaranteeing that the poorest communities remain poor and that every other community has the potential to be bled dry, is an equation that only allows capital to flow in one direction and to only pool around the corporate class which has never represented more than 5% of the population nationally and never more than 2% internationally.

So, assuming that everything ever told to me about the virtues of American democracy was in the end nothing but a bureaucratic trick of misdirection designed to keep me from realizing that I was having my pocket picked, both financially and spiritually, by the recidivism of American capitalism, I went to the peace march in San Francisco on April 20^th, 2002 and stood, much to my own surprise, with 50,000 other suckers and proclaimed both my awareness and my deep sadness at having to live in a country that considered pocket picking, because it was its most benign form of shaking down its own citizens to help pay for both the expanse of its operation into the rest of the world (which was an expanse that employed much less benign forms of shaking down people for their money and/or real estate and/or labor) and its future ability to pickpocket our children and our children’s children and their children’s children, to be something uniquely legible to the hearts and minds of freedom lovers, not to mention to the intellects of the staunchest defenders of our super-duper, highly evolved, envy of the goddamn universe western civilization.

And although 50,000 critics of the U.S. government and the corporate imperialism that she and other governments like her encourage weren’t considered significant enough to make the evening news (although I understand that we made the midday traffic report as “…an area that you’ll want to avoid”), we certainly were significant enough, considering the additional 100,000 protesters demonstrating at the same time in Washington D.C., not to mention the hundreds of thousands who had participated in similar mass demonstrations in Seattle, Quebec City, Prague, Genoa, Qatar, Gothenburg, New York City, Rome, and Paris in recent months, to assume that a real revolution, bloodless or blood filled, was possible and perhaps even inevitable.

And despite the fact that most of the picket signs at the demonstration, then as now, contained the same clichéd us vs. them rhetoric that, rather than advancing the agenda of humanitarianism and progressive politics, only served to reinforce the reputation of liberalism as an overly simplistic expression of ill-informed nihilism, there were still enough of them there to fan the sky and, for a little while at least, to prevent it from falling on our repressors who might one day wish that they’d noticed and said thank you.