Silly Thinking
*with Jim Farris*
2011473 Curiosities served
Analyzing The Movement-Looking Back at PPRC 2
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POSTED BY DOUGLAS LAIN
In Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces there is a chapter entitled “The Culture of Terror.” It is a very short chapter. In fact, here it is:
Blatant colonialism mutilates you without pretense: it forbids you to talk, it forbids you to act, it forbids you to exist. Invisible colonialism, however, convinces you that serfdom is your destiny and impotency your nature; it convinces you that it’s not possible to speak, not possible to act, not possible to exist.
In late September of 2001, maybe a week or two before the US bombing of Afghanistan, while millions of Afghan refugees were fleeing to the Pakistan border, while the aid agencies were begging the US to reconsider, I went to my first PPRC peace protest. I joined it midway through, abandoning my outside table at a corporate coffee shop near work, and catching up to the marchers, glad to see their unambiguous peace signs, their open defiance.
This was, I later learned, PPRC’s third rally. It was also the last major demonstration that PPRC would put together. With about a thousand participants, it was certainly the largest war protest that Portland would see until April 20th of 2002, and this later event would not be officially organized by PPRC. More still, by the time the big demos against the invasion of Iraq came together a entirely new group would have formed (the Coalition for Peace and Justice), and while this group would consist mostly of PPRC leadership, it would be a separate organization with an entirely different (and even less democratic) structure. In many ways this third rally in 2001 was the last time PPRC would be relevant.
After the march we ended up at Shemansky Park; there were about a thousand of us, it was about three o’clock in the afternoon, and I found myself in the back of the crowd, listening to the official activists who had formed a line behind the podium. I remember PPRC had a decent sound system for the event, probably on loan from the Green Party. I wouldn’t see a sound system at a PPRC event again for months.
Lloyd Marbet stood up to speak.
“One of the most important problems facing the American people today, one that you don’t often hear about on the TV news, is the amount of corporate money floating around in political campaigns. If we’re going to take this country back from the corporation we have to pass strong campaign finance reform legislation. There is no other way,” Marbet said.
“What the hell is he on about?” I asked the crowd in front of me as loudly as I could.
A guy next to me, in his early 20’s and collegiate looking in a fine wool coat and fashionable glasses, tried to explain it to me:
“He’s talking about Campaign Finance Reform, an important issue,” the college student said.
“We have a war to stop. He can run for office later,” I told the guy.
But, after Marbet somebody stood up with an acoustic guitar and sang “Imagine” by John Lennon. She played one song after another, and I settled down. I was even moved.
A few women with sidewalk chalk started drawing a spiral Mandala at the front of the crowd, and we walked the path the women had drawn, one at a time, to the center of the spiral.
When I got to the center I was overcome by despair. I understood what the singer and the sidewalk chalk artists were up to, I even supported the sentiment, but it was clear that all of this was a dead end. It was hopeless to call for simple peace, to rely on beauty and love to save us. For one thing it seemed a nostalgic act. My 70’s childhood, recuperated images of flower power and be-ins, seen only on Saturday morning television, came back to me in Shemansky park.
These paltry visions of paisley patterned peace were all I had though. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, every other set of cultural tropes tended to affirm America’s New War. Every other myth just propelled you into a lockstep march to war.
This nostalgic yearning for 60’s style rebellion was misguided, inadequate, but it was also all I had.
“We’ve got to start talking about the economic sanctions on Iraq,” my radical friend from work told me when I found him in the crowd.
“You said they’d rally around the flag,” I told him.
“So?”
“They didn’t. It’s not much, but they did something,” I said.
“I’m cynical.”
“They’re not rallying around the flag, though. You admit that.”
“Aren’t they?” he asked.
I had two separate responses to the challenge of 9-11. I both fell into a period of sentimentality, a touchy and mawkish commitment to naïve pacifist principles, and I also had an impulse to gather facts. I read five or six newspapers a day, though mostly the American and British press, memorizing the facts like I was going to enter a trivial pursuit contest. I somehow thought that my feelings when combined with an unassimilated catalog of facts would amount to not only a good understanding of what was happening, but a response.
I should have asked questions, tried to think.
Here’s a list of questions I should have asked, a list of questions that I didn’t hear asked, let alone answered, at that first rally.
1. What is extradition? Why is the Bush administration avoiding extraditing bin Laden?
2. What do we know about the crime of 911? What should we expect to know before action is taken?
3. What are the predictable consequences of a US bombing campaign in Afghanistan in terms of future terrorism?
4. What will the human costs of a bombing campaign be, especially in light of the famine in the region?
5. What can we do?
Finally, what I didn’t hear at this rally was any kind of dialogue. Instead there was a series of disconnected lectures, mostly about the evil nature of war, but none of them gave the audience much room to act or engage. And nothing said from the podium directly challenged specific decisions being made at the time.
The rally was a ritual, an empty gesture. And as an empty gesture it was inevitably part of this culture of invisible colonialism. Its emptiness itself served to convince the dissenters that it was not possible to speak, not possible to act, not possible to even exist in opposition to the US Empire.
In Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces there is a chapter entitled “The Culture of Terror.” It is a very short chapter. In fact, here it is:
Blatant colonialism mutilates you without pretense: it forbids you to talk, it forbids you to act, it forbids you to exist. Invisible colonialism, however, convinces you that serfdom is your destiny and impotency your nature; it convinces you that it’s not possible to speak, not possible to act, not possible to exist.
In late September of 2001, maybe a week or two before the US bombing of Afghanistan, while millions of Afghan refugees were fleeing to the Pakistan border, while the aid agencies were begging the US to reconsider, I went to my first PPRC peace protest. I joined it midway through, abandoning my outside table at a corporate coffee shop near work, and catching up to the marchers, glad to see their unambiguous peace signs, their open defiance.
This was, I later learned, PPRC’s third rally. It was also the last major demonstration that PPRC would put together. With about a thousand participants, it was certainly the largest war protest that Portland would see until April 20th of 2002, and this later event would not be officially organized by PPRC. More still, by the time the big demos against the invasion of Iraq came together a entirely new group would have formed (the Coalition for Peace and Justice), and while this group would consist mostly of PPRC leadership, it would be a separate organization with an entirely different (and even less democratic) structure. In many ways this third rally in 2001 was the last time PPRC would be relevant.
After the march we ended up at Shemansky Park; there were about a thousand of us, it was about three o’clock in the afternoon, and I found myself in the back of the crowd, listening to the official activists who had formed a line behind the podium. I remember PPRC had a decent sound system for the event, probably on loan from the Green Party. I wouldn’t see a sound system at a PPRC event again for months.
Lloyd Marbet stood up to speak.
“One of the most important problems facing the American people today, one that you don’t often hear about on the TV news, is the amount of corporate money floating around in political campaigns. If we’re going to take this country back from the corporation we have to pass strong campaign finance reform legislation. There is no other way,” Marbet said.
“What the hell is he on about?” I asked the crowd in front of me as loudly as I could.
A guy next to me, in his early 20’s and collegiate looking in a fine wool coat and fashionable glasses, tried to explain it to me:
“He’s talking about Campaign Finance Reform, an important issue,” the college student said.
“We have a war to stop. He can run for office later,” I told the guy.
But, after Marbet somebody stood up with an acoustic guitar and sang “Imagine” by John Lennon. She played one song after another, and I settled down. I was even moved.
A few women with sidewalk chalk started drawing a spiral Mandala at the front of the crowd, and we walked the path the women had drawn, one at a time, to the center of the spiral.
When I got to the center I was overcome by despair. I understood what the singer and the sidewalk chalk artists were up to, I even supported the sentiment, but it was clear that all of this was a dead end. It was hopeless to call for simple peace, to rely on beauty and love to save us. For one thing it seemed a nostalgic act. My 70’s childhood, recuperated images of flower power and be-ins, seen only on Saturday morning television, came back to me in Shemansky park.
These paltry visions of paisley patterned peace were all I had though. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, every other set of cultural tropes tended to affirm America’s New War. Every other myth just propelled you into a lockstep march to war.
This nostalgic yearning for 60’s style rebellion was misguided, inadequate, but it was also all I had.
“We’ve got to start talking about the economic sanctions on Iraq,” my radical friend from work told me when I found him in the crowd.
“You said they’d rally around the flag,” I told him.
“So?”
“They didn’t. It’s not much, but they did something,” I said.
“I’m cynical.”
“They’re not rallying around the flag, though. You admit that.”
“Aren’t they?” he asked.
I had two separate responses to the challenge of 9-11. I both fell into a period of sentimentality, a touchy and mawkish commitment to naïve pacifist principles, and I also had an impulse to gather facts. I read five or six newspapers a day, though mostly the American and British press, memorizing the facts like I was going to enter a trivial pursuit contest. I somehow thought that my feelings when combined with an unassimilated catalog of facts would amount to not only a good understanding of what was happening, but a response.
I should have asked questions, tried to think.
Here’s a list of questions I should have asked, a list of questions that I didn’t hear asked, let alone answered, at that first rally.
1. What is extradition? Why is the Bush administration avoiding extraditing bin Laden?
2. What do we know about the crime of 911? What should we expect to know before action is taken?
3. What are the predictable consequences of a US bombing campaign in Afghanistan in terms of future terrorism?
4. What will the human costs of a bombing campaign be, especially in light of the famine in the region?
5. What can we do?
Finally, what I didn’t hear at this rally was any kind of dialogue. Instead there was a series of disconnected lectures, mostly about the evil nature of war, but none of them gave the audience much room to act or engage. And nothing said from the podium directly challenged specific decisions being made at the time.
The rally was a ritual, an empty gesture. And as an empty gesture it was inevitably part of this culture of invisible colonialism. Its emptiness itself served to convince the dissenters that it was not possible to speak, not possible to act, not possible to even exist in opposition to the US Empire.
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