It is too often the case that organizing around the Political is the most conservative of categories. Political people are pragmatists by and large. I am one of them - a self described Anarchist Opportunist. But like the Groucho whose Marxist I have always been, I eventually came to the conclusion, after so many forays onto community liberal turf and nonprofit building, that I would no longer join groups that I could guarantee I would be thrown out of after the group got well established.
The gathering of Humboldt Revolution which I estimated, counting by tens, to be 150 people at its crest, was a political gathering par excellence. But this was not a gathering of the usual opportunists but one of the Highest Pragmatism, so to speak. While the greatest number of people I meet think at best that suffering dutifully through Amy Goodman every day is all the politics they are called to, I was heartened to spend hours with a group that is called to a deeper politics.
Club Mud on Monday played a taped memoir of Coretta Scott King commemorating her life which rang with the kind of experiment in truth worthy of a Gandhian. She describes MLK speaking at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, emphasizing that the time for Patience had passed. The relevance of King’s moment to today’s situation was real and inspiring to me - as totally out of patience with the US political scene as I am.
King had a favorite text he used concerning Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. King says that when Rip went to sleep, the portrait of George the Third was on the wall and when he woke up, there was a portrait of George Washington. Rip van Winkle, exclaims King, had Slept through a Revolution. And King pointedly tells his audiences, the time is now, Don’t sleep through this revolution.
A generation later, King’s revolution is as current as ever and the government - the pire - forces which killed him are as ruthless as ever. The match up is again inevitable - not because we are so together and ready to roll. Rather, as my friend Father Flotsky used to say - The revolution begins when the government attacks. And the government - the Empire - must attack and attack and attack, opening up fronts no sane person would expect - all in order to survive.
These are Caesarian gamblers who know its all or nothing if they are to have another century. They are heedless of defeats. These are merely opportunities for more reckless dice throws. They think we are all bluff. They don’t realize that we too are determined to survive. But, unlike them, survival is not the only value we serve. After all, we are many and survival in our terms, I think, means continuity of a way of life that only a people and not an elite can sustain.We are canaries in the coal mine who are determined to fight back in the nonviolent manner of Latin American peasants that been called Relentless Persistence. The resistance of a people who will not be eradicated is the natural antidote to the madness of an elite divorced from the natural world it seeks to totally dominate.
After 9-11, I became reconciled with the flag. I actually publically carried one as a two mile part of an idealistic young woman’s healing cross country ceremony. The flag wasn’t “them” to me anymore. 9-11 made me realize the depth of the betrayal of “my people” by the government - the Empire. I realized that “my people” - Americans - had no natural defenders anymore.
Of course, my political life had been a testament to the fact that the government - the Empire - did not serve the values it claimed. But somehow I bought the division between my politics and those “fellow Americans” who supported the government - the Empire - in large numbers. But now I realized like I had never thought it before - that when the government - the Empire - betrayed the values of our way of life it also betrayed those “fellow Americans.” The government - the Empire - had no right to that flag. It used the flag, the constitution, history, religion to distract us from the fact that it served nothing but a so small elite.
The US has always been an occupied country. In conquering this continent, it was conquering its “own” people. That’s when I came to see that the 5 illegitimate years of this particular Bush regime added up to 5 centuries equally illegitimate. That precisely at the moment 5 centuries ago when Europe had set out to conquer the world it had also already lost its soul. It served no God but Mammon and a materialism that declared war on life itself.
The most alienated and oppressed people - Native Americans, Afro-Americans, Women, Indentured Wage Slaves, among many - had told me nothing else but the story of this wouless conquest and I thought I got it. And maybe I have - in fleeting epiphanies. But now it seems to be an indelible mark on my mind, or maybe a ringing in my ears that won’t go away.
One of our speakers quoted with great effect a pertinent Dylan song. I have another that is as pertinent to me now as it was at the end of the Vietnam War -”It’s All over now, baby blue.” I’ll find the text to print because we are at the moment of the government’s - the Empire’s - next great defeat. Our moment is coming around on the guitar again, I think.
Thanks for the opportunity to think it. Paul Encimer