[News] See you in NYC

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SEE YOU IN NEW YORK CITY


         Todd Gitlin’s at it again.
         Even more depressing than a retired radical filled with nostalgia 
for a ship that’s already left the shore is one pumped up with 
righteousness -- an old scold bent on lecturing the young.  Not only do we 
get those golden days of perfect protest preserved in gauzy memory like a 
bug in amber, but there’s the gloomy sermon thrown in for good measure.
         In his current letter to young activists (No Bush, No Chicago ’68, 
The Nation, August 30, 2004), Gitlin (with collaboration this time from 
John Passacantando), the self appointed CEO of an imaginary “Sixties Inc.,” 
travels a well-worn path.  The war, he claims, was launched with “high 
expectations,” the justifications “highminded,” the problems with a 
resurrected and unapologetic American empire merely tactical.  There’s no 
urgent call here for fellow citizens to join us at the Republican National 
Convention in active opposition to war and conquest, no advice on how we 
might mobilize millions, nothing about building a sustainable radical 
movement to change a world riven by war and injustice.
             It’s a simple lie to report, as Gitlin now does, that “In 1968 
a substantial number of the toughs who surged through the Chicago streets, 
inciting the police to riot, were later revealed to be police and 
intelligence agents.”  In fact, the Walker Report concluded that the 
conditions created by Mayor Daley led to a “police riot.”  Gitlin himself, 
in his 1987 book on the sixties says, “The folklore lives on in the 
precincts of the Right: that the cops, besieged by bags of urine and 
excrement, and by vile language that they had presumably never heard in the 
locker room, acted with justification
 [but] there is good reason to 
believe that [the police] were ordered to assault the crowds.”  In New York 
today, officials have done something similar, spreading fear and 
intimidation, inventing stories and manipulating the media.  Overwhelmingly 
people are coming to New York intending to raise their voices in spirited 
and militant and peaceful opposition.  If anything goes off the tracks, it 
will be the responsibility of the Bloomberg administration and its allies.
         It’s true that the measure of whether our actions in New York are 
effective or not will be primarily their persuasive power.  Was truth 
revealed in new ways?  Did people -- those who participated as well as 
those who witnessed from near or far -- make new connections and learn 
something of lasting value?  Did we deepen and grow?  That’s a good 
standard by which any demonstration or action or organizing campaign ought 
to be judged.  It recognizes the centrality of pedagogy, of dialogue, of 
speaking with the possibility of being heard and listening with the 
certainty of being changed.
         The problem is that nothing in that standard tells us exactly what 
to do in any given situation, nothing dictates strategy or tactics.  We 
must still debate and discuss and make judgments and draw conclusion from 
our efforts.  Is there room in New York for Code Pink?  I think so.  Could 
the Interventionist Artists open up a new public space for 
debate?  Surely.  And is the largest possible peaceful mass mobilization 
critical?  It is.
         Now is time to reach out to each other with humor and imagination, 
in good faith, solidarity, and an expansive view of progressive 
possibilities.  But Gitlin wants none of that: anyone who deviates from 
what he prescribes as appropriate is not, he sermonizes, a “misguided 
friend”, but an objective enemy.  What authoritarian nonsense.
         In truth, the young people who sat-in in the segregated South, his 
example, and later those who shut down draft boards, and those who told the 
truth about what they were sent to do in Vietnam, were courageous, 
uncertain, and frightened as they forged new pathways of resistance.  The 
established civil rights spokesmen of the time, as well as older labor, 
peace, socialist, and communist leaders condemned those actions as “playing 
into the hands of the right” and “hijacking the Movement.”  They were 
wrong, it turns out, for those were brilliant pedagogical tactics, but no 
one knew for sure in the midst of the turbulence.
         Now, as then, it is time to act, and, as always, we need to doubt.



Bill Ayers
University of Illinois at Chica

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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