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SEE YOU IN NEW YORK CITY<br><br>
<br>
Todd Gitlin’s at it
again.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
Now, as then, it is time to
act, and, as always, we need to doubt.<br><br>
<br><br>
Bill Ayers<br>
University of Illinois at Chica<br>
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(415) 863-9977<br>
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