by Matt Robesch
The Free Press
illustration by Dick Lande
"The '90s are the '60s turned upside down." So went the mantra of liberals who felt the election of a Baby Boomer president would magically cause the full possibilities of the '60s progressive movements to somehow reassert themselves in a modern whirlwind of good karma'd chaos. Optimism and overconfidence abounded after Clinton's election, as if his ascension would somehow bring down the U.S. military industrial complex and return the environment to the Eden it once was. Well, it's 1998 folks, and nothing even close to this has been achieved.Looking back to the '60s, we can see how the youth movements of that era were works of grassroots near-genius. Progressives helped stop the Vietnam War. The feminist and environmental movements - themselves inspired by the earlier civil rights movement - thrived in this new fertile age of ideas and experimentation. The careers of many important progressive thinkers were spawned. Campaigns succeeded where participants adhered to democratic and inclusive grassroots political structures, and where policies and actions were, on the whole, well thought-out and well-executed.
On the flipside, the far-Right conservatives of the '60s were a disorganized collection of finger-pointers and complainers. "That's immoral!" they'd exclaim, gesturing toward televised scenes of freakish-looking protestors. "That behavior isn't right! ... Those ideas disturb and offend me!" When conservatives turned to the government to help stop the "madness," they were reminded of the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Turn the '60s upside down, and you'll find that nearly every effective grassroots mechanism utilized then has been co-opted by the Christian Right of the '90s. The New Right is using these activist tools - with more success than the 60's activists ever enjoyed - to take over PTAs, school boards, city councils, state legislatures - even the Congress. Virtually every organizing method they use - from phone trees to protest rallies, from letter-writing campaigns to passive resistance - comes from the progressive movements of the 1960s. Nowhere will you find a more successful example of "Think Globally, Act Locally."
Today it's the progressives who have become unfocused and disorganized. The dysfunction is so bad the Religious Right could probably snatch the word "progressive" and use it uncontested. Self-described progressives have allowed themselves to become fractionalized to the point of irrelevance. While the rainforests that make our air breathable continue to be decimated at alarming rates, protests break out over activities that are far from life-threatening. Today it is the progressives - under the guise of political correctness - who are lamely pointing fingers and making empty proclamations.
As we approach the year 2000, is protesting a 19th-century French painting containing "Oriental" stereotyping (on the wall of Seattle's ObaChine restaurant) our most important struggle? Is it the end of the world that the Taco Bell Chihuahua speaks with a Mexican accent? Of course not. It is unfortunate that lunkheads in the promotion and advertising industries resort to racial stereotypes as marketing strategies. Yet time and energy are being spent protesting such private ventures. Your full energies are needed in the public sector. Rally those forces against I-200 instead! It threatens to legislate the racial diversity out of the universities and workplaces of Washington State.
I can appreciate how some people care very deeply about ending negative stereotypes in media and American culture. However, how can people carrying signs and chanting "No Justice! No Peace!" in front of a restaurant (guilty of poor decorating choices, at worst) possibly believe the media would take them seriously? Instead of practicing some degree of spin control, the Left is spinning out of control. It has no true focus. Instead it uninspiringly attempts to revisit played-out protests of the past. Haven't we liberals learned anything from Michael Moore? In the modern era, you need more than signs and slogans to translate a message via mass media. You need an edge, otherwise even your most poignant on-camera moments will end up on the frumpy news editor's floor.
Even when the media do sympathize with progressive causes, the protestors themselves often are unclear about a protest's objectives. At the Activist-Media Teach-In (held February 21 at the University Friends Meeting House), long-time KPLU reporter Paula Wissel said that more protests and actions would be covered seriously by the major media if people attending them knew more about the problems and conditions they were protesting. Wissel - who participated in a panel discussion of local print and broadcast media makers - said that on many occasions she put a microphone in the face of a rallier who knew little or nothing about the issues at hand.
The ObaChine protest, of course, has a focus ("take the artwork down!") however there's no discernible threat to society here. It's unfortunate that people's feelings have been hurt by that establishment, or by Taco Bell advertising, but we cannot allow America's progressive sensibilities to become solely defined by how well they protect people's feelings. If you're an adult on planet Earth in the late 20th century, your feelings will be hurt at one time or another regardless of who you are or where you're from. This is the simple reality of life on an overpopulated, media-driven planet. Trying to protect everyone from emotional bruises, though noble, is a political boondoggle. Most of what hurts our feelings is protected by the First Amendment anyway.
The ObaChine and Taco Bell protests exemplify how today's progressive culture has become chronically distracted by mini-PC wars. Meanwhile... the Christian Right continues to eye the presidency and recently controlled the Republican party of WA State for one gubernatorial election. Meanwhile... atmospheric ozone continues to disappear and our air gets a little more poisonous each day. Meanwhile... cancer rates are on the rise in a nation with a only-for-profit pseudo-healthcare system. Meanwhile... the progressives, possibly the only group of people who can stop this madness, have digressed - if not fully re-gressed - from the big picture.
It's time for self-described progressives to stop indulging their lower, fascistic instincts (the darker side of political correctness no liberal wants to talk about) and regain their focus. They should stop trying to control other people's speech, behavior and tastes, and learn that being tolerant of others also means learning to live with the buttheads and morons who surround us. They need to stop spending so much energy on changing the views of the average Joe, steal the political playbook back from the Christian Right, and focus on controlling the seats of power themselves.
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Contents this page were published in the May/June, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1998 WFP Collective, Inc.