The RNC Demonstrations: Exercise in Futility
Press Action
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/secor08312004/
By James L. Secor
With regard to America’s vested liberties—a myth, mind you—these demonstrators had to apply to demonstrate. The same thing happens in China. Now, what kind of demonstration is an officially sanctioned demonstration? Further, these demonstrations are caged up, fenced in: only in certain areas under tight control—even behind actual fences! Certainly behind (?) growling, pig-headed, narrow-minded, racist policemen hired to upkeep the (State) status quo. Certainly beneath the watchful eye of the Fujifilm (Japanese) blimp hired by the NYPD, who don’t seem to be able to do enough on the ground. Luckily in NYC there’s no street wide enough to rival Tiananmen Square.
But there is another, more sickening side to this demonstration. It has to do with what Jonathan Kozol calls “a standard exercise of pre-planned effort-and-denial.” It works this way: we are given a project, something to do—and we do it. But it nets us nothing but denial. But we are told that we have, nevertheless, accomplished something. This is impotence, not action. It is engaging in an activity that we know will be a failure and feeling good about it. We have, if Goodman and Kozol are correct, learned our lesson well.
This round of demonstrations. We somehow know, beforehand, that these people we are demonstrating to will not respond—at least, not as we would like them to. But we go ahead and demonstrate for them just for this reason itself: that they won’t respond. And we figure we’ve done something good. We’ve proven our point: that these people don’t, won’t listen. Well, duh, the blonde college sorority sister cheerleader says. We already knew that. Hello? Is anybody home?
What is happening with these wonderfully, exquisitely planned demonstrations is that we prove, once again, that there is nothing to be done. Nothing to be accomplished. That we can do nothing. That is, that we are ineffectual. This is no more than an adult version of the effort-and-denial we learned in school. Do these demonstrators like wallowing in their own ... self-delineated impotence? Self-pity? Self-fulfilling prophecy?
This is the truth: first we realize our sense of ethical ineptitude, then we seek to still our sense of unrest, in this instance by demonstrating. And then we fail, as we knew we would, and praise ourselves for trying. What a costless—not priceless—way to tell ourselves we’re just plain good human beings a la John Updike. We are being naïve citizens in a dysfunctional society engaging in “going again to ask once more and once again to be refused.” Because it isn’t realistic that our actions will bring a good result.
There are some who think that interrupting the news broadcasts or other television programs is much more effective. But, in the end, it is as useless as this present RNC demonstration. Interrupting the signal of a broadcast and filling that space with a message of our own—now that would accomplish something. And it would be honest because we’d stand to lose something. If accomplishing something revolutionary—or just plain new—and remaining comfortable and safe is our end, then we will do nothing, accomplish nothing, introduce nothing—except a show of our own impotence.
Now. Let’s look at this RNC demonstration bit. There’s been a lot of hoopla, most of it exaggeration by the media, especially the print media, especially the New York Times, a news organization that is becoming more and more like The Enquirer or Amazing Stories. Paranoia and lies to live your lives by. And the RNC and Bush’s Range Riders have gone all out with the paramilitary police and National Guard (you don’t think they’re on stand-by?)—and probably the Air Force: how do you know there are not high flying “spy planes” taking pictures of you? The Fujifilm blimp is! You know, too, that the FBI and the CIA will be there, embedded in our numbers. Remember: the city government has made you petition for your right of free speech. They will be listening. Watching.
This takes an amazing amount of planning and coordination. Well ... all of this preparation, all of this isolation that Bush and the Range Riders are implementing could be upended in one fell swoop, as the saying goes. How? If no one had shown up. If no one had come to rally. If no one had decided to demonstrate. What kind of message, then, would be given to the people of The State?
There is a great deal of power in silence if it is used properly. America’s present-day revolutionaries know only noise—and lots of it. But if they had bothered to be silent at the RNC convention in the Big Apple, then the Republicans and Bush’s Range Riders would have been the ones giving the message. There is no better way than to let the opposition say themselves what it is you want to say (to the country).
If even a measly 40-100 people marched—say, all the queens in Queens in drag—the message would have been a great scream emanating from the RNC in Madison Square Garden—an apt place for their convention, built as it was for entertainment. What would all the fuss have been all about? This—or silence—would have been honest conflict. You don’t have to thrust a fist into someone’s face to defeat them; you can use their own energy, their own impetus to do that. All you have to do is re-direct it back at itself.
As it is, we are cheapening ourselves as we once again live our despair and impotence in the face of life crises. For the media will not properly (objectively?) cover us. They will underplay or ridicule us. They will lie. They will spout the myths that America thrives on concerning rebellious youth and adults (those people who have never learned). You cannot win people’s confidence in the face of this media blitzkrieg, this bombing of Dresden approach to reporting. You cannot win them with didacticism and logic either, for they cannot think. They gave that up by the fifth grade. But you can win them by showmanship. You can win them by imagistic means. Sometimes you can win them by doing nothing, by not causing uproar: people might just think we are rational and well-behaved.
So, with these demonstrations we have proven, once again, our impotence—and the impotence of the rest of the nation-state. That is, that nothing can be done. It’s all a game of futility. Jose Ortega y Gasset might say that we are nothing more than mass-men who do not think and have no ideas of our own and if we did we wouldn’t know what to do with them. We are full of ourselves and, believing we have “arrived,” we keep on doing the same thing over and over again because there’s nothing to do, nowhere to go when you’ve “arrived.”
It is futile. We knew it was futile before we began. Why are we doing it, then, except by way of proving that we – it—are futile? What an absolute waste of a great opportunity! We could have created a great open space of silence that would have been filled with their paranoia (not ours). As it is, the media will turn this around and make us proof that they are not, after all, paranoid: we were there creating problems (even if we weren’t).
Here is something else we could have accomplished by not showing up: the police would have had no one to beat on. They, therefore, might very well have taken out their frustration on the general populace. What better way to prove our shouted, screaming contention that there is police brutality at work in the U.S.? How, possibly, could the media have explained those collateral damages?
The RNC Demonstrations: an exercise in futility.
James Secor can be reached at shikejian@care2.com.