New Left, New Right, New New Left, New New Right

NOTE: This is a post that I drafted in April and never had time to go back and edit for publication. In the spirit of the message stated, I'm finally just going to publish, and not worry about "perfecting" it or correcting phraseology that may convey a meaning other than what I really intend. Fuckit. In the wake of this week's election sweep, especially the elimination of Congressman Alan Grayson from his office and the suspension of Keith Oberman from his cable talk show, the crux of the statement below is badly needed and can't wait any longer to be put out there.

"Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sheep talking rhetoric. Sexism is bad. Racism is bad...." I'm not sure if I am recalling this exactly right, but this was the gist of Abbie Hoffman's critique of the way the Old Left articulated its concerns in the late 1960s and early '70s. He advocated a more artistic, expressive way of political messaging in his book, Revolution for the Hell Of It.


The methods he advocated and employed (John Lennon and Yoko Ono called Abbie and his co-Yippie Jerry Rubin "artists" in describing their tactics) were super-effective at attracting and holding the attention of the media and the masses in the late 1960s and early '70s, but did not catch on widely with other parts of the Left, old or new. It was the New Right that adopted their methods beginning with Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, Inc., and continuing into the present day with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and many others.


Hoffman and Rubin were geniuses at using creative shock tactics and formulating catchy, memorable memes that had a tendency to "go viral," to use a term that did not exist at the time but describes the communicative process perfectly. (We called it "myth-making" back then.) They overstated and exaggerated and put things into terms that could not be ignored. They were sensationalistic and over-the-top and in-your-face. And they were not afraid of appearing to be completely crazy. In fact, they thrived on the attention it produced.


Sound familiar?


I have often thought that the ONLY reason the Left was "winning" in the late Sixties was because of Hoffman, Rubin and the few others like them who infiltrated the dominant culture of the U.S. with their "media manipulation" and myth-making abilities. They certainly captured MY imagination as a 13-year-old hearing about them on Chicago radio station WBBM when I was home sick with the Asian Flu the winter of 1968, listening to stories about their efforts to win a permit from the city to hold their demonstrations during the Chicago Democratic National Convention. Just the name "Yippie" was so clever and funny, after hearing of "hippies" for several years, it was impossible not to listen to the stories. But it was also that they were truly funny in many other respects--Abbie's wild curly hair was completely outrageous at that time, for example.


In recent years, the only politically Left public personalities I have seen who have ANY sense of humor that I can think of off the top of my head are Michael Moore, Lynn Winstead, Al Franken and Stephanie Miller. And of those, only Michael Moore was actually primarily a political activist who then used media in a creative way, as opposed to someone whose main role in life was to be some kind of a professional humorist or entertainer who also happened to hold progressive political beliefs. And then, after he began to make money, Moore just seemed to suck it all up and spend it on fast food. By now he should have started another SunDance Film Festival or some kind of scholarship for radical filmmakers. Where does all that money go?


For Right wing activists, it makes natural sense to be a professional propagandist, because they are de facto representatives of the status quo and commercialism and moneyed interests. For the Left, the only way a progressive political activist can be truly authentic and credible is to be primarily an outsider who finds ways to use the existing system to get their message across and effect change, but remains basically too independent from it to ever risk becoming a sell-out to it. (Something that happened frequently with the Left, especially in their incorporation into universities as faculty members--for example Bernadette Dohrn and Angela Davis and Todd Gitlin. Universities may be seen as a bastion of raving radicalism by the Right, but in fact are a place where the Ruling Class is cultivated, refined and connected.)


Abbie Hoffman did this (authentic activism, I mean) better than any other radical figure in my lifetime. When he received offers to endorse products, he laughed them off. When he was paid a huge advance on one of his books, he immediately donated ALL of it to the Black Panthers. When my small independent political tabloid interviewed him in New York in 1981 after he emerged from the Underground, he had a phone call from the New York Times that he turned down because he was busy with us, a 20,000-circulation alternative paper in Minneapolis. "The Times?" he asked. "Which one?" It was only years later, after he settled into an "elder statesman" role in middle age, that he finally indulged a small portion of his speaking fee proceeds into a boat, and even then felt conflicted about enjoying it. He was clearly driven by his principles and his ideals, and cared little about aggrandizing or enriching himself personally. He derived infintely more thrills out of getting to be the hero, outlawed by the authorities, than accumulating material junk or "security."


Abbie's portrayal in "Forrest Gump" is all the proof that is needed of his impact. The film is based entirely on finding the absolute most definitive symbols of the period of history spanning the second half of the 20th century, through the Civil Rights era into the Space Age. Abbie is there, in his American flag shirt (something he went to jail for, remember--this was totally sacrosanct at the time, an utter taboo that only became normalized later), speaking at the Washington Monument. "There was this man giving a little speech...and he liked to use the 'F' word a lot. 'F' this, 'F' that. And every time he used the word, the people--well, they cheered!"


For progressives to get anywhere in counteracting the move to the Right that began with the election of Reagan in 1980, they would need to get back to the kind of courage and heroism that Abbie embodied, very much in the mold of previous American heroes like Tom Paine and Henry David Thoreau, who rejected personal gain in favor of their ideals. One of the most self-defeating errors of the Left has been the notion that a "hero" is antithetical to progressivism, that it is a symptom of Westernism that must be expunged from the lexicon in order for social justice and peace to prevail. The Left has to get over this stupid notion. The Left also needs to speak plain English and pull the giant stick out of their collective ass. Stephanie Miller, on her nationally syndicated radio show, makes reference to "stick-up-the-ass liberals." This has been a chronic condition. The Yippies were despised by most leftists during their own time because of their flamboyancy and outrageous theatrics and rhetoric. Only years later did a tiny handful of intellectuals re-claim them as contributors to whatever degree of revolution had occurred.


The basis for using outrageousness as a legitimate tool for change was, according to Abbie and Jerry, Marshal McLuhan's "The medium is the message." Rubin wrote in his book "Do It!" that his wild long hair, beard, beads and hippie garb were inseparable from his ideology. He remarked that if he was watching a "radical" on television who was wearing a suit and tie and had a normal haircut, he never trusted them. Think back... It was Reagan who won the cultural image war for the Right when dissidents began to feel that to be credible they had to be fashionable in terms defined by the Right. There was a point in the 1980s where the Democrats began to try to outdo the Republicans in terms of flying American flags at their conventions.

The Left was the side calling openly for violent revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Black Panthers were the ones appearing in public with sidearms and semi-automatic weapons. Although Abbie distinguished himself from Jerry in that he liked "the clenched fist with a flower in the hand" as opposed to just the clenched fist, there was a kind of macho forcefulness as lefties embraced Castro and Che as idols and joked about the bombing of the Bank of America and other symbols of U.S. "pig" culture. The conservatives were the ones gasping and shaming such terroristic talk. Today Rachel Maddow and Keith Oberman make a living gasping and shaming kooky, wild-eyed Right wingers and Tea Baggers from the Left.

The image from National Lampoon's "Animal House" of the stuffy sorority girl removing her rubber gloves after trying to jack off her preppie boyfriend, impotent with anxiety from dealing with the anti-authoritarians at the Delta house, is perfect to represent the dynamics of political domination. Whichever side is REALLY winning is the one partying and having fun. Remember at the end of "Animal House" when the characters are freeze-framed and there is text showing what happened to each of them? John Belushi's character became a U.S. Senator.

When he was a young political activist, John Kerry tossed his medals over the wall. When he ran for president, he was "swift-boated" for it. Had he embraced his own past instead of letting it be used against him, had he said, "Hey, things were a lot different in the 1960s and early 1970s," and explained how his current beliefs were derived from and connected to what he had done as a youth, he might have won the presidency.