Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
the danger of “feel-good” protests →
liberals can be infuriating →
astrological granola California bullshit
the
National War Tax Resistance
Coordinating Committee conference started in Santa Rosa. I’d never been to
one of these before and didn’t know much about the group or what to expect.
There are about 40 or 50 of us, from all over the country, split about evenly
male/female, aged from the late 20s to the 70s or thereabouts.
Almost everyone is from the white granola left. Which is to say, this is the
kind of group where standing in a circle, holding hands, and singing something
by Peter Paul and Mary is an earnest and unironic display, and where to divide
up into four smaller groups the immediate suggestion is “fire signs in this
corner, earth signs over there,
etc.”
As tax resisters, they run the gamut from folks who haven’t paid taxes for
years to folks who are getting their feet wet by refusing to pay the federal
excise tax pennies on their monthly phone bill. Some folks, like me, are doing
the income reduction / voluntary simplicity technique. Others are working in
the underground economy, doing jobs for cash or keeping their monetary
transactions offshore. Some others file tax returns but don’t include any
payment, and wait for the
IRS to
work its way through the long bureaucratic process of seizing money from their
bank accounts. One fellow had joined with a bunch of other people nationwide
in a constitutional challenge to the tax law until the lawyer who was running
the scheme got stomped down by the government recently. He’s trying to figure
out his next step.
And so everyone’s got a story to tell. We’re all fishing basically the same
stream, but some of us are using flies and some are using bait and we’ve all
got our own favorite spots and our own techniques. Now we’re talking fish.
I wandered down to the New College of California to take in a “moderated panel discussion focusing on ways in which activists with differing tactical approaches can strategically work together to increase the impact of civil disobedience and direct action work.”
So while most of the audience was there expecting to hear bold, romantic tales of bolt cutters, slingshots, molotov cocktails, and battling cops in the streets, I was taken aback at first at the casualness with which the option of violent direct action was being discussed.
A panelist named Starhawk (and before you giggle, realize that in San Francisco even Republicans have names like this) tried to inject some reality.
I paraphrase, since my notes are spotty:
“I tend toward pacifism myself, although I think pacifism is better practiced than preached.
When I hear someone delivering a sermon about pacifism I just want to punch them.
[Laughter].
I’m not encouraged by the prospects for violent direct action, and this isn’t because of any moral qualms on my part but simply because let’s face it:
we’re vastly, completely, hopelessly outgunned.
If we try to win a battle of violence we’re fools.”
Most of the talk on the panel was of an abstract nature like this — not, as advertised “ways in which activists with differing tactical approaches can strategically work together to increase the impact of civil disobedience and direct action work” but “four people’s opinions about direct action and what’s good about it and why it’s important.”
After an hour or so they opened it up to questions from the audience.
Questions typically in the form of “here’s something that I think is important or some insight that occurred to me” with “what does the panel think?” tacked onto the end so as to fit the formal definition of a question.
After hearing a couple of these, and in the middle of an especially uninteresting one about activists “acknowledging their race and class privilege” I decided that if I was going to keep this from having been a complete waste of my time I’d have to do something about it myself.
So I stood up to “ask a question,” but instead of asking the panel, I turned to the crowd and asked ’em to raise their hands if they were paying federal income tax.
About three quarters of them admitted to it (I would expect no less from folks who can afford $6,676 per semester for a masters in activism).
Having started off with a question, I felt free to launch into my speech:
I’d like to suggest that before you can start opposing the government and what it’s doing, you have to stop supporting the government and what it’s doing.
Getting below the tax line and stopping your support for the government isn’t all that hard.
It takes some commitment and some attention, but so does any conscientious direct action.
It may not be as dramatic as bombing the federal building or chaining yourself to a fence, but do you want drama or do you want…
And then the moderator asked “do you have a question for the panel?”
And I got suddenly sheepish and said “okay, I’ll end my speech.”
I thought to myself: “It’s finally happened. I’ve become a wingnut.
I’m surrounded by people debating armed insurrection at a school that wants to extend a sacred world to all of existence across the dimensions of time and space and they’ve just listened patiently to a pagan named Starhawk talk about leading a group of witches at a protest and now that I’ve gotten up to speak they bring out the hook.
Have I become like the guy who always brings every conversation around to his favorite Kennedy Assassination theory?”
But I got a thumbs-up from one audience member on my way back to my seat, and then the more I reviewed what I said the less I thought it was particularly nutty (of course, the wingnut is the last one to know how nutty he sounds).
I think I broke two rules — one, rather than “expressing concern” for some abstract issue or other I tried to actually promote a specific direct action tactic, which oddly enough seemed off-topic; two, I addressed the audience directly, rather than pretending to address the panel.
I think it’s the second bit that got me, because future “questioners” got away with wild deviations in subject matter and format — one rambling on for ten minutes about whether or not the Italian government was responsible for the cooption of the Italian autonomist movement of by armed revolutionaries, another wondering aloud for a while what we should replace capitalism with should we succeed in overthrowing it.
Addressing a soliloquy to the audience while facing the panel and adding a token question to the end preserved the panel’s authority, while addressing the audience directly challenged that authority.
That’s my theory anyway. I’m keeping “I’m a wingnut” as a backup, though.
When I go to an activist meeting, seminar, or rally here in San Francisco, I almost always come away feeling newly pumped-up and enthused about the possibility of feeding hippies to crocodiles.
I think maybe it’s a “power of visualization” thing.
I’m fed up.
If it’s not someone hijacking a meeting about X to talk about their favorite topic Y, it’s some narcissist rambling incoherently to a sea of indulgent nods.
If it’s not some hippie demanding that we all center ourselves with a group “Om,” it’s someone making an “underrepresented voices” power play and shutting down all conversation in favor of a violin solo we’ve all heard a million times before.
The most underrepresented voices among San Francisco activists are the ones that stay on topic and speak in complete sentences.
No wonder the right wing is running the country — the lefties can’t even run a meeting.
If the San Francisco Left ever became relevant or threatening to the Powers That Be, they could destroy it simply by sending someone to every meeting to say something like “boy I wish those Palestinians would stop being such terrorists” or “why does this group have so many white people / men in it?” or any of a vast number of other triggers and without fail the bees will start to buzz, the hive will go berserk, and it’s honey time for the bear.
We’ve been preaching the virtue of tolerance so adamantly and so long that we’ve forgotten the virtue of intolerance.
What I wouldn’t give for someone who would stand up and say — “to heck with being inclusive and making sure everybody gets heard.
We’re here to try to get something done.
If you want to get something done, you’re in the right place.
If you want to talk about the harmonica virgins or if you think your favorite issue or minority group isn’t being respected here, find another group, because we don’t have time for that now.”
I know what you’re thinking — why don’t you do it yourself? I tried that once.
Learned pretty quickly from the chorus about what a pattern of white male dominance I was perpetuating.
So I backed off to let the underrepresented voices get heard, and got an earful of information about how if everyone in the world were to chant “boomshanka” at the same time the enlightened masters from Unarius would come and bring us all to the next level of consciousness together.
And the fact is that nobody is really up to the task, because no matter how many minority cards they’ve got in their hand, there’s always the risk that someone else in the room has ’em trumped.
And any ol’ softie may stand up at any time and serve out that old familiar pudding about “tolerance” and “inclusivity” and so on, and then the bobblehead nods begin and it’s all over.
This time it was some jerk who interrupted again and again to ramble on about the magnificent struggles of and… oh, Paris, the barricades, I’m writing a book, Jefferson and Mao and I’m going to make a movie, and Bush is a right-wing maniac who wants to turn us into robots, and remember the struggle against Vietnam in the sixties oh yes we were united then and had solidarity, us and the proletariat, I worked two months as a laborer and saw with my own eyes Hamilton and Trotsky and Hegel, I’ve got a xeroxed pamphlet of collage art and poetry right here, we need to come together, all of us…
I took the bullet.
Luring him into another room away from the meeting with a feigned interest in learning more about his upcoming book.
He went on and on and on.
All I had to do was let my eyes glaze over in his general direction and nod from time to time, but I ended up feeling exhausted, the way you do when you’ve been fighting a strong headwind all day.
I’d like to think the meeting went on in my absence and worthwhile things were discussed.
Stranger things have happened.
If, after having been exposed to someone’s presence, you feel as if you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence.
You need it like you need pernicious anemia.
We don’t like to hear the word “vampire” around here; we’re trying to improve our public image.
Building a kindly, avuncular, benevolent image; “interdependence” is the keyword — “enlightened interdependence.”
Life in all its rich variety, take a little, leave a little.
However, by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process they always take more than they leave — and why, indeed, should they take any?
Avoid fuck-ups. FUs, I call them.
You all know the type — no matter how good it sounds, everything they have anything to do with turns into a disaster.
Trouble for themselves and everyone connected with them.
A FU is bad news, and it rubs off — don’t let it rub off on you.
Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit.
Tell them firmly, “I am not paid to listen to this drivel — you are a terminal FU!”
Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.
San Francisco’s activist groups often seem like FU conventions.
FUs and their victims and their nodding enablers.
Email me for details about the next meeting of Intolerant San Franciscans Against Bullshit.
The Great Experiment starts around the world on when millions of people around the world will focus their prayers of peace, sending a wave of healing energy to the governments of both the US and Iraq.
The title is “The Great Experiment Ⅲ; Living and Praying Peace.”
This is the third time they have organized such an event.
The first two were apparently successful efforts: hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people focused their energies and prayed.
The result was sudden de-escalation of hostilities.…
It’s that simple.
Then at the same time (depending on your time zone) on , join together to focus our prayers of peace, sending healing light to dissolve all negative energies that could lead to war.
When you go to The Great Experiment, one of the items you’ll notice is registration for a Free 4 week course called “The Spoonbenders Course” where you will learn meditation techniques that will enable you to bend a spoon with your mind.
The teachers say, …“this course should enable you to bend a spoon with your mind in three weeks, then apply the same technology to bending the whole world toward peace.”
And they ask, “If we can bend spoons with our minds, why can’t our prayers bring peace?”
Indeed, why not?
From the concluding paragraph of a letter from
H.D. Thoreau to
R.W. Emerson (who was in England at the time),
on :
They have been choosing between John Keyes and Sam Staples, if the world
wants to know it, as representative of this town, and Staples is chosen. The
candidates for governor — think of my writing this to you! — were Governor
Briggs and General Cushing, and Briggs is elected, though the Democrats have
gained. Ain’t I a brave boy to know so much of politics for the nonce? But I
shouldn’t have known it if Coombs hadn’t told me. They have had a peace
meeting here, — I shouldn’t think of telling you if I didn’t know anything
would do for the English market, — and some men, Deacon Brown at the head,
have signed a long pledge, swearing that they will “treat all mankind as
brothers henceforth.” I think I shall wait and see how they treat me first. I
think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my
voice is still for peace. So good-by, and a truce to all joking, my dear
friend…
