The whole of May 6th was marked by demonstrations which turned into riots in the afternoon. The first barricades were thrown up at the Place Maubert and defended for three hours. At the same time fights with the police were breaking out at the bottom of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, at the Place du Châtelet, and in Les Halles. By the early evening the demonstrators numbered more than ten thousand and were mainly holding the area around the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where they had been reinforced only after 6p.m. by the bulk of the march organized by the UNEF at Denfert-Rochereau. On May 8th Le Monde wrote:

What followed surpassed in scope and violence everything that had happened throughout an already astonishing day. It was a kind of street fighting that sometimes reached a frenzy, where every blow delivered was immediately returned, and where ground that had scarcely been conquered was just as quickly retaken. . . There were dramatic and senseless moments which, for the observer, seemed rife with madness.

And on May 7th L'Aurore noted: "Alongside the demonstrators could be seen bands of young hoods (blousons noirs) armed with steel bars, who had come in from the outlying areas of Paris to help out the students." The fighting lasted until after midnight, especially at Montparnasse.

For the first time cars were overturned and set afire, paving stones were dug up for the barricades, and stores were looted. The use of subversive slogans, which had begun at Nanterre, had now spread to several parts of Paris. Insofar as the rioters were able to strengthen the barricades, and thus their own capacity for counterattack, the police were forced to abandon direct charges for a position strategy which relied mainly on offensive grenades and tear gas.

May 6th also marked the first intervention of workers, blousons noirs, the unemployed and high school students who that morning had organized important demonstrations. The spontaneity and violence of the riots stood in vivid contrast to the platitudes put forth by their academic initiators as goals and slogans. The very fact that the blousons noirs had fought in the streets shouting "The Sorbonne to the students!" marked an end to an entire era.

Tags: collage, history, nostalgia, politics, theory
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From Karl Marx, Grundrisse--

The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to the greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a "political animal," not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of a society. Production by an isolated individual outside society -- a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness -- is as much of an absurdity as the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.

Tags: holiday, politics, theory
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Muse: Celestialis - Deepchord Presents: Echospace - The Coldest Season

I had occasion yesterday, for the first time in ages, to revisit the second piece I wrote for Bad Subjects, way back in October, 1992. I had distanced myself from it because of the buttons it pushes and my memories of having written it very quickly. But, as I shared it with a student writing about shifting notions of masculinity during the Clinton Era, we realized that it was strangely prescient, particularly in light of the direction his wife Hillary's 2008 Presidential campaign has taken:

A polished, well-spoken Baby-Boomer with a strong, independent wife, Clinton initially appears the consummate Yuppie. When addressing bureaucrats, leaders in high- tech industry, educators, and other professionals, it is this appearance that Clinton cultivates. At the same time, however, Clinton is also the son of a lower middle-class Arkansas woman who married four times. Emotionally scarred by an abusive stepfather, born far from the 'loop' of power and success, this Clinton rises from obscurity to fame without forgetting his humble roots. He remains regionally-fixed, an outsider. Thus we have a Yuppie Clinton on the one hand, a 'White Trash' Clinton on the other. How can these two identities be linked together?

In his address to the convention, Clinton suggests that they can be linked discursively. In other words, he intermingles the fashionable high-tech language of Yuppies with the religiously inflected, humble yet hopeful language of what the Cultural Elite derides as 'White Trash America'. America's 'oppressed' middle- class consists of those who "play by the rules and keep the faith": Yuppie game-theory language is made synonymous with the language of Ol' Time Religion. Similarly, Clinton gestures toward an America full of high-tech jobs, but labels its promise a 'New Covenant'. At this point in the campaign this sort of intermingling of discourses is working, Every day it seems a new bunch of high-tech executives flock to Clinton's camp while the Bush campaign's 'family values' strategy fails to win a majority of the White Trash Reagan-Democrats appealed to in the New Covenant. Regardless of whether it is coherent of theoretically unified, Clinton's campaign strategy seems to be working because it links radically different elements of white America on a discursive level.

In closing, I would like to emphasize that we bad subjects must find ways of linking all oppressed Americans together, not just white ones. Clinton's apparent success suggests a model for this undertaking, despite the exclusions it practices rather than because of them. Looking at the Clinton campaign's appropriation of popular music, we can see both its strategic intelligence and politico-moral limitations. Clinton had Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow" played at the end of the convention. This quintessential Baby-Boomer song was juxtaposed to Clinton's obsession with that quintessentially white trash icon, Elvis, whom Clinton identified himself with in his speech, saying Al Gore felt he was doing the "warm-up for Elvis." Like matter and anti-matter, these are two kinds of music that normally shouldn't be brought into contact with one another; it is, however, precisely this fact that makes their juxtaposition so compelling. Still, both artists remain very mainstream and very white, even if their 'whiteness' differs radically.

Given the success which Hillary has had among people over fifty, including those who were Yuppie thirty-somethings still back in 1992, I wonder if it makes sense to regard her come-from-behind strategy as an attempt to activate nostalgia for her husband's approach to whiteness. Maybe all the talk about Bill's popularity among African-Americans deafened us to the real strength of his politics, namely its realization that there are enough white people who might vote Democratic under the right circumstances to counterbalance those who refuse to do so.

Tags: bad subjects, politics
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Tom Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas, founder of the much-lamented journal The Baffler, and someone I had the pleasure of interviewing back in my hairy youth has an opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal focusing on the continuing controversy over Barack Obama's supposed dis of blue-collar folk in the Rust Belt:

Consider, for example, the one fateful charge that the punditry and the other candidates have fastened upon Mr. Obama – "elitism." No one means by this term that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn't until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

"Elitism" is thus a crime not of society's actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has "a dash of Harvard disease," proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of "supercilious" Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here's a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers' organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton's own sins, when these are our standards? Didn't he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

Although I've had my differences with Tom over the years, not least over his own tendency to mobilize a sort of alternative populism -- evident in this evocative passage -- against academics who study mass culture, I agree with him 100% here. The way in which the Clinton campaign has borrowed the "elitist" charge from the Right and used it to defame Obama makes me retch. While I would probably vote for any Democratic nominee against John McCain, I sure would think twice before picking Clinton. Not because I doubt her ability to be an effective President. Given the constraints that anyone in that position will face after eight disastrous years of George W. Bush, she could probably get more done than most. But the way she, her husband and their handlers have comported themselves in the primaries has me less eager to support her than I was to support the Gore-Lieberman ticket in 2000. And that's saying something.

Tags: media, politics
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Last Friday Joel Schalit and I gave our presentation at the EMP pop conference. It went reasonably well, despite a technical complication that led to the musical bed we'd set up starting late and therefore getting out of sync with the words of our text. Earlier that afternoon, however, we'd made the short trip to Seattle's superb independent music station KEXP in order to speak about our topic for possible later use in one of the station's short audio documentaries. And then we got to go on air, where, with Kevin Cole, a wonderful DJ, at the controls, the bed worked perfectly.

Later that weekend, our gracious host Vance Galloway found a way to distill the four-hour stream in the KEXP archives into a sound file comprising only our twenty-minute segment. Be advised, if you listen -- it's in Apple's AAC format, BTW -- that I'd had way too little sleep and way too much coffee -- I was in Seattle, after all -- that day, amping up my nervous energy to the point where I ended up sounding like I'd been making recreational use of a dentist's office. Joel, who was so tired that I feared he would start nodding off, revealed his radio experience by sounding calm and collected. Oh well. At least the content came through clearly enough.

In closing, I must give a shout out to some folks whose words played a major role in the development of our presentation and whom time constraints prevented us from properly acknowledging at the EMP: K-Punk, Simon Reynolds, The Stranger's Charles Mudede, Steven Shaviro, Tomas Palermo, and, last but not least, our host Vance Galloway. Joel knows enough about dub to fill their footprints, but I feel like I'm wearing baby shoes in comparison.

Tags: clips, conference, friends, media, music, politics, theory
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Tikkun's Michael Lerner has weighed in about Barack Obama's much-critiqued comments concerning working-class bitterness in places like small-town Pennsylvania. Personally, I don't think Obama has as much to apologize for as others -- particularly, it goes without saying, those who support the Clinton campaign -- have argued, though it troubles me that he spoke so freely without considering the political consequences. Nor do I fully agree with Lerner on this subject. But his argument certainly merits careful scrutiny:

Obama's Error--and What It Would Really Take to Rectify It

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

A continuing irony of American politics is that the candidates of the ruling elites have been able to convince many Americans that the candidates who seek to redistribute wealth to the less fortunate, provide health care for all, and provide jobs and housing for the poor are the real elitists. They've been able to get away with that not only by demeaning the "Hollywood limousine liberals" (never explaining why those wealthy who support tax increases on their own wealth to feed, house and care for the hungry are not deserving of more praise than those who horde their wealth for themselves), but also by portraying liberals as hostile to the religious concerns of the American people.

Unfortunately, on that latter point Right-wingers are often accurate. The relgio-phobia Americans encounter in many sections of the liberal and progressive world often push them away and into the hands of the Right. Deeply suspicious of the slippery slope from some right wing religious beliefs to religious coercion, homophobia, sexism, and racism, people on the Left have created a cultural assumption that anyone who is into religion or spiritual life is probably a little less intellectually or psychologically developed than the secularists, perhaps seeking mystery or a father-figure God to compensate for some lack in their lives.

The message that most Americans receive from the Left is an elitist and demeaning put-down: "We need your votes, so you are welcome into our ranks, but we hope that by hanging out with us secular leftists you will eventually give up your pathological need for religious beliefs and evolve to a higher level of rationality that us secularists have been developing as the only possible way to think clearly about the nature of reality." Often unconscious, this religio-phobic message has done much to push away the majority of Americans whose religious beliefs are extremely important to them, even though on purely economic grounds they'd feel more aligned with the Left's agenda than that of the Right.

Barack Obama understands this, and has done much in his career to avoid failing into that trap. His political worldview draws upon the spiritual and religious wisdom of the human race, without making explicit some of those connections. Others may shout about their religiosity to score points with particular religious constituencies, but Obama is the closest thing we've seen in American politics to a man who actually embodies spiritual depth.

All the more sad, then, to have witnessed his error in listing religion as one of the compensations people who are bitter about their economic situation embrace along with guns and anti-immigrant sentiments. Seeing religion as a substitute gratification grabbed on to by people who are otherwise oppressed is an insight that has been part of liberal and progressive culture for at least 150 years. Unfortunately, Senator Obama, like Karl Marx before him, got it wrong because he identified the needs that are being systematically denied as purely material, thereby failing into the deep "It's the economy, stupid" mistake of the Left. And so far, he has sought only to justify his description of people as "bitter" rather than to address his mistake in reducing their upsets to those that flow from the current economic downturn. The fact is that significant growth in the religious right happened in the 1990s, during the Clinton Administration's years of growing prosperity, precisely when people were feeling most economically secure.
( Read the rest of Michael Lerner's piece )

Tags: politics, religion
Current Location: 85704

Also, as much as I have been impressed with Barack Obama, today's commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death inspired me to détourn Lloyd Bentsen in my head. The Reverend's last speeches, when he knew he was being stalked and full of the radical fervor already making 1968 a year like no other are, in their own way, even more stunning than the one he gave on the Mall in 1963. His last speech, which has been getting a lot of play today is a fine example:

Or how about about this sermon, on the "drum major instinct" from precisely two months before that shot rang out in the Memphis sky:

And there is deep down within all of us an instinct. It's a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life.

And so before we condemn them, let us see that we all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade. Alfred Adler, the great psychoanalyst, contends that this is the dominant impulse. Sigmund Freud used to contend that sex was the dominant impulse, and Adler came with a new argument saying that this quest for recognition, this desire for attention, this desire for distinction is the basic impulse, the basic drive of human life, this drum major instinct.

And you know, we begin early to ask life to put us first. Our first cry as a baby was a bid for attention. And all through childhood the drum major impulse or instinct is a major obsession. Children ask life to grant them first place. They are a little bundle of ego. And they have innately the drum major impulse or the drum major instinct.

Now in adult life, we still have it, and we really never get by it. We like to do something good. And you know, we like to be praised for it. Now if you don't believe that, you just go on living life, and you will discover very soon that you like to be praised. Everybody likes it, as a matter of fact. And somehow this warm glow we feel when we are praised or when our name is in print is something of the vitamin A to our ego. Nobody is unhappy when they are praised, even if they know they don't deserve it and even if they don't believe it. The only unhappy people about praise is when that praise is going too much toward somebody else. (That’s right) But everybody likes to be praised because of this real drum major instinct.

Now the presence of the drum major instinct is why so many people are "joiners." You know, there are some people who just join everything. And it's really a quest for attention and recognition and importance. And they get names that give them that impression. So you get your groups, and they become the "Grand Patron," and the little fellow who is henpecked at home needs a chance to be the "Most Worthy of the Most Worthy" of something. It is the drum major impulse and longing that runs the gamut of human life. And so we see it everywhere, this quest for recognition. And we join things, overjoin really, that we think that we will find that recognition in.

Now the presence of this instinct explains why we are so often taken by advertisers. You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion. And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey. In order to make your neighbors envious, you must drive this type of car. (Make it plain) In order to be lovely to love you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of perfume. And you know, before you know it, you're just buying that stuff. (Yes) That's the way the advertisers do it.

I got a letter the other day, and it was a new magazine coming out. And it opened up, "Dear Dr. King: As you know, you are on many mailing lists. And you are categorized as highly intelligent, progressive, a lover of the arts and the sciences, and I know you will want to read what I have to say." Of course I did. After you said all of that and explained me so exactly, of course I wanted to read it. [laughter]

But very seriously, it goes through life; the drum major instinct is real. (Yes) And you know what else it causes to happen? It often causes us to live above our means. (Make it plain) It's nothing but the drum major instinct. Do you ever see people buy cars that they can't even begin to buy in terms of their income? (Amen) [laughter] You've seen people riding around in Cadillacs and Chryslers who don't earn enough to have a good T-Model Ford. (Make it plain) But it feeds a repressed ego.

You know, economists tell us that your automobile should not cost more than half of your annual income. So if you make an income of five thousand dollars, your car shouldn't cost more than about twenty-five hundred. That's just good economics. And if it's a family of two, and both members of the family make ten thousand dollars, they would have to make out with one car. That would be good economics, although it's often inconvenient. But so often, haven't you seen people making five thousand dollars a year and driving a car that costs six thousand? And they wonder why their ends never meet. [laughter] That's a fact.

Now the economists also say that your house shouldn't cost—if you're buying a house, it shouldn't cost more than twice your income. That's based on the economy and how you would make ends meet. So, if you have an income of five thousand dollars, it's kind of difficult in this society. But say it's a family with an income of ten thousand dollars, the house shouldn't cost much more than twenty thousand. Well, I've seen folk making ten thousand dollars, living in a forty- and fifty-thousand-dollar house. And you know they just barely make it. They get a check every month somewhere, and they owe all of that out before it comes in. Never have anything to put away for rainy days.

But now the problem is, it is the drum major instinct. And you know, you see people over and over again with the drum major instinct taking them over. And they just live their lives trying to outdo the Joneses. (Amen) They got to get this coat because this particular coat is a little better and a little better-looking than Mary's coat. And I got to drive this car because it's something about this car that makes my car a little better than my neighbor's car. (Amen) I know a man who used to live in a thirty-five-thousand-dollar house. And other people started building thirty-five-thousand-dollar houses, so he built a seventy-five-thousand-dollar house. And then somebody else built a seventy-five-thousand-dollar house, and he built a hundred-thousand-dollar house. And I don't know where he's going to end up if he's going to live his life trying to keep up with the Joneses.

There comes a time that the drum major instinct can become destructive. (Make it plain) And that's where I want to move now. I want to move to the point of saying that if this instinct is not harnessed, it becomes a very dangerous, pernicious instinct. For instance, if it isn’t harnessed, it causes one's personality to become distorted. I guess that's the most damaging aspect of it: what it does to the personality. If it isn't harnessed, you will end up day in and day out trying to deal with your ego problem by boasting.

You can hear excerpts on the excellent site for the King Papers Project at Stanford University. I can't link there directly, but it's easy enough to find if you look around a bit, which would be a worthy way to spend your time today.

Tags: history, media, politics
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Also, I keep fantasizing about not voting for Hilary Clinton, should she connive the nomination. The next thing you know, I might stop insisting on proper punctuation when I text message!

Tags: everyday, humor, politics
Current Location: 85704

I already voted for Barack Obama. But if I were in a state where the primary had yet to occur and wavering in my decision, the speech he gave today -- here's the transcript -- would have won me over for good. I don't know whether that means it was the right thing to do politically, since I am hardly the demographic he most needs to court. Still, I want to believe that Americans can be convinced by rhetoric that is more than rhetoric. Long an advocate of heeding the autobiographical impulse in prose, I recognize that it is often used too freely, particularly in political discourse. In this case, though, Obama's first-person singular is not the empty "I" of stump speech boilerplate. It's the "I" of his first book, written long before he was out on the Presidential campaign trail, steeped in the language of Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau alike. I only hope that this strong, clear voice survives the muddy waters ahead.

Tags: history, politics
Current Location: 85704

I've started blogging at an internet news start-up called All Voices, which is one of the more promising attempts to blur the line between traditional media and user-generated content. I want All Voices to succeed. And I want my own contributions to be acknowledged and appreciated. To that end, I'll be posting periodic entries letting you know that I've published something there. While not quite a popularity contest, the way All Voices is set up makes it important to show evidence of positive feedback from readers. So, if you read what I've posted there and like it, please do give me the figurative "thumbs up" and, if you're so inclined, comment.

My plan is to write two or three All Voices entries a week, with the longer term goal of compiling some of them together into a book that tackles the political landscape in the United States from a cultural perspective, focusing more specifically on the peculiar blend of patriotism and hostility towards government that has dominated American society since the Reagan Revolution. For now, though, I just want to get into a writing groove, since it has been a while since I wrote regularly about politics.

My first entry reflected on the way in which Jerry Brown's 1992 campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination prefigured Barack Obama's rise in 2008. And the one I just posted today muses on the deeper implications of the American media's extensive coverage of Russia's turn back towards authoritarianism. Given the nature of this sort of blogging, my entries will represent speculative exercises more than fully fleshed out positions. But I hope to have them build on each other as I write my way towards a more concrete map for my book.

Tags: clips, politics, self-promotion
Current Location: 85719
Muse: Gardenia - Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash

In reading the latest in a series of incisive critiques, thanks to ankh156, of French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- a man who seems to inspire good sentences, if not good policies -- it occurred to me that much of the trepidation people in the United States feel with regard to Barack Obama's campaign for President has to do with the fact that he represents a new generation of political thinking. Although Sarkozy falls squarely within the span of the American Baby Boom, he goes out of his way to appear younger than he actually his. Some would place Obama, born in 1961, within the tail end of the Baby Boom. Personally, I think that date qualifies him as someone caught between the Baby Boom and Generation X, as the differences between his reception and that of Hillary Clinton suggest. The fear, I believe, is that the Obama who is running for office might, like Sarkozy before him, struggle to translate the call for a break with convention into political results.

Roger Cohen had an interesting editorial in The New York Times yesterday in which he sought to ease fears in the American Jewish community that Obama, because of his worldly upbringing and personal experience of Muslim cultures, might constitute a "Manchurian candidate" where Israel is concerned. I agree with Cohen that such worries are baseless. But the notion that Obama, once elected, might turn out to be a lot different than he presents himself on the campaign trail is harder to dismiss. Indeed, I have the sense that many Americans, myself included, are hoping that he will turn out to be a bit of a "Manchurian candidate" where issues of social and economic justice are concerned, someone who really will try to shake up the establishment by turning the hope he constantly invokes into practice. I'm sure that's a major reason why he's raising so much money from small donors. Unfortunately, however, reflection on the recent history of American politics suggests that someone who can raise money as effectively as Obama has may not be able to transform himself from a receiver into a giver. If he is elected and that turns out to be the case, the analogy to Nicolas Sarkozy will seem more apt than it does now, when Obama supporters are flush with the prospect of proving the Establishment wrong.

Tags: media, news, politics
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