Glimmers of History

Just back from seeing “Milk” at the Castro, the big biopic on first gay supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco. I got to San Francisco at the beginning of 1978 so I lived through a bit of the time the movie represents. Unlike every person I spoke to, I did not love Milk. I found it shallow and Hollywood, and kept thinking how much better the documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” is. In fact, there are a few overlapping scenes and the doc is way stronger. Sean Penn is good, but didn’t blow me away. The complete lack of females in the film is really stunning (the one exception: the woman playing campaign manager Anne Kronenberg; there was also a 2-second view of the black female supervisor as she casts a vote). The possibility of exploring the awkward but real alliances made in that era between men and women would have really added a lot of depth to this. As it is portrayed, it’s practically a 100% male “movement”, but in reality this was the same time that Valencia Street had two lesbian bars, a women’s bookstore, Good Vibrations, and several other gynocentric businesses, similar if not as overwhelming as the Castro’s sudden colonization by gay men.

History is constantly distorted of course. Hollywood is particularly egregious at the rewriting of history, and while Milk does some good things, overall I felt it was a serious flattening of a very complex and interesting time in history, to its own detriment as a film. Oh well. Don’t expect much from fantasy factory in Hollywood.

Another interesting lens on history are the monuments and plaques that disappear in plain view all around. On our way back from Thanksgiving we took the north shore of Clear Lake, a place that is deeply haunted by a brutal massacre in 1850. Here’s one of two plaques commemorating it:

Bloody Island Massacre at foot of hill.

Bloody Island Massacre at foot of hill.

A close-up of the 1942 plaque

A close-up of the 1942 plaque, obviously vandalized appropriately.

In reality there wasn’t any battle, but a brutal massacre. Two former trappers who had abused a band of starving, semi-enslaved Pomo Indians, were murdered by the Indians they were tormenting. The Indians fled to what became known as Bloody Island in Clear Lake (today it is a landlocked hill along the north shore), where in April, 1850 U.S. troops came and slaughtered the entire population of the island, bayoneting dozens of women and infants (a very graphic account of this was told by Chief William Benson, who was born 12 years after the event, find it in Gray Brechin and Robert Dawson’s “Farewell, Promised Land“). The plaque above was installed in 1942 by the “Native Sons of the Golden West,” a blatant misrepresentation of what had happened. Later, the California state gov’t. had to make an effort to more accurately represent the events of 1850, so they installed this plaque out on the road:

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20 Theses Against Green Capitalism

This came to me via a Midnight Notes friend, and given the frenzy and local enthusiasm for the “Green New Deal” I thought it timely to just put them right up for general viewing and discussion… curious to hear rebuttals if anyone wants to take that up…

“… A few critical theses against green capitalism. they were originally intended as an input for a meeting in Poznan discussing the mobilisation towards/against the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen, but since the whole ‘green capitalism’/’green new deal’ discussion is by now sort of centre stage (carmakers in the US having to turn green, European carmakers managing to avert such an ‘imposition’), these ideas can maybe be useful in all sorts of discussions. if you like them, please spread far and wide, and of course, sorry for cross-posting.

solidarische gruesse, tadzio

20 Theses against green capitalism

No to false solutions! Climate Justice Now!

1. The current world economic crisis marks the end of the neoliberal phase of capitalism. “˜Business as usual’ (financialisation, deregulation, privatisation”¦) is thus no longer an option: new spaces of accumulation and types of political regulation will need to be found by governments and corporations to keep capitalism going

2. Alongside the economic and political as well as energy crises, there is another crisis rocking the world: the biocrisis, the result of a suicidal mismatch between the ecological life support system that guarantees our collective human survival and capital’s need for constant growth

3. This biocrisis is an immense danger to our collective survival, but like all crises it also presents us, social movements, with a historic opportunity: to really go for capitalism’s exposed jugular, its need for unceasing, destructive, insane growth

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The Tortoise vs. the Gangster

The other night I went to the SF Art Institute to speak to a class on “The Contested City.” The students had been given Nowtopia to read and a bunch of intelligent questions were prepared. The 3-hour class was given over to “grilling” me in a friendly but pointed way, which I really enjoyed. Analogously I was interviewed over Thanksgiving weekend by email for an intelligent literary website “Three Monkeys Online” which you can find here.

Curiously I found myself feeling a bit desolate after I got home that night and when I tried to figure out why I decided the inadequacy of my answers was at least part of it. During the class a number of questions had gone beyond the scope of the book to challenge me to propose a program for a broader agenda of social transformation, or at least to question my thoughts on how what I’ve written about might become a broader social movement. And to be frank, the honest answer beyond “I don’t know” is that the Nowtopian initiatives are NOT ready for prime-time! That is to say, the growing and dynamic efforts that I’ve labeled “Nowtopian,” like urban food gardening, free software development, DIY bicycling culture, etc. are important experiments in their own right, they are important loci of new social communities with political, technological and ecological practice and meanings, but clearly are far from being able to supplant life as we know it with a new logic.

That does not invalidate them, or make the analysis that argues this is the glimmer of working-class recomposition outside of wage labor, wrong. It does highlight the frustrating experience of gaining some perspective on a moment in history and wanting it to speed up, to be subject to our willpower or our foresight, and to move more quickly into its full potential, or to exceed its bounds maybe before it really can”¦

And that thought in turn leads me to the topic of today’s post, the Tortoise vs. the Gangster. While touring with Nowtopia this past year this moment came up many times, when an audience member wanted me to outline how this early, inchoate, multiplicity of daily life initiatives could become something more recognizable as a political and social movement, tackling the bigger questions of political and economic power. Of course I wish I knew, and I wish I could be certain that these Nowtopian efforts would someday arrive at that scale. Maybe they will. I think so. But we cannot know, and worse, we cannot make it happen by will power, or wishing, or even organizing per se. I think the self-organizing that these efforts embody is the key, and it means that one author, or a small group, or even a somewhat larger coalition of groups, cannot push the process any faster than it will go (even though we’re trying!). History is frustratingly out of anyone’s control, especially the self-designated vanguards that are always running around promoting one agenda or another.

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