Astroturf Capital Storming Jackasses and the Lukewarm Response
I've been teaching my students words like "coup" and "putsch" and "astroturf". I have never hidden my politics at school*, and have had many discussions on wars being prosecuted, on Black Lives Matter protests, on gender and sexuality, and so on. But this is so freighted with history. With our Plague Year and with this storming of the Capitol Building, these kids are living through immediate history that their grandchildren will probably hear about.
In DC, those dumbasses were chanting "1776! 1776!" as they followed the red velvet rope-demarked path into the Senate (or House, I dunno) chamber or Rotunda, after breaking windows to get in. Like the women who stormed Versailles (it pains me to make that comparison, because obviously fuck these wankers) they looted and shat and pissed all over the place. It's weird because I think of the at least seven or eight huge protests in DC that **I** fucking fundraised for coalition bus tickets to a 17 hour exhausting ride through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland to DC -- all of which were in the 100,000 to 800,000 range, and these komedy klowns had "thousands". Thousands of deluded wannabe brownshirts and "patriots" waving the Confederate battle flag and that stupid piece of red and white stripes and stars on a blue field and that "Don't Tread on Me" Gadsden (?) flag -- with one of the wavers of that flag literally being trampled to death which is some fine, fine level of irony (? Or Morissettian sarcasm? Despite being an English teacher, I never know). "Thousands", when claimed by right wing assholes to me means about 3,000 to 5,000 tops, but I haven't seen any hard counts.
I grew up hearing about Selma (which my father and my stepmother were both at, though they didn't meet for another fifteen years) and the many Spring Mobilizations against the Vietnam War, including the Moritorium. I went to my first national demonstration in DC when I was thirteen, with my uncle who was in the Workers World Party (its youth group was called Youth Against War and Fascism). The demo was against the resumption of the Draft -- it was very likely one of those where the WWP and its various fronts and separate coalition called a SEPARATE demo from the one called by a larger group... that was always happening. But my parents, in the opposition faction within the Socialist Workers Party couldn't take time from work to go to the majority anti-draft demo, and my uncle could. It's not even listed in Wikipedia's sorely scanty and incomplete list of US Protests! Not in the list of the biggest ones and not in the overall list. Neither is the second Solidarity Day labor protest march, which had around 500,000, and I went to both of those anti-Reagan marches. Nor are the Central American solidarity demos I went to in DC. All of them were undercounted in the press, because the press always accepted police estimates. All of them trained their own marshals in crowd control, as Fred Halsted of the SWP had pushed for in the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam.
My high school group Students for International Understanding (a name forced on us by the teacher sponsors, one of whom was a closeted full on CPer**) organized a rental van (which none of us were old enough to drive, so we had a Maoist adult do it) from my high school in 1982 to New York City to the Nuclear Freeze demo which is, I think, still the biggest demonstration in one city. These were grassroots movements, which took sweat, organization, fundraising, etc.
A cousin on Facebook just posted that Clarence Thomas' wife funded 70 buses with her own (or his, how do I know?) checkbook. George Soros never funded SHIT on that scale, afaik. I need to find more articles I can cite with those sorts of facts.
I have never been one for conspiracy theories -- capitalism is enough on its own for its remorseless logic to grind this shit out -- so I was able to reassure kids in my classes last November that no, shit wasn't going to burn down around them (in the Bay Area!) because Trump supporters would go rogue if they thought they were losing. So these events ARE shocking, to me. The prospect of a rump of the Republican party base founding something like "The Patriots' Party" with exactly these quasi-fascist politics... I mean, Godwin's law was sort of hung up for the duration after 2016, but this is... bierkeller Reichstag WANNABE territory, and it IS fucking scary. I don't think these bozos have the social weight or training to do what was done in 1930s Germany, but more than before I think they'd like to. When a fucking Illinois Representative can unabashedly approve Hitler's way with indoctrinating the Youth (Mary Miller) and double down in a perfectly Trumpian double-tongue way? Fucking A.
Whither the United States?
*This was less of a potential problem when I taught in Oakland, CA, which is a district riddled with lefty teachers and even former Maoist administrators. It is potentially a problem in my working class small district south of Oakland, where there are certainly Trumper parents (more over the hill in Castro Valley than right here) but more and more non white families -- Asians and Pacific Islanders, Latinx, and maybe 10% Black families. I COULD be narked on here, but our new Superintendent (who will crush us in terms of wages and working conditions, no question, any chance he gets) has put out a letter encouraging us to talk about it... and put out a good video in early June right before the first helping of distance learning was done... he started his video with his usual boring hoo hah, but then almost broke down about how he was having trouble dealing with the upsurge in BLM protests after George Floyd -- he's Black -- and he put up a silent Slide show with the names and descriptions of hundreds of Black men, women, and children murdered by the police. It made me cry. So I have hopes that if I AM narked on, the district will defend me. I never HAVE been narked on for my open politics, even TAing at the University of Missouri, where my teaching evaluations often decried my politics but said despite them, their white asses didn't feel oppressed.
**She and I did not mutually discover our respective Stalinism and Trotskyism until a party for the SIU at her house in Winnetka just before the founding members graduated. Her house was full of Eastern European conference posters and Cuban political/tourist posters from the 1970s and the lightbulb went off... She'd struggled with my harder left attitude for three years -- I pushed anti-apartheid stuff with Dennis Brutus, a South African poet then at Northwestern, and Central-American solidarity demonstrations (which the CP hated) and circumvented her to get a translator and a masked Sanctuary guy from El Salvador who was living underground with the local Mennonites to speak at school -- to a captive (and huge) audience of kids in detention. Anyway, I maliciously somehow dropped the info that my parents were in the SWP and her face drained of all color and she almost dropped a tray with glasses of lemonade. It was pretty funny, though no one but us got it.
In DC, those dumbasses were chanting "1776! 1776!" as they followed the red velvet rope-demarked path into the Senate (or House, I dunno) chamber or Rotunda, after breaking windows to get in. Like the women who stormed Versailles (it pains me to make that comparison, because obviously fuck these wankers) they looted and shat and pissed all over the place. It's weird because I think of the at least seven or eight huge protests in DC that **I** fucking fundraised for coalition bus tickets to a 17 hour exhausting ride through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland to DC -- all of which were in the 100,000 to 800,000 range, and these komedy klowns had "thousands". Thousands of deluded wannabe brownshirts and "patriots" waving the Confederate battle flag and that stupid piece of red and white stripes and stars on a blue field and that "Don't Tread on Me" Gadsden (?) flag -- with one of the wavers of that flag literally being trampled to death which is some fine, fine level of irony (? Or Morissettian sarcasm? Despite being an English teacher, I never know). "Thousands", when claimed by right wing assholes to me means about 3,000 to 5,000 tops, but I haven't seen any hard counts.
I grew up hearing about Selma (which my father and my stepmother were both at, though they didn't meet for another fifteen years) and the many Spring Mobilizations against the Vietnam War, including the Moritorium. I went to my first national demonstration in DC when I was thirteen, with my uncle who was in the Workers World Party (its youth group was called Youth Against War and Fascism). The demo was against the resumption of the Draft -- it was very likely one of those where the WWP and its various fronts and separate coalition called a SEPARATE demo from the one called by a larger group... that was always happening. But my parents, in the opposition faction within the Socialist Workers Party couldn't take time from work to go to the majority anti-draft demo, and my uncle could. It's not even listed in Wikipedia's sorely scanty and incomplete list of US Protests! Not in the list of the biggest ones and not in the overall list. Neither is the second Solidarity Day labor protest march, which had around 500,000, and I went to both of those anti-Reagan marches. Nor are the Central American solidarity demos I went to in DC. All of them were undercounted in the press, because the press always accepted police estimates. All of them trained their own marshals in crowd control, as Fred Halsted of the SWP had pushed for in the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam.
My high school group Students for International Understanding (a name forced on us by the teacher sponsors, one of whom was a closeted full on CPer**) organized a rental van (which none of us were old enough to drive, so we had a Maoist adult do it) from my high school in 1982 to New York City to the Nuclear Freeze demo which is, I think, still the biggest demonstration in one city. These were grassroots movements, which took sweat, organization, fundraising, etc.
A cousin on Facebook just posted that Clarence Thomas' wife funded 70 buses with her own (or his, how do I know?) checkbook. George Soros never funded SHIT on that scale, afaik. I need to find more articles I can cite with those sorts of facts.
I have never been one for conspiracy theories -- capitalism is enough on its own for its remorseless logic to grind this shit out -- so I was able to reassure kids in my classes last November that no, shit wasn't going to burn down around them (in the Bay Area!) because Trump supporters would go rogue if they thought they were losing. So these events ARE shocking, to me. The prospect of a rump of the Republican party base founding something like "The Patriots' Party" with exactly these quasi-fascist politics... I mean, Godwin's law was sort of hung up for the duration after 2016, but this is... bierkeller Reichstag WANNABE territory, and it IS fucking scary. I don't think these bozos have the social weight or training to do what was done in 1930s Germany, but more than before I think they'd like to. When a fucking Illinois Representative can unabashedly approve Hitler's way with indoctrinating the Youth (Mary Miller) and double down in a perfectly Trumpian double-tongue way? Fucking A.
Whither the United States?
*This was less of a potential problem when I taught in Oakland, CA, which is a district riddled with lefty teachers and even former Maoist administrators. It is potentially a problem in my working class small district south of Oakland, where there are certainly Trumper parents (more over the hill in Castro Valley than right here) but more and more non white families -- Asians and Pacific Islanders, Latinx, and maybe 10% Black families. I COULD be narked on here, but our new Superintendent (who will crush us in terms of wages and working conditions, no question, any chance he gets) has put out a letter encouraging us to talk about it... and put out a good video in early June right before the first helping of distance learning was done... he started his video with his usual boring hoo hah, but then almost broke down about how he was having trouble dealing with the upsurge in BLM protests after George Floyd -- he's Black -- and he put up a silent Slide show with the names and descriptions of hundreds of Black men, women, and children murdered by the police. It made me cry. So I have hopes that if I AM narked on, the district will defend me. I never HAVE been narked on for my open politics, even TAing at the University of Missouri, where my teaching evaluations often decried my politics but said despite them, their white asses didn't feel oppressed.
**She and I did not mutually discover our respective Stalinism and Trotskyism until a party for the SIU at her house in Winnetka just before the founding members graduated. Her house was full of Eastern European conference posters and Cuban political/tourist posters from the 1970s and the lightbulb went off... She'd struggled with my harder left attitude for three years -- I pushed anti-apartheid stuff with Dennis Brutus, a South African poet then at Northwestern, and Central-American solidarity demonstrations (which the CP hated) and circumvented her to get a translator and a masked Sanctuary guy from El Salvador who was living underground with the local Mennonites to speak at school -- to a captive (and huge) audience of kids in detention. Anyway, I maliciously somehow dropped the info that my parents were in the SWP and her face drained of all color and she almost dropped a tray with glasses of lemonade. It was pretty funny, though no one but us got it.