Let me add to the way-too-many posts around the internet concerning Cindy Sheehan. She’s such an odd player on the media-politics scene, really. Few real vocal sympathizers in the image-media scene – though, it is worth saying, her take on the War in Iraq has been pretty much mainstream for the past year: back that shit up and come home.
What has been so divisive, if not uniformly hostile, about Sheehan’s presence? I get the hostility from the Right. They want her to go away because she’s too public and too sensitive of a figure for blunt, mean-spirited critique. You could almost hear the Right’s sigh of relief when she met with Chavez. It gave referrent for venom, and then the critique moved from substance (which would be hard to do, turns out she’s right) to character assassination (easy to do, the specialty of the Right these days). So, I get that part of the story.
I find it really interesting when folks on the Left turn on Sheehan. I’m thinking in particular about the new write-up from Joan Walsh on Salon.com, which raises a big objection to Sheehan’s new threat: running against Nancy Pelosi. Walsh’s criticism is pretty straightforward. In calling for impeachment proceedings, Walsh thinks Sheehan is heading down a destructive path, namely, alienating the swing-ish voters who have pushed the Democrats into power. Not sure if she’s right about that, but the argument is clear and strategic. What concerns me is not so much the nature of the strategy – though I don’t see Pelosi as an especially galvanizing figure, nationally – but rather what it says about the meaning of activism in relation to politics.
The decisive part of Walsh’s argument is here:
Until then, I think it’s the wrong move for the Democratic leadership to push right now — I think their priorities have to be stopping the war, winning the White House and retaining control of Congress in November 2008 — and I think Sheehan’s threat to run against Pelosi is misguided. It just shows how much work the left has to do to build a voter base that understands the importance of avoiding circular firing squads. Nancy Pelosi isn’t perfect — I wasn’t thrilled with the way she tried to depict the Democrats’ cave-in on the war-funding bill as some kind of victory — but she’s done a decent job holding together a fractious caucus that isn’t unanimous about anything, including the war. She is not the enemy.
To this she ads the rather derisive remark that “lefties love symbolic fights,” fights that ultimately lose general sympathy (and so elections).
Maybe. I think that is open to question.
What is so strange about this criticism is that it actually asks Sheehan to be purely symbolic – while wielding the charge of “symbolic fights” against the Left. (I’m not so convinced that symbolic fights are bad, but, whatever.) And this is the peculiar place of activism in popular life in the U.S. We prefer it stay at the level of symbolism, perhaps even just an alternative aesthetic or lifestyle (see my post on The Beatles and another on The Clash), and get really anxious when it moves to the level of political change. I’d argue that this is where the Left actually fails to register the successes of the Right. The Right never hesitates to move activism into politics. It has served them well. From abortion to affirmative action and school busing to regressive taxation – i.e., women, blacks, money – the Right has put edgy activism into law and politics. The Left’s real failure has been the unwillingness to take this very risk. To mean what you say. And act on it.
Activism on the Left is still just so saturated with the ghost of the 1960s. That is, the fantasy that something was really changed in Viet Nam, rather than seeing in that movement what is so glaringly true: nothing changed politically in that historical moment, and, after that, things actually got worse. Nixon seems almost progressive these days, just as the “sixties generation” takes political and economic power as its own.
So, when Sheehan moves to mean what she says, I’m not surprised to see the Left begin turning on her. To be “not thrilled” with Pelosi’s spin on caving-in to a crazy, last-breath Right is straight-up soft. It means you don’t really care if your words and principles have actual bite in the world. Disappointment is not outrage. We should be outraged. Let’s remember and keep this always in the center: war is about a bunch of people dying and being maimed. And all those waves of people changed forever because of that dying and maiming. “Meaning what you say” in this context seems an almost foundational moral requirement. Shame on the Left who criticizes Sheehan for this statement and, maybe, actual plan of action.
In the end, I’m just as concerned about what this says about the Left’s attitude toward women and activism. Walsh’s write-up smacks of this sentiment, just barely beneath surface of the strategic concerns: you’re a mother. Go mourn your son and love your children. That split between the domestic and the political has done so much harm to women. You know what, ladies? Don’t bring THAT stuff out here in the big boy world. And it has done real harm to our public life. The concerns of “mothers,” literally or figuratively (your choice), are actually the concerns of a good society: how we live and eat and suffer and die. I don’t think we have to scratch much at these sort of sentiments before that very sentiment comes out. Consider Walsh’s own words:
I was also a little relieved when Sheehan said she’d retired from the movement in May. I never wanted to criticize Sheehan; she lost her son and she tried to do something brave and world-changing with her grief…In May she told reporters she was taking a break from the struggle to spend more time with her three children, and I was happy for her.
And yet making that grief political – rather than just symbolic, edging into politics – over-reaches? Maybe we have a lot still to learn from this mother, in particular that an aesthetic revolution is no revolution at all. That is, posturing as a mournful mother, while it might grant Walsh et. al. some relief and “happy for her” feelings (aesthetic effect par excellence!), makes no change in how we live and suffer and die.
It is a rare thing for me to absolutely agree with you. I read that Walsh piece today and ended up just head-shaking but unsure as to why. This is a really helpful articulation of what was frustrating me–the demand that Sheehan remain symbolic. I am just not sure what good thing Pelosi is ‘holding together’ when whatever it is can make no substantive movement on the war in Iraq. Glad to see you online again!
Right on. Again.
I’ve found myself incapable of making cogent points lately so forgive me if this is a bit unfocused. I’m positively apoplectic at the state of things these days.
LiveEarth felt like a big circle jerk.
Every time some new revelation comes out about GeeWhat and Co’s crimes, Olbermann and the leftyblogosphere crow about THIS being the tipping point. THIS being the Saturday Night massacre… LOOK how it all resembles watergate! It’s uncanny! Their house of cards will come tumbling down!
And then… nothing.
The sixties were a myth.
What is the role for activism now? What should it look like? How can it work, realistically? This isn’t the turn of the century. People today are comfy, cosy. There’s no triangle shirtwaist factory fire to point to and say “Are you fucking KIDDING ME!?” Actually, there was, times a thousand. Americans watched in collective horror as a city drowned. We wiped a tear, yawned, rolled over and went back to sleep.
And as far as Iraq is concerned… There will never be a large enough groundswell to force DearLeader to reverse course because there will never be a draft. He knows where the line is and he won’t cross it. He’ll just put his tootsies right up against it and bleed this country dry.
I was at a dinner party with my folks a few months back. I was the youngin’ at the table. Everyone else was a child of the sixties. “Where are the kids?” they asked me. “The college students who have time for things like protests and raising hell?”
In their dorms, studying, getting high. Institute a draft and they’ll come out. By the way, where are you?
Cindy should be given a medal. There should be an army of Cindys. Fuck anyone who says otherwise. And yet, despite her valiant efforts, nothing changes.
What are we missing?
I can’t write any more letters or make any more calls. I can’t scream any more. I’m hoarse and besides, no one listens.
Where the fuck is Molly Ivins when I need her!?
I agree. Molly Ivins is sorely missed these days. And all the other stuff.
The funny thing about people asking “where are the students?,” and perhaps this was your point, is that older people are the ones who get shit done. They have the economic and political power, really. College kids could be in the streets every day and those in power would chuckle at “kids today…” and move along.
This is one of the lasting effects of the sixties myth: students do the activism work. And we all know it won’t mean anything.
People in their fifties and sixties are responsible for this war and this ongoing, ongrowing economic disparity. Since they hold the power and were the promisers of a new age, I hold them responsible. I don’t care if they “object” over expensive wine, watching HBO. They need to make that conscience work. After decades of fantasizing themselves “outsiders” (the whole sixties mythology), it is time to realize they are the insiders.
Cindy Sheehan is taking that responsibility seriously. If impeachment really would lose voters, etc. – to get back to Walsh’s write-up – then shouldn’t the Republicans have been weakened by all that bullshit with Clinton? Huh. History has a different lesson, I guess. At least the Republicans were consistent and meant what they said – and this is still true with the President today – about Clinton, Iraq, war-making. Disgusting as they are and this all has been, at least we knew they meant what they said. Entrenched Democrats don’t. It’s time to realize that and act on it. Enter Cindy Sheehan against Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah, Molly Ivins. Sorely missed.
I’m always grateful for posts that mention how the sixties accomplished nothing.
” I was at a dinner party with my folks a few months back. I was the youngin’ at the table. Everyone else was a child of the sixties. “Where are the kids?” they asked me. “The college students who have time for things like protests and raising hell?” ”
That exact same thing has happened to me twice recently. My mother and I were fighting about whether people should vote for Democrats. My mother, born in ‘53 – a child of the 60s, actually said those same words “where are all the college kids in the streets like in the 60s”? The second time was when I was at a July 4th anti-imperialist picnic with some older, pre-60s socialists. We got into a discussion where the old guys asserted that America was never as radical in recent history as in the Vietnam era and that we should thus view the Iraq war as a way to radicalize people into fighting capitalism (a perspective with which I strongly disagree: the Iraq war will not and cannot lead to a rejection of capitalism). I in turn asked the older people to look around the picnic and notice that there was a generation pointedly not present: out of the 30 or so people there, everyone was either 60 and up or 35 and under. Some radicalism. Likewise, my mother refuses to admit that the sixties accomplished zilch, understandably enough, having been a part of it herself. I think you got it exactly right in the comment John with the fantasy about being outsiders when they’re the insiders now. It’s as though they feel that they once resisted in the past, they are perpetually resisting. As though the system actually remembers the fact that they were once dissenters and is therefore subtly inhibiting their luxurious lifestyles and careers as doctors, stock brokers, and lawyers.
One beef that I have with the post is that you make no distinction between liberal and radical, it all just falls under “Left”, which I think is problematic. I think your argument would have been stronger if you pointed out that (white middle-class) 60s actvisim was liberal, not radical – and that radical implies a break with that tradition. Walsh is firmly in the liberal camp; we want to break with that.
The other thing I found interesting was the talk about symbolic fights. Baudrillard had some really interesting stuff on this. I think the best was in “The Spirit of Terrorism” where he argues that terrorism has an inherent symbolic advantage over the system in that it can use death as a weapon, whereas the system cannot. Of course, Baudrillard was often criticized for priveleging the symbolic over the real (how ironic), but I think symbolic battles strangely enough do effect reality. It’s the same as the idea that “paradox though it may seem… it is nonetheless true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Somehow symbolism has a strong impact on reality, perhaps because it is actually reality concentrated or simplified or magnified or…something.
Thanks for the comment, Jay. And you’re right about the “liberal” thing and how it pretty much sets a conservative political trajectory in motion.
I said “Left” and would keep the word, though with the modifier “institutional.” The institutional Left – by which I mean the Left concerned with the maintenance of power within the given system – is about swaying voters and the like. But that has come to mean giving up principles. I think this Left finds the President’s actions actionable, possibly to the point of impeachment. Certainly the Right was brave enough to press forward with their (albeit fucked-up, in my point of view) principles. No penalty, it turns out. The institutional Left has no courage that way.
Shouldn’t be surprised, I guess. Yet I always am. I’ll learn.
“The funny thing about people asking “where are the students?,” and perhaps this was your point, is that older people are the ones who get shit done.”
Yes, that was exactly my point. Poorly articulated as it was.
“If impeachment really would lose voters, etc. – to get back to Walsh’s write-up – then shouldn’t the Republicans have been weakened by all that bullshit with Clinton? Huh. History has a different lesson, I guess.”
I’m well aware I’m choir preaching here bit it makes me feel a mite better so here it goes…
I think the percentage of Americans who have a workable sense of our history (and sadly, by history, I mean anything before 2001) is frighteningly thin. And it’s from this knowledge that these bastards draw their power. In the past, those in power on the left and right alike have had enough respect for the constitution to at least pretend to work with in it’s boundaries. These guys quite literally have no shame. They know no one knows or cares enough to call them on their flagrant and repeated breaking of the law. It’s awe inspiring. Positively stupefying.
Impeachment can not be about political maneuvering. It doesn’t matter what it means for the next election. What matters is that by NOT at least attempting to impeach these heinous excuses for leaders, we are institutionalizing the justification for their crimes and that can not stand.
Then again, what the hell do I know? I’m just a writer. I don’t “get” the reality of politics the way Rahm et al do. I should just leave it to the professionals.
Totally agree. And your comments were super clear, actually!
The professionalization of politics, which has been around for thousands of years, at least, is just so icky. Writers, et. al., are our only hope. That’s my take. So, it’s no coincidence that conservatives have taken on lawyers, professors, and journalists as the last enemy. People-who-think-critically-for-a-living, in other words.