This Week: Just Say No!
This week: Civil Disobedience with L.A. Kauffman, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Mariama White Hammond, Vanessa Williamson and Mark Greif. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime at our website.
Mary McGrath: Open Source was on the march last weekend. Our troops were deployed in Boston, New York City and at the official women’s march in Washington, DC. (Don’t tell NPR; we understand they sent a memo to staff advising them not to attend.) It was an amazing, empowering display: “anxious and buoyant”, Chris called it; L.A. Kauffman said it was “upbeat unruliness.” We tried to answer the inevitable and obvious what-now questions, and our guests had good answers and good context. Protest works (and at press time there was evidence that the weekend airport protests over Trump’s refugee ban were working), L.A. Kauffman reminds us, recalling not just the big ones — the massive world-wide demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2003 that had exactly no impact, for example, but things like the work of the activist group ACT-UP that did — raising important awareness about AIDS in the 80’s and significantly speeding up FDA drug approvals, which was one of their specific goals. Remember these signs?
We loved all the imaginative signs last weekend that gave the protests some humor and edge, too, of course, from bawdy to badass. Here’s our own Susan Coyne’s poster:
And who could miss the rogue twitter accounts from the Park Service this week!
For Keeanga Taylor, the incredibly sharp Princeton professor who wrote an important book about Black Lives Matter, radical reconstruction is the name of the game here, and it needs to happen outside the Democratic Party.
Her guide is Angela Davis (who also spoke in DC last week), who said radical simply means grasping things at the root; so for Taylor the target needs to be our economic system that privileges the tiniest minority against the vast majority. One line that didn’t make it into the show was her observation that President Barack Obama had the power and ability to direct drone strikes in the farthest reaches of the mountains of Pakistan, but couldn’t stop the police brutality directed towards African American communities in the U.S.
Zach Goldhammer: This week, we asked our guests to help come up with a name for the nascent resistance. While each was understandably reluctant to try and title the diverse, amorphous movements that are now forming all across the country, the name I’d offer is: “The War on Trump.”
We’re all pacifist at the OS office, so this militarized frame might seem a bit off-brand. But by now we’ve become used to top-down metaphorical wars issued by the executive office — the wars on drugs, poverty, and even on “Christmas” — so now maybe it’s time to declare militant opposition against the office of the president. As Trump mounts his own blitzkrieg this week in terrifyingly anti-democratic executive orders, why not mobilize ourselves in battle formation?
Unfortunately, the Democrats seem too timid to make any such declaration. Even our local fave Liz Warren inexplicably conceded her vote in confirming Ben Carson this week, right after rallying the marchers in oppositional marchers in Boston over the weekend (as Keeanga Taylor put it on our show: “She was raising hell at the women’s march on Saturday and doing the devil’s work on Tuesday.”)
If even the most progressive and pugnacious Democrats are unwilling to mount a real, revolutionary opposition, the left may need to form into something like the Tea Party which, as our guest Vanessa Williamson knows, took over the Republican party in the Obama years and now effectively owns it.
There may be quite a bit that the left can learn from Republican strategies this week, as Michael Kinnucan notes in Current Affairs. Mark Greif, in a portion of our conversation that didn’t make it to air (we’ll be posting the full interview later this week) also notes that we can learn a lot from a figure like Kim Davis, a government employee who took a moral stand against a policy she opposed. Even if you don’t agree with Davis’ views (and we don’t), Greif says, channeling his hero Henry David Thoreau, we should still respect and maybe even admire those who have the strength of will to take an individual stand for what he or she believes.
Perhaps progressives and liberals in government should start doing the same. As Chapo Trap House podcast co-host Will Menaker wrote, in an uncharacteristically sincere Facebook post this weekend:
Every one of these objectively monstrous, cowardly and evil executive orders issued this week depend on the acquiescence of thousands of federal employees and bureaucrats to carry them out. They, and all of us must get used to monkey wrenching all of this. If the Democratic leadership wanted to really be “The Resistance” they would hold a press conference and encourage all federal employees to passively resist or openly sabotage their new bosses. Stop doing work, leak everything, break the law. Start with all airports, grind everything to a halt. Same goes for Congress, stop everything through every means, legal or otherwise. If you want to make a difference, remove your consent. Let’s start thinking about a mass general strike, it’s the only hand left to play.
This is the week to make it happen. Let’s find our Kim Davises — maybe they’ll be TSA agents & NYC cab drivers — and get this Thoreauvian war of civil disobedience going.
(FWIW, Tim Barker also reminded me that friend-of-the-show Nathan Robinson wrote a Thoreau-inspired children’s book on rule breaking & civil disobedience called Don’t Let the Pigeon Question The Rules! A Parody. Pick up a copy for your anarchic kids.)
What We’re Reading: Lots of Baldwin
Chris Lydon: The force of the Harlem prophet James Baldwin (1924–1987) is breaking on us anew.
Those incendiary essays from the Sixties — in Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time — were part of our growing up, such as it was. John F. Kennedy gave the commencement speech to our Yale class of 1962, and James Baldwin addressed our big dinner on the eve. We thought we knew Baldwin, but his sentences go off again like rockets for today, and the novels read like classics.
Maybe his first was his best, Go Tell It on the Mountain, nakedly autobiographical about the zealous 14-year-old boy in the Lenox Avenue storefront church, whose father, the deacon, kept telling him he had the face of Satan. David Leeming’s illumination helps: that in Go Tell It, Baldwin was composing a version of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: a decisive flight from father, country, church and empire — laying out the author’s ambition to speak ‘the uncreated conscience of my race.’
And then comes Raoul Peck with his documentary film, ‘I Am Not Your Negro,’ in which not just the fire but the love and the heartbreak in James Baldwin all speak to us as if he were in the room. The frame of Raoul Peck’s story is Baldwin’s effort to write a personal chronicle of the civil rights movement in the stories of three revered men: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — assassinated in 1963, then 1965 and 1968, before any of his subjects reached the age of 40. Baldwin wanted to call his book Remember this House. Small wonder that he could not bear to finish it. Visionary, humanist, preacher to the end, James Baldwin keeps telling us: “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America.”
The wise comic Jimmy Tingle is an old friend. He’s doing his Humor for Humanity show at Sanders Theatre on February 4th. Use the code — Open Source — when you buy a ticket, and you’ll be helping our cause, too!
Don’t pay attention to that Doomsday Clock; at least we get one more Super Bowl with Tom Brady.
We’re gonna make it after all! Go Pats!
Mary, Zach, Chris and the OS mob
