Patriotism and the Prison of Dissent

On the same day that Barack Obama begins his nationalistic patriotism tour in Independence, Missouri, the authorities-that-be announced that protesters will be fenced in by chain-length
or chicken-wire during the Democratic National Convention. While the Democratic presidential candidate wags on about a love of country and the importance of sacrifice to the nation-state, the Federal Court approves the creation of "Free Speech Zones," or the sectioning off of areas where Freedom of Speech can be granted within a metal cage.

What Obama, the Federal Government, the City of Denver, Secret Service, and Homeland Security are forgetting is that to demonstrate a commitment to the best of "American" ideals, basic constitutional rights must be protected by any means necessary. Rather than addressing the ever-increasing totalitarianism of the United States Police State, Obama glibly blabs patriotic pap as police continue harassing communities of color, queer people, poor people, and people who dare criticize the corporate state this country has become.

The cage protesters will be confined in will be a visual reminder of the 2 million plus people incarcerated in the United States, the legacy of slavery that U.S. corporations continue to profit from, the Japanese Internment Camps, and the incarceration of queer people.

When Obama yaks about patriotism, it is imperative to remember what pro-Americanism supports--genocide masked by the right to life, slavery masked by the right to liberty, and the planned poverty, sickness, and misery of millions masked by the right to the pursuit of happiness.

American patriotism is the naturalization of racism and in claiming this project of white supremacy, Obama's claims of patriotism become a tool for white power.

The Fist of a Ghost: White Nostalgia and the DNC Protests

Political nostalgia signifies the death knell of the white Left. Denver has been overcome with it. First it was the slogan "recreate 68" which has received dozens of varying and historically intriguing critiques. Even so, the folks in Recreate 68 made compelling cases for the evocation of that complicated year referring to Paris, May of 68 and a spirit of revolution. While I don't share their analysis, they've made a concerted effort to defend their title and largely I bought their line.

Perhaps, that is, until it excused an even more nostalgic project.

A new ghost of the sixties has arrived--Come Up to Denver---a website and video based on Crosby, Stills and Nash's song Come To Chicago. I am not sure why people believe that youth culture can be revived via nostalgia for the 60s white counter-culture, a subculture fraught with racism, patriarchy, hierarchical leadership, and other systems and structures rejected by the best of contemporary activism.

Let me say it once and for all : I think evoking the sixties as an inspiration to today's youth is a bad idea.

When I saw the video Come Up to Denver for the first time I couldn't decide whether I should laugh or cry. Sometimes the only response to cliché is cliché.

Unlike Denver, the people in the video are largely, if not entirely white. The musicians are wallowing in an earnest glorification of musty music. The music video contracts grim shots of left-over, white hippies in Denver with Civil Rights era masses protesting in full force. In desperation, the contemporary outmoded hippies cling to a few uninspired, hand-scrawled signs.

The image conveyed by so-called activists is pathetic. It fails to capture the truly inspirational actions going on throughout town--productive projects like The Derailer Bicycle Collective, INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, Food Not Bombs, Cafe Cultural, Cafe Nuba, Sisters of Color United For Education, Art in Motion, Transform Columbus Day and Denver Open Media.

A misused image of Abu Ghraib and an illustration of a black man tied to a chair accompany the badly sung song. These two still images are two of the few photographic references to the struggles of people of color. Static, frozen icons, bodies of color become symbolic objects for the misguided benevolent white activists to giddily, happily try to demonstrate on behalf of. The paternalistic objectification and inability to include moving images of people of color betrays the resurgence of 60s style racism, a wolf hiding in hairy, white skin.

What's stranger than what is shown is that the video erases inspirational contemporary histories--the recent May 1st immigration marches in Denver where tens of thousands protested corrupt immigration policy, the hundreds of thousands in the streets who protested the Republican National Convention and the millions around the world who protested the war.

The video fails to address local issues of race--police brutality, housing foreclosures, mass incarceration of people of color, failures of the education, health, and social service sector alike. By erasing activists of color and the issues communities of color face, the video traffics in a white supremacist, white cultural narcissism even the two-party system has moved beyond with its problematic tokenism of Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell.

Rarely do I use my blog to criticize people trying to do good things. In this case, my sincere belief is that without a harsh critique of the video's erasure of people of color, glorification of outmoded, anachronistic, failed 60s movements, and inability to appeal to all but a handful of nostalgic, white, aging hippies unaware of white supremacy, many far from Denver might assume that this video represents what the protest movements at the Democratic National Convention will be all about.

Fortunately, this assumption can be dead wrong.

With fierce actions promoting immigrant rights, combating the prison industrial complex, racist military recruiting strategies, the white gentrification of communities of color, and environmental racism, the protests at this years conventions have the opportunity to be a new jumping off point in anti-authoritarian organizing where the much neglected issues of race finally come to the surface as the anachronistic white Left withers into oblivion.

6.26.08. COME UP TO DENVER AND RECREATE 68 ARE TWO ENTIRELY DISTINCT PROJECTS. RECREATE 68 DID NOT PRODUCE THE VIDEO COME UP TO DENVER.