In a thousand years, if there’s History / America’ll be remembered as a nasty little Country.” — Allen Ginsberg
The above is a dooming epitaph for a doomed millennium, and not only because this country again fell for a centuries-old joke and elected another president. What frightens me is not the 50 percent or so who did not vote, but rather the other 50 percent who showed up to compromise their very selves at the polls, thinking Nader would be better than Gore would be better than Bush.
It’s no great stretch here to argue that only sheep need shepherds, and that anyone capable of being president should by no means be allowed to do the job, least of all that crafty little sawed-off pip-squeak who, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll say won the election. But if you voted in November, regardless of which lever you pulled, consider yourself implicated: Voting is not a political action, it’s political acquiescence.

There is some kind of deep connection between these thoughts and the topic of activism here at the University and in Eugene. Excepting, perhaps, a few anarchists — who, as little more than caricatures of themselves, could stand to brush up on their historical and philosophical anarchism ? the local, so-called activists are perfectly content to fancy themselves ‘progressive’ or ‘alternative’ because they organize a conference on ‘sustainability’ (insert your favorite abstract catch-phrase here) or because they can afford to shop at Sundance Natural Foods or The Kiva.
Frankly though, when the cold eye of history looks back on this time, the idea that consumer tendencies or circle-jerk forums could affect significant change in a capitalist system is going to look downright ridiculous. The last thing this country needs is another insular academic movement or politics based on spending money.
But these people are good soldiers and true believers, and they’re gathering some dramatic stories to tell their children. Our trusty activists will graduate from college, find a job with PepsiCo or a fashionable not-for-profit of dubious necessity, and they will ultimately become a piece of the system they once claimed to fight and detest. Should their motives ever be called into question, they can point to — as evidence of their open-mindedness — the time they went to Portland and chanted anti-U.S. slogans and demanded the liberation of East Timor or some other country about which they knew nothing. It’s just an insurance policy against the inevitable future.
Political apathy, however, is no longer fashionable — to the point that those who are suspicious of the government are also no longer merely paranoid or subversive. As I write this, some 20,000-30,000 people with thorns in their respective asses are giving a very active finger to the pompous, flag-waving nonsense of “globalization,” as it’s so benignly termed. Then again, the fact that a multimillionaire oil titan president is paying less income tax than most city of Eugene employees, even while energy prices skyrocket, ought to put a briar in the butt of more than a few normally complacent citizens.
But if any one of these thousands of valiant fools in Quebec City has any doubts about what he or she is doing, then that person is on the right track. It takes at least two teams to play any game, and the requisite protesters are merely providing the necessary opposition for the home team, as it were. Capitalism has been in place for thousands of years and this — meaning the Free Trade Area of the Americas, as well as wars, treaties and secret negotiations — is the game they play to propagate their wickedness upon you, the citizen. In the same vein, and for the same tens of thousands of years, people have been holding protests and rallies as the scripted opposition.
When the orders came down from above, these good soldiers in Quebec did as told: They protested. But as long as people are willing to work in sweatshops or for $6 per hour in this country, none of these protests will do a damn bit of good, and certainly nothing will change until we stop thinking on their terms, in the prescribed realm of capitalism.
People en masse will have to walk away from our present economic and political system — and this means putting yourself on the line, for which organizing a conference or ‘buying local and organic’ cannot possibly prepare you — before anyone anywhere can expect a significant concession from the powers that be.