IVE BEEN WATCHING We Interrupt This Empire , a documentary by ...
Watching Empire from my place in the Castro, I'm struck by the true San Fran flavor of the protests. People blocked traffic with yoga: Upward dog! Downward dog! Warrior II! At one lockdown, folks from various walks of life shook their booty and crooned Milli Vanilli at the riot cops: "Girl, you know it's true! Ooo, ooo, ooo, I love you!" The Biotic Baking Brigade pied the odious and unfortunately named Jennifer Jolly, a Channel 2 banshee who was ranting off-camera about the protestors. Through a mask of tofu creme, she shrieked, "Who did that!?!" and a bystander sneered, "It was the Iranians, lady!"
This past month in SF, I've been spending some time with Patrick Reinsborough, a longtime educator and organizer who founded smartMeme (smartmeme.com), a project to develop new, analysis-based tools for social change and promote a culture of strategy in grassroots movements. For the 2004 election cycle, smartMeme has launched an idea campaign called Beyond Voting. There's a lot more to righting societal ills than just beating Bush, and the campaign is working to mobilize people to do more than just vote as an expression of democracy.
What excites me most about smartMeme is the emphasis on strategy, analysis and vision. Activists often fall into a terrible trap: We tend to marginalize ourselves by identifying solely with protest versus conceiving of sustainable social movements. Our own sense that we are outnumbered, that change isn't really possible, goes a long way toward keeping radicals on a self-imposed fringe. For those of us from privileged backgrounds, that's in part a failure to understand the long-term nature of struggle.
But it's in large part due to something Reinsborough discusses in "De-colonizing the Revolutionary Imagination," an essay that appears in an upcoming City Lights Press anthology called Globalize Liberation. Reinsborough, a man as tall as he is likeable, points out that, "Colonialism is not just the process of establishing physical control over territory; it's the process of establishing the ideologies and the identities-colonies in the mind-that perpetuate control." Those ideologies include racism, consumerism, sexism and social classes. Imagining a culture devoid of such things, a culture that values human life and the health of the planet over corporate profits, is daunting.
One of the myriad reasons that protest alone doesn't cut it: We don't have money, and we don't have power. It's 21st-century David and Goliath. We do, however, have the facts on our side. Yet those facts are not always evident outside activist enclaves, and using our campaigns and direct actions to communicate them in thought- and action-provoking ways-versus data-laden fliers or the ever-popular shrill rant-is key. Ergo, the "meme." Patrick's definition is, "a unit of self-replicating cultural transmission (ex. ideas, slogans, melodies, symbols) that spreads virally from mind to mind."
Take the Billionaires. During the 2000 election cycle, the Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) campaign (billionairesforbush.com) used eye-catching satire to convey the simple but profound message that big money owned both candidates. Hundreds of activists across the country dressed up as Billionaires and tailored the shtick to their projects. Memes are not ends in themselves, though. They can be potent amplifiers for the range of social-change work we do; there's tremendous power in the stories we tell.
To oversee their media operations, the RNC has hired James Wilkinson, director of strategic communications at U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar, and the force behind the story of the Jessica Lynch rescue. Back in October, he told the New York Observer, "We're looking at embedding reporters. We're looking at new and interesting camera angles." Clearly, the Bushies know the value of a story, and they're gearing up to spin some turbo-powered yarns. As we prepare for the biggest protests NYC has ever seen, a great deal rests on how well we tell our side.
We Interrupt This Empire? will screen March 14 & 15 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the New York Underground Film Festival.