A Conference to Remember: Response, Re/Action. And Revolt
I had hoped to post this blog piece two week ago: but here it is Norman Markowitz. I was also the author of the article on Religious Wars and the Republcians but didn’t put in my name
Bowling Green, Ohio. The Seventh Annual Battleground States Conference, sponsored by the
Bowling Green State University’s Culture Club, its American Studies Department. A former student of
mine, Diana Dipasquale, a graduate student now and a key organizer of the Conference asked me to
participate as a keynote presenter.
I was happy to go and participate and asked that I be cited as a contributing editor of Political Affairs,
which they were happy to put on the conference cover. I had lived for five years in the upper Middle
West in another time in U.S. history, 1966-1971. I had spent three years as a graduate student at the
University of Michigan, getting my degrees in U.S. History on a National Fellowship which Richard Nixon
took away from the Humanities just as I completed my degree(he believed not without some
justification that the graduate programs in the humanities were important centers of opposition to his
administration—just as Santorum believes today that Obama wants everyone to go to college so that
they can be brainwashed into becoming liberals(what a disgrace the man is to his decent Communist
relatives in Italy)
I then taught for two years at Northern Illinois University at DeKalb, Illinois, the hard of the very cold, very windy Corn Belt, before I went to Rutgers. Those were among the best years of my life so far and I have often wondered what would have happened if I had stayed.
But that in the U.S. was really another, albeit related historical epoch. To make a long story short, the organizations and institutions of capitalism today are much worse as they harm the majority people in their daily lives in the U.S. but the people whom I met outside and inside the Conference were at least as good and often a lot better.
My first presentation was titled “Back to the future: Politics, Mass Media, and Resistance to the “new normal” 1908-present.”based on recent Political Affairs articles I had written. But, I had to postpone it because I ran into the “new normal “ on my way out to the Detroit airport I had a 9 0.clock plane to catch at Newark Liberty Airport. As I was on the train heading to the airport at 7:30 AM my cellphone rang to tell me that the (o’clock was no an 11 o’clock. After waiting around for a few hours, my 11 became a 12 o’clock. A fellow would-be passenger mentioned that Delta was in and out of bankruptcy and they wouldn’t have even cell phoned me were it not for new Obama regulations. He also mentioned that there were people who had gotten their tickets much earlier than us who were paying half of what were and others who had gotten their tickets later who were paying more than twice as much I
As 12 were nearing, I and my fellow passenger had also gotten seats on a 12:30 flight. Now it was a gamble. He chose the 12:30 flight and I stuck with the 9 aka 11 aka 12 noon flight. He won and I lost as the twelve noon after leaving the gate came back and didn’t leave until 1:40 P.M
So much for the efficiency of deregulated capitalism. But then when I got to Detroit Metro everything changed. The man whom my student had gotten to pick me up, a retired motel owner who know drove people to and from airports, a man with the best of the small business , be efficient and treat your customers with dignity, had kept in touch with me through all of this by cell phone, guided me to where he was, and took me to the Bowling Green in the most efficient way possible.
As we drove through the de-industrialized regime we both remembered better times and the nonsense of politicians who think they can revive industry with gambling casinos. I thought how things might have been if the stimulus funds had gone to small business like this man, and to a public jobs program to repair the crumbling infrastructure, not to the monopoly banks and large corporations.
Certainly, Delta was no example of anything positive. The first airline flight that I have ever taken was in August 1966 to go to the Detroit airport. That flight cost 10 times less, was on time, and even gave you a meal on board
Bowling Green State University reminded me of Northern Illinois University at DeKalb when I first came there is 1969.The undergraduates I was told, were heavily first generation college students from Cleveland working class suburbs and rural areas. The Conference itself was a sort of multi-media festival, an attempt to explore and enhance activism through culture.
The presentations at the conference were wonderfully diverse. The ones I missed were titled Welcome to My Channel: YouTube and Social Commentary, Regional Activism through Artistic Production, and the Construction of Race in Disparate Institutions and Cultural Industries, among others. I also missed my own first presentation, but the it was rescheduled for the following day with no trouble. The university classrooms were very well organized, better than I was used to at Rutgers and of course much more efficient than Delta.
Panels the following day dealt with everything from Urban Sustainability to Challenging Popular Notions through Visual Forms to a Wikipedia Workshop. There was one that I attended, “Embodying the Change: Wisconsin as the Apogee of Solidarity and Resistance. Here three graduate students from Wisconsin/Milwaukee gave presentation on the Occupy movement, its achievements and failure. Th3 first presentation, by Melissa Seifert, dealt with the role of homemade peoples art in the occupation and its living on in the signs and posters of the capital and other places—art not only for by literally by the people. I thought of my old comrade, the late Charles Keller, who always fought to the role of art and culture in the policies of the CPUSA—he would have loved this conference, which saw politics and cultural as two streams flowing together to make a powerful current.
The Conference ended with my Keynote panel, moderated by Dr, Ellen Berry. She said that it reflected different generations and kinds of struggle and she was very right. Dr. Kembrew McLeod of the University of Iowa, film maker and Professor in the Communications Department led off. You may have come across Professor McLeod but, as was true of many actors in Hollywood, don’t remember the name.
He studies political pranks in mass media among other things and he revised his own prank character, a robot who confronts politicians. Recently he turned his robot into a “gay robot” to stick it to Michelle Bachmann at one of her Iowa rallies and reached national and international media by focusing on her reactionary homophobic demagoguery. He dealt with the strengths and weaknesses of such pranks, how one can use media while at the same time understanding the dangers of being used by media.
My presentation, which was well received, was decidedly “old left” or “new old left,” since the “new left” is now the “old new left” for many. I stressed the necessity of educating, organizing and coordinating struggle, the successes of center left political movements in the past and their possibilities for the future. In as non-doctrinaire way as I could. I also stressed the necessity of criticism but constructive criticism of the Obama administration and this was also very well received in a state where “tea party” Republicans used the failure to establish an effective jobs program to seize power but where the ultra-right governor, John Kasich, has suffered major defeats in his campaign to destroy the labor movement and is hugely unpopular.
Mark Covington, an African American organizer of the Georgia St. (Detroit) Community Collective, an urban farmer seeking to create a productive community based collective in a slum region also spoke of the collective, its achievements and struggles as the third keynote presenter.
As I went home to New Jersey, I was much more hopeful of struggles and victories ahead, even though Delta didn’t disappoint me ---if was more than an hour late thanks to what the pilot called “air traffic control “ issues. When he said that such things were “rare,” though, the passengers on the flight burst out in laughter
If there is an afterlife or a re-incarnated existence, (I would not bet on either) maybe Ronald Reagan is somewhere waiting for hours and hours to catch a plane, only to be bumped off the flight and receive a cell phone message from former air traffic controllers telling him that he deserved that but the people deserve much better. And we will work to assure that the get much better in regard to jobs, transportation, health care, housing, and a politics that is less history, in Marx’s famous comment repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, but endless reruns of a farce that has tragic consequences for the lives of working people.
