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Incremental Steps to "The Revolution"
By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)
"It won't change tomorrow, or after the next election. No candidate of this moment will change it in any measurable sense. But it can be done. It must be done. We are Americans, children of a crazy dream, always striving to make that more perfect union, so that we will be a little more free tomorrow than we were yesterday."
THE POWER OF MARSHMALLOWS
From a 1968 letter to a dear friend about to go on trial for his Draft Resistance work:
"Would it sound patronizing, Bob, if I said I'm proud of you and what you've been doing these past few years? You've got more guts than I, that's obvious; I hope your payoff is worth it all. I think it probably is.
"I've always used the image of a marshmallow to characterize American society: it is so flabbily strong, it can take any punch thrown at it, usually absorbing the puncher in the process. What it can't absorb, it disciplines, harshly or softly, depending upon the mood of the time. In my more pessimistic moments, I believe the U.S. mottleclass society can absorb anything the left can present; Chicago is a good demonstration of that. It absorbed the Gene McCarthy thrust, then disciplined the radicals -- and, of course, the great American public supports the cops, who are now a political power all their own to be reckoned with...
"So you see, despite all our agitations and hard slogging labors, the 'objective conditions' are not present for a massive social revolution, and will not be present in the foreseeable future. The underlying structure is simply too strong, too well-entrenched for anything other than occasional reform.
"In my more optimistic moments, I see the crumbling pillars of the superstructure about ready for the historical shove, and the merging of the youth/hip/black/student movements -- if they ever could do it -- would serve as that shove, as they are attempting to do (and sometimes even manage to do) from Belgrade to Bratislava to Berkeley to Beijing. Oversimplified, I admit, but enough of 'something happening,' of generational gaps, to justify the analogy.
"I feel torn -- intellectually and tactically schizoid -- when listening to the current movement debates. Is this the year? Is now the time? Perhaps I've answered that for myself: I'm going down to Seattle next Tuesday to join in the founding convention of the New Party in Washington State."
THOSE PESKY "OBJECTIVE CONDITIONS"
If the "revolution" couldn't come in The Sixties when tectonic social plates seemed to be shifting every day, then it probably wasn't coming at all. (By "the revolution," I think we activists meant a "revolution" in consciousness throughout the land that would lead to imminent major changes and shifts in everything from politics to foreign policy to economics to education to child-rearing, etc. etc.) "We want the world, and we want it NOW," to quote Jim Morrison, but, alas, it wasn't going to be that easy.
The giant American "marshmallow" absorbed that social dynamic, deflected it, attacked it, altered it, and the "New Left/hippie" alliance began splitting apart (with a little help from J. Edgar Hoover & Friends) as factions and ideological sects emerged to battle for the future direction of "the movement."
It turned out that the "objective conditions" were really not there in "The Sixties" (roughly mid-'60s to the mid-'70s) for the kind of changes we desired. And that could be said, in spades, for our current situation in 2007, though we must continue to do everything we can to help create those "objective conditions."
True, anger and resentment and frustration are building and gaining momentum in the body politic, enough so that there is at least talk about the formation of progressive alternatives to the calcifying Democratic Party leadership. But it's all amorphous, scattered energy, with few if any leaders or factions emerging to help guide its birthpangs. At least not yet.
AMALGAMS & ALLIANCES
I suspect that it may be too late to do anything significant along these lines for the 2008 election, though certainly it's imperative that we keep fighting for those changes now. This at the same time we're loosening the soil and planting seeds that will grow and send out deep roots, and hopefully yield a bountiful harvest of grassroots alliances somewhere down the line, perhaps even as early as the midterm election of 2010 and the presidential campaign of 2012.
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