The Year of Five Liberations (5 of 5)

by John Shannon

art by Paul Takizawa

13

Which still leaves us the question: What is true, what is self-deception, and what is merely the formalized necessity of hopefulness that you adopt when you set out on a path with others toward any goal at all? You cannot enter any organization, even the Boy Scouts, without a pledge to yourself to support its prospects for doing something honorable in the world. And that pledge makes you complicit with optimism. Cynicism, even the vaguest doubt, neutralizes the moral force of your decision, or at least diminishes its impact. Realism—if there can be such a thing any longer—becomes a term used only by those who stand off to the side, uncommitted, the passive consumers of our daily news-glut. You’re a member now, an actor, you’re inserted into the dialectic, so you must and do hope for the best.

It makes you different. Every argument develops along many levels. I think we should call a demonstration Friday. It will be the same old faces. It will put people into motion. Another pointless group of people waving signs. It might be seen on TV and have an effect there.

I can only imagine the fiercer and far more uncompromising disputes that would occur where lives were at stake. St. Petersburg, 1917.

“And you may turn out to be wrong, wrong, wrong!” Gordy will shout, as he does when he wants to muddy the waters for his own purposes. “Everything you do may blow up in your face!”

“Okay,” I yell back at him in frustration. “I accept, I agree! I’ve made a choice (a choice that I hope leads to human liberation) but I may be mistaken, and my innocent mistake (or my negligence before history) may mean defeat for our allies (or death or slavery). That’s the price of trying to make a change!”

I wince today, after what we know of Cambodia or the Gulag, but I said and wrote things very like it and it seems to me an inescapable attitude if you are honest enough to look at the consequences of even your most idle wishes, whenever you intend to make a political act. Let those horrors go on haunting us. Remembering events in their entirety is an ethical act. Dream and risk or don’t dream at all. Western capitalist liberalism (the view that all change is glacial and tends upward and never has evil consequences) has a skewed kind of glance that hides all the death and destruction in its wake—preferring not to see, preferring to compare its own high ideals to its enemies’ concrete acts. And the past becomes opaque: We believe in democracy and opportunity for all. True, it’s quite peculiar about all those poor dead Indians on the Great Plains. Perhaps mistakes were made.

14

Ends. Endings. Fissions. Implosions. At its simplest, at a certain point an institution no longer has the situation it needs to go on functioning. It may be external factors to some degree, such as a massive metaphorical deforestation, dust storms blowing away the topsoil, salt leaching into the rich farmland, but even then it is probably more a blind failure to respond to the external than the externals themselves, especially if you’ve always deceived yourself a little about these surrounding “forces in motion” that sustain you. Really, it’s something internal that’s no longer up to snuff, a balance has gone, a lethal dynamic ignored for ages stores up far too much centrifugal energy, a death wish rises from the unconscious (if Freud was ever right about anything) and everything that had once been part of a work in progress, malleable, fixable through process, becomes definitive, ramparts to defend, the black letter type of an obit.

I know, I know. These death throes should be available to explain everything. I should make them concrete and comprehensible.

But I am at a great disadvantage (I was no longer privileged, as the deconstructionists say) because as it happened I fell in love and moved overseas, and it was in that lost banal year that the wheels came off. The DOC became more and more unstable, pulsing and heaving out gas like a red giant announcing its impending supernova to the whole galaxy. I heard reports in my distant perplexity, rumors of wars, explanations, position papers were mailed to me, I even had visits from emissaries but nothing really made sense.  These twenty people I knew when the engine was running smooth were no longer quite the same people, and Gordy was almost right. What they were doing then changed the past, changed even what I had done.

The issue. There had to be an issue, you say. Or did there? Since what we were doing was inherently built on a grand illusion, maybe almost anything would have served to puncture our balloon. The war faded away, dynamic national leaders had been murdered, civil rights hotheads got the token jobs they had once denounced, and entropy slowly cooled the surrounding “movement” down to a soft and bewildered murmur. Did we still have any hope of striking a blow for a more human society?

15

Yet, in the Debs Organizing Committee we were only a score of people. How hard could it have been to see where our tiny groupule had been situated from the very beginning out in our edge city? Denny McMahon again: “We couldn’t have run a small bus system in Dubuque and still we wanted state power.” Do the young ever have a right to be so confident and so wrong?

16

One great error is to feel that our current apathy is the opposite of a passion. Apathy is born of two huge passions—rage and impotence.

17

Take 1968. That heartrending transient year. Memento Mori. Go ahead. Drop from the skies and ask the students of Paris, the intellectuals of Prague, the young of Mexico City or Montevideo about the value of their actions.

In America we no longer have a public space to ask these things, to challenge or question. We only have depoliticized TV and the Mall. Who knows why the whole world erupted that strange year, 1968, but millions shouted NO to the status quo. Be as sly and aloof as you wish, it was a magnificent year.

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