On authentic messes, strategic militancy, and the middle-class fantasy
Three readings plus a chance to give
Hello dears, it’s lovely to be back with you after a month staying just afloat on the high surf of full-time K-12 and adult teaching and instructional-design piecework; haven’t had a moment for consecutive thought till now. Starting this month’s post with a request: please consider a gift to the re-entry fund of my good friend Clyde Jackson. Clyde recently turned 60, his first birthday on the outs after 42 years in the California prison system, 23 of which were spent in solitary confinement. Clyde and I have been penpals since 2014, when he was involved in the (successful) hunger strike and coordinated legal campaign against California’s torturous, unconscionable use of indefinite solitary confinement; he was finally freed on January 3 of this year.
Clyde is a tender, wise, and soulful person, an intellectual and a committed mentor to the younger men he met both in prison and now in transitional housing. He’s well-supported and loved by comrades, friends, and family, but a gift to this re-entry fund is still meaningful: it’s a nest egg, the only one he’ll have, toward things like first and last month’s rent, a car, a laptop, all the essentials he needs as he applies for jobs and returns to life on the outs. Thank you!
Also, mark your calendars: I’ll be reading poems as part of the wonderful Poetry Séance series Friday, July 28 at the Royal Room here in Seattle. More details soon.
Below are seven three things I loved on the internet this month: a touch of radical history, a jokey stroll through a future I never got, and some actually messy TV.
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Johanna Fernández on The Dig. The Dig podcast is one of my favorite left intellectual spaces anywhere, and I’ve now fully reconciled myself to host Daniel Denvir’s voice—a guest called him “the Communist Ira Glass” and I now adore his earnest, amused, rushed cadence—so I’m listening back through his archives. My favorite oldie so far is his interview with Professor Johanna Fernández on her then-recent (2020! I go slow!) book, The Young Lords: a Radical History. Fernández’s book deals with the history of this radical organization’s New York chapter, which focused on health justice and urban poverty as the 60s turned the 70s, but she begins by describing the Lords’ initial emergence in Chicago. The first Lords were members of Puerto Rican youth gangs, formed in the early 60s, during America’s first period of deindustrialization, to protect their neighborhoods against white-ethnic gangs who saw post-WWII Black and Puerto Rican immigrants as interlopers in a competition for scarce resources. The Lords began as a gang, but under the leadership of José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, they became an activist organization, one modeled on the Black Panthers. Thanks to publicity in the Panther paper, the Chicago organization inspired a New York chapter, one consisting mostly of college-educated working-class first- and second-generation Puerto Rican Americans, many of whom had been politicized by radical teachers who’d snuck into classrooms through Johnson-era antipoverty educational programs.
The Lords’ program and activism, rooted in the Panthers’ Ten Point Platform, hoped to inspire a united Third World and US-proletarian revolution. They didn’t succeed, but they were ambitious, militant, and (for their most effective years) absolutely committed to community organizing. The amount the Lords accomplished over 1969 and 1970 is astounding. They all lived together; Fernández notes in passing that the cost of living in New York was then much cheaper. New cadre had to complete a stack of Third World Marxist reading and then run, as a test, a free community breakfast program for their neighborhood before being given membership. (Early members included Democracy Now’s Juan Gonzalez and Last Poet Felipe Luciano.)
The New York chapter’s first campaign, in 1969, was a “Garbage Offensive”: sanitation and trash collection in East Harlem had been horrid for years, and white sanitation workers were openly racist to their Puerto Rican co-workers. (This, when the Lords had asked, had been their neighbors’ number-one concern—not police brutality, not independence for Puerto Rico, etc.—so the Lords took it on first.) In response, the Lords blockaded busy intersections all over Manhattan with garbage, sometimes set aflame, and publicized demands for better collection and sanitation—as well as raises for all sanitation workers. And they succeeded! Their following campaign, against the “silent epidemic” of lead poisoning in their communities, shamed the city into removing lead paint as well as sending doctors door to door to immunize against and test for sickle cell, rubella, and measles. (Lords organizers coined the term “diseases of poverty.”)
The Lords’ work against staffing cuts at East Harlem’s Metropolitan Hospital took them into campaigns organizing healthcare workers (one of the few professions in the city then open to women of color without a B.A.) and patients (as children, many Lords had had to support and interpret for parents through horrible ER visits and ignorant racist medical care). The Lords developed the first patient bill of rights, including the right to a translator, during their occupation of Metropolitan. Their later week-long armed occupation of a conservative Cuban evangelical church to create a daycare and free-meal program forced the city to roll out its own free-breakfast program.
So how did it end? In Fernández’s telling, the Lords were undone by a disastrous move to Puerto Rico in 1971—the group believed the US and its territories were on the edge of revolution just as conservative reaction was taking hold—and by their own increasing retrenchment in theoretical, culty Maoist vanguardism at the expense of basebuilding. After their church occupation, the Lords were also increasingly honeycombed by federal informants and provocateurs, corroding organizational trust. In adopting the Black Panther Party’s cadre structure, the Lords had also adopted some of the BPP’s predilections. Among these was the belief that it was the lumpenproletariat (unskilled workers, the unemployed, the homeless, the criminalized) who were the most revolutionary sector of society. This was opposed to the more orthodox Marxist belief that revolutionary action would first ignite among the educated working class, as had been the case, of course, among the Lords’ own New York membership. But this centering of lumpenproletarian recruitment had opened the group to new members vulnerable (because of criminal histories and police surveillance) to being pressured into informing or turning on members, as Fred Hampton’s bodyguard had been. COINTELPRO disruption heightened factionalism, paranoia, and distrust, and the group had withered by 1976. But in the militancy of their direct action, responsiveness to community needs, and skill at communication, the Lords left an astounding legacy. (See Fernández’s coda summarizing—I love things like this—the Lords’ lessons, as she understands them, for future radical organizers.)
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Pavement, Brighten the Corners. I probably have a whole essay in me on the CD shelves of the stripmall branch library of my adolescence—who was this librarian, this gorgeous lonely soul offering The Dreaming, Fear of a Black Planet, Giant Steps, Zen Arcade, Painful, Doolittle, The Yellow Princess, The Charm of the Highway Strip up to the suburbs, up to my nerdy hungry 13-year-old heart?—but the particular fruit of teenage nostalgia I’ve plucked from those shelves this month is Pavement’s Brighten the Corners. I checked it out on a rainy eighth-grade afternoon because I thought its cover was cool. Brighten was their fourth record, ramshackle and tuneful, enthusiastic and lazy like everything they made, but as I listened, I also found the band newly preoccupied with, like, adulthood. (Frontpeople Steven Malkmus and Scott Kannberg were both going on 31.) Adulthood, they reflected: what a funny thing! We spent our twenties rocking out, but here we now find ourselves, strolling shady lanes to a date with Ikea. Malkmus and Kannberg are ironic about it all, of course—“you’ve been such a great host / the roast / was just so perfectly prepared / I know-ow-ow you cared”—but there’s a bemused acceptance to the lyrics too. Hilarious, that after rock ‘n roll comes middle-class life, dreaming Passat dreams on the road to middle age.
This was a precocious, maybe even silly, dream for me to join in on at 13, but its comfortable inevitability was still there through white-boy adolescence. Can’t find the tweet now, but some 40s-ish wag recently jokingly gave voice to that long-ago-now dream, something like: When I grow up, won’t it be a bummer that my comfortable square job will leave me so little time to rebel?
And now, of course, at 39, on state benefits, squeezing my skinny independent-contractor earnings to raise a kid and still put aside something, I recognize that that dream has missed me. It’s weird to articulate it consciously: I can do, give, and be many things with my little portion of life, but I don’t think I’m ever going to be middle-class. Who among the adjuncts and teaching artists and instructional writers now can imagine a shady lane for ourselves? Yes, there’s something noble in the refusal, but I never quite got to refuse it.
We can love art for showing us something that we’ve never had, and we can love art for showing us something that we’ve lost, even something so small it hardly qualifies as a dream.
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Generation on HBO. This bright little ensemble TV show was canceled by HBO more than a year ago, after a single season (because HBO had a hit with its other teen-ensemble show, Euphoria, thanks I guess to its sensationalism and mostly-horrible view of human nature, and the network could shrug their smaller show off), and this is too bad. The world of Generation—Orange County high schoolers, some rich, some poor, groping through sexuality, bad fights, drama—has quite a bit more genuine moral messiness and gray zones than the zillion other ensemble dramedies it joins. Its characters are, like, complicated. Representation means something—sweet coming-out fables or anti-racist parables fortify us against many generations of exclusion or awful representations—but pop TV cares about representation in the flattest possible sense. “I love Sex Education,” my friend Cass told me this winter, “but it’s nowhere near as messy as it thinks it is.” A character has a feeling; a caring adult applies an identity to that feeling; the caring adult validates that identity; the character’s feeling is fixed. Or the mean character lashes out; the nice friend identifies the mean character’s unmet need; the mean character squirms; the mean character vulnerably acknowledges the unmet need; the mean character becomes nice.
In other words, pop TV wants us to feel good about ourselves for values we already have. Of course, The O.C. or Boy Meets World pandered, too, just to a different us with different values. But what I love about Generation is its mess: how characters, for example, crave love but have their own coldness flare up and interrupt receiving it; how they can’t stop picking at relationships, looking for a flaw; how they make moral resolutions secretly hoping their resolutions won’t remain necessary; how they come out and are still stuck with themselves; how they blow opportunities; how they fuck each other to spite each other; how they want to be treasured as unique even as they eat themselves up with self-dissatisfaction. How they behave, in other words, at least a little recognizably. (The Australian show Please Like Me—RIP!—was another exemplar of this kind of thing.) We can sometimes be shitheads to our friends; we can crave redemption without ever fully deserving it or fully saying thank you when we get it. I like seeing this mess on TV.
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Thanks for reading, friends! Tell me what you think and tell me what else I should read.
Also, you should subscribe to: Sam Kriss’s Numb at the Lodge, gnomic and funny (where exactly does his research shade into fantasy?), learned and enervated, childishly enthusiastic even about its own sense of doom.