CSotD: Local interviews, global issues
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I find myself continually frustrated with the political process, in large part because the people who seem to question it also seem unwilling, or unable, to access it.
The great success of the Civil Rights Movement and, to a lesser extent, the Anti-War Movement, was the grassroots actions that did not simply confront the system but transformed it.
There were large moments, like the March on Washington in which Dr. King gave his famous speech to the throngs at the reflecting pool.
But the heart of the movement was in smaller actions, like voter registration drives in individual communities, and boycotts, and pamphleting at factory gates, and movements to elect mayors and state legislators.
Today, you sometimes hear people say "All politics are local" but you rarely see any follow-through. They want to elect a president from a third party, and they reject the two major candidates, but they don't see that the crack in which you can fit a wedge is much farther down, at the local level, at the grassroots level, and that you can't take the White House if you don't first take the school board and the city council and the state legislature. (Note: The Tea Party seems to grasp this.)
And they look to the major media for information that has never been in the major media until after it was in the local media. And local media no longer exists in most communities, given that the local outlets are owned by corporations that dictate cookie-cutter coverage, not out of a dystopian desire to suppress the truth but simply because it's less expensive.
This leaves the story-telling to people who are willing to do it on their own. Fortunately, there are still ways for those stories to be told, and cartoonists are a part of that.
Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco are bringing out a book called "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," for which they have gone around to local communities and talked to people whose lives have been impacted by an increasingly distant, global system.
Joe Sacco has been written about here at CSOTD for his work telling the stories of individual Palestinians.
"My interest," he said then, "is in the people who are dispossessed, who are swept under the rug of history."
And you really should click on that link for a more complete article on comics and political reporting. My point today is that Sacco continues to cover those people, but they don't all live in Third World countries. They are right here.
I think, if the book does nothing more, that it is important to make that point.
In one newsroom where I worked, there was a phrase "Stupid Angry People," which referred to the people who would stand up at the public comment portion of a meeting and rant about various things, or who were eager to buttonhole reporters after the meeting and rant, but who were all hot air and anger, with no real grasp of the actual issue that had upset them and certainly no practical solution for the problem they felt existed.
Stupid Angry People do get time on the news, because they are easy to find and because they project raw emotion into a story that would otherwise just be talking heads droning away.
What Sacco and Hedges have done, at least according to the excerpts from the book which will be released in about two weeks, is to seek out people who are less stupid and angry than resigned and frustrated, who feel the weight of a system that seems overwhelming and inevitable, "inevitable" not in the sense that it ought to be but in the sense that it is, and that there's nothing to be done about it.
What Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Cesar Chavez were able to do was to demonstrate to those people that the system is not inevitable, that it is vulnerable, that there are access points, that you can force the system to respond to your needs.
The placing of wedges in the cracks of the system requires, first, that people begin to recognize the frustrations of average people and, second, that they stop listening to Big Picture solutions from Stupid Angry People who don't know how to access the system.
First things first.
Here's Chris Hedges explaining the book:
In other news:
The Kenosha Festival of Cartooning has succeeded at Kickstarter and raised enough additional money to add friend-of-the-blog Hilary Price of Rhymes with Orange to a lineup that already included Stephan Pastis of Pearls Before Swine, Greg Cravens of The Buckets, Michael Jantze from The Norm and Jantze Animation Studios, Norm Feuti of Retail and Gil and Dave Coverly of Speed Bump and Parade Magazine and Tom Racine of Tall Tale Radio.
This will be a free event, thanks to the Kickstarter supporters. If you are anywhere near Kenosha this fall, you have to make it to this. Once the details are nailed down, I'll provide them.
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