CSotD: The Roar of the Greasepaint
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Matt Bors is the progressive equivalent of Scott Stantis: Prone to thoughtful commentary from a direction you don’t always expect. This pragmatic take on a very unpragmatic phenomenon surprised and delighted me.
I’m not going to project any further motivations on him, but, letting the piece speak for itself, I can say that this cartoon helped crystalize my long-standing thoughts on the Guy Fawkes mask phenomenon, and, if I come across like Andy Rooney, well, as the young folks say, “Whatever.”
Guy in the Guy Fawkes Mask is a clown. Don’t get me wrong: Clowns have their place and their value. But the clowns are only one part of the circus, and perhaps this clown has served his purpose and needs to make way for more focused performers.
This isn’t simply because I’m old and GitGFM is young. It’s because I’ve been around long enough to have seen him before.
“The trouble was that a lot of people thought demonstrations were the movement,” Peter Yarrow said, in 1967, “They weren’t.”
That applies as much to Abbie Hoffman tossing dollar bills from the visitors gallery of the New York Stock Exchange the year Yarrow said it as it does to Guy in a Guy Fawkes Mask today: It may be good marketing to sell the sizzle, but the sizzle is not the steak.
And it always seems to be somebody else’s job to serve the steak.
Abbie Hoffman was all sizzle, and, to the extent that it was necessary to get the questions in front of the public, he was valuable. However, of the Chicago 8, he and Jerry Rubin were the clowns, not the acrobats.
Well before Chicago, this appetite for attention had rankled more focused activists, including the Diggers, who were working hard to feed and clothe the less fortunate, as Peter Coyote recalls in his memoir of the era, “Sleeping Where I Fall“:
The deeper implications of anonymity were lost on Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, both of whom came to investigate our activities in late 1966. Abbie returned to New York and published a book (for sale) called Free, which catalogued every free service in the city of New York that supported truly needy people; these services were immediately swamped by an influx of suburban kids into the Lower East Side. He plastered his own name and picture on the book, thus advertising himself as a “leader” of the free counterculture. While egocentricity may be as authentic as anything else, performing under its influence does not represent a new form of any kind, and we criticized Abbie for confusing the issue.
Abbie was and remained a close friend of mine until his disappearance underground after selling drugs to an undercover narcotics cop, but a friend with whom the Diggers had pronounced disagreements. One morning he woke up Peter Berg by pounding on the door and shouting in his pronounced New England twang, “Petah, Petah, I bet you think I stole everything from ya, donchar?” This was indisputably true. Berg stumbled to the door, regarded the cheerful hairball before him as if he were sucking a lemon, then responded sleepily, “No, Abbie. I feel like I gave a good tool to an idiot.” He closed the door, and that was the last time they spoke.
Still, the question remains: Would TIME Magazine have paid attention to the steak without Abbie’s sizzling antics?
Nor was the anti-war movement or Digger grassroots activism the only time that mainstream media images obscured the actual work that made the real difference.
The popular media — the magazines at the checkout counter and in your dentist’s waiting room, as opposed to Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s — rarely get it right.
Demonstrations were not the movement, but demonstrations got the ink, going way back to the Civil Rights Movement.
Rosa Parks was not a “tired seamstress” but a trained and dedicated activist, and her decision to force the issue was not the beginning, but rather a critical point in a movement that had been charted more than a decade earlier, and before.
But all that puttering around in courtrooms didn’t have the sizzle of the bus boycott, the Freedom Rides or the March on Washington.
Not that the front-line demonstrators of the Civil Rights Movement were clowns. Far from it, and that’s my point.
John Lewis’s graphic memoir, “March: Book One,” speaks of how he and other young activists were recruited and trained for their very specific roles in the movement. You cannot understand the Civil Rights Movement without knowing of the carefully measured interplay between organizers and demonstrators.
And here’s the connection: The core of the Anti-War Movement was made up of tail-end veterans of the earlier Civil Rights Movement, which was where they had learned the grassroots strategies of voter registration, of utilizing phone banks, of pamphleting outside factory gates and of otherwise organizing to effect change.
That’s also where they had learned when and how to use a thoughtful, relevant demonstration to bring positive focus to the issues on which they were working so hard.
There was, however, a falling off, particularly on college campuses, as the last of the students who had been enthusiastic youngsters in the Civil Rights Movement graduated and left activism to those who had not been in it at all.
Demonstrations and confrontation became the movement, and activism was displaced by antics.
By the time Abbie Hoffman died, Michael Moore had emerged as the public face of “activism,” standing outside corporate headquarters with his bullhorn. He might just as well have been trying to levitate the Pentagon for all he accomplished beyond attracting attention.
But that sort of “Look At Me!” gratuitous, pointless, confrontational gesture seems to have become the reference for modern activism.
Here’s what I suspect: All those ad hoc social programs — the free clinics, the storefront legal aid places, the Digger stores, the Panther breakfast programs, the runaway shelters, the crash pads — have become respectable, entrenched governmental and non-governmental entities.
Which is cool, and I know young people who are involved in those more established places. I’m pleased that people who are willing to dig in and make a difference are finding ways to do so and I’m in awe of them for it.
But, as governmental funding, foundation grants and corporate donations for those efforts continue to dry up, as the public mood towards helping others becomes increasingly hostile, I wish that the clowns would at least try to make a positive difference, and I wonder if they’ve lost focus on everything but the spotlight?
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