Don't Need No Giraffe

At the risk of frightening away some righties, I'm going to admit, just for today, to being a lefty, and talk about lefty political strategy.

I want to talk about a subject we lefties (speaking about myself, not Real Change) feel a little uncomfortable talking about. For us, talking about this subject is like priests talking about sobriety, or social conservatives talking about chastity, because it deals with a value we cherish far more in theory than practice. I am speaking of solidarity.

Solidarity was invented as solidarité by French lefties gearing up for the French Revolution. Being a colossal dramatic mess that got everyone's attention, the French Revolution branded revolutions. So whenever anyone talked about revolutions, up until that even messier one in 1917, some form of French was needed. Had the 1917 revolution been the brand we'd be talking splochennost.

When lefties imagine social, political, or economic reform, they usually think of the word "revolution" as the Marseillaise marches through their synapses, even when they aren't thinking of armed revolution. It has become a metaphor for change itself. That's the power of a good brand.

Solidarity can be an organizing goal. If you want a revolution, you want it to succeed. So you want all the allies you can get. So you organize across classes, ethnic groups, occupations, and religions, to get the broadest possible base of support. Ideally the base should be 100%, so there won't be any resistance to the revolution at all. This never happens, because Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin always wreck it.

I'm personally all for cross-class solidarity, so long as I don't have to use salad forks, or eat snails. Where it starts getting trickier is where we are talking about solidarity in opposition, AKA the unified front.

The way the unified front works, we all have to march together in the same direction to the same beat and shout the same slogans in unison, or we're being obstructionists, or even counter-revolutionary. We have to speak the same speeches, and use the same talking points.

The idea that good working solidarity requires a unified front has gained support among lefties in recent years owing to the remarkable success that the Bush administration has had employing it. Bush got us into an amazingly unnecessary and illegal war, just by having his chorus of ninnies repeat "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" over and over again.

But just because someone else has succeeded in building a house out of discarded toilet bowls, doesn't mean you "need" to build your house out of discarded toilet bowls. Just because the Ponzi scheme works for Ponzi, doesn't mean it works for you. Just because Michael Jackson got himself a giraffe by being pale, doesn't mean you "need" to be pale, or that you "need" yourself a giraffe. The unified front is not, strategically, the best front, although it may be the best front the Bush administration can manage. For the rest of us, though, working with what we have, we need multiple voices.

In fact, speaking in unison, in one voice, defeats the whole purpose of having solidarity. If you all say the same thing together it sounds like one speaker blessed with an amplifier. Who, with a brain, listening to the Bush administration, doesn't hear it as just one person with many mouths? The only question is, which person is it? Cheney?

What we need, as a mass movement, is to appear as a mass movement, by speaking with all our voices.

Questions for Further Discussion

1. Name three French things about revolution other than solidarité. The word "revolución" may be one of them, I don't know.

2. Research topic: Find an article by Michelle Malkin, and try to justify it in public. Let us know how that went.

3. The author was planning to mention madrigals and Renaissance polyphony. Pretending to be one or both of your parents, write that paragraph for him.

The Cheap Alcohol Theory

WHAT IS POETRY TO ME?

© Dr. Wes Browning

Your head, an orange,

a pencil up my nose.

A lost weekend,

found in my pants.

Chocolate cake,

vanilla snake.

The passing fancy,

the staying plain.

X marks the spot.

Anybody got an eraser?

Speaking of lost weekends, the North American Street Newspaper Association had its annual conference in Cleveland two weeks ago, and Real Change was there. Four of us, anyway.

I bet a lot of you wonder what we homeless and formerly homeless representatives of street newspapers do at these long weekend conferences. Do we exchange train hopping techniques? Do we share pigeon recipes? Do we drink gallons of coffee? Do we use these conferences as an excuse to have loads of wild anonymous casual sex?

Sure, we're only human, but there's more to it than that. That other stuff only takes so long and then you find yourself in the odd workshop listening to an ACLU lawyer or a labor pool organizer, and then Anitra "on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept" Freeman suddenly gets up and foments revolution.

That's right. Our Anitra, urging us all to help establish an alternative economy. Down with capitalism! Up with some other thing!

All right, I'm exaggerating. The closest we all came to fomenting revolution was when, in one workshop, after trading horror stories about the treatment of the homeless in our respective cities, we all agreed that "it's bad everywhere" and "we should make a list of common demands."

So now the street newspaper movement has a list of demands and principles, which includes such things as "people have a right not to be homeless."

Some other things we decided included "people should not have to accept illegal work (like prostitution, running drugs, transporting illegal immigrants) in order to survive," and people should not have to breathe asbestos in order to get a paycheck."

Radical stuff, huh?

OK, it was as boring as a Republican caucus in Peoria. The high point, for me, of the whole conference came when one of the organizers told us that our conference site (Case Western Reserve University) was the cultural center of Ohio, prompting me to ask, "If this is such a hot-shot cultural center where are all the 7-11's?"

You see I have this theory, that poor people are so essential to every economy that everywhere you go in the US and Canada it must be possible to find cheap alcohol. Somebody has to do the grunt work. Somebody has to clean the toilets, mop the floors, wash the dishes. And there have to be affordable drugs to make that all possible.

I go so far as to say that in every city there must be, within walking distance from city center, 40-ouncers of beer or the equivalent for two dollars or less.

So far I've always been proved right. I never found the 7-11 I was looking for near the campus in Cleveland, but found instead, right in the middle of the school, a drugstore selling 40-ouncers of Schlitz Malt Liquor for $1.60 including tax – score!

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the poor drinking cheap booze.

On the contrary! My point is that the alcohol industry knows what it is doing. They know that poor people are a market. So they don't just sell expensive aged wine, they sell Thunderbird and Night Train.

So why can't we have the housing equivalent of Thunderbird? Why can't real estate developers see the market that is so plain and evident to Schlitz, and move in on it?

Your answers are anxiously awaited.