Activism is now like poetry or philosophy. Few people take it seriously. These days the activist, like the poet or philosopher, has no public. And as the poet and philosopher have lost their power to engage, educate and entertain, so has the activist lost the power to effect progressive change—assuming progressive change is the objective of the activist. Somehow all public protest of this corrupt and intransigent government appears futile. Mainstream American culture regards such activity as self-indulgent and effete. The present cultural context of activism is now the absence of a cultural context. The only reason to proclaim that one is an activist at all would be to gratify a sentimental delusion that such a role might still exist—a proclamation that would ring as ridiculous as that of being a poet or philosopher. Nevertheless, there are those who visibly assume the role. And it’s embarrassing to watch them as they go public with their naked need for attention. Like impoverished street musicians, they’re mocked and ignored. Folks pass by, wisecracking in hushed tones or feigning distraction to bypass the unpleasantness of being embarrassed for them. Fortunately, most poets, philosophers and activists do not go public. They gratify their vanities in supportive, obscure subcultures, or in universities where they ply their passions on the young, gullible and whimsical. Some survive outside of these safe havens, but only by hiding from coworkers and acquaintances the obscene futility in which they daily engage, closeting their perverse leanings toward intellectual inquiry, esthetic perfection and social betterment. They hide the outrage evoked by a political climate that abets and exploits mass stupidity, shuffling obsequiously from office to market, suppressing an urge to take dramatic action against this pervasive chicanery like a flasher suppressing an urge to show his penis to the checker.
You may say, “Come on, writing beautiful verse, communicating original thoughts on human existence and fighting for a just and peaceful society are enormously respectable endeavors.” Congratulations on another dubious platitude. These endeavors are now about as respectable as they are relevant. It takes a culture to make cultural endeavors respectable and relevant. For example, we would have no Sophocles if 20,000 Greeks hadn’t spent two weeks a year drinking wine and going to the amphitheater. Sure, they had their Olympic games; but they also had their annual drama festival, which was an extended competition no less seriously attended than the Olympics. Activism too had its cultural context. In the Athenian democracy, citizens gathered to cast their votes in person. To exercise that right, they first had to hear the speakers, and these speakers–Demosthenes comes to mind immediately–were not politicians; they were activists who were of the people and whose end was to move the political will of the people.
Dr. Kinsey said of sex in America, “Everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin.” I say of America, nobody’s culture isn’t a culture. A few hundred thousand people with signs and banners gather in the National Mall to protest an unnecessary war. Yet this has no effect; war is waged, with fifty percent of the Nation supporting it and politicians willfully ignoring the other fifty percent. Those protesters do not represent a culture; they are an isolated, arbitrary phenomenon as quickly forgotten as a summer rain. The press and the politicians, once war is waged, continue as if there were no warnings whatsoever of the war’s uselessness. Even if the war turns out to be a universally acknowledged failure, that demonstration might well have not occurred, however well-founded its admonitions.
Poetry, philosophy and activism will always exist. But have they ever been as irrelevant and arbitrary as they are now? What these endeavors lack is not excellence; they lack a fourth of all Americans giving a damn. But there is an obvious impediment to giving a damn about anything that takes time: survival. Where there is time to cultivate there is cultivation; where there is cultivation there is enlightenment; where there is enlightenment there is progressive thought; and where there is progressive thought there is progressive political will. But this concatenation is simply impossible in a society as stratified as ours, where 5% of the populace benefits from the blind struggle of 95%. This dilemma does not amount to something as simple as a conspiracy; it amounts to something simpler: a fact.
A culture that concerns itself with poetry, philosophy and activism is not good for those whose sole ambition is to accumulate tremendous wealth. This fact has been cast in cultural terms: conservative culture versus liberal culture. Americans have taken sides in what is referred to as a “culture war.” But is it really a culture war? Is conservative culture a culture at all? Or is it big business for big profit? That the advocates of concentrated capital call themselves conservatives and claim to have a set of “values” is cultural camouflage. In Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the definition of culture is universally associated with intellectual and esthetic enlightenment by way of education and learning. There is no mention of business or profit in the definition. So the question is, why are big-business interests calling their agenda a cultural one? The answer is obvious: to disguise the fact that they have no cultural agenda and stand to benefit the least from one.
– Jan DiVincenzo
© Copyright 2004, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.