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The Fist of a Ghost: White Nostalgia and the DNC Protests

June 24, 2008 by Couch Potato Re...

Political nostalgia signifies the death knell of the white Left. Denver has been overcome with it.  First it was the slogan "recreate 68" which has received dozens of varying and historically intriguing critiques. Even so, the folks in Recreate 68 made compelling cases for the evocation of that complicated year referring to Paris, May of 68 and a spirit of revolution. While I don't share their analysis, they've made a concerted effort to defend their title and largely I bought their line.

Perhaps, that is, until it excused an even more nostalgic project.

A new ghost of the sixties has arrived--Come Up to Denver--a website and video based on Crosby, Stills and Nash's song <span style="font-style: italic;">Come To Chicago</span>. I am not sure why people believe that youth culture can be revived via nostalgia for the 60s white counter-culture, a subculture fraught with racism, patriarchy, hierarchical leadership, and other systems and structures rejected by the best of contemporary activism.

Let me say it once and for all : I think evoking the sixties as an inspiration to today's youth is a bad idea.

When I saw the video Come Up to Denver for the first time I couldn't decide whether I should laugh or cry. Sometimes the only response to cliché is cliché.

Unlike Denver, the people in the video are largely, if not entirely white. The musicians are wallowing in an earnest glorification of musty music. The music video contracts grim shots of left-over, white hippies in Denver with Civil Rights era masses protesting in full force. In desperation, the contemporary outmoded hippies cling to a few uninspired, hand-scrawled signs.

The image conveyed by so-called activists is pathetic. It fails to capture the truly inspirational actions going on throughout town--productive projects like The Derailer Bicycle Collective, INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, Food Not Bombs, Cafe Cultural, Cafe Nuba, Sisters of Color United For Education, Art in Motion, Transform Columbus Day and Denver Open Media.

A misused image of Abu Ghraib and an illustration of a black man tied to a chair accompany the badly sung song. These two still images are two of the few photographic references to the struggles of people of color. Static, frozen icons, bodies of color become symbolic objects for the misguided benevolent white activists to giddily, happily try to demonstrate on behalf of. The paternalistic objectification and inability to include moving images of people of color betrays the resurgence of 60s style racism, a wolf hiding in hairy, white skin.

What's stranger than what is shown is that the video erases inspirational contemporary histories--the recent May 1st immigration marches in Denver where tens of thousands protested corrupt immigration policy, the hundreds of thousands in the streets who protested the Republican National Convention and the millions around the world who protested the war.

The video fails to address local issues of race--police brutality, housing foreclosures, mass incarceration of people of color, failures of the education, health, and social service sector alike. By erasing activists of color and the issues communities of color face, the video traffics in a white supremacist, white cultural narcissism even the two-party system has moved beyond with its problematic tokenism of Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell.

Rarely do I use my blog to criticize people trying to do good things. In this case, my sincere belief is that without a harsh critique of the video's erasure of people of color, glorification of outmoded, anachronistic, failed 60s movements, and inability to appeal to all but a handful of nostalgic, white, aging hippies unaware of white supremacy, many far from Denver might assume that this video represents what the protest movements at the Democratic National Convention will be all about.

Fortunately, this assumption can be dead wrong.

With fierce actions promoting immigrant rights, combating the prison industrial complex, racist military recruiting strategies, the white gentrification of communities of color, and environmental racism, the protests at this years conventions have the opportunity to be a new jumping off point in anti-authoritarian organizing where the much neglected issues of race finally come to the surface as the anachronistic white Left withers into oblivion.

6.26.08. COME UP TO DENVER AND RECREATE 68 ARE TWO ENTIRELY DISTINCT PROJECTS. RECREATE  68 DID NOT PRODUCE THE VIDEO COME UP TO DENVER.

Go to Couch Potato Revolution.

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Open Newswire

Zhibin Gu: China entrepreneurship, open society revolution vs Communist dynasty: history, politics, economy, and corruption
9 hours 24 sec ago
Anonymous

George Zhibin Gu summarizes the history of China's Communist Dynasty:

(George Zhibin Gu of China is an author of several new books, including: 1. China's global reach, 2. China and the new world order, 3. Made in China.)

The past 60 years of China's Communist history can be divided roughly into two phases.

The first phase, between 1949 and 1978, was this: the Communist bureaucracy had totally destroyed society, the economy and the culture. This was done by a total bureaucratic monopoly over all of nation's wealth, labor, markets, organizations and institutions. Furthermore, it completely destroyed the free press and the law. But this unprecedented bureaucratic domination immediately produced unprecedented man-made disasters in world history, not just China's. The disasters include endless violence and terror, the creation of the state sector and people's communes, the total bureaucratization of media, education, and thought.

In the end, beginning in 1958, the regime wanted to have a total bureaucratic miracle in the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958-60), and record disasters emerged all at once. Record deaths of some 50 million people occurred in the period of 1958-62, killing some 50 million people by an unprecedented famine as well as a record oganized violence.

What is more, these unprecedented miseries turned out to be the very beginning of bureaucratic disasters. Worse than the famine, three bureaucratic wars emerged against society and the people in the period of 1959-78, which ended to destroy countless millions of lives, or even more, by organized violence, not to mention a near total destruction of culture, education, thinking, wealth and all other good things in life.
Responding to Harmful Government Inaction, Protestors Stop Blasting on Coal River Mountain
1 day 20 hours ago
Anonymous

PETTUS, W. Va. – Early this morning two concerned citizens, Dea Goblirsch and Nick Martin, locked down to a drill rig on Coal River Mountain’s Bee Tree mountaintop removal site, effectively stopping blasting. Two others, Grace Williams and Laura Von Dolen, joined them in direct support, holding a banner with the message “Save Coal River Mountain”.

These nonviolent protestors have taken this action to bring attention to the extreme danger facing residents of the Coal River Valley from blasting near the Brushy Fork Impoundment. They plan to stay locked down until law enforcement removes them.

Resident of Rock Creek, W Va., Delbert Gunnoe, stated his concerns with the blasting, “You know when they put a blast over there, and it shakes the windows over here, at what, ¾-a-mile distance, imagine what it does over there.” Gunnoe continued, “if [the impoundment] did bust…what would be the destruction? The town of Whitesville would no longer exist.”

The four are fearful of the blasting that Massey Energy began in late October. These blasts are 200 feet from the Brushy Fork Impoundment, permitted to hold nine billion gallons of toxic coal slurry. The impoundment sits atop miles of hollow, abounded underground mines, further endangering its integrity. By Massey’s own estimates, roughly 998 people will die should the dam break. The emergency evacuation plan states that a 40-foot wall of sludge, cresting at 72 feet, will flow through the valley, reaching 20-feet-high about 15 miles down the road. Apart from the initial flood, the impact of this potential spill would be felt along the Coal River’s 88 miles.
EVIDENCE THAT UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS WELCOMES FBI INTEL OPERATIONS AGAINST WHISTLEBLOWER
2 days 21 hours ago
gsosbee

The universities across the nation (and AG) do more for the fbi/cia than assist in the search for foreign terrorists; today our colleges and universities directly encourage their campus police and civilian employees to engage in unlawful intel operations against whistleblower
GERAL SOSBEE.

 

 

 

In November, 2009, the Texas Attorney General (AG) grants near blanket authority (in Case number OR2009-16316 & Case ID#367454) to the University Of Texas Police (UTP) and Harlingen, Texas (HTP) Police to withhold from Open Records (OR) disclosure the key data in their possession relating to Geral Sosbee. The AG also states in each opinion that the AG has no authority beyond the scope of the OR statutes. The AG thus hides from his responsibility as a citizen and human being for civil and human rights violations behind the the OR guidelines ( which are designed to allow the police to engage in witch hunts, stalking, harassment, fraudulent stings and other crimes as I have documented at many pages of www.sosbeevfbi.com.) I have also provided the AG with evidence of ongoing felonies against my person (continuing in Texas and other locations for the past decade); by the AG letters referenced above the fbi now gains the AG approval and authority to use UT employees (including UTP) in efforts to silence or kill me; see for example the specifics of some of my reports at

http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/affidavit2007.html

 
Evening of Solidarity for Dr. Mutulu Shakur
2 days 21 hours ago
denverabc

An Evening of Solidarity for Mutulu Shakur
Presented by Denver and Aurora CopWatch, Sisters of Color United for Education, and Denver ABC

Saturday, November 28th
Sisters of Color 2895 8th Ave, Denver, CO (8th and federal across the street from the bus yard)
7:30-12ish
Sliding Scale 1-5$ (if you ain't got it don't let it stop you from coming)

Teach-in by Professor Ward Churchill

Live Music by:
Mike Wird
Ietef
Debajito (of Debajo Del Agua)

Hosted by Shareef Aleem

Please join us on Saturday, November 28th to stand in solidarity with Dr Mutulu Shakur before his appeals hearing on Monday, November 30th at the super-maximum Federal prison in Florence, CO.

Dr. Shakur is a New Afrikan (Black) man whose primary work has been in the area of health. He is a doctor of acupuncture and one of the most prolific, committed and conscious freedom fighters and political prisoners to whom the Black liberation struggle has given birth.

Since the age 16, Dr. Shakur has been a part of the New Afrikan
Independence Movement. As a part of this movement Dr. Shakur has been a target of the illegal Counterintelligence Program carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (COINTELPRO). This was a secret police strategy used in the U.S. starting in the 1960's to destroy and neutralize progressive and revolutionary organizations. It is believed that Dr. Shakur's resistance to this program led to his arrest and trial.

"Straight ahead, stiff resistance"

contact info: 970.302.7349/miketruswell@yahoo.com
www.mutulushakur.com
www.dare2struggle.org
The Shortwave Report 11/20/09 Listen Globally
3 days 15 hours ago
Anonymous

 Dear Radio Friend,
The latest Shortwave Report (November 20) is up at the website
http://www.outfarpress.com/outfa... in both broadcast quality (13.3MB) and quickdownload or streaming form (4.9MB) (28:59)
(NEW! If you have access to Audioport.org there is a higher quality version posted up there {26.7MB} http://www.audioport.org/index.p...)
Water and Imperialism
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NickB

(www.raimd.wordpress.com)

Water is essential, in various ways, to all human activity. Water is something that humans, literally, cannot do without. Every human needs water in order live and to have a good life. Societies need water in order to be provide for the survival of their populations. Usable water, as a resource, is finite and distributed unevenly across the planet. Most societies have difficulty providing water to their populations, especially in the Third World. The inability to access water is referred to as the water crisis.
la virgen de Guadalupe y los curas
3 days 21 hours ago
Anonymous

LA VIRGEN DE LA GUADALUPE ES DE TODOS LOS MEXICANOS, NO DE LOS CURAS

La Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano (CEM) no está de acuerdo en que los Mexicanos utilicemos a la Virgen de la Guadalupe, como sucedió en la marcha de SME el pasado 11 de noviembre (2009) por “manipular el sentimiento religioso”, se ha afirmado en varias ocasiones desde que concluyó la 88ª Asamblea Plenaria del CEM. Los curas, junto con los políticos y las grandes transnacionales se han adueñado de nuestro país y de nuestros símbolos.

¿Ya se les olvidó a los curas que la Virgen de Guadalupe es el único símbolo religioso auténticamente Mexicano? ¿Ya se les olvidó que ellos llegaron con Hernán Cortés a robar y a imponernos su cruz a sangre y fuego? La Virgen de Guadalupe es Tonantzin y es nuestra, aunque no les guste a los extranjeros como ellos.

Lo que los curas del CEM no quieren es que el pueblo Mexicano, unido al SME, siga la trayectoria de don Miguel Hidalgo y les arrebate la jugosa ganancia.

Yo les pido a los curas del CEM que ya no nos “salven”.
¡¡Larguense de aquí!! ¡¡Larguense!! ¡¡Larguense!! ¡¡Larguense!! ¡¡Larguense!! ¡¡Larguense de México y de todo este continente!!
Josefa Ortiz
http://josefaortiz.hpage.com/sme...

 
PRESIDENT OBAMA ~ TAX EXEMPT U.S. FOUNDATIONS OF OUR AMERICAN WEALTHY ELITE HAVE BECOME TAX EVASION FOUNDATIONS THAT NEED NEW FEDERAL GUIDLINES.....
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Anonymous

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TAX EXEMPT SLUSH FUND CHARITIES(FOUNDATIONS) FOR OUR U.S. WEALTHY ELITE AMERICANS WE ALL KNOW  are QUITE COMMON AND COSTING THE U.S.GOVERNMENT BILLIONS IN POSSIBLE TAX REVENUE.

***MANY OF THESE SAME AMERICAN WEALTHY ELITE NOT ONLY HAVE FULL CONTROL OVER THEIRTX EVADING  FOUNDATIONS BILLIONS,BUT ALSO FIND IT NECESSARY TO HIRE LOBBYISTS TO ATTEMPT THE DIRECT CONTROL OVER VARIOUS USES OF AMERICAN TAX PAYERS TAX $$$ ???

WEALTHY ELITE AMERICANS HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL OVER OUR U.S.CONGRESSIONAL TAX DOLLAR SPENDING WITH THEIR BEHIND THE SCENE LOBBY MONIES... AND ARE CONTINUING TO DENY MIDDLE~CLASS AND WORKING POOR AMERICANS PROPER HEALTH ~ CARE , PROPER LEGAL PROTECTIONS IN AMERICAN FAMILY COURTS,CIVIL COURTS,& FEDERAL APPEALS FROM STATE COURTS. **THOUSANDS OF POORER AMERICANS ALL ACROSS AMERICA ARE LOSING PARENTING AND VISITATION RIGHTS WITH THEIR CHILDREN, ARE BEING FALSELY IMPRISONED, WRONGFULY EXECUTED,LOSING THEIR HOMES OR APARTMENTS ETC...

** IS THIS REALLY WHAT MANY SAY APPEARS TO BE THE FORMATION OF A NEW WORLD ORDER IN AMERICA THAT IS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK DOWN AND DESTROY AMERICAN FAMILIES AND ESTABLISHED FAMILY VALUES ACROSS OUR GREAT COUNTRY ???
Chickenhawk Hall of Shame
5 days 20 hours ago
Anonymous

<p>Compiled by <a href="http://www.nhgazette.com/">The New Hampshire Gazette</a></p>

<p>When an American male (or an especially belligerent female) makes the challenging transition from late adolescence into early adulthood, he is faced with many decisions. One certain, specific combination of choices will result in his becoming a chickenhawk: choosing to “support” war, while also choosing not to serve in the military. His motto becomes: “Let’s you and him go fight; I’ll hold your coat.”</p>

<p>Depending on external circumstances, such an individual may become one of three varieties of chickenhawk:</p>
<p>• If there is no draft, and the nation is at peace, the individual becomes a Common Chickenhawk;</p>
<p>• If there is a draft, and the nation is at peace, the individual becomes a Chickenhawk First Class;</p>
<p>• If the there is a draft, and the nation is at war, the individual becomes a Chickenhawk First Class with Distinguished Fleeing Cross.</p>

<p>We currently have 132 Chickenhawks listed in our database. Here they are, listed chronologically by date of birth. <a href="http://www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks/?sort_list=0">CLICK HERE</a> to see them listed alphabetically.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.nhgazette.com/nominate/?id=-1&action=new">Nominate a Chickenhawk</a></p>

<p>posted by the <a href="http://wintersoldier.org">Thomas Paine Project</a> (FYI: the organization is run by veterans)</p>
The False Hope of J Street and the Gentile Problem
6 days 18 hours ago
Anonymous

Philip Giraldi on Antiwar.com produced an excellent article on J Street, the new “pro-Israel, pro-peace” alternative to AIPAC, which last month held its inaugural conference in Washington. [“My Problem with J Street,” http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2009/10/28/my-problem-with-j-street/]

The organization’s name, J Street, a lettered street which does not exist in Washington, DC, is presumably an effort to identify with K Street, which is considered the central location for lobbying firms in Washington, with the “J” presumably standing for “Jewish,” since “J” is not the only unused letter for Washington street names.

J Street has been excoriated by the neocons and other hardline Zionist rightists as being anti-Israel, while it has been hailed as a great hope for the future by many proponents of a more balanced, less pro-Israel, American policy in the Middle East. Giraldi, however, stands virtually alone in seeing things in a much different light. To him, J Street is “just another Israel advocacy group with a slightly more progressive and politically correct and therefore acceptable message.” In short, with its moderate, pro-peace image, J Street can more effectively promote the policies of the Israeli government, to the detriment of the Palestinians and the United States.
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