Harvard Students Launch a Free Course on How to Resist: Now You Can Watch the Lectures

in Current Affairs, Politics | April 5th, 2017

NOTE: As of July 22, we updat­ed this post to include the videos from the class ses­sions. Watch the playlist of lec­tures above.

I have my doubts about whether we should call reg­u­lar acts of civic duty “resis­tance,” rather than Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly-pro­tect­ed demo­c­ra­t­ic free­doms.  Yes­ter­day we remem­bered Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. on the 49th anniver­sary of his assas­si­na­tion (and the 50th anniver­sary of his speech oppos­ing the Viet­nam War). As King and count­less oth­er civ­il rights and anti-war cam­paign­ers have demonstrated—some at the cost of their lives—civil dis­obe­di­ence is very often required and moral­ly jus­ti­fied when legal appeals for jus­tice fail. But for bet­ter or worse, “The Resis­tance” has become a catch-all media term for a loose and very often frac­tious col­lec­tion of main­stream Democ­rats, pro­gres­sives, and rad­i­cals of all stripes, whose tac­tics range from polite phone lob­by­ing to brawl­ing with white suprema­cists in the streets.

Mil­lions of peo­ple who for­mer­ly had lit­tle to no involve­ment in pol­i­tics have thrown them­selves into activism, and vet­er­an orga­niz­ers have been over­whelmed with new recruits. Just as quick­ly, those orga­niz­ers have met the chal­lenge by dis­sem­i­nat­ing guides for lob­by­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives, run­ning for office, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in more direct forms of action.

Every move­ment has its res­i­dent schol­ars and edu­ca­tors, whether they be eru­dite laypeo­ple, pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics, or enter­pris­ing col­lege stu­dents. A group from the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, “pro­gres­sive stu­dents,” writes CNN, from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment, begin today what they’re call­ing “Resis­tance School,” a “4‑week course in anti-Trump activism… open to peo­ple across the coun­try and the world.” (You can watch the video from the course above.)

At their site, the stu­dents bill “Resis­tance School” as a series of “prac­ti­cal skills for tak­ing back Amer­i­ca” and open their online syl­labus with a quote spu­ri­ous­ly attrib­uted to Thomas Jef­fer­son: “When injus­tice becomes law, resis­tance becomes duty.” It’s pos­si­ble that who­ev­er said it had blood­i­er things in mind. Resis­tance School sticks to peace­ful means, with four ses­sions that teach, in order, “How to Com­mu­ni­cate our Val­ues in Polit­i­cal Advo­ca­cy,” “How to Mobi­lize and Orga­nize our Com­mu­ni­ties,” “How to Struc­ture and Build Capac­i­ty for Action,” and “How to Sus­tain the Resis­tance Long-Term.” Instruc­tors are drawn from the ranks of acad­e­mia, labor orga­niz­ing, and the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, and you can stream the ses­sions on the school’s site or on Face­book, or attend in per­son.

The Resis­tance School is sure to attract crit­i­cism, not only from the expect­ed sources but from more anti-estab­lish­ment fac­tions on the left. But that may be unlike­ly to deter the more than 10,000 peo­ple who have reg­is­tered for the first class. Orga­niz­ers have encour­aged peo­ple to attend in groups, and cur­rent­ly have about 3,000 groups enrolled. “Some are com­ing with groups of 700 peo­ple,” says co-founder Shanoor Seer­vai, “some are small­er groups, potlucks, gath­er­ing in people’s kitchens.”

Ser­vaai and fel­low Kennedy School stu­dents have been tak­en aback and are now, writes CNN, “grap­pling with ques­tions of scale.” How, they won­der, will such large num­bers of peo­ple coor­di­nate; how to mea­sure the impact of the pro­gram?.… ques­tions, per­haps, they will resolve by the fourth ses­sion, “How to Sus­tain the Resis­tance Long-Term.” But they’re cer­tain­ly not alone in try­ing to steer a mas­sive surge of new inter­est in activism and elec­toral pol­i­tics. As the mil­lions now plan­ning and par­tic­i­pat­ing in civ­il actions across the coun­try attest, peo­ple have begun to take to heart sen­ti­ments recent­ly expressed by orga­niz­er Alice Mar­shall: “If we wait for some great leader to save us we are lost. We have to save our­selves.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Prob­lem is Civ­il Obe­di­ence,” a Call for Amer­i­cans to Take Action

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Watch The March, the Mas­ter­ful, Dig­i­tal­ly Restored Doc­u­men­tary on The Great March on Wash­ing­ton

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Introduction to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and How He Used Semiotics to Decode Popular Culture

in Current Affairs, Philosophy, Politics | April 4th, 2017

In 1979, French the­o­rist Jean-François Lyotard declared the end of all “grand narratives”—every “the­o­ry or intel­lec­tu­al sys­tem,” as Blackwell’s dic­tio­nary defines the term, “which attempts to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive expla­na­tion of human expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge.” The announce­ment arrived with all the rhetor­i­cal bom­bast of Nietzsche’s “God is Dead,” sweep­ing not only the­ol­o­gy into the dust­bin but also over­ar­ch­ing sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries, Freudi­an psy­chol­o­gy, Marx­ism, and every oth­er “total­iz­ing” expla­na­tion. But as Lyotard him­self explained in his book The Post­mod­ern Con­di­tion, the loss of uni­ver­sal coherence—or the illu­sion of coherence—had tak­en decades, a “tran­si­tion,” he wrote, “under way since at least the end of the 1950s.”

We might date the onset of Post­mod­ernism and the end of “mas­ter nar­ra­tives” even earlier—to the dev­as­ta­tion at the end of World War II and the appear­ance of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialec­tic of Enlight­en­ment and of Roland Barthes’ slim vol­ume Mytholo­gies, a col­lec­tion of essays writ­ten between 1954 and 56 in which the French lit­er­ary the­o­rist and cul­tur­al crit­ic put to work his under­stand­ing of Fer­di­nand de Saussure’s semi­otics.

As a result of read­ing the Swiss lin­guist, Barthes wrote in a pref­ace to the 1970 edi­tion of his book, he had “acquired the con­vic­tion that by treat­ing ‘col­lec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tions’ as a sign-sys­tems, one might hope to go fur­ther than the pious show of unmask­ing them and account in detail for the mys­ti­fi­ca­tion which trans­forms petit-bour­geois cul­ture into a uni­ver­sal nature.”

While gen­er­al­ly lumped into the cat­e­go­ry of “struc­tural­ist” thinkers, as opposed to “post-struc­tural­ists” like Lyotard, Barthes nonethe­less paved the way for a par­tic­u­lar­ly French mis­trust of “petit-bour­geois cul­ture” and its pop­ulist spec­ta­cles and all-know­ing talk­ing heads. He was an oppo­nent of total­iz­ing nar­ra­tives just as he was “an unre­lent­ing oppo­nent of French impe­ri­al­ism,” writes Richard Brody at The New York­er. Like Adorno and many oth­er post-war Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­als, Barthes riffed on Marx’s notion of “false consciousness”—the men­tal fog pro­duced by dog­mat­ic edu­ca­tion, mass media, and pop­u­lar culture—and applied the idea relent­less­ly to his analy­sis of the post-indus­tri­al West.

“Barthes’s work on myths,” writes Andrew Robin­son at Cease­fire Mag­a­zine, “pre­fig­ures dis­course-analy­sis in media stud­ies.” He direct­ed his focus to “cer­tain insid­i­ous myths… par­tic­u­lar­ly typ­i­cal of right-wing pop­ulism and of the tabloid press.” Barthes though of pop­ulist mythol­o­gy as a “meta­lan­guage” that “removes his­to­ry from lan­guage,” mak­ing “par­tic­u­lar signs appear nat­ur­al, eter­nal, absolute, or frozen” and trans­form­ing “his­to­ry into nature.” Through its nor­mal­iza­tion, we lose sight of the arti­fice of cable news, for exam­ple, and take for grant­ed its for­mat­ting as a uni­ver­sal stan­dard for high seri­ous­ness and cred­i­bil­i­ty (as in the por­ten­tous sig­ni­fi­ca­tion of “Break­ing News”), even when we know we’re being lied to.

The Al Jazeera video at the top of the post asks us to con­sid­er the “rhetor­i­cal motifs” of such media, which con­struct “the biggest myth of all: that what we are watch­ing is unmedi­at­ed real­i­ty.” The obser­va­tion may seem ele­men­tary, but Barthes sought to go fur­ther than “the pious show of unmask­ing,” as he wrote. He “would have seen,” the video’s nar­ra­tor says, “the TV screen as a cul­tur­al text, and he would have unveiled its myths,” as he did the myths prof­fered by wrestling, adver­tis­ing, pop­u­lar film and nov­els, tourism, pho­tog­ra­phy, din­ing, and oth­er seem­ing­ly mun­dane pop­u­lar phe­nom­e­na.

The video above from edu­ca­tion­al com­pa­ny Macat offers a more for­mal sum­ma­ry of Barthes’ Mytholo­gies. The French crit­ic and semi­oti­cian made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to lit­er­ary and crit­i­cal the­o­ry, demonstrating—with the wide-rang­ing wit and eru­di­tion of his human­ist coun­try­man Michel de Mon­taigne—how “dom­i­nant ide­olo­gies suc­cess­ful­ly present them­selves as sim­ply the way the world should be.” Look­ing back on his book over twen­ty years lat­er, after the events in Paris of May 1968, Barthes remarked that the need for “ide­o­log­i­cal crit­i­cism” had been “again made bru­tal­ly evi­dent.” Indeed, we have ample rea­son to think that, over six­ty years since Barthes pub­lished his clas­sic analy­sis, the need for a rig­or­ous­ly crit­i­cal view of mass media, adver­tis­ing, and polit­i­cal spec­ta­cle has become more press­ing than ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Roland Barthes Present His 40-Hour Course, La Pré­pa­ra­tion du roman, in French (1978–80)

Hear the Writ­ing of French The­o­rists Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard & Roland Barthes Sung by Poet Ken­neth Gold­smith

Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Edward Said’s Ground­break­ing Book Ori­en­tal­ism

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Animated Introductions to Edward Said’s Groundbreaking Book Orientalism

in Current Affairs, Literature, Philosophy, Politics | March 31st, 2017

For a few years, many people—those who might these days be called a “self-sat­is­fied lib­er­al elite” (or some­thing like that)—believed that the argu­ments in Edward Said’s 1978 book Ori­en­tal­ism were becom­ing gen­er­al­ly accept­ed. Put broad­ly, Said argued that our con­cep­tions of cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal dif­fer­ences between “the West” and “the East” are pro­duced by Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­al and lit­er­ary tra­di­tions that have exag­ger­at­ed and dis­tort­ed such dif­fer­ences, cre­at­ing a nar­ra­tive in which “the West” is civ­i­lized, dis­ci­plined,  indus­tri­ous, and enlight­ened and “the East” is exot­ic, back­ward, sen­su­al­ist, lazy, pas­sive, dan­ger­ous, irra­tional.…

The tra­di­tion of Ori­en­tal­ism—which stretch­es back into the mid­dle ages—came to jus­ti­fy colo­nial­ism, land and resource theft, slav­ery, and impe­r­i­al aggres­sion in the name of civ­i­liza­tion and sal­va­tion, Even where Euro­pean Ori­en­tal­ist schol­ars and writ­ers had a nuanced under­stand­ing of oth­er cul­tures, such nuance was lost in the pop­u­lar­iz­ing and instru­men­tal use of their ideas.

Said’s the­o­ret­i­cal inter­ven­tion into Ori­en­tal­ist dis­course showed us how the “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” trope that per­vades hun­dreds of years of inter­ac­tions between “the west and the rest” of the world itself has a history—as a ratio­nal­iza­tion for dom­i­nance and exploita­tion. The short ani­mat­ed Al Jazeera video above neat­ly sum­ma­rizes Said’s major argu­ments in the book, and asks us to “unlearn the myth.”

Cast­ing West and East as two dis­tinct civ­i­liza­tions makes lit­tle com­mon sense on its face. Chris­tian­i­ty, one key sup­posed bedrock  of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, is an East­ern reli­gion. Aris­to­tle, a foun­da­tion of West­ern thought, was pre­served for many years by Islam­ic schol­ars, who were in fre­quent dia­logue with Greek thinkers, who were them­selves in fre­quent dia­logue with North Africans…. the inter­re­la­tion­ships and cor­re­spon­dences between con­ti­nents and cul­tures are innu­mer­able, the bound­aries between the cat­e­gories high­ly per­me­able. But with the rise of what we’re call­ing “pop­ulism” in the past decade or so, the nuances of intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry have been lost. Old false dichotomies, always haunt­ing the mar­gins, have once again moved firm­ly to the cen­ter.

In the realm of cable news pun­dit­ry, cor­po­rate secu­ri­ty con­fer­ences, and con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tees not only do we rarely see actu­al schol­ars rep­re­sent­ed, but we almost nev­er see schol­ars like Edward Said, a Pales­tin­ian intel­lec­tu­al who spoke and wrote crit­i­cal­ly as a per­son from the Mid­dle East with exper­tise in West­ern lit­er­a­ture and his­to­ry. This fact is itself cen­tral to the con­struc­tion of Ori­en­tal­ist dis­course, as Said wrote in 1978:

The Ori­ent and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal­ly reduced sta­tus that puts them out of reach of every­one except the West­ern expert. From the begin­ning of West­ern spec­u­la­tion about the Ori­ent, the one thing the Ori­ent could not do was to rep­re­sent itself.

We can accept noth­ing about “the East,” in oth­er words, unless it is first fil­tered through the lens­es of Euro-Amer­i­can admin­is­tra­tive “experts,” who often have extrem­ist views, very lit­tle schol­ar­ly exper­tise, and whose ideas often still come direct­ly from Ori­en­tal­ist nov­els and philoso­phies.

Said’s the­o­ries in Ori­en­tal­ism have received ample crit­i­cism from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum. He’s been cast by the right as a kind of reverse racist against “Cau­casians,” an anti-intel­lec­tu­al accu­sa­tion that dis­torts his views and makes ad hominem attacks. Said traced Euro-Amer­i­can colo­nial his­to­ry with a lev­el of depth that demon­strat­ed the remark­able con­ti­nu­ity in the way major Euro­pean colo­nial pow­ers and the U.S.—their suc­ces­sor by the late 20th century—constructed ide­olo­gies of excep­tion­al­ism and supe­ri­or­i­ty through very sim­i­lar rhetoric.

For a slight­ly dri­er overview of Said’s Ori­en­tal­ism, watch the short video above from edu­ca­tion­al com­pa­ny Macat, a self-described “glob­al leader in crit­i­cal think­ing.” Nei­ther of these explain­ers can sub­sti­tute for actu­al­ly engag­ing with the argu­ments in Said’s book. His his­to­ry of Ori­en­tal­ist fables is itself an adven­tur­ous tale. As a lit­er­ary prod­uct, “the Ori­ent was almost a Euro­pean inven­tion,” he writes in his Intro­duc­tion, yet as a region, it “is an inte­gral part of Euro­pean mate­r­i­al civ­i­liza­tion and cul­ture.” There is no one with­out the oth­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edward Said Recalls His Depress­ing Meet­ing With Sartre, de Beau­voir & Fou­cault (1979)

Edward Said Speaks Can­did­ly about Pol­i­tics, His Ill­ness, and His Lega­cy in His Final Inter­view (2003)

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Mid­dle East­ern His­to­ry: Free Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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I’m Just a Pill: A Schoolhouse Rock Classic Gets Reimagined to Defend Reproductive Rights in 2017

in Biology, Current Affairs, Health, Politics, Television | March 27th, 2017

Like many Amer­i­can chil­dren of the 70s and 80s, my under­stand­ing of how our gov­ern­ment is sup­posed to func­tion was shaped by School­house Rock.

Immi­gra­tion, sep­a­ra­tion of leg­isla­tive, exec­u­tive and judi­cial pow­ers and of course, the promise of the Con­sti­tu­tion (“a list of prin­ci­ples for keepin’ peo­ple free”) were just a few of the top­ics the ani­mat­ed musi­cal series cov­ered with clar­i­ty and wit.

The new world order in which we’ve recent­ly found our­selves sug­gests that 2017 would be a grand year to start rolling out more such videos.

The Lady Parts Jus­tice League, a self-declared “cabal of comics and writ­ers expos­ing creeps hell­bent on destroy­ing access to birth con­trol and abor­tion” leads the charge with the above homage to School­house Rock­’s 1976 hit, “I’m Just a Bill,” recast­ing the original’s glum aspi­rant law as a feisty Plan B con­tra­cep­tive pill. The red haired boy who kept the bill com­pa­ny on the steps of the Cap­i­tal is now a teenage girl, con­fused as to how any legal, over-the-counter method for reduc­ing the risk of unwant­ed preg­nan­cy could have so many ene­mies.

As with the orig­i­nal series, the prime objec­tive is to edu­cate, and com­ic Lea DeLar­ia’s Pill hap­pi­ly oblig­es, explain­ing that while peo­ple may dis­agree as to when “life” begins, it’s a sci­en­tif­ic fact that preg­nan­cy begins when a fer­til­ized egg lodges itself in the uterus. (DeLar­ia plays Big Boo on Orange is the New Black, by the way.) That process takes a while—72 hours to be exact. Plen­ty of time for the par­tic­i­pants to scut­tle off to the drug­store for emer­gency con­tra­cep­tion, aka Plan B, the so called “morn­ing-after” pill.

As per the drug’s web­site, if tak­en with­in 72 hours after unpro­tect­ed sex, Plan B  can reduce the risk of preg­nan­cy by up to 89%. Tak­en with­in 24 hours, it is about 95% effec­tive.

And yes, teenagers can legal­ly pur­chase it, though Teen Vogue has report­ed on numer­ous stores who’ve made it dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, for shop­pers to gain access to the pill.

(The Repro­duc­tive Jus­tice Project encour­ages con­sumers to help them col­lect data on whether Plan B is cor­rect­ly dis­played on the shelves as avail­able for sale to any woman of child­bear­ing age.)

There’s a help­ful foot­ball anal­o­gy for those who may be a bit slow in under­stand­ing that Plan B is indeed a bonafide con­tra­cep­tive, and not the abor­ti­fa­cient some mis­tak­en­ly make it out to be. It’s NSFW, but only just, as a team of car­toon penis-out­lines push down the field toward the uter­ine wall in the end zone.

The oth­er bills who once stood in line await­ing the president’s sig­na­ture have been reimag­ined as sperm, while song­writer Hol­ly Miran­da pays trib­ute to Dave Frish­berg’s lyrics with a piz­zazz wor­thy of the orig­i­nal:

I’m just a pill

A help­ful birth con­trol pill

No mat­ter what they say on Cap­i­tal Hill

So now you know my truth

I’m all about pre­ven­tion

If your con­dom breaks

I’m here for inter­ven­tion

Join me take a stand today

I real­ly hope and pray that you will

Drop some facts

Tell the world

I’m a pill.

Let’s hope the resis­tance yields more catchy, edu­ca­tion­al ani­ma­tions!

And here, for com­par­ison’s sake, is the mag­nif­i­cent orig­i­nal:

Via BUST Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

School­house Rock: Revis­it a Col­lec­tion of Nos­tal­gia-Induc­ing Edu­ca­tion­al Videos

Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Rock: The School­house Rock Par­o­dy Sat­ur­day Night Live May Have Cen­sored

The Birth Con­trol Hand­book: The Under­ground Stu­dent Pub­li­ca­tion That Let Women Take Con­trol of Their Bod­ies (1968)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” a Call for Americans to Take Action

in History, Politics | March 15th, 2017

Say, for exam­ple, that a gang of obscene­ly rich mer­ce­nar­ies with ques­tion­able ties and his­to­ries had tak­en pow­er with the intent to destroy insti­tu­tions so they could loot the coun­try, fur­ther impov­er­ish and dis­em­pow­er the cit­i­zen­ry, and pros­e­cute, imprison, and demo­nize dis­si­dents and eth­nic and reli­gious minori­ties. Such a sce­nario would cry out, one might think, for civ­il action on a nev­er-before-seen scale. Mil­lions, one might imag­ine, would either storm the cas­tle or refuse to obey the com­mands of their new rulers. We might describe this sit­u­a­tion as a top­sy-turvy turn of events, should, say, such an awful thing come to pass.

Top­sy-turvy is exact­ly the phrase Howard Zinn used in his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the U.S. dur­ing the Viet­nam War, when he saw a sit­u­a­tion like the one above, one that had also obtained, he said, in Hitler’s Ger­many and Stalin’s Rus­sia.

“I start,” he said, open­ing a debate, in 1970, at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty with philoso­pher Charles Frankel on the ques­tion of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence,

from the sup­po­si­tion that the world is top­sy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong peo­ple are in jail and the wrong peo­ple are out of jail, that the wrong peo­ple are in pow­er and the wrong peo­ple are out of pow­er, that the wealth is dis­trib­uted in this coun­try and the world in such a way as not sim­ply to require small reform but to require a dras­tic real­lo­ca­tion of wealth.

And with this pre­am­ble, which you can hear read by Matt Damon in the video above, the his­to­ri­an and activist began to make his case that civ­il dis­obe­di­ence “is not our prob­lem…. Our prob­lem is civ­il obe­di­ence.”

We rec­og­nize this for Nazi Ger­many. We know that the prob­lem there was obe­di­ence, that the peo­ple obeyed Hitler. Peo­ple obeyed; that was wrong. They should have chal­lenged, and they should have resist­ed; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stal­in’s Rus­sia we can under­stand that; peo­ple are obe­di­ent, all these herd­like peo­ple.

But “Amer­i­ca is dif­fer­ent” than oth­er world empires, says Zinn, antic­i­pat­ing the usu­al claims of excep­tion­al­ism. No, he says, it isn’t. “It is not that spe­cial. It real­ly isn’t.” Lat­er in his speech, Zinn calls the “vot­ing process” a “sham.”

Total­i­tar­i­an states love vot­ing. You get peo­ple to the polls and they reg­is­ter their approval. I know there is a difference—they have one par­ty and we have two par­ties. We have one more par­ty than they have, you see.

What is called for, he argued, is not a return to the past nor a rejig­ger­ing of the polit­i­cal machin­ery, but a polit­i­cal con­scious­ness that rec­og­nizes com­mon strug­gles across bor­ders:

Peo­ple in all coun­tries need the spir­it of dis­obe­di­ence to the state, which is not a meta­phys­i­cal thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind of dec­la­ra­tion of inter­de­pen­dence among peo­ple in all coun­tries of the world who are striv­ing for the same thing.

Damon’s read­ing took place dur­ing the 2012 per­for­mance in Voic­es of a People’s His­to­ry, a now-year­ly event that since 2003 has dra­ma­tized “the extra­or­di­nary his­to­ry of ordi­nary peo­ple who built the move­ments that made the Unit­ed States what it is today, end­ing slav­ery and Jim Crow, protest­ing war and the geno­cide of Native Amer­i­cans, cre­at­ing unions and the eight hour work day, advanc­ing women’s rights and gay lib­er­a­tion, and strug­gling to right wrongs of the day.”

The words of Howard Zinn fea­ture promi­nent­ly in all these events, and “The Prob­lem is Civ­il Obe­di­ence”—which was pub­lished as an essay two years after the 1970 debate—has proven a pop­u­lar choice. In 2004 at the sec­ond Voic­es of a People’s His­to­ry, Wal­lace Shawn (above) read the text, and Zinn him­self was in atten­dance. Shawn is best known for his com­ic turns in Woody Allen’s Man­hat­tan, Louis Malle’s My Din­ner With Andre, and Rob Rein­er’s The Princess Bride, and he can’t help but bring his wry humor to the read­ing sim­ply by sound­ing like him­self.

In anoth­er read­ing of Zinn’s speech, Grey’s Anato­my actor and out­spo­ken activist Jesse Williams takes on the text, intro­duced by a record­ing of the 2004 intro­duc­tion to Shawn’s read­ing. These three dif­fer­ent read­ings from three very dif­fer­ent actors and per­son­al­i­ties all have one thing in com­mon: their audi­ences all seem to rec­og­nize the sit­u­a­tion Zinn described in 1970 as entire­ly rel­e­vant to their own in 2004, 2012, 2014, and… per­haps, also in 2017.

Read Zin­n’s full remarks here and see new per­for­mances from this year’s Voic­es of a Peo­ple’s His­to­ry at their web­site.

You can find Zin­n’s essay pub­lished in the col­lec­tion: The Zinn Read­er: Writ­ings on Dis­obe­di­ence and Democ­ra­cy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 21 Hours of Lec­tures & Talks by Howard Zinn, Author of the Best­selling A People’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy

in Media, Politics | March 13th, 2017

For near­ly as many years as he’s occu­pied the pub­lic eye, famed lin­guist and anar­chist philoso­pher Noam Chom­sky has made claims that might have dis­cred­it­ed oth­er aca­d­e­mics. Per­haps his many books, arti­cles, lec­tures, inter­views, etc. car­ry such weight because of his “famed lin­guist” sta­tus and his long­time tenure at MIT. But there’s more to his longevi­ty as a respect­ed crit­ic of U.S. state pow­er. His voice also car­ries sig­nif­i­cant author­i­ty because he sub­stan­ti­ates his argu­ments with eru­dite, gran­u­lar analy­ses of eco­nom­ic the­o­ry, his­to­ry, and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy.

We’ve seen him do exact­ly this in his fierce oppo­si­tion to the Viet­nam War at the begin­ning of his activist career, and in his cri­tiques of proxy wars, impe­ri­al­is­tic repres­sion, and cor­po­rate resource grabs in Latin Amer­i­ca and South­east Asia in decades since.

When it comes to the U.S. domes­tic scene, one of Chomsky’s most point­ed and con­tin­u­al­ly rel­e­vant cri­tiques address­es the way in which we’re led to believe the country’s actions over­seas jus­ti­fy them­selves, as well as its actions upon its own cit­i­zens. We might debate whether the U.S. is a democ­ra­cy or a repub­lic, but accord­ing to Chom­sky, both notions may well be illu­so­ry.

Instead, Chom­sky argues in Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent—his 1988 cri­tique of “the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of the mass media” with Edward S. Herman—that the mass media sells us the idea that we have polit­i­cal agency. Their “pri­ma­ry func­tion… in the Unit­ed States is to mobi­lize sup­port for the spe­cial inter­ests that dom­i­nate the gov­ern­ment and the pri­vate sec­tor.” Those inter­ests may have changed or evolved quite a bit since 1988, but the mech­a­nisms of what Chom­sky and Her­man iden­ti­fy as “effec­tive and pow­er­ful ide­o­log­i­cal insti­tu­tions that car­ry out a sys­tem-sup­port­ive pro­pa­gan­da func­tion” might work in the age of Twit­ter just as they did in one dom­i­nat­ed by net­work and cable news.

Those mech­a­nisms large­ly divide into what the authors called the “Five Fil­ters.” The video at the top of the post, pro­duced by Marcela Pizarro and nar­rat­ed by Democ­ra­cy Now’s Amy Good­man, pro­vides a quick intro­duc­tion to them, in a jar­ring ani­mat­ed sequence that’s part Mon­ty Python, part Res­i­dents video. See the five fil­ters list­ed below in brief, with excerpts from Goodman’s com­men­tary:

1. Media Own­er­ship—The endgame of all mass media orgs is prof­it. “It is in their inter­est to push for what­ev­er guar­an­tees that prof­it.”

2. Adver­tis­ing—Media costs more than con­sumers will pay: Adver­tis­ers fill the gap. What do adver­tis­ers pay for? Access to audi­ences. “It isn’t just that the media is sell­ing you a prod­uct. They’re also sell­ing adver­tis­ers a prod­uct: you.”

3. Media Elite—“Jour­nal­ism can­not be a check on pow­er, because the very sys­tem encour­ages com­plic­i­ty. Gov­ern­ments, cor­po­ra­tions, and big insti­tu­tions know how to influ­ence the media. They feed it scoops and inter­views with sup­posed experts. They make them­selves cru­cial to the process of jour­nal­ism. If you want to chal­lenge pow­er, you’ll be pushed to the mar­gins…. You won’t be get­ting in. You’ll have lost your access.”

4. Flack—“When the sto­ry is incon­ve­nient for the pow­ers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: dis­cred­it­ing sources, trash­ing sto­ries, and divert­ing the con­ver­sa­tion.”

5. The Com­mon Ene­my—“To man­u­fac­ture con­sent, you need an ene­my, a tar­get: Com­mu­nism, ter­ror­ists, immi­grants… a boogey­man to fear helps cor­ral pub­lic opin­ion.”

Chom­sky and Herman’s book offers a sur­gi­cal analy­sis of the ways cor­po­rate mass media “man­u­fac­tures con­sent” for a sta­tus quo the major­i­ty of peo­ple do not actu­al­ly want. Yet for all of the recent ago­niz­ing over mass media fail­ure and com­plic­i­ty, we don’t often hear ref­er­ences to Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent these days. This may have some­thing to do with the book’s dat­ed exam­ples, or it may tes­ti­fy to Chomsky’s mar­gin­al­iza­tion in main­stream polit­i­cal dis­course, though he would be the first to note that his voice has not been sup­pressed.

It may also be the case that media the­o­ry and crit­i­cism like Chom­sky’s, or the work of Mar­shall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, or Jean Bau­drillard (all very dif­fer­ent kinds of thinkers), has fall­en out of favor in a 140-char­ac­ter world. In the late-80s and 90s, how­ev­er, such the­o­ry received a good deal of atten­tion, and Chom­sky appeared in the many venues you’ll see in the short video above, excerpt­ed from an almost 3‑hour 1992 doc­u­men­tary called Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent, a film made by “die-hard fans,” wrote Col­in Mar­shall in an ear­li­er post, that “curates instances of Chom­sky going from inter­view to inter­view, debate to debate, forum to forum, mak­ing sharp-sound­ing points about the rela­tion­ship between busi­ness elites and the media.”

Our desire for instant reward and set­tled opin­ion may have over­tak­en our abil­i­ty to sub­ject the entire phe­nom­e­non of mass media to crit­i­cal analy­sis, as we leap from cliffhang­er to cliffhang­er and cri­sis to cri­sis. But should we take the time to watch this film and, prefer­ably also, read Chomsky’s book, we may find our­selves some­what bet­ter equipped to eval­u­ate the onslaught of pro­pa­gan­da to which we’re sub­ject­ed on what seems like an hourly basis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er (1971)

Noam Chom­sky Talks About How Kids Acquire Lan­guage & Ideas in an Ani­mat­ed Video by Michel Gondry

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Sinclair Lewis’ Chilling Play, It Can’t Happen Here: A Read-Through by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre

in Politics, Theatre | March 7th, 2017

As a num­ber of com­men­ta­tors have not­ed, it has already hap­pened here in the past—that is, the fer­vid nativism, immi­gra­tion bans, and mass depor­ta­tions, the nation­al­ist, fanat­i­cal­ly reli­gious, anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic mil­i­tan­cy… many of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of Amer­i­can author­i­tar­i­an­ism, in oth­er words. In the polit­i­cal cli­mate we face today, these strains have come togeth­er in some very overt ways, under the lead­er­ship of a pur­port­ed­ly charis­mat­ic leader who swayed mil­lions of fol­low­ers with the promise of renewed “great­ness.”

The ques­tions that now arise are those once asked by It Can’t Hap­pen Here, the 1935 nov­el by Sin­clair Lewis that imag­ined the elec­tion of a charis­mat­ic leader who promis­es great­ness, “then quick­ly becomes a dic­ta­tor,” writes the Amer­i­can Library Association’s Pub­lic Pro­grams Office, “enact­ing mar­tial law and throw­ing dis­senters into labor camps.” The nov­el res­onat­ed with a pub­lic increas­ing­ly con­cerned about ris­ing dic­ta­tor­ships in Europe, as well as the grow­ing pow­er of the pres­i­den­cy at home. “Short­ly after it was pub­lished,” the ALA notes, “the nov­el was recre­at­ed as a play and opened in 21 cities nation­wide on Octo­ber 27, 1936.”

You can see some still images of an orig­i­nal It Can’t Hap­pen Here pro­duc­tion in the video above about the Fed­er­al The­ater Project. Last year—almost eighty years after the play’s debut and just days before the pres­i­den­tial election—several dozen the­aters, uni­ver­si­ties, and libraries across the coun­try held read­ings of Lewis’ the­atri­cal adap­ta­tion. See one such read­ing at the top of the post, per­formed on Octo­ber 24 at the Yolo Coun­ty Library in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia by the Berke­ley Reper­to­ry The­atre, who at the time also staged a full, two part pro­duc­tion of It Can’t Hap­pen Here that was both “thrilling and grim,” as Alexan­der Nazaryan writes at The New York­er. (See a trail­er below)

The Berke­ley Rep’s pro­duc­tion sig­nif­i­cant­ly rewrote Lewis’ adap­ta­tion, which they decid­ed was “ter­ri­ble.” But the nov­el itself is not quite a lit­er­ary mas­ter­piece. “Lewis was nev­er much of an artist,” Nanaryan notes, “but what he lacked in style he made up for with social obser­va­tion.” While his skills as a close observ­er of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal ten­den­cies may still be unmatched, the pre­science of his nov­el in imag­in­ing the sit­u­a­tion we find our­selves in today may have as much to do with Lewis’ abil­i­ties as with the recur­rence of cer­tain depress­ing themes in Amer­i­can polit­i­cal life. As Alex Wag­n­er writes at The Atlantic, the mass depor­ta­tions and raids on immi­grant pop­u­la­tions that have now increased in cities nation­wide saw a chill­ing prece­dent in the 1920s and 30s, “a time of eco­nom­ic strug­gle, racial resent­ment and increas­ing xeno­pho­bia.”

Then, Her­bert Hoover, “promised jobs for Americans—and made good on that promise by slash­ing immi­gra­tion by near­ly 90 per­cent” and deport­ing as many as “1.8 mil­lion men, women and chil­dren” of Mex­i­can descent or with “a Mex­i­can-sound­ing name.” As many as six­ty per­cent of those deport­ed were U.S. cit­i­zens. We’ve seen in recent months numer­ous com­par­isons of our cur­rent polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion to Nazi Ger­many and Fas­cist Italy. While these may be war­rant­ed in many respects, they may also be super­flu­ous. To under­stand the ori­gins of racist author­i­tar­i­an­ism in Amer­i­ca, we need only look back to sev­er­al moments in our own his­to­ry, those that Lewis close­ly observed and sat­i­rized in a nov­el that once again shows us an image of the coun­try that many peo­ple have cho­sen not to see.

This read­ing will be added to our list, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Rec­og­nize a Dystopia: Watch an Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Dystopi­an Fic­tion

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

Philoso­pher Richard Rorty Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Results of the 2016 Elec­tion … Back in 1998

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Banksy Opens a Hotel with the Worst View in the World: Visit the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem

in Art, Life, Politics, Travel | March 6th, 2017

Quirky, artist-cus­tomized guest rooms equipped with wifi, fridge, and safes…

Leather couch­es and “an air of unde­served author­i­ty” in the com­mu­nal areas…

VIPs who spring for the Pres­i­den­tial suite will enjoy access to a tiki bar, library, and Dead Sea min­er­als for use in a plunge bath spa­cious enough for four…

Sounds like the sort of hotel cater­ing to well-heeled hip­sters in San Fran­cis­co, Brook­lyn, or Shored­itch…

…but Beth­le­hem?

The artist Banksy’s lat­est mas­sive-scale project may nev­er find its way onto Palestine’s offi­cial tourism site, but it’s no joke. The ful­ly func­tion­ing hotel is set to open for online book­ings on March 11.

Vis­i­tors should be pre­pared to put a $1000 deposit on their cred­it cards at check in, a secu­ri­ty mea­sure aimed at those who might be tempt­ed to walk off with art­work by Sami Musa, Dominique Petrin, or the hotel’s famous founder.

Guests are also cau­tioned to con­tain their excite­ment about their upcom­ing stay when pass­ing through cus­toms at Tel Aviv air­port, where trav­el­ers who blab about their inten­tions to vis­it the West Bank are often sub­ject­ed to extra scruti­ny. One won­ders how many Tel Aviv TSA offi­cers would get the appeal of stay­ing in a hotel that boasts of its ter­ri­ble views of the wall divid­ing Pales­tine from Israel.

The hotel’s prox­im­i­ty to the wall pro­vides both its name and its raison‑d’etre. Banksy is mark­ing the cen­te­nary of British con­trol of Pales­tine by entic­ing vis­i­tors to edu­cate them­selves, using his cus­tom­ary humor and lack of polemic as the launch­ing pad.

To that end, a muse­um and gallery on the premis­es will be open to the pub­lic, offer­ing “a warm wel­come to peo­ple from all sides of the con­flict and across the world.” (The hotel’s FAQ coun­ters the notion that the project is an anti-Semit­ic state­ment, issu­ing a zero-tol­er­ance pol­i­cy where fanati­cism is con­cerned.)

One of the hotel’s most orig­i­nal ameni­ties is its in-house graf­fi­ti sup­plies store, staffed by experts ready to dis­pense “local advice and guid­ance” to vis­i­tors eager to con­tribute to the Wall’s pro­lif­er­at­ing street art. (For inspi­ra­tion, refer to Banky’s work from a 2015 trip to Gaza, below.)

Arm­chair trav­el­ers can check out Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel here.

The online reser­va­tions desk will open for busi­ness on March 11, the same day the gallery and muse­um open to the pub­lic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Always Bank­able Banksy

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Banksy Cre­ates a Tiny Repli­ca of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is now play­ing in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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