The day after Thanksgiving, some young progressive types whiled away the hours in Wal-Marts across America, slowly pushing empty carts through the aisles. The idea was to celebrate Buy Nothing Day, an antiholiday invented by the Vancouver-based Media Foundation in the early 90s that takes place on what’s traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year. “As an action of resistance,” notes the Northeastern Pennsylvania Whirl-Mart Web site, meandering through a superstore “utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle.”
The left, meanwhile, has become affirmational–concerned with reassuring ourselves that we are good people in the face of everything, that we’re united in the struggle, that we’re right on–a term that’s actually returned to the lexicon of junior lefties, though the accent these days is on the first word. We all know Bush is a chimp, that his administration has been bought and paid for, that the 2000 election was a crime against democracy. So as long as we’re right on, there is nothing to be done but to proclaim and demonstrate our right-on-ness.
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Another headline: “GOP Leadership Puts Anti-Choice Measures at the Top of Agenda.” Follow the link, and it says “the criminalization of so-called ‘partial-birth abortions’ is just the tip of the iceberg….” Nobody used the extraordinarily loaded term “partial-birth abortions” until conservatives introduced it a couple years ago. But what’s at the top of the agenda for Democratic leadership? Who knows? Democrats.com strongly suggests that our number one priority is to resist Republicans. At the bottom of the page, there’s a call to “help us stop the extremist Republican agenda.” But there isn’t a single juicy, reductive, confident Democratic catchphrase to be found here. “It’s Still the Economy, Stupid” doesn’t count.
The witty demonstrations of the last few years, like the Whirl-Mart ritual, have invariably been exercises in ego gratification–the last one that worked in America was arguably the Boston Tea Party. Adbusters’ Web site for this year’s Buy Nothing Day suggested “fanclubbing” as a tactic–repeatedly buying and returning the same item. That’ll bring the capitalist machine to its knees, all right. Besides, protesting the entire faceless abstraction of “consumerism” seems the wrong place to start. It’s like that Monty Python routine where the arrested criminal announces that “society’s to blame.” “Agreed,” says the cop. “We’ll be charging them too.”
There are solutions to the left’s severe image problems, but they’re not easy or even appealing. They involve careful sloganeering (even when it means simplifying issues for mass consumption), and presenting progressive ideas as easy-to-like actions, in moderate language–energy conservation, for instance, should be simple enough to sell as home-front patriotism right now. They probably require swearing off the prefix anti- for the duration. And they demand hard work–the kind of activism that doesn’t have a laugh track and doesn’t look like a yellowed clipping of a 40-year-old march.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Jim Siergey.
