June 2005 Archives

Last December, I was feeling particularly uppity and wrote this letter.

I've been enjoying Arthur since issue 4.  Here's some reflections:

Arthur seems to be embracing the role of sixties revivalist in a lot of ways.  If you're going to go that route, it's important that you avoid replicating the mistakes of that era.

There are a lot of young people who look back and have to conclude that drugs were the achilles heel of the sixties peace movement. Trying to get stoners politically organized is like herding cats. There's people who've been trying to start a NORML chapter at my college for like 6 years, but by their own admission their drug intake means they always seem to lack the motivation and organization.  The corporate media then-as-now loves drug culture because its emphasis on immediate gratification resonantes so strongly with consumerist desire.  (cf. Thomas Frank's first book, Conquest of Cool).  They glamorize and normalize getting fucked up through shitty movies like "Dude Where's My Car" and shitty music like Pantera & Cypress Hill & Staind.   For many of us, getting serious about overthrowing the corporate oligarchy means staying self-aware by not fucking with our brain chemistry.

So that's why it bugs me to see articles like Mark Pilkington's piece on magic mushrooms, replete with glamorous photos.  Pilkington adheres to a false binary between cool progressive hipsters who like drugs and stodgy old conservatives who wanna stop them.  This oversimplification means that people who support decriminalization of drugs but have strong reservations about their use are never represented.  This is pretty much true throughout the magazine.

I don't want to come off as authoritarian or judgmental.  Of course drug policy in this country is absurd, racist, and counterproductive. I'm open to the idea that psychedelics might provide legitimate insights or heightened consciousness for some folks, though I'm certain that one can get there in other ways.  And of course, I'd rather see the 14 year old kids around my small rural town doing shrooms than meth or oxycontin (seriously a big problem here).  But I'd REALLY rather see them explode their minds in healthier ways.  If you're going to try to start a consciousness-raising trend, why not publish a nice big feature spread on transcendental meditation?

I guess what I'm asking for is balance.

Also:  more articles written by and about women & queers.  Please?

Thanks.

xo,
Kevin Erickson
Walla Walla, Washington

The letter ignited a lengthy and not-very-productive exchange of emails between myself and Jay Babcock, Arthur's rather defensive editor. (Can someone explain to me why dudes always bring up "quotas" when you ask for more emphasis on women and queers?) So I was surprised and pleased when Babcock decided to print my letter and also to take my advice and print an excellent article on "Meditation as a subversive activity" by Michael Brownstein. Brownstein's article is definitely worth the effort of trying to track down a copy of the magazine (issue #15, Feb 2005). He apparently also wrote this book, World On Fire which is now on my wishlist.

May 1 was Mayday! aka International Worker's Day, an official state holiday in most nations. (There are indications that Labor Day was created to avoid a U.S. recognition of Mayday and its displays of international solidarity). To celebrate and honor working people, I lazily sat on my ass and watched John Sayles' excellent 1987 film Matewan.

The mostly-true story: Labour leader Joe Kenehan (a surprisingly hottt Chris Cooper) comes to the town of Matewan to try to organize the local mine workers of the Stone Mountain Coal Company in order to better their and their families' lives. He takes a room at a boarding house run by Elma Radnor and her young son Danny (a surprisingly teenaged and beardless Will Oldham). The talk of unionizing has prompted the mine owners to bring in black and Italian workers as scabs while at the same time, they are employing "muscle" in the form of detectives from a private agency to try to break up any unionizing activities. The internal process of unionization is a difficult one as the workers deal with racism and betrayal in trying to develop a common front. The struggle culminates in a violent confrontation on the main street of the town, the infamous Matewan massacre. (synopsis stolen from DVD verdict)

The film nicely illustrates how religion can be a tool for enforcing hegemony (director Sayles makes a cameo as a red-baiting preacher denouncing unionization) or as a means of encouraging liberation (Oldham as the boy preacher Danny talks union from the pulpit and finds scriptural support). It all depends on who is allowed to interpret the tradition.

But moreover, I like Matewan because to me, it is a film about the power and the challenge of faith.

To explain what I mean by this, I'm going to have to first unpack what I mean by faith. Too often we reduce faith to simple willful adherence to a set of unprovable doctrines. Instead I'm going to use the definition of faith provided by the 20th century theologian Paul Tillich in his excellent and very short book Dynamics Of Faith. Tillich contends that Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned about something without conditions. It is all-encompassing, a way of living, an act of total personality - one's whole being is drawn to the ultimate concern. Faith is about commitment, trust, and investment, not about the veracity of a set of empirical claims in the absence of supporting evidence.

One nice thing about this definition is that it allows us to see faith at work in contexts we don't think of as religious. Capitalism, nationalism, DIY punk subculture; these are manifestations of faith. The object of faith might be undeserving, but it is faith nontheless.

Additionally this definition breaks down the false binary between the "irrational" religious faithful and the "rational" secular faithless. Everyone has faith in something.

Okay, back to the film. Chris Cooper as Joe Kenehan is an atheist marxist, and yet he is a man of deep unwavering faith. For him the ultimate concern, the object of faith is social justice through a praxis of nonviolence and solidarity.

Kenehan understands that driving wedges between different subsets of working people is a trick to distract and weaken them, to keep them from ably fighting the battles that matter. In Matewan the divisions are racial and ethnic. As Danny says "They got you fightin' white against colored, native against foreign...when you know there ain't but two sides in the world - them that work and them that don't. That's all you got to know about the enemy" Today in the U.S. the wedge is cultural: red state vs. blue state, urban vs. rural. (Here's an example, it's the absolute worst political analysis I've read in recent memory, and let me take this opportunity to out Dan Savage as a libertarian propagandist posing as a liberal activist. Jerkface.)

So the workers and their families put their faith in the union, putting aside differences and finding strength in each other. They invest themselves in the cause fully, even with no guarantee of success. The film is honest about the difficulty of holding onto faith in hard times, as we see that Danny's faith is wavering. His choice about whether to repay violence with violence is the film's dramatic climax.

Hopefully it does not spoil anything to note that Matewan doesn't have a happy ending. Actually it doesn't have much of an ending at all. It seems intentional; the fundamental struggle between the workers and the wealthy elites hasn't ended. Arguably, it's still the dominant narrative of our history-in-progress, and radical faith in nonviolence and solidarity is still desperately needed.

The film is sort of obvious in its moralizing. But is there anything wrong with that really, as long as its done honestly and artfully?

For another object lesson in faith, read John Sayle's book Thinking In Pictures: The Making of the movie Matewan . This book documents the struggles Sayles went through trying to get the film made, and his commitment to doing the project on an independent level. It's practical inspiration for creative folks trying to stay honest about their art in the face of tough fiscal realities.

Note: if you are interested in this movie, do not get the domestic DVD released by Artisan. It is a very crummy transfer with poor image and sound. Get the Canadian DVD released by Seville Pictures, it's way better. Canadians may get better DVDs, but the USA gets better slurpees.