Weave our stories from the best materials.

Weave our stories from the best materials.
The corollary to open stories is not that we dump in whatever leftovers are mouldering in the back of the refrigerator, but that we are selective about what we borrow, so we don’t end up fooling our neighbors and ourselves.

Admit it, you like big ideas anyway. Me too. I like to contemplate the far reaches of the cosmos, the millions of years of human experience, the complexity of my own consciousness. It makes me feel as big as the world itself. I have to be careful, though. Sometimes my ideas don’t fit with one another. It’s like they can’t really exist in the same universe. That bothers me. Then, when I try to knead and stretch and pull them together, they burst like a gooey mass of chewing gum. I’ve always tried to come up with just the right idea, the perfect formula, to solve my problems. If I can find just the right words, I like to think, I can just skate around the blood-soaked contradictions confronting me. I think sometimes we have a tendency to draw our ideas with such a large brush because we hope to eliminate the need for hard choices or (dare I say it?) conflict.

On the one hand, democracy and telling the truth require that many hands weave our political story from many strands. On the other, if we use the wrong materials --the tattered threads of worn-out lies and overstretched excuses-- we end up with something quite different from what we aimed for, or maybe the design unravels entirely. We don’t need to patronize other people by assuming they require or will accept the easiest, cheapest explanations. We have to respect our neighbors’ ability to understand true stories and distinguish them from shoddy half-truths.

Put it another way: among other things, using the best materials means that we don’t need no little white lies, pretty fantasies, or polite silences, no matter how much these would grease the conversations. It’s true, we’re building relationships, working relationships, but we’re also sketching out a common plan for action; we need to do it right. Stories are a kind of structure, and if we build on sinkholes, let dry rot into the beams, or forget to brace the load-bearing columns, we just set ourselves up for collapse. We’re not in Oz anymore, but Kansas, and we have to build for drought and flood, blizzards and tornados.

Big tent ideas have a long history among reformers of all stripes. White boys of the Middle Ages spent centuries trying to reconcile Judaism, Christianity or Islam with Greek philosophy, believing that both had roots in reality. (At least they didn't while away the time designing anthrax sprays and atom bombs.) Chinese mandarins developed elaborate rationales to accept Western technology without losing imperial values, and now, a century and a half later, their communist successors have managed to combine the thrills of capitalism with the delights of dictatorship-- a combination as innovative as, I don't know, polluted water and dysentery.

In my country we keep trying to reconcile systems of domination with something more hopeful. We hope to stitch some liberating ideas on to the authoritarian framework, or borrow the dominant symbols for our own campaigns: business unionism; the Social Gospel and liberation theology; gay marriage; special-role feminism; et cetera ad nauseam. Many times our creative meme-splicing brings important successes in the short term, or anyhow a comfortable level of protection and patronage. At least as often it strengthens the structures of control.

That’s because the underlying submission stories are usually more coherent and certainly more reinforced than the progressive umbrella stories we try to cobble together. If you’re going to adopt the “family values” vocabulary, you have to account for the millenia of marriage as a way for men to own women and children. Liberal religionists have to contend with their faiths’ origins as war propaganda. Technology optimists might recall the very long list of scientists in service to racism, sexism, war and predatory corporations. We fund schools to make children more “competitive” with Chinese kids, or whoever is the latest face of the Yellow Peril. We exhort schoolkids to be little ladies, or to act like princesses, training them in our ecstasies of obedience and privilege. Black nationalists seek to create a glorious past from the gangster empires of Ghana and Mali. As workers, we are trained by employers, and sometimes by our union reps, to value our jobs and wages without regard to the health of our communities (because, after all, there are only so many jobs to go around). Many economists and policymakers talk as if rebuilding the economy means going back to the model of endless growth and consumption. Some of us are satisfied to applaud recycling programs and fluourescent light bulbs, even when the promoters blame the environmental crisis on “greedy” consumers. Our usual refrain is that “Government is corrupt”-- rather than “The Halliburton government is corrupt.”

We can see some of the consequences from historical examples. For instance, despite modern feminism’s roots in the abolitionist movement, some early leaders made deliberately racist deals and appeals, at a time when KKK terrorists were gearing up to smash the gains African Americans had made after the Civil War (Segrest 212-13, Pratt 32). Eventually some politicians agreed to support women’s right to vote as a way to cancel out the votes of immigrants and Black people. It's the old story of people winning some privilege, then pulling up the ladder after them. Even today some women assert rights based on the suppposedly innate moral superiority of women-as-mothers (Tobias 129), an old claim, and very congenial to millenia of Talibanistas. Similarly, how many times have our organizations have turned their backs on key leaders because they are or could be portrayed as gay? These submissions have crippled our work to build democratic power.

There are all sorts of things we can do to help people understand and risk democracy and justice, including changing our own ideas about how to achieve these. But accepting Halliburton’s fantasies of control and domination in order to legitimate the democratic struggle has to be a losing strategy.

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“Don’t be ashamed of the gospel. The only thing that can get people through difficult circumstances is God, not you. As someone from one of the poorest ghettoes of Brooklyn, I can attest that though social justice movements and programs are needed, Jesus Christ has provided the joy that was and is my strength. Progressive Christians cannot throw out the baby of the gospel with the bathwater of Religious Right rhetoric.
“I know that an overemphasis on the afterlife has prevented some Christians from moving on social issues, but progressive Christians do not have to abandon the part of the gospel that commands us to be ‘ born again.’ The ‘good news’ is not just an end to poverty, but the opportunity for rebirth in Christ and an intimate relationship with him” (O. Alston 13-14).
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Kelman (139) points out that people who resist authority almost always look to another authority --the “higher law” of one sort or another-- to justify themselves. In olden days peasants in dispute with their lords would claim the sanction of a distant king. 60 years ago many activists posed a religious challenge to the legal framework of racism, forcing racists to retreat to their own churches-- from which emerged like a delicate butterfly (under the impact as well of feminism, the security state, and the gutting of the U.S. manufacturing sector) our turn-of-millenia fundamentalism. The bosses try to split the workers; naturally we try to split the bosses.

There are lots of reasons to claim the protection of one authority even as we challenge another. To live with each other we have to have some way to know what to expect of our neighbors, some written or unwritten rules. In societies so tightly controlled that people cannot speak honestly to each other, they have no opportunity to develop their own codes of behavior; they have to fall back on one or another traditional set of rules. Portelli contrasts the class consciousness of Italian workers with the individualism of Kentucky coal miners: “In the absence of a vision of class conflict, there is little space for self-validation of the workers’ identity. Recognition must be confirmed by ‘significant others,’ and management is as ‘other’ and as ‘significant’ as they come, especially in the semi-feudal layout of a coal camp" (203). In explaining civil disobedience, M.L. King at first tried to distinguish just and unjust laws by writing that "a just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God" (Letter from Birmingham Jail). (Years later a colleague posed a similar question to a group of grassroots activists in Mississippi. "Do we feel bound to obey all the laws?" my co-worker asked. No, came the chorus. For instance, the government says we can't beat our children. Everyone agreed: now that is an unjust law.)

Through generations of struggle, people have had to work out ideas of justice that are not just singing the company tune. As Scott points out, even in prisons, even among slaves, many people can and do develop ways of thinking, talking and acting that help them maintain some measure of dignity and freedom. And later in King's essay he became much more specific about unjust laws; for instance, those that apply to minorities but not the majority, or those which the minority have no voice in legislating.

Another compelling reason to seek shelter behind alternative authority is that it’s very hard for dissenters to dispute issues considered settled, because then their opposition is so easily seen as an attack on the group itself (Atkinson 734-5). In that case that what is meant as a challenge to the leadership gets seen as a threat to the whole community. Appeals to alternative authority signal that the issues in question are still legitimately open to question.

Many of us also continue to admire the mighty even as we resist them because once our brains have grown up around the idea of Big Daddy, we always have that Big Daddy-shaped space in there for him. So, for instance, we may be under the impression that Karl Rove was the genius of the Halliburton empire, and we need only study the master to outdo him. Or we may believe that we don’t really have the power to change the political economy; the best we can do is coax the bosses into being nicer, by throwing their own slogans back at them-- the land of opportunity, the sanctity of the family, Operation Iraqi Freedom, etc. That presumes, of course, that the machers take their own propaganda more seriously than we do. As it happens, the empire is not built on the thrill of the red, white & blue, but by putting the rank and file into positions where we have to admit our role in Halliburton’s crimes, or pretend they are not crimes at all, but heroisms.

The dominant ideas make up such a big part of our toolkit, it's hard not to try to use them to solve our problems. However deferential we might be, though, let's not imagine the rightists will stand idly by as we try to steal their punch lines. Once talk radio host Dan Patrick on the Laura Ingraham show put it this way (I’m paraphrasing): The Democrats are talking a lot more these days about God. But you can’t talk about God on the one hand, and gay marriage and abortion on the other, because God is not on that side (4-27-05). We can’t win over rightists by putting a few sprigs of authoritarian camouflage in our hair. They see through that, and won’t appreciate us treating them like suckers. In 2008 Barack Obama spent a lot of time on his knees, rolling his eyes heavenward, but white evangelicals voted for the GOP anyway, 73 - 26% (Boston 12/08 p.9). Pehaps, in the long run, bowing and scraping can reduce resistance among rank and file rightists. Can a combination of groveling and good works win over the rightist preachers?(I’m amused to note the right has a mirror-image critique. One radio host [1-30-03] lambasted churches that permit rap and rock music to attract baby boomers and young people. She called it “bait and switch”, and said it doesn’t work; half of young adults leave the church anyway. Religion is not supposed to be fun!)
For all these reasons, it's important speak the ideas of governance and justice that we have from our own experience, and disentangle them from the control ideas we're trained to.

As I've worked at stripping away layer after layer of my false identity, notions of skin, blood, heart based in racism and anti-Semitism, another way I've tried to regain my self-respect, to keep from feeling naked and ashamed of who it is I am, is to look at what I have carried with me from my culture that could help me in the process. . . . a sense of connection to history, people, and place, through my family's rootedness in the South; and a comparative and skeptical way of thinking, through my Presbyterian variety of Protestantism . . . . I also discovered a tradition of white Christian-raised women in the South, who had worked actively for social justice since at least 1849 . . . " (Pratt 43, 44).

Pratt goes on to mention some of the many many women whose work enriches our lives, though they didn't make it into the textbooks. There's already another path for us; it's just not finished.

We can also remind each other of the goals we share, or should, and measure our performance, and the managers', by those. Does our work help the community? We don't need to beg permission from one boss to defend ourselves from another.


I'm not looking for purity of ideas. We know too little to be dogmatic. Precisely because we need to keep learning, we can't afford to waste time on ideas that we know already are not grounded in reality, and will make our problems worse.

Clarity about our goals would be nice, too. Liberal evangelical Jim Wallis said, "When a hurricane is coming and you are passing out sandbags, you don’t ask if the person sitting next to you is liberal or conservative," (Cimino 153). I might ask, however, who helped cause climate change, who paved over the wetlands, who built developments in the flood plain, and who cornered the market on sandbags. See, I don’t want to get flooded out again next year, and every year after that.

Wallis is really talking about two different things: coalitions for action, and the open set of liberating ideas to which all of us can contribute. Democratic movements need both. We need tactical allies to help fight the immediate battles, and take apart the corporate regime piece by piece. We need long-term partners with a vested interest in democracy and its fruits, to change the balance of power in this country and the world. I think we assemble the partnerships by assembling the partners' stories.

We need to learn from people who are not like us. The most useful stories are composed of elements from many sources, and they change as our needs change. Moreover, some elements that might seem contradictory at first can add depth and flexibility to our understanding. But if we accept ideas that are not true from the start, or worse, pretend to accept them, they poison our attempts to solve problems.

Again, keeping our minds open does not mean accepting every dirty lie Halliburton can manufacture. It’s one thing to have a big tent for people; quite another to imagine all ideas have equal value. Here's an example: we can put together an effective coalition to fight a local nuclear plant. But what I want, really, and I hope you do too, is to stop these poisonous contraptions everywhere, and take a more sustainable path to energy use. Short-term, we can work with the folks who say, Not in my backyard! Long-term, we build a very widely shared understanding, and shared responsibility, that we're not going to let Dick Cheney dump radioactive wastes in anyone's back yard.

That means we don't hide our ideas, but that we are even clearer. And we can do it without losing the tactical allies. The folks who don't care where a reactor goes, so long as it's not in their gated communities, won't stop working with us because we have a bigger view. Knowing our agenda from the git-go, they won't suddenly freak out one day when they find out. Possibly they'll believe they can use our help, then abandon us at their convenience. Some of them will broaden their own understanding. With all these possibilities, our strongest course is to have clear analysis, goals and strategies: clear and convincing stories.
Otherwise, when the storm hits, our ramshackle liberal shelters break apart and blow away, leaving the hard bricks of control ideology. Portelli explains,

the way in which different meanings attach themselves to the same symbols depends to a large extent on the context of power relationships. The powerless, the poor, the unschooled groped toward interpretations of their own, but are constantly exposed to the powerful interpretations of the elites. They may risk the lonesome and doubtful effort of creating their own meanings; but when this fails, it is too easy and tempting to go back to the warmth and security of those authorized interpretations which even the insurgents carried inside them all the time anyway (233).

Indeed, our compromises salvage and legitimize the authoritarian stories. They suggest that justice and democracy are inconceivable outside the frameworks set by the warlords-- as one woman put it, after learning more about less savory history of Roman Catholicism: now she was all the more determined to peel away the layers of corruption to get at its “social justice core”. They reinforce relations of inequality by appealing to the very authorities that justify injustice.

We can't afford to sit back and say, Don't be so alarmist! Don't plan around the 100-year flood! Because the political and economic storm is the underlying condition and assumption of our work. Otherwise there would be little need for or chance of casting down the structures of domination. But crises are also the conditions giving rise to fascism. Segrest writes, "North Carolina created Helms because hard times create demagogues everywhere” (237).

We’ve seen again and again how important it is to confront the big lies even as we work for more tangible goals. How many times in the past century have we seen revolutions promise democracy and lapse into dictatorships?-- Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, Iran . . . not only because the gangsters killed off so many democratizing leaders, but also because even as the institutions of the old regime collapsed, democratic traditions were too new and feeble to replace the deeply entrenched habits of submission and control. Classic fascism is by definition the product of an authoritarian society where the old bosses lose control, but the ideas of submission still prevail, reinforced through new technologies. Millions of Germans resisted the Nazi takeover in the 1930s, but millions more found it very comfortable, because of long practice with the old imperial military, bureaucracy, and churches.

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The German bishops during these years spoke up against the Nazis’ glorification of race and blood, but they had practically nothing to say specifically about the widespread anti-Semitic propaganda and acts of violence. . . . a Church that justified moderate anti-Semitism and merely objected to extreme and immoral acts was ill-prepared to provide an effective antidote to the Nazis’ gospel of hate (Lewy 274).
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We have to recognize too that many times people opposed to the dictatorships failed to come up with a shared analysis and strategy. In Germany and in Spain socialists, communists and middle class liberals fought each other almost as bitterly than they fought the fascists. They didn't develop ideas that would express their common interests, while authoritarian strains ran deep within all these camps.

Let's take a closer look at how such confusions can hurt our work. Portelli recounts the struggle over symbol and substance in the coal fields of east Kentucky.

The majority of the strikers in fact attempted to reconcile their actions with their patriotism, by proving that they, not the judges and operators, were the ‘real’ Americans and that the union fulfilled the Constitution-- while the operators and the judges were claiming the same values and authorities for themselves. Thus, they became involved in a cultural as well as a material class struggle, fought with symbols as well as guns. . . . Together with the question of ‘Who owns the land and the wealth?’ the strike also raised the question of ‘Who owns the symbols of the land?’ (222).

This was in the 1930s. In response to charges of Bolshevism, the miners claimed to be 100% American. But

the confrontation took place on ground chosen and defined by the operators and their supporters. Therefore, the operators campaigned aggressively, while the strikers were mostly on the defensive. There was more emphasis on proving that the strike was not un-American than in proving the ‘un-Americanism’ of the operators, nor was any attempt made to reject this ground of confrontation altogether. . . (225).

In fact, their defensiveness led some miners to further scale down their vision, swearing off any such crazy notions as equality: ‘I don’t want your millions, mister,’ sang Jim Garland later; ‘All I want is food for my babies / Give me back my job again’” (225).

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“There are three things I believe in: the Bible, the Union, and God.”
-- Sudie Crusenberry, Brookside, Harlan County, Kentucky, 1989 (Portelli 226)
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Religion, of course, was the other battleground for the miners’ understanding. Portelli notes that “All the great strike songs . . . are based on hymn tunes” (228), and that the strikers got substantial help from some city preachers and religious activists like Reinhold Niebuhr. But the mine operators employed their own preachers. More fundamentally, the church ideology did not reliably support the strikers’ ideas. Partly it was the old Pie in the Sky dynamic: to the extent the churches have a critique of capitalist injustice, many tend to channel members’ energy away from this corrupt world and towards striving for personal salvation. Partly it reflects the deep Christian pessimism about our ability to govern ourselves, since we are wicked by nature. So

while the operators hardly entertain a doubt about their own righteousness, the miners are again uncertain, ambivalent, and in constant need of justification. Their religion tells them that what they are doing is both righteous and sinful; and this contradiction is the lever which the operators use to finally break the precarious continuity between the old and the new, the actions and the beliefs, leaving the defeated miners culturally powerless, sinful in their own eyes (230).

By characterizing the strike as stealing, the operators claimed the mantle of the two systems most miners were not prepared to challenge, Christianity and private property.

Some organizers take outcomes like this to mean they must rid their ranks of anyone who would challenge my country’s twin religions. Indeed, some see the unions’ postwar purge of radicals as a key element in the deals that brought a generation of properity to hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers. Others argue with equal force that those same deals set the conditions for organized labor’s sclerotic condition today, by creating fragile enclaves of privileged workers and a court-retainer mindset.

Churches don't always serve the status quo; indeed, they are often credited with the second watershed success of the postwar generation, the civil rights movement. Without dispute, African American churches formed the most visible institutional and ideological support for the movement. Perhaps as important, the defection of mainstream churches from the racist cause undermined the ideological basis for segregation (Schwarz 143). But there’s a real question as to how much the churches led the movement, and how much they had to be dragged into it, kicking and screaming. Just read King's letter from the Birmingham jail to liberal clergymen, or read about King's own intellectual journey. Charles Payne and others name many sources of the movement’s strategies and power, from Dubois socialism to Gandhian nonviolence and Ella Baker’s vison of democratic communities. Others reckon that the movement lost steam short of complete success, and attribute that in part to the limited goals of some of the churchmen who led it, and their sometime white allies.

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“N.T. Wright says that Christian social activism is ‘building for the kingdom, as opposed to ‘building the kingdom.’ We are like stonemasons working on a great cathedral that will take centuries to finish. We have been told to carve our piece of stone, even though we have no idea how the builder will use it. We trust that someday God will make our work part of the new creation. But we’re not actually building ‘the kingdom’-- only God can build the kingdom” (L.Bean 24).
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On the other hand, a lot of rightists claim King lost it when he started linking racism to the Viet Nam War and economic injustice. Stick to your pulpit! Much to their relief King got killed before he got far along that track. So I guess there’s data on either side of the argument. Narrow goals can be more achieveable. But what is it you’ve achieved?

Today a lot of anti-racism work goes under the rubric of teaching tolerance. Implicit in this model is the idea that racism is at heart a matter of personal attitude, and the remedy is changing people’s minds, one by one. There can also be a suggestion of moral equivalence --your people are in pain, just as my people are in pain, let's just be nice to each other-- even in situations where one group has vastly more power than another. Some activists seem to assume that racism is like Original Sin, something we’re born with, and can overcome only with years of personal struggle. It’s almost a therapy approach, and tends to ignore the stark facts of persistent structural inequality of opportunity, income and criminal justice.

With gender issues, too, some people would like to focus on personal attitudes rather than public policy. We know folks who, because a relative is gay, have become very kind and gracious to the gay people they meet in person-- while insisting on laws and policies that punish gay people. Most but not all of us see through such hypocrisy.


There’s an interesting account of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, that I think illustrates some of the issues of contending stories. You may remember, at that time (and until 1967) Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools. The ACLU got a Dayton teacher by the name of John Scopes to challenge the law, and sent Clarence Darrow and Dudley Field Malone to defend him. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate on a populist platform, headed the team prosecuting evolution. The trial got heavy press coverage. Darrow and Bryan reduced a host of cultural conflicts -- urban vs. rural, North vs. South, wet vs. dry, immigrant vs. nativist-- to a simple story of competing authorities, science vs. religion. And though Scopes lost the legal case, as we know, the anti-evolutionists suffered a severe setback in terms of public opinion. Bryan was no match for Darrow, and at the time the Christian right had nothing to match the mainstream media. In addition, and perhaps most significant for the local crowd attending, Scopes’ other lawyer, Malone, was momentarily able to bridge the cultural divide.

First, he reassured the court that God could have created an evolving world.

Malone then turned to the question of morality. “What is this psychology of fear?” he asked. “I don’t understand it.” Science would not hurt the younger generation. “The children of this generation are pretty wise,” he said. They did not produce the Great War that killed 20 million people. If they are allowed to think, he argued, “They will make a better world of this than we have been able to make it.”
By now Malone had the courtroom on his side. Fundamentalists as well as modernists hung on his words and interrupted him with applause. After twenty minutes Malone turned to the question at hand, admission of the expert testimony. Malone urged the court to admit it, to promote the free exchange of ideas.
“The truth always wins,” he said, “and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the forces of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal, and immortal and needs no human agency to support it. . . .
“We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America. We are not afraid. Where is the fear? We meet it! Where is the fear? We defy it! . . . “
The courtroom exploded with cheering and applause (Youngs 145-6).

Youngs explains Malone’s success:

Curiously, Malone rather than Bryan had articulated [religious people’s] deepest anxieties.
Were they worried about their children? So was he. But he had confidence that they would grow up into wise and caring human beings. Did they want to believe in God? So did he. But he assured them that God could have chosen evolution as His method of creating human life. Did they wish to face the future with confidence? So did he. But in place of a fearful rejection of the modern world, he offered them a vision of triumphant progress. The unfettered search for truth, he assured them, would bring mankind to a better future.
Here was a synthesis combining traditional values with confidence in the future, a simple credo of optimism, morality, and progress (Youngs 146).

Notice the way Malone went straight to the heart of folks’ worries, that is, the heart of the anti-science campaign. Instead of tiptoeing around the fear and anger, instead of dithering with safely obscure legal technicalities or the minutiae of the fossil record, Malone talked about the war and the future for our kids and the sense of being beleaguered by outside forces. In place of God he nominates the truth as the unchanging touchstone on which we can rely, on which we can face our fears. He says science and freedom and progress are really part of the same thing. Basically, he drew on the stories people already had to help them construct a compelling new story. He made sense because he dealt with the big issues.

At the same time, Malone’s speech an illustrates the great pitfall in the big-picture approach: trying to paper over contradictions. Observing the world and accepting authority are fundamentally different ways of knowing, and promote very different approaches to politics. It’s not clear how Malone could equate science with “triumphant progress” so soon after the Great War, which brought us tanks, bomber planes and mustard gas; to praise technical advances without questioning their use and sponsorship was irresponsible at best. And by suggesting that only stupid people oppose his position Malone undermines both free debate and his own credibility. He bought his immediate oratorical success at the price of setting false boundaries to what folks should learn and discuss.


How to challenge the core lies we're all caught up in is a real dilemma. I care a lot about money, though I’m richer than 90% of the world’s people. We know how easy it is for politicians and corporados to grab power by stoking racism, but we also honor cultural identity as a key element of collective action. Most of the lefties I know came to their work via religion, or at least express it in religious terms. Having read a justice message into the authoritarian raw materials, they may assume it will be obvious for others to do the same.

Aside from our own intellectual struggles, we feel constantly under pressure to affirm our respectability and deservingness by borrowing corporate symbols. After the 9-11-01 murders, for instance, some of my friends took care to bring U.S. flags to anti-war rallies. (That was during, let’s see, the invasion of Afghanistan; do you remember? Or shall we say Americastan?-- where farmers eat grass and religious activists continue to rape and murder women every day.) Did the flag remind passersby that, as U.S. citizens, each of us has a right to our opinion? That promoting peace is as legitimate as mass murder?

Take another example. Defending her lesbian daughter’s participation in a political event, a woman writes to the newspaper, “These people are just like you and me, sir, shame on you for thinking any different. They are good neighbors, friends, and relatives. I love my God and my country; I work hard for my dollar and raised my children to the best of my ability as you did. My house is not a house of corruption, hatefulness or deceit . . .” (Metro Pulse 6-3-04). Probably the writer does not believe that it’s OK to discriminate against people from different countries, religions, or family backgrounds, but that’s not what she wrote: she claims protection for her daughter on the basis of particular merits and memberships as defined by our rulers. Similarly, I was sorely tempted one time to reply to the baby soldier who was giving me the finger over my anti-war sign: I been American three times as long as you; don’t you dare say you’re killing people for me.

Even more ambiguous were recent church efforts to fight racism near my town. In May 05 community leaders held a press conference deploring an attack on La Lupita, a Mexican store ($12,000 damage, no physical injury). Citing a statement by the National Bishops Conference, a local priest said, “probably 80% of Hispanic immigrants were raised in the Catholic faith. These new neighbors, then, are fellow Christians in a county which is already predominantly Christian. A spirit of welcome lets us help and learn from our new neighbors in this society without regard to race, religion, ethnicity or background.” In other words, we should be nice to people because their religion is OK, although we should be nice to people regardless of their religion. The first part of his statement undermines the second. (The father doesn’t mention the fact that, where I live, Roman Catholics are a tiny minority, and many people do not regard them as Christians.) Further on the father reminds us that our inalienable rights come from god, not the government, just like the Declaration of Independence says. I know he didn’t mean that, if god hadn’t been so considerate when he made up these rights (the eighth day?), it would be OK to beat up Mexicans.

Accepting grants of rights from people in power, in exchange for accepting their authority, can actually leave us more vulnerable. Not to mention, rights that can be granted are no rights at all. Segrest describes one way finding accommodation in the hierarchy can marginalize us:

The assimilation model leads us to try to smooth the rough edges of our community, putting limits on visible leadership by people of color, working-class white gay men and lesbians and anyone else who doesn't look and act like most lobbyists. It leads to 'outing' powerful, rich people to show that they, too, are gay. It leads to surveys that tout the marketing power of the gay dollar and position us as a movement of the middle to upper class, with higher than average spending power. This dynamic sets us up to be a 'buffer class,' in a similar way that Jews were portrayed in Europe, to draw off class anger from the economic elite who are really making the decisions and reaping the rewards in a period of national economic crisis and decline. It makes us appear narrow and selfish (which I do not think we are) and cuts us off from allies, increasing our vulnerability to insurgent right-wing populist movements agitated by economic unrest. This is classic fascism, and its foundation has already been laid in our time and our nation (241).

We have seen that the crisis often forces the right to borrow some of the ideas and language of democracy, which they carefully distort and trivialize. Gary Younge cites the anger against corporate bonuses in early 2009, strenuously inflated by the rightist media, not just as an attack on the Obama economic bailout plans, but also as a way to turn the big issue of income inequality and destructive corporations to the arrogant behavior of a few millionaires.

The trouble is, before AIG we were already in a teachable moment; the hubbub over bonuses just interrupted the lesson. We had been learning about the systemic flaws in capitalism, the need for it to be regulated immediately and the need to find an alternative in the future. . . . We had been addressing the abuses of an entire system; within a week we’re reduced to abusing people at their addresses in Connecticut.
The problem isn’t just that the sums involved in the AIG bonus crisis are less than one-thousandth of the amount of bailout money being paid out. It is that by concentrating on them so completely the focus shifted from the institutional to the individual, from class struggle to class envy. . . . Politicians performed ‘outrage’; news anchors shook their heads in disbelief, as though we had never heard of private companies ripping off the government . . . . People were angry. But AIG didn’t make them angry.
Secondly, just like AIG’s Edward Liddy working for a dollar or the Detroit CEOs foregoing their jets to drive themselves to Washington, these particular matters can be ‘solved’ with little more than a gimmick coated in fudge. . . .
Meanwhile, as everyone claims victory, nothing really changes (The Nation 4-13-09, p.10).

Even in our own organizations we can be careless about the messages we pass on. How often do we grant extra space and deference to Dr. Whosit and Reverend So-and-so, on the basis of the credentials they’ve earned with foundations, universities, corporations and political parties? It’s one thing to flatter strategic allies with a seat on the dais, in return for services rendered (we have few other bribes to offer), another to ooh and aah their clichés, then pick our noses when co-workers or neighbors get up to speak. Such are our yearnings for respectability, our fantasies of recognition by our superiors.


And what about our neighbors? If we don’t pepper our talk with references to business, baseball and the Bible, will they even understand us? If we explicitly reject religion or citizenship as the source of human rights, will they turn the channel right away?

I remember a big argument with a woman at the university. This was at the time we were pushing Reagan to stop murdering peasants in Central America. Some of us objected to the students’ clothes, haircuts, and piercings. I felt my own bland mainstream appearance was less exclusive than theirs. For me the question was, What is our message? I said, The people we’re trying to reach will dismiss us out of hand if it seems we’re asking them to take part in a culture war. The student replied, We’re acting for freedom, everywhere, including my freedom to be who I am; it’s indivisible. Elsewhere I discuss the perils of compartmentalizing.

I continue to think there’s a difference between artistic self-expression and political dialogue, though the latter must include the former. Effective dialogue has to involve some common language and opportunity for response. It's a narrow walk, though, between accessible language and the language of domination. When Susan B. Anthony downplayed the importance of the Bible, she prompted a fierce backlash. Even liberal Protestants who supported women's rights denounced her (Marty 160). In 1932, when a secretary for the National Miners Union said she believed in the religion of the workers, the union lost half its membership (Portelli 230).

On the other hand, it's probably true that a lot of people who said they supported the women and the miners were going to flake out anyway, and just used these women's words as cover. So it's hard to know exactly when we must speak out and when we have to shut up.

Ultimately, I don't think that we all have to wear high heels or baseball caps (although both together would be smashing) to make our ideas accessible. I don’t think the language of democracy is elitist, or foreign, or confusing to our neighbors.