Activictim or Transformicon? Dostoevsky says ’Yes’
Putting anxiety to work
BRENDAN CATHCART
Stitch “I Heart Trees” into your underwear, sell cookies to stop genocide, walk for a miscellaneous disease, feed the homeless food you’d never be willing to eat, wear expensive clothes for the destitute in Africa. Pick a cause, support the cause, bust the cause like the Thigh-Master-Ultra, Millennium Edition.
There seems to be everything to do and everybody wants everybody to do all of it all the time. But only some people can do some of it some of the time, so it seems like almost no one is doing any of it most of the time. But who doesn’t feel pressure to do something? Even the great representative of modern inertia, Dostoevsky’s hero from Notes From Underground, felt the pressure. “Man is an animal predominantly constructive,” he says, lamenting his condition, “foredoomed to conscious striving towards a goal, and applying himself to the art of engineering, that is to the everlasting and unceasing construction of a road — no matter where it leads, and that the main point is not where it goes, but that it should go somewhere.” Since there are a million roads clambering to be built it makes sense to go for efficiency by tackling the super-highways, the catch-alls. Though there are many such routes in Canada this summer, there are two that even come with convenient acronyms: YAR and ™.
SUPERHIGHWAY NO. 1 — “ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SOCIAL JUSTICE?”
For the young at heart that like to use words like “eco-feminism,” the first superhighway is YAR (Youth Activist Retreat), taking place in Clearwater, M.B. this August. Put on your collectivist-hand-me-down-boots, join hands and say, “Boo!” to capitalism, because this retreat doesn’t cost anything. Last year’s retreat boasted a wide range of speakers, from a former MLA, university professor, lawyer and anti-racism advocate, to community organizer, mid-wife, co-op worker and, I’m not kidding, a “cultural producer” who is “fighting the class war.” Workshops centered on such uplifting topics as feminism, anti-racism, global justice, worker’s rights, unions, activism, political ideas, and unlearning patriarchy and sexism.
There is no available information yet about this year’s workshops but the theme is “Ecological Justice.” Twenty-five hundred years ago the Chinese sage Lao Tzu recognized many of the same issues still needing dedicated activism today. “The court is corrupt,” he said, “the fields are overgrown with weeds, the granaries are empty; yet there are those dressed in fineries, with swords at their sides, filled with food and drink, and possessed of too much wealth. This is known as taking the lead in robbery” (Tao Te Ching, Book II, 121). None of these problems will go away unless people are willing to stand up and protest against them.
Before enthusiastically signing up your angst for the latest fist-pumping, sign-waving, rock-throwing techniques, it would probably be helpful to consider what Jack Duvall, president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, had to say about protest in Joseph Hart’s recent article entitled: “Protest Is Dead. Long Live Protest.” Duvall insists that, “if it’s not a part of a dedicated strategy to change policy, or to change power, protest is only a form of political exhibitionism” (Utne, May-June ’07). With that in mind, attending YAR could be a good start for those who want to learn how to keep their pants on for effective social and political change.
SUPERHIGHWAY NO. 2 —
“NO SACRIFICE, NO VICTORY!”
If you don’t have time to give to activism because you have a job (oh, snap!), then there’s a streamlined, hyper-stylized, two-hour route available called Transformers: the Movie. “ONE MOVIE WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING” claims the quarter-page ad in our local free newspaper, Uptown. For a few dollars you can be as passive as you want and still effect change. To borrow once more from the thankfully versatile Lao Tzu, “it is always through not meddling that the empire is won. Should you meddle, then you are not equal to the task of winning the empire” (Tao Te Ching, Book II, 109).
The benefits are endless. Literally millions of people around the world will be sitting side by side in theatres disregarding race, class, religion and gender, and afterwards making boatloads of children happy through the miracle of Hasbro toys. Making the movie put $150 million dollars into the North American economy and paying to see it will multiply that stupifyingly gargantuan sum. Girls can learn to be successful wooden support beams for the world’s population through such inspiring lines as those from female lead, Mikaela: “I just have this weakness for really hot guys with tight abs and big biceps.”
In the article “The Rebirth of Optimus Prime” in the July ’07 issue of Wired, Scott Brown interviews Phil Strub, the Pentagon’s Hollywood liaison, about the military presence in the movie. “When Hollywood comes to us for assistance,” says Strub, “we see it as an opportunity to inform the public about the U.S. military.” We can all agree that the world needs more U.S. military, because, in the resounding words of Optimus Prime himself, “freedom is the inalienable right of all sentient beings.” Plus, don’t mess with them because they have sable rounds that can burn straight through metal.
Putting your anxiety to work building either of these routes this summer can provide high-speed access to empire-sized fields of social action. Superhighway YAR claims to give you the tools to start more effectively at square one. Superhighway ™ claims that if you don’t see this movie then you are a square.
