Yesterday, reflecting upon Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide and it being the anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, I wondered if there was anybody left with the balls to both tell the truth and do something about it. HST exposed the Nixon years for what the sitcoms and the nightly news wouldn’t – dirty, bloody and insane - and he did it in a voice that compelled us to not look away. Malcolm X realized that talk transmuted into change too slowly, over generations. He looked at the Civil Rights movement and said, “An old lady can sit; we need to stand up.”
What we need is a New Activism.
And by a New Activism I mean we need to get as dirty as HST and as menacing as Malcolm X. With all three branches of government and the machinery of enfranchisement in the hands of liars and killers, with the media castrated or complicit, we need to go asymmetrical, figuratively speaking. We need to be honest about our powerlessness to fight the Right conventionally. What we need to do is to expose the Neocons and the Dominionists for what they really are: bloodthirsty liars. We can’t pray a compliant press or rigged elections will do it for us. They clearly won’t. Forget about issues framing – I’m talking about reputation fragging.
Jeff Gannon’s filthy little life as a right wing shill exposed? Good but not enough. The members of the White House Press Corps surly had some idea about this guy and yet did nothing. Clean out your own house and quit crying about your precious, precarious access. What the hell kind of access have you had to this White House that you couldn’t have gotten from a press release? I see almost no interviews, no real questions from you journos. Organize, and then boycott all press briefings until the White House agrees to the give the American people some straight answers. Stand up to your editors, out them for not standing up to their corporate owners. Get some skin in the game.
Same to you in the gay community (uh, so to speak): stop protecting these closeted schizophrenics who kiss you at night then revile you by day. I don’t care if you’re sleeping with them – stop it, out them, and get your priorities in order before they take away even more of your dignity. Turn the Right’s homophobia into a weapon of your own wielding.
Along these lines… you escorts in New York during the RNC, indeed, sex workers of all stripes: We need a list of every Family Fucking Values Republican trick who made you dress like a little girl and call him daddy, and we need that list continuously updated up on the internet. There’s plenty of ways to use their hypocrisy against them without revealing your identity. Push comes to shove, they’d just as soon arrest you as fuck you, so do it to them now because they're going to do it to you sooner or later.
You hackers and crackers and script kiddies, stop wasting your talents on furtive schemes for a little fame within your closed community and start doing some good for the whole community. You think this government is ever going to support an open source anything? Ever not going to kowtow to the content “owners” who want to put you in jail for downloading a song you can hear for free on the goddamned radio? I think a little civil disobedience is in order. You have the skills - be our mouse army.
And to the bloggers: well done on Gannon, but it’s time to go after them all. Anybody even slightly exposed, start digging. Back taxes, past convictions, drug use, kinky sex – anything you can find, put it out there. I want every one of those hypocrites reaching for the xanax and a shot of Wild Turkey when they recall their lives and what’s out there to be found. We need 20 more mini-Gannons in the next two months. Even if it’s only slightly incriminating, even if it doesn’t stick, as long as it’s true, publish it. We want them afraid and making mistakes.
Infiltrate their media outlets, their online fora like Free Republic and Power Lines, and sow dissension, stir it up. Pretend to be a fundi berating the abortion agnostic neocons, or an neocon ridiculing the fundis as Luddites. Or become a tax hating libertarian that starts flame wars with security moms over federal spending for port protection. Write over-the-top letters to Rightwing rags, letters so extreme it’ll force fissures in happy-happy joy-joy unity. Tear their big tent apart from the inside. And imagine the paranoia once they realize they’ve been good and infiltrated.
If nothing else, pass the memes along in your blogs and email. My mainstream, suburban family down South had heard nothing at all about the Gannon story until I told them about it Friday, a good 10 days after it broke. My Republican-voting, Viet Nam vet father was incensed at the gay prostitute angle. Sure, he was infuriated for the wrong reasons, but in this way, chink by chink, we can erode the mindless faith folks like him have in the Right.
And remember we’re fighting not just for ourselves; this is not vindictiveness but effectiveness, perhaps the only effective methodology we have left. We're doing this for all Americans, including the vast majority of Republicans, most of whom are decent folk and all of whom are Americans, to spare us all the hell that will be our children’s tours in foreign wars and the shame and poverty of our retirements.
It’s time we all became our own Hunter S and our own Malcolm X because nobody else is going to do it for us.
