The powerful and the powerless

Saturday, February 21, 2015

The last few weeks became a lesson in street theater as traditional political forces garnered their strength in an attempt to push back again the black lash of radical protestors.
This was not a 1960s kind of radical protest, but had a lot to do with the spirit of underground press I was weaned on, the irreverent, even mean attacks on powerful people through satire, sarcasm and humor.

The East Village Other and the LA Free Press, even my much later Scrap Paper Review were always designed to strike at the heart of corrupt power in a way corrupt power was helpless to stop.

Back then, printing costs and paper were cheap and almost anyone with access to a mimeograph machine could issue political satirical diatribes.

For a time, mafia-owned newspaper and magazine distributors and corporate controlled media – along with FBI informants – nearly shut down the underground movement, making it too expensive or risky to continue.

Even my humble newspaper had its FBI informant who kept trying to get close to us to that they could keep an eye on us. He eventually went on to spy on WBAI, partly because the inner circle of our little revolution was too small to accommodate him, and we suspected his intentions from the start.

Controlling media was a huge part of halting the social revolution, and for a good part of the 1980s and early 1990s, the power brokers were able to shut us down, leaving people like me to print news letters and later magpie call up internet sites (my publication was on line in the late 1980s).

The revolution reemerged when the web exploded on us, and we had an early page in 1995-96.

Liz Smith, of course, criticized this recently, saying that this exposure had eroded the quality of celebrities. She has always been part of the mainstream and her power has always rested in being one of those allowed into places like Club 54 while the rest of the humbled masses remained out in the cold.

The biggest complaint I’ve heard this week about the trial of internet bloggers who attacked their enemies on their websites is that they were offensive and vulgar.

Indeed, they often are – just as we were back in the heyday of the 1960s when we could say nothing nearly vulgar enough to attack the outrages of political power killing millions in places like Vietnam.

People are upset by these bloggers partly because the bloggers have touched nerves and are able to mouth truths (even if by accident) that traditional power is unable to silence. Powerful people can control traditional media – as they did in destroying the old school underground movement and as they are trying to do in the fight against internet neutrality, but as long as there is an open free press that is not controlled by mobsters or corporations, they must resort to other means.

Corrupt people tend to hide their mean behavior behind the mast of civility, saying how outraged there are by the radical behavior. This is passive-aggressive. While they pretend to be holier than thou, they secret pull the levers of the old style political machine to maintain their power, manipulating traditional press, political institutions and sometimes even the legal system. And while shooting from the cover of anonymity, they complain about the Revolutionary War-like radicals that shoot back from similar positions, often more effectively showing just how corrupt the system is.

The legal victory over the last week is a temporary reprieve by radicals fighting the corrupt system, of course. Eventually, corruption wins, simply because like rust it never sleeps.

But sometimes – as one famous orator from the 1960s pointed out – we can stick something in the gears and stop the machine for a short time, at least long enough in this never ending conflict to readjust and find new ways to defy the corrupt forces that control traditional institutions such as media and government. Sometimes, the little guy actually wins,