grassroots

Please Don’t Bomb The Suburbs: A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement

payal — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Depending on your age and your social/political circle, you may not know the name William Upski Wimsatt. In his youth, Wimsatt was the youngest Utne Reader “Visionary” award winner. In the last two decades, he’s written several books about the suburbs, the prison industrial complex, white urban subculture, hip-hop, and graffiti. These days, he’s mostly known for political organizing and working with and supporting groups like Generational Alliance and Resource Generation.

Following up his 1994 book Bomb the Suburbs, which garnered him a bit of a cultish progressive following, Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs is Wimsatt’s older (if not much wiser) take on adulthood, organizing, and personal politics. The book’s basic premise is this: Get power, get corporate power, use it for good. If you don’t agree with that message from the jump—or you’re not already a fan of Wimsatt’s grandstanding and youth minister-esque appeal—you may not get a whole hell of a lot out of Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs.

From the jump, Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs is a bit confusing for folks new to the activist’s work. Written as one man’s account of what has been important in the last thirty years of American progressive organizing, it’s anything but comprehensive or objective. Mixing storytelling and action plans in a somewhat haphazard fashion and at times reading like a who’s who of modern progressive activism, Wimsatt shamelessly name-drops seemingly everyone he’s ever known or worked with, from Van Jones to Adrienne Marie Brown. While that’s not inherently bad, it’s terribly insular and not very interesting—especially to the outsider, non-activists Wimsatt claims to want to reach.

Wimsatt writes that his audience for the book is two groups: seasoned forty-two-year-old businesspeople and curious seventeen-year-olds just learning about progressive movements. That said, he also wants desperately to identify with people across this entire spectrum of age and experience. By Wimsatt’s definition, he and I share a generation—he claims both Gen X and Gen Y as “his”—even though he’s more than ten years older than me, and I’m one of the oldest in the Millennial club. This sort of confusing, broad, and aimless reaching to include people is the ultimate weakness of the book, when it was no doubt intended to be its strength.

Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs isn’t an analytical dissection of movements and organizing. If anything, it’s one man’s self-congratulatory journey through youthful transgressions to his late thirties, when he realized, as he writes in the book, “Adulthood hits you like whoa.” That same tone, carried throughout, makes the book feel more like a blog than an actual literary accomplishment. I’m sadly not post-print enough to think that turning blog-like ramblings into a bound publication is a good idea; nevermind whether I agree that adulthood “hits you like whoa.”

Wimsatt covers a lot of topics without nuance. He praises the work of non-profits without addressing the non-profit industrial complex. He warns of how overpopulation is pushing humanity to the brink of disaster, and on the same page, questions whether or not he’ll have children. Wimsatt blindly embraces new media, excited about the potential for change using online tools, without considering the drawbacks and legitimate reasons why Facebook is not part of a truly progressive revolution.

It’s incredibly difficult to write a book that appeals to a thirty-eight-year-old suburban homeowner with nephews and a sixteen-year-old urban blogger who’s just learning about environmentalism. It’s also difficult to explore nuance and history when you believe your own experiences and your own self-selected version of history takes precedent. As much as I’d like to believe in the collectivism of a movement necessary for the generation- and experience-breaking organizing that Wimsatt tries to hawk in Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs, this conversational plea to remain relevant didn’t sell me on anything.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, December 22nd 2010

Brown Bagazine (Issue Four, Spring 2008)

admin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:23:00 +0000

Edited by Amy Lyn Hess

Gypsy Daughter

Why do we read poetry and poetic prose? Some people like the unique language. Others recognize the “ordinary” described in a new way. We read poetry, ideally, to change, inside.

Gypsy Daughter is a poetry chapbook and literary magazine publishing company. Their intention is to create an attractive physical venue for poets to reach their audience. Brown Bagazine, Gypsy Daughter’s quarterly literary magazine, is such a venue.

I laughed with pleasure, when I first saw Brown Bagazine. What a clever idea, this is! The chapbook is approximately 5 ½” x 4 ½” with a blue cover and seventeen pages held together by a lovely silver paper clip. The tiny periodical was inside a gold, zipped pencil bag, approximately 7 ½” x 10 ¼”, with a three-hole punched clear plastic cover (to put the bag in a binder). Marketing 101 says, “It’s all in the packaging.” This Brown Bagazine is perfect because it appeals to the kid inside the adult, and we feel drawn those things that make us feel young once more.

This issue of Brown Bagazine features six writers: Julio Peralta-Paulino, Maryann DiEdwardo, Richard Wink, Brenda Polk, Liz Collins, and Rowland Saifi. I was caught by the words in Julio Peralta-Paulino’s "Untitled," and Maryann DiEdwardo’s "Like the Snow" is great. There is an elusive image of Appaloosa horses moving in this poem. I get it, at the same time I do not, but it makes me think.

Moreover, what is this “trout mask” that the priest wears in Richard Wink’s "The Eden Express?" Brenda Polk’s "Begin" got me to consider what this simple word means in my life. (Thank you, Brenda. I needed that.) And Rowland Saifi’s "A Drama," though hard to explain, is funny and clever.

I think what is vitally important about this periodical is that it is a grassroots, community effort. What Gypsy Daughter is trying to do is give a sense of social obligation to support such an effort. It helps that the writing is thought-provoking, and therefore, quite good. Read it!

Written by: Patricia Ethelwyn Lang, August 5th 2008

McLibel

admin — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:32:00 +0000

Directed by Franny Armstrong

Spanner Films

Dave Morris, a former postman, and Helen Steel, a gardener, both lead quiet lives in London, England before getting involved in one of the most influential libel suits the world had ever seen. The meetings, pickets and fliers they created in protest of the global fast food chain McDonalds worked so well that spies, secret investigations and even a lawsuit were used against the two activists. The lawsuit, and subsequent appeals, spanned fifteen years, and its effects are still being felt.

McLibel exposes the extraordinary lengths McDonalds went to in order to silence Dave and Helen, the only two out of a small anti-McDonalds group brave enough to face the fast food giant. After sending spies to report on the group's bank reports, agendas and, most importantly, personalities of its members, McDonalds felt it had no choice but to silence the activists for advertising "false information" about the company to the public at large. The thought that a global corporation would sue a group of only a dozen people is frightening enough, but the real horror, as McLibel reveals, lies in the corporate spokespeople's vague sense of fact, overwhelming spirit of manipulation and damning ability to sweep over anybody in their way. The group's accusations - that McDonalds lies about the nutritional benefits of its food, unfairly targets children in their advertising, supports the destruction of the rainforest and is a leading cause of the increasing obesity in society - are now widely accepted in public debate. But in the early 1990s, any attempt by the British mainstream media to discuss these concerns ended with editorial corrections and apologies to the fast food giant.

The street style documentary, directed by Franny Armstrong, perfectly captures the grassroots movement it took to battle the corporate giant: volunteers opening letters and sorting donations in bedrooms, legal council working for nothing and witnesses flying over from the United States to testify on their behalf, to name a few. Shots of cramped London apartments juxtaposed with expert interviews and distorted flashes of McDonalds advertising give the viewer a full view of what Dave and Helen were up against: a tower of neverending money. Despite the company's wealth, it couldn't stop two people from changing the way fast food does business. Next stop... NYC bans transfat in cooking oil.

Written by: Jessica Rossi, December 7th 2006