Interesting Ideas Update

From my fat and lazy perspective I don’t have much standing to grouse about the tactics of the Occupy movement. Whether they’ve clearly articulated their goals, or whether I would agree with them all if they did, or whether I find the drumming annoying, at least these people are trying to do something active about the state of the nation. All I do is get depressed.

Still, even if I envy the movement’s pluck, I don’t love the creation of spectacles aimed at media consumption. For decades this has been the Left’s tactic of choice. The realists have believed it’s the most direct way to exert pressure on those who control the levers of power (the media itself, politicians, and perhaps even big business). The unrealists have believed it could supply the spark to mobilize the masses (now quantified as the 99 percent) into that endlessly overdue uprising.

I think there’s actually some validity in both perspectives. Big demonstrations do tip the political zeitgeist a bit toward the left. And publicity can spread some of the contagion of dissent. But playing to the media is a horribly inefficient strategy, creating, with rare exceptions, way more heat than light — and most often just plain disappointing.

If only progressives could take a lesson from their political opposites. The far Right figured out 40 years ago that the most effective political organizing involves focusing on the prosaic mechanics of victory, struggling not to influence power but to seize it — the Tea Party being the most recent example. Sure, their activities generated publicity, but the real point was getting control of key races, not getting exposure in the press. Of course, the right wing’s advantages include generous funding, vast religious networks, the sympathy of the already powerful, and the ability to dispense in good conscience with democratic process. Those are indeed formidable, but that doesn’t mean the only choice left for the Left is to panhandle attention from journalists by way of media stunts.

I’ll acknowledge again that I’m in no moral position to pass judgment, however, and I never was. After all, my cynical reaction last month when I heard protesters chant “the people united will never be defeated” was the same as when I first encountered it at demonstrations when I was 20: wishful thinking.

If racism has become a non-issue for minorities, as some believe, how odd that it remains a widespread and life-destroying influence on white males, which seems the basic premise of the opposition to Sonia Sotomayor.

Not every offer to help is a passive-aggressive effort to assert control.

Bureaucracy is the most practical cure for irreconcilable differences.

Incompetence trumps intention.

A Blackberry’s best use is for the polite avoidance of conversation in elevators.

Bad things don’t happen to people who don’t care.

Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, by Vladimir Arkhipov, Fuel Publishing, 304 pages, 180 color pictures, 2006. ISBN 0-9550061-3-9

Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Book Works, 158 pages, 2005. ISBN 1 870699-81-5

Two recent books from abroad attempt to document the spontaneous art making of ordinary people, one broadly and one eccentrically.

Folk Archives, from Britain, covers a wide range of vernacular expression, from protest posters to shop signs. Home Made, also published in Britain, takes a certain kind of ingenuity as its subject, specifically creative responses to the acute scarcity of consumer goods in the Soviet Union and its aftermath.

Folk Archives collects the more obviously artistic material, including a number of conventional (if sometimes clearly self-taught) paintings and sculpture, where the artifacts of Home-Made are far more prosaic – flashlights, screwdrivers and floor lamps, among other things.

While the bodies of work in some instances feel familiar (hand-painted shop signs from Britain, a cloth toy animal from the Soviet Union), in others they seem rather alien. The British protest art doesn’t track to any living tradition in the U.S., nor do the makeshift knives and forks from Russia. As hand-crafted utilitarian objects, though, the Russian pieces resonate with traditional folk craft, and like those objects they occasionally attain aesthetic distinction. Home Made makes a strong case that even the most mundane of these objects convey a message about the society and the people who made them.

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Whatever the War on Christmas poseurs may say, Christ is all over the place in the holiday season. But how many blow-up Xes do you see on front lawns? How often do store clerks says “Merry Xmas”? And why don’t we call it Xgiving, too? It would make for a more efficient season and add more variety at the same time.

Even the most brilliant, historically proven governing strategies can come to grief. The Russian czars relied on a track record of dimness, bureaucratic idiocy and stubbornness to create mass fatalism. But that cocoon was breached by the disasters of the Great War. Russians who had put up with their rulers’ incompetence for decades had finally had enough.

Now we see our own triumphant incompetent, George W. Bush, continuing to reel from Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes even the most cynical public actually expects performance from its highest leaders. It may be premature to expect actual heads to roll, but it does seem like public tolerance for things like cronyism and inexcusable warmaking is, for the moment, greatly diminished.

For more on the strategic use of incompetence in the business, political and spiritual realms, see my article Compound Ineptitude, a theory of corporate incompetence. (Staying stupid means never having to say no.)