From The Morgue

The Progressive movement stared into the abyss two weeks ago.
On November 3 the United States of America had a chance to correct its course, the first chance since things began to go out of control.
But the United States of America re-elected the Bush Administration.
In that moment, the struggle changed. You can see it all over the internet, all over the opinion media, all over the grassroots networks. If you look, if you read, if you listen you can see it happening. This is how it begins.
The election has become a symbol of what we face.
We are using the symbol to transform ourselves. The progressive movement is changing. It is realising that it must do what it hates to do: it must go to war.
A war of justice, for their culture is built on exploitation.
A war of truth, for their culture is built on deceit.
And a war of survival, for they want to wipe our culture from existence.
There is no room to negotiate – what would we negotiate away? Our belief in social justice? Our belief in the vulnerability of the environment? Our belief in human rights? We are past the point of negotiation: this is a war.
This is a culture war. We have fought these before, and we have won. We will win this time as well. Their culture must be shattered.
It will not shatter itself.
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Allow me to deflate my own rhetoric here. I know I’m speechifying. There’s a lot of it going around – it’s a sign of how things are changing, right now. Anyway, I’ll step down from the rhetoric.
Getting real: we’re all ordinary people with lives and commitments and responsibilities and nuanced understandings of how the world works. The question I ask in the title remains: where now? What can we do?
You tell me. Put a message in the comments, or a link to suggestions elsewhere you found useful. (Lurkers especially welcome – I know you’re out there.) This blog is one tiny bit of a very big network. But it’s part of that network. Lets see what we come up with.

Listening to ‘Dazed & Confused’, the first track on Marxman‘s second album ‘Time Capsule’, delivered into my hands by the illustrious Malcolm Craig mere weeks after I mentioned I was searching for it. I had been on the hunt for seven years and it took him two weeks. Blimey.
Damn it’s a good track. Oisin made it available on the internet a few years ago so I’ve got the mp3s, but it was taken down sometime in the last nine months – there might still be copies floating around the P2Psphere if anyone’s into it.
Malcolm tells me Marxman – a militant Irish Marxist hip-hop group – once played on Top of the Pops, to the confusion of the audience. Heh.
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Will there ever be, in the modern era, a leader with as complicated and compromised a position as Yasser Arafat? For every honour he rightly bears, there’s a crime; for every achievement there’s a failure.
Maybe not – but every political leader is compromised. That’s the conundrum of political leadership. Arafat is exceptional only in the extremity of his achievements and his crimes, not in the fact of their dual existence.
Of course, opinions differ as to whether his achievements outweigh his crimes, or vice versa. This is as it should be for so complicated a figure.
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Finally took Brad’s box of books to the post office to ship to NZ.
*looks at overland shipping bill*
*looks at growing pile of morgue books to one day be shipped to NZ*
*feels nervous*
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Anyone interested in the interface of tech and media, and the possibilities of new forms currently unfolding, will probably already be reading Warren Ellis’ writing on the subject.
If you’re not already, and you want a glimpse of the future, go read. The man is essential. He’s currently writing a fascinating series on ‘mind gangsterism’ that is bringing together a dozen strands of technological innovation and sewing them together. I’ve linked to his livejournal, which he’s winding up soon, but that’s where the action is right now.

Despite (or, perhaps, because of) his likely future of being bounced out of the UK for 6 months or longer, Leon’s Godhood remains secure. There’s a bunch of new testimonials and some more teachings.
For those who haven’t yet welcomed Leon into your life – well, there’s never going to be a better time than now.

Dec 4, Glasgow
It ain’t quite Public Enemy, but it’s damn close. I mention Public Enemy because bloody Siobhann who was a delightful dinner guest tonight saw the PE when they played here last year. Dammit. I missed them. Then they played in Glasgow months later and I missed that too. Grrr.
But: I’ma gona to the Beastie Boys!
I really need some sleep. Good night everybody.
(I only just realised Siobhann’s blog is Cankerous not Cantankerous)
(Also: Sesame Street – 35 years old! Happy birthday Sesame Street.)

Just back from a gig by NZ heeeeroes Pitch Black.
Now eating toast. Mmmm. Toast. With Vegemite. Mmm. Toast with vegemite.
Ahhhh.
Reminded of last time I saw Pitch Black play – at the legendary gig Freefall in, what was it, ’97? Where PB shared the stage with the Nomad, Salmonella Dub, Roots Foundation Sound System and of course the one and only Jet Jaguar. I remember it as the single best dance-music experience I’ve ever had. I pretty much danced non-stop from the first beat to the last – I wasn’t drinking in those days, so I didn’t need to take a break for, well, anything, and I was there alone so I had no-one to answer to but the music. Damn good.
Bloody hell, the site is still up.
Toast finished now. Er. It’s nearly 3am. I have to get up in 4 hours. That’s me, devil-may-care wild party animal that I am! Now, where did I put my slippers? Zzzzz

I don’t see any reason to believe BushCo stole the election.
Yet.
I do see reason to interrogate the shit out of the whole electoral process.
And for those Repubs who are bugged by the cries of ‘fraud!’ – all I can say is – that’s what you get for having such an amateurish electoral system.
Seriously. The left’s been pointing at the voting systems for two years now. To do nothing about it? Stupid.
I just thought of a new way of categorising voters:
* think USA best country in the world at pretty much everything: voted Bush
* don’t: voted Kerry

This post is devoted to me congratulating myself on being the rockingest man in Myplaceville.
So. I finally got my hands on a copy of Signs & Portents issue 15, which contains 9 pages of Morgtastic goodness in the form of Breakdown Control, an article for the OGL Horror roleplaying game.
Sweet.
Someone I’ve never heard of says “I love this article and would rate it as one of the best to come out of S&P yet.”
Sweet.
And Perhaps The Most Brilliantest Game Designer Dude In The World said of my pride and joy Providence Summer:
“I remember that and really liked it. :)”
Sweet.
See? Rockingest. Right here.

Continue reading Yay me! Like, really, yay!

Stuff I’ve been doing:
* running a wildly fun roleplaying thingy for Halloween. Steve and Brian and I put it together and recruited 8 lucky souls to the cause. It were creepy and funny and involving and a success! Huzzah. We’re currently looking at re-spining it to make it even better the next time we run it, which should be soon…
* eating meals at Monster Mash. Yum. Monster Mash.
* seeing movies. Like The Corporation (groove) and AVP (er).
* reading stuff. Like, finally, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. By co-incidence, Apocalypse Now was on TV here the night before I finished it. Choice. Also: Michael King’s Penguin History of NZ, again, and Rory Stewart’s the Places In Between.
* buying stuff. I’ve been a bit of a retail fiend this past week. All comfort buying, I think. Stupid books! I don’t need more books! Gah.
* eating vegetables. Yum. Vegetables.
* writing lyrics for a hip-hop remix of ‘Mull of Kintyre’. No, I can’t share them, I’ve deleted them. Even as an exercise in deliberate badness they were too awful. And we shall never speak of this again.

The global progressive movement is not the US Democratic Party.
The US Democratic Party is not the global progressive movement.
The extent to which these two are getting mixed up in discourse concerns me.
An interest in the Dems is important for those on the left. We want them to be strong, and smart. We want them to field electable candidates. Faced with a choice between them and the Republicans, we want the Dems to win in any contest you’d care to name.
But the Dems are not the progressive movement.
We should care about the Dems, try and make them strong, because at this point in time they are the best hope the world has for redirecting the US. But first we need to look to ourselves.
We need to expand the progressive movement. We need to make it larger, more robust, more certain. We need more people aware and involved. We need to find the common ground that its many elements share and articulate clearly what we want.
We need the movement to become an undeniable and major political constituency.
The Democratic party will not become a party of the left again with political reality as it is now. Every political indicator says that all it can do is keep colonizing further rightward. To call for them to move left is to ask them to reduce their share of voter support – a futile call. In a game like this one, with players like these, principles are negotiable.
We cannot shift the Dems to the left from within. We need to expand the progressive movement in the real world. We need to bring more people around to our understanding and our values.
We need to grow into a constituency that will swing elections.
We aren’t there yet, but we’re growing. Look back just a few short years to Seattle and the WTO protests. Since that time we have grown beyond any expectation. Our literature, our arguments, our information, are spreading everywhere. In parts of Europe we are mighty. It will be the same everywhere, in time. Even in the US. The US will not be easy to crack – it is in fact our greatest challenge because of its singular command over the heavily-mediated reality of its citizens and its skill in exercising this command – but it too will fall. In time.
It is inescapable. We in the progressive movement understand the true, long-range cost of our current global system. We have exposed the exploitation and unsustainability on which this system stands. The lies of our opponents will not survive against our truth. The cog-blindness of those who do not understand us will not survive against our truth.
This isn’t a political struggle of two equivalent poles offering different models for political decision-making and resource-distribution. This is the survival struggle of a system that is breaking the world and its peoples. The system will change, perhaps piece by hard-won piece, perhaps in massive revolution, but it will change, because as it is it cannot last.
The only question is how long it will take for us to win, and whether it will then be too late to repair the damage already done.
We are right. And that is our strength. That is what will help us grow. As we grow, our political strength increases. As our political strength increases, the political landscape will begin to change. Our task isn’t to make the Bush-supporter down the street love the Dems – it is to make her see the truth about international exploitation, environmental degradation, the deceiving myths of the system’s controllers.
The failure of the Democratic party in the US is not the failure of the global progressive movement. It is a sign that there is more work for us to do.
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In the last entry, Matt interrogates the use of the term ‘Progressive’.
“Progressive is a fairly bad word, in my opinion, to call anything because Progression is defined in terms of the goal. I could be a totally and extremely right wing and call myself progressive because I am moving towards a political goal.”
The word ‘progressive’ is an umbrella term. I’m not sure of its provenance but it’s a recent coinage. It is used for the wide range of groups and ideologies that support the notion that ‘another world is possible’. It is a positive phrasing – one of the noxious memes of the current global system is equating itself with progress, and progress with the greater good. Movements that oppose unfettered globalised capitalism are thus de facto tarred as luddite, backward and working against the greater good out of fear or intellectual failure.
The ‘progressive’ label stakes different ground, challenging the notion that corporate primacy is the end of history. It is a positive framing, rife with meaning, and a significant and useful term that cannot be as easily undermined as, say, the word ‘liberal’ has been.
It isn’t a satisfactory term. All the concerns Matt has are legitimate ones. At some point in the future, what is now known as the progressive movement will have to divorce itself from that term, and that divorce may well be difficult and even costly. Nonetheless, at this stage in the political struggle, it is the best name we have.
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There will be some non-election stuff soon, I promise. I’m not even thinking about the election 24/7 any more, and that’s got to count for something, right?

(I take as read that the US election, and US domestic politics, are a critical concern for anyone interested in the global progressive cause.)
The Republicans and their supporters are already reframing the narrative of this election. In every speech, every talking point, every blog post, the election is being portrayed as an overwhelming vindication of the Bush administration, and a victory that demonstrates what America really wants – and, more profoundly, who Americans really are.
This narrative must be challenged.
The Republican narrative portrays the result as a landslide for Bush.
The truth is that the result was close. It is incredible how soon we forget the long hours waiting on the Ohio results. This was not a landslide victory – the margin of decision was small. More people voted for Bush than in any previous election – but also, more people voted against Bush than against any previous candidate. The mobilization of opposition to Bush is the important factor here.
The Republican narrative portrays the result as a massive rejection of the left.
Many on the left have taken up this same line – that the US, the world’s largest democracy, has rejected the progressive project. The truth is, more people voted for the candidate of the left than in any previous US election.
The Republican narrative holds that the President has a clear mandate.
Bush has a clear majority of support in the US, but not an overwhelming majority. He also has a very large minority of entrenched opposition – the largest that any previous President has had to deal with. Claims to a clear mandate are complicated by this situation, which is as far as I know unprecedented in US politics.
The Republican narrative holds that the Democrats were naive to expect the youth vote to make a difference.
The truth is that the youth vote did make a difference, just not as large as was hoped. The youth vote was up – but so was every other demographic. The Democrats were wise in supporting and driving this effort, although it turns out that they, and I, hoped for more than was realistic.
The Republican narrative conceals the efforts they made to bring out the vote.
The story is told as if the American people of their own accord rose up to stand up for what is right. The truth is that the Republicans have used their network to get their issues and their message into every evangelical Church in the country and, crucially, to get more people voting. This isn’t the whole story, but the extent of this massive, hidden mobilisation is the biggest single revelation of the election.
So – with this in mind, what must we do?
We must recognize that this was just one clash in what will be a long struggle. In that context, there is much to be pleased with.
We must challenge any attempt to reframe the narrative of this election in the ways described above. If the above narrative takes hold, that makes the progressive movement’s task all the harder. Not impossible – not by any means – but harder. And it’s hard enough already.