propositions press

I just found out that there are rumblings of a billion dollar project to increase I-90 from four to six lanes in the stretch from Madison to the Illinois border. Here is the article. 

A few weeks ago I dropped by the Frugal Muse on the West Side. To feed my book-buying habit, you know. I picked up a copy of Li Minqi's The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy. I browsed the book and it seems to be very relevant given the widely reported labor unrest in southern China from the spring of this year.

No chance to read the book yet (surprise!), but I found an excellent video interview featuring Professer Li on the changing power of the workers in China.

Imagining and making real the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor requires a reconsideration of the relationship between the region’s university towns and its urban centers. Towns like Madison, Champaign-Urbana, and Iowa City are often spoken of as somehow being insulated from the challenges that plague the big cities of their states. The thought patterns behind such assumptions must be interrogated.

The ills that come with the growing pains of big towns turning into small cities include sprawl, crime, housing problems, and other trends. This happens wherever there is growth. The difference in the university towns is that frequently the discussions around city problems include implied or directly stated blame on the cities for exporting their problems. So ideas of regional connection only get articulated in the negative —for example, understanding the reality of people’s lives as being split between places through commuting or frequent relocation, and thereby linking towns and cities across the region, often gets talked about in terms of undesirable people moving to Madison or Iowa City from Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis.

On the other hand, there also exists much discussion about what the university towns are doing right, but always only in comparison to their distressed rust belt urban siblings. To focus on the positives as indicative of some kind of economic and cultural gap that delinks the two kinds of places is, to me, a recipe for continued misunderstanding of what has always and in the future will increasingly operate as a shared regional space.

This topic demands a fuller treatment, obviously. Here is the article that got me again imagining different ways of thinking about Madison in relation to Milwaukee and Chicago. The authors tell the story as one of strategizing for economic competition and survival, without regard for what makes the area surrounding Madison different and resource-rich. Compartmentalizing economic sectors seems like a bad habit from the perspective of cultivating a regional consciousness.

The trip to Minneapolis was short. But very sweet.

 

Gabriel Mindel-Saloman, Sam Gould, and Mike Wolf carried the Red76 standard in a triumphant return to the Upper Midwest. Though triumphalism is not really the Red76 thing. How about a less imperialistic word, then? We could go with a winning return, meaning the project won people.

 

And how could it not? There was a lot going on. Along with the Walker’s summer-long Open Field programming, there was something for everyone. Making small playful structures out of high quality museum waste materials, with tools borrowed from the Walker. Lectures and discussions, both informal and outside and formal and inside one of the Walker’s lecture halls. A drawing club. Perfect bound books printed on demand. A childrens’ violin circle on a lovely summer evening. Plenty of bleed over in  people out strolling the sculpture garden.

 

Later it occurred to me that the departure of the Guthrie really worked to the Walker’s advantage. The Walker’s field is literally open because of it, and that is a beautiful thing.

 

To top it off there were a couple of pretty good shows inside the Walker, too—Guillermo Kuitca: Everything—Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008 and 1964, which included some great Wallace Berman printed matter and Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. I had never seen either in person, never having bothered to view Cut Piece on the web, even.

 

A bonus was getting to visit with a friend, the artist David Lefkowitz, who happened to be there the same night I was speaking. He was around to take part in his own summer reading group. They met out on the tables in front of the Walker’s Vineland Place entrance. I sat in on the last few minutes of their group. It was one of those moments when it struck me once again that some cultural activities that are either a terrific luxury or hard to even imagine happening in other towns just seem so normal in the Cities.

 

David—another Carleton alum from the Wellstone era—stayed for my Pop-up Book Academy session in the Flat Pak House. The sociologist and activist Stephen Duncombe made it, as well. In my talk I focused on one of Wellstone’s favorite books in particular, Poor People’s Movements, by Piven and Cloward. Turns out Frances Fox Piven was a graduate adviser to Steve! I also brought to pass around other books that I first purchased for Wellstone’s classes that still live on my bookshelves. And then it happened that one of them, Power and Powerlessness by John Gaventa, is one of Gabriel’s favorites. And that title is the one that I have never actually read. For me, it stands as the book that Paul listed on the syllabus but never got around to covering during the term. Now I will definitely have to read it. It will be like returning to Paul’s class, completing some unfinished schoolwork twenty-five years later.

Nearly eight years after the plane crash that killed him, today I am traveling to Minneapolis to give an informal talk and lead a discussion about the books I was exposed to in the two courses I took with Paul Wellstone in 1986-87. This is happening in an art context, at the Walker, as a Red76 Pop-up Book Academy. Far from the political sphere. But maybe not, and there again is a lesson learned from Paul: no matter what we do, or who we are, politics matters because it is about people’s lives.

 

Needless to say, reviewing some of the books I still have after all these years, I am reminded again of Paul, his impact on my life, and my memories of him in the classroom. Also of Marcia Wellstone. She was about the same age as my Carleton cohort and conveniently was home in Northfield for a few days over the time I took her dad’s Social Movements and Protest Politics course. She sat in with us for one week of lectures.

 

Revisiting the books and what I can remember of the reading lists reminds me of the lively discussions that took place in nearly every Wellstone class period. For a young person curious about the world, trying to map my politics and find my activist self, those times were a gift for which I will be eternally grateful.

 

I hope some people who knew Paul will be at the event. One of the lasting pleasures of having known Paul is meeting other people who somehow knew him, or knew of him, and in either experience continue to find inspiration in the person he was. If it happens, I know there’s a good chance that together we’ll grieve a little, smile a lot, argue, get righteous, and share a spirit…and be full of life, just as Paul always was.

I never saved a syllabus from the classes. One of these days I'll have to dig in that direction; there must be some out there. From memory (and my bookshelves) here are some of the books were assigned:

Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman

 

Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, Charles Murray

 

The New Politics of Inequality, Thomas Byrne Edsall

 

 

 

Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, John Gaventa

 

Who Spoke Up: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975, Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan

 

The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the Left, Todd Gitlin

 

Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward

 

The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, Lawrence Goodwyn

 

A Passion for Equality: George Wiley and the Movement, Nick Kotz and Mary Lynn Kotz

My summer reading so far, not new books, but very good ones. Mimesis and Alterity by Michael Taussig and Against the Law by Ching Kwan Lee, with a totally indulgent diversion into Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

 

The last title is a library book from the Madison Public Library. As you might imagine, given the readers of Madison, this volume is well-worn. And the site of snarky intra-borrower comments.

This week the inspiring Natasha Wheat is in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. From yesterday, Tuesday, through next Sunday she will hold court in a gallery turned into an orangerie, an architectural and garden space of European origin, and associated with the ornate court buildings of the French and other European countries in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Her display included an archival print, an illustration from an 1871 newspaper, of the defeated Parisian Communards imprisoned in the Orangerie of Versailles. I mean, those Communards who escaped summary execution.

Anyway, for the Tuesday night opening Natasha invited Mike Wolf, Salem Collo-Julin, and I to read texts we had written for the accompanying chapbook she made for the project. Mike opened and delivered a song and then a heartfelt reading. Here is his text. Salem read with her usual entertaining, authoritative, playful, and thoughtful angles.

Here is my text.

My Summer Travels: Meditations on the Illusions of Our Time

Dan S. Wang 

1.

In May of this year, 2010, I made a pilgrimage to Penglai, a seaside town on the southern shores of the Bohai Sea in Shandong Province. The town is known for its naturally occuring mirages. Being perfectly reflective when they periodically appear, the mirages gained association with legends involving immortality and fantastical travel. For centuries Chinese people have gone to Penglai in search of whatever it is that they imagine the sea-borne optical illusions may offer. These days the mirages form the basis for what may prove to be a kind of updated illusion, that of a developmental model that follows a path littered with failure.

Once a sleepy port and fishing town with a curious past, Penglai is in the midst of a minor boom, largely the result of the rise in domestic tourism. The tourists are members of China's new middle class, with disposable income and a hankering for those lifestyle elements not afforded the masses of China's revolutionary period. When a town with some claim to historical significance beckons, as Penglai now does, they come, and as with all people-related quantities in China, they come in droves. I have no good reason to criticize the tourism, and the tourists I observed all seemed to be having a good time. But it is easy to see the questionable foundations upon which the new consumer class is built. For example, only about twenty kilometers outside of Penglai, one drives by the Shanghai GM Dong Yue plant, a massive facility that has the capacity to produce 300k cars and 750k motors annually, according to the company's website. Just down the highway sits a Foxconn plant that employs 80k people. The brute nature of global capitalism may not be obvious in Penglai's hotel lobbies, but it certainly is a factor in the plants. While I was in the area Foxconn announced that it would raise the wages of its workers in all factories by 30% in response to the rash of worker suicides in its Shenzhen factories. As with the despair in America's Rust Belt inner-cities, more than a few of which General Motors abandoned for Mexico, Brazil, and, as it turns out, Shandong province, it does not get much more brutal than that.

It remains to be seen whether and how the Chinese come to terms with the unavoidable realities behind their unsustainable development. I saw one good sign. While walking the perimeter of Bao Luan, a village of 2500, I asked my guide about a power plant located just beyond the far edge of the village. She told me it is a coal-fired plant that was just recently decommissioned, despite being only about ten years old. Wind farms up and down the coastal hills are coming online, she explained, and I could see some of those not far from the Foxconn and GM facilities. So even though car ownership in China retains some of the dreamlike quality that the ugly requirements of American lifestyles long ago eroded, there, too, the illusions may be falling away. But even the opacity of Chinese politics reminds the American visitor of yet another awful reality: that perhaps our best political effect happens within our own system.

2.

I wince every time I hear a business report use the word “recovery.” There will be no recovery. The economy will be what the conventional economists and business minds—who in recent years have made just about every wrong turn you can make, and continue to do so—call soft, for the rest of our days. Whether they invent a new terminology to describe the same or worsening conditions does not matter. What matters is that the age of Peak Everything is upon us. This does not mean that the world ends tomorrow, just that we lose a few dozen human languages and an untold number of species over the course of a year. Every year, from here on out. Welcome to the Anthropocene, the period in which we human beings may finally understand ourselves, our power, our potential, and in which the skies are still often enough blue. Often enough to have us seeing equilibrium where there is none.

Unlike the earth scientists who argue over whether the Anthropocene started with the agricultural activity and consequent environmental impact of humans several thousand years ago, or with the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s, I prefer thinking of the Anthropocene as beginning now. For me it is a question of consciousness as much as it is an issue of measurable impact. Moreover, the two developments are connected inasmuch as the planetary impact of human activity has reached a level of such self-evident obviousness that a very basic understanding of what humans are doing to the Earth is becoming a generally accepted fact. Or, I should say, at least among a significant and growing segment of the human population. Not everyone acknowledges the reality.

Illusions, mirages, warped fantasies—deeply entrenched, expertly maintained, highly capitalized, and indulged daily—not only remain, but define the major contradiction of our time. The division is between that portion of humanity willing and desirous of living according to the constraints and possibilities of our social and environmental realities, on the one side, and that portion committed to continuing in the fantasy of a fossil fueled techno-developmental model, on the other. This is the new political fault line, the major antagonism of the twenty-first century. All the twentieth-century fault lines of identity and even class now persist as the minor contradictions, meaning the major contradiction crosses all the secondary fault lines. Illusion versus reality, this is the struggle.

3.

Like most people who grew up in south and central Michigan in the 70s and 80s, my memory is strewn with stories of gimmicky initiatives meant to revitalize local economies. Complementing the ventures in idiocy (AutoWorld, anyone?) are a trail of bad development and policy moves that includes incinerators, ill-conceived school closings, privatization schemes, casinos, austerity measures, poorly timed tax-cuts, and prison construction. Taken together, by now the long list of failures ought to have made clear one truth. The oligarchs have no vision, only attachments to illusion.

Given this evident poverty of imagination, the question becomes, How does the ordinary citizenry author a vision of itself and its future? In Detroit and the greater Rust Belt, thousands upon thousands of people, done with the waiting for answers to be delivered, are busy authoring their own answer. Most concretely, it involves literally planting a new Earth. Over a thousand family and community garden projects are underway within the city limits of Detroit. Some are large, some are tiny. Most all of them are productive, certainly of healthy food and nearly always of improved social relations. This is happening in a city so desperately underserved that one even has a difficult time finding stores that will accept the returned beverage bottles and cans for which you had already paid the famous Michigan 10¢ deposit.

Grace Lee Boggs, 95 years old in 2010, a principal of the Johnson-Forrest Tendency, active in Black Power circles, Asian-American activist heroine, and a dear movement elder, offers her vision of the emerging Detroit, the city she has lived in for more than fifty years: Detroit can and will be the Chiapas of North America. Drawing on the struggle and unshackled imaginations of the Zapatistas and the indigenous peoples up and down the hemisphere, she sees an incipient world blossoming out of the ruins. Detroit is poor in dollars, but rich in time. Outside of things retailed, materials are abundant, as is available space. Detroiters are subject to a repressive state apparatus, but also ignored and only nominally administered. As some residents and recurrent visitors can testify, this mix of life and death produce the surreal qualities that are attracting the imaginative to Detroit, while repelling the mainstream and the managerial. Former lives, the work of many hands long absent, hang in the air all around you, but the relative emptiness suggests 140 square miles of de facto autonomous territory. Detroit's industrial capitalization was unique in its intensity, as is the deindustrialization. The illusion has been lifted in Detroit for many—though it remains to be seen whether enough.

 

 

 

From others come further thoughts and perspectives on Detroit and the Social Forum.

Writer, activist researcher, and mrcc co-traveler Brian Holmes adds a great report here.

One of my new friends from the Social Forum is Shahid Buttar, a rad lyricist Pakistani-American who also happens to be a dedicated civil rights attorney fighting the power in the post-9/11 era.

Here is his report. Note his description of the Social Forum as a place where finding potential collaborators and project partners "seems as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel." That was my feeling, too.

Kristen Cox, a Chicago activist and emerging leader in the creative funding and progressive wealth-channeling movement, reports on the Spaulding Court project that was jump started around the time of the Social Forum.

Detroit activist and educator Shea Howell's brief take on the USSF, though I know she has much more to say.

And finally, an audio file of our movement elders Grace Lee Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein in dialogue at the USSF.

Also, as a follow up to our time in Detroit, I learned from Nicolas Lampert about this new documentary called The Water Front. Nicolas knows about the doc because of his research while curating a show about water and water politics to be mounted in Milwaukee later this year. The film focuses on the water politics in Highland Park, the small municipality completely surrounded by the city of Detroit, where we rented a house for the week of the Social Forum. Apparently, the story of water services in Detroit and especially Highland Park are instructive to those of us on alert to the encroachment of market logics and privatization on basic public goods like water and air. I looked into screenings of the documentary and it turns out that it will be broadcast on the Documentary Channel on July 18. I knew we got satellite TV for a reason.

The following text is lifted from the press release sent to me by the filmmaker, Elizabeth Miller.

*

DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL^® SHOWCASES EXCLUSIVE U.S. TV PREMIERE OF MULTI-AWARD WINNING “THE WATER FRONT” ON SUNDAY, JULY 18

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (June 22, 2010) --- Documentary Channel^® (DOC) is stepping forward to bring attention to the worldwide water crisis in July when it presents three consecutive films on the subject culminating with the exclusive U.S. television premiere of multi-award winning documentary “The Water Front” on Sunday, July 18 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.  Directed by Liz Miller, the film tells the story of a Michigan city’s determination to fight the seemingly inevitable path of water privatization while ensuring affordable access to this life sustaining resource.

 

“The Water Front,” examines the downward slide of Highland Park, Mich., the birthplace of mass production, which is a post-industrial city on the verge of financial collapse.  The state of Michigan has appointed an Emergency Financial Manager to fix the crisis, and she sees the water plant, which Ford built in 1917, as the key to economic recovery.  The Manager has raised water rates and has implemented severe measures to collect on bills.  As a result, Highland Park residents have received water bills as high as $10,000; they have had their water turned off; their homes foreclosed; and are struggling to keep water from becoming privatized.  This community portrait also is an unnerving indication of what is in store for residents around the world as cities look to update water systems and face increasingly complex issues such as water shortages and implications of the bottled water industry.  The film raises questions such as: Who determines the future of shared public resources? What are alternatives to water privatization? How will we maintain our public water systems and who can we hold accountable?

“My objective in making this film was to encourage people to think about where the water we drink comes from, as well as touch on the very essence of our democratic system,” says director Miller.  “It presents a community in crisis, but also presents the powerful enactment of local participation in finding solutions to the problems of our times.”

 

“In our efforts to bring attention to the water crisis, Liz Miller’s documentary reveals the truth behind one community’s fight to make water affordable,” adds Kate Pearson, Documentary Channel’s senior vice president of programming.  “This film introduces us to those struggles and will help inspire viewers to make changes in their community.”

The the second part of my early summer research travels consisted of just under a week spent in Detroit. There I joined eleven of my Compass colleagues, living together in a rented house, sharing food and space. We timed our days in the city to coincide with the week of the United States Social Forum.

 

The US Social Forum is part of the worldwide Social Forum process. Some from our group had attended the World Social Forum in Caracas, in Nairobi, and the European Social Forum in Paris. Other friends and wider collaborators of ours attended the first US Social Forum in Atlanta three years ago. I’d found their reports intriguing. Once some of us learned that the 2010 event would be held in Detroit, we were set on being there.

 

But right then, at least for me and I think all of us, came the question, what does it mean, “to attend,” “to participate in,” “to witness” a complex event like the Social Forum? We each had to answer that question for ourselves, and also as a group. An important consideration was our aim to find ways to further understand, engage in, and contribute to the ongoing work of social change happening in Detroit, beyond the Social Forum. And finally, this whole effort also exists in the context of our larger work of situating radical cultural work in the greater Midwest.

 

Indeed the Forum proved to be a multi-faceted event that no single person could possibly experience in full. There were many components, beginning with the opening march, continuing with hundreds of workshops and sessions, the daily schedule of plenaries, the work brigades, the demonstrations, the parties, the tours, and so on. Added to this extensive menu of goings on were the great many unofficial events, hang-outs, performances, and social spaces that welled up from the true grassroots. Even expecting it to be this way, the actual experience was a bit overwhelming just the same.

 

One from our crew, Brian Holmes, had described Paris during the European Social Forum as a city that was remade by activists for the duration of the Forum, extending the spirit of the Social Forum process—ie, that Another World Is Possible—far beyond the confines of the official Forum site. This approach to what creative activists could do during the Forum informed our plans. Since some of us had been working on meeting and forming relationships with Detroit activists over the past year, putting energy into some kind of self-initiated production out in the neighborhoods of Detroit seemed like a contribution we could make that might be out of reach for visiting activists less familiar with the city, and without the relationships with people operating locally.

 

That is the backdrop to the decisions I made for my week. My experience, which overlapped greatly with and depended on the group experience, but was different from every other individual experience, could be divided into three elements. Each part resulted in its own narrative of labor, decision-making, research, experimentation, and outcome.

 

They were

1)    The housing. The process of finding a suitable house for short term rental in a city not our own was an involved experience requiring a good deal of cooperation, outreach, and planning. The actual experience of living with eleven comrades for a week in a big house, plus at least nine or more who joined, was a joyful test of how we could get along and know each other at a greater level of closeness. Also, the location was terrific. Robert Taylor, our on-the-ground scout really set us up well. We were in Highland Park, on a side street between Woodward and John R, just a little ways south of Henry Ford’s first factory, and a short bike ride from D*Flux. It was good to learn a little bit about Highland Park, including the embattled public utility situation there.

2)    The participation in the official Social Forum program. For us this meant registering as an organization and offering a two-hour workshop, and that involved another process of discussion, writing, and workshopping

(at Mess Hall in Chicago and at the Beneath the University conference in Minneapolis) over several months. Though persons from our group attended other USSF sessions and official events, for me the participation in the official program was limited to  helping with our session, walking in the opening march, and volunteering with one of the work brigades

3)    Creating a free event and temporary social space in Detroit, away from the downtown USSF site. This event, which became known as Drift and Surge, took the form of a cookout under a large tent designed and loaned to us by the progressive architect Adrian Blackwell. Though this event also took some amount of foresight and planning, especially in terms of arranging the loan and delivery (the tent is quite large, needing about four people to easily lift it when folded up), the particulars of the event simply could not be determined until we were actually assembled in Detroit. For one thing, we had to find an appropriate space to hold the event, and then go through the process of setting up the tent, which was not exactly a straightforward task. And then making determinations about guesstimating attendance, getting the word out, buying the food, etc.

 

To record a sense of the mosaic-like experience of the week, then, I can specify the following highlights from the above three.

 

Thanks to the early arriving crew, by the time I arrived along with six others several days later on Sunday night, the house had been transformed into a home environment. Over the course of the next six days, it became ever more our space. Everybody arrived with more food, drink, kitchen gear, and simple comforts, adding to the temporary furnishings. Upon leaving for the conference site or other activity around the city, we all knew we had some place to come back to, where there would be food, comfort, and familiar company. This made a huge difference; we weren’t staying in a hotel, we weren’t scattered across town on borrowed couches, and we weren’t camping out in a tent city. If only for two weeks, we had our home, together. The absence of internet service added to the social life of the home. People left the experience with a shared desire to find a reason to do it again, whether in Detroit or elsewhere. Also, we now know for a fact that there is plenty of cheap real estate in cities like Detroit, and undoubtedly throughout the Midwest. Get a group together, find a reason to engage with a place you don’t live, find a willing landlord, and make a temporary home.

 

The opening march was great.

The innumerable groups on display—many of them announcing on signs and shirts from where they came, the wholly heterogenous assemblage, the creative noisemaking, and the perfect weather added up to a stellar event.

It was qualitatively unlike any American political march I have seen or participated in. The celebratory vibe prevailed, over the anger and sense of powerlessness that usually dominates American political marches. The only downer was the ending. The march petered out at Cobo Hall. Marchers were were not given any clear direction toward the opening plenary, and there were no places toward which the considerable momentum and spirit could channeled. There was some confusion and a “Oh, I guess it’s over” kind of feeling. We made it to the large indoor hall for the opening ceremonies, but the cavernous, dark, and echo-ey space killed the raucous, roiling celebration of the march.

 

I was somewhat ambivalent about our session, Cartography with Your Feet. I saw the purpose in having some official conference presence, and I liked our session description, but really, what can you do in two hours? For me (though not others in the group) it was about supporting the Forum, and not so much about expecting an amazing experience. Still, there was at least one terrifically gratifying episode from the session. It was delivered by a young woman named Nicki (?) who had just graduated from college, and who in the last couple of years had become connected to the local organic and sustainable food production activity around southern Wisconsin. She stepped up to share her story (to a roomful of strangers, how confident is that?) of getting acquainted with a radical Midwest and feeling connected to a place at a profound level for the first time in her life, having come out for college from the East Coast. She presented some images from her recent trip to the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, and also spoke of having been positively moved by our Call to Farms book, which she somehow found online. That, too, was a pleasant surprise. Nicki’s enthusiasm was an inspiration.

 

I joined a work brigade for two mornings. The people in the brigades were different but the work site was the same, the garden project at Calimera Park on the northeast side, just off of Seven Mile. The garden is a large vegetable plot initiated by a nearby Afrocentric school, Nsoroma Institute with help from the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Right next to the cultivated land is an art work by Magma Glacier and Kevin Beasley called Memory Field. This earthwork sculpture will operate as a functional rain catcher, with water drained and collected in a buried cistern next to the garden. It is a brilliant collaboration between artists, students, educators, and food activists.

 

The reality is, both the art work and the garden are in-progress. The garden is in its first season and needs the help of many hands. Upon first sight, the garden seemed like an overwhelming project, certainly for the two people trying to see it through the summer. On both days we were very happy to provide labor.

 

But the lasting lesson from the work brigade was, in fact, the way the shared labor became a medium for social interaction. Especially on the first morning, when the participants came together from very different starting points, social and geographical locations. There were housing and welfare activists from Harlem, a mother and young daughter from Ann Arbor, a roving crustie who’d biked up from Cincinnati, the artist Laurie Palmer. Unlike much of the conference activity, which tended to channel people toward their pre-exisiting interests, here our worlds collided in the shared work before us. Laurie, myself, and an elder from Harlem named Ann who came with a big group from Community Voices Heard, worked for two hours together as a weeding team. We talked about where we came from, why we came, what kinds of activities we’re doing. We talked about Obama, the national political situation, compared situations in different home states. We talked about gardening and where our food systems are taking us. We laughed, sympathized with each other, and got a lot of weeding done, for which the brigade directors were extremely grateful.

 

This three person crew, with dirty hands and sweaty brows, stays in my memory as the real social forum, the time and space of sharing and learning from each other. Malik Yakini and Fabayo from the DBCFSN led the session, starting and finishing with circles of reflection. The whole thing was invested with a kind of reverence and honor, which is exactly the attitude we need to have in relation to the earth out of which all our food comes.   

 

The best experience worth commenting on here was the Drift and Surge event. After successfully rehearsing the tent set-up (during which we were unsure enough to call Adrian for advice, and were exhorted by him to “be creative!”), identifying an appropriate site, coming up with some sort of rough concept, making and passing out flyers, composing a menu, and shopping at Costco, we had an event to roll out on Friday night, the last night of the USSF. Matthias Regan of Compass and CAFF went to town on a personal screenprinting mission, printing up hundreds of small flags, which he then strung together as streamer lines for decorating the tent. This provided a much-needed element of visually festivity and a graphic identity. Check it out!

 

We invited everyone we knew in town, on short notice. We invited the people who were living or hanging out near the site. With the site being unfamiliar to many of those visiting Detroit and some distance from the conference, and with no rsvp, we had no idea how many people would show up. It was all a big experiment, calculated to be sure, but with enough variables to make predictions of outcome difficult. But the basics were in place for a positive event: free food, a comfortable and visually appealing space, a sense of security and welcome. That was the primary purpose: to offer a small thank you to the city of Detroit, for all we’ve gained from our visits, by staging a free social and meal event to which all would be welcome.

 

The site, chosen for both its symbolic significance and its actual open lawn-like character, was a big grassy lot across the street from the historic King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church, where Martin and Malcolm had both preached, and around the corner from the Hush House. In street parlance the neighborhood is known as Zone 8, one of the toughest parts of a very tough city. Some from our group tracked down the property caretaker, Sam, and the pastor of the church, explained as best we could what we hoped to do, and were granted permission.

 

The evening turned into another real social forum. Sam loaned us a second grill, and then helped take a turn cooking. Visiting activists from different parts of the country, many friends and collaborators, and neighborhood people all joined in, making for an unusually mixed assemblage. A group of USSF attendees visiting from California happened upon the tent while being led on a walking tour of Zone 8 by local activist and author Yusef Shakur. A group of the 16 Beaver radi-cats dropped in.

We ran out of food and drink and had to make a store run. A neighbor, Mike (and Sam’s brother), who lives literally a hundred feet from the site, said to me, “Look at all this. We’ve got black, white, brown…everyone. Why can’t we have this all the time??” Rashaun Harris, and activist who is part of the Hush House staff, came by. Later on he led a group on an impromptu tour of the Hush House gardens and then into the house itself. Mike helped with some unscripted commentary about the local neighborhood that only one who had lived there for decades would know. For all of us who were lucky enough to take part, the short journey to the Hush House went way beyond a tour and become something of a shared moment of understanding. Without getting into the details, I can say simply that the sharing of information left the realm of the programmed and rose to the plane of the transformative.

 

The lesson taken from Drift and Surge: that with adequate and competent planning and groundwork, a social space with room for the unscripted episode can be opened up. If the instigatory group comes in with enough of a presence, and yet takes care to keep the interpretation of the event somewhat open (ie, this was not instantly identifiable as an “activist” or “political” event), then the chances are good that the resulting event is positive. The appreciation expressed by many in attendance confirmed the worthiness of producing these kinds of spaces in the (conventionally considered) marginal neighborhoods. Was it an organizing event? Did it advance some sort of agenda or get a political message out? No. But without the simple experiences of shared time and space, broad-based movements will never be built in segregated societies. Also, this was a statement against the instrumentalist tendencies found in activist spheres and subcultures. We opened a space, invited people in, and then what happened after that was up to all of us. To paraphrase E.P. Thompson, unpredictability is in many ways the essence of democracy.