or The Exploding Cult of Personality Circus

has anyone else noticed that it's looks like obama's getting the democratic nomination?

i'm never ever ever going to forget this day, mother's day 2008:
blustery blue skies smelling like lilacks, the flawed but important new york times story drawing parallels between gay pride and mad pride, and barack obama on the front page in black and white (the code that it's historic) with a series of articles making it clear from multiple directions that he's going to be the democratic presidential candidate.

i was raised by people who believed in electoral politics and it's always felt like such an obvious sham. my dad was friends with david dinkins, the first black mayor of new york, and i was on his "youth advisory committee" and got to see first hand how full of shit the whole thing actually was. growing up in the 80's with reagan and bush at the end of the cold war, any glimmers of hope from an earlier revolutionary era squelshed under thick layers of corporate class war propaganda straight from the right wing think tanks in d.c., the underlying race and class and gender battles that tore apart a movement eating away at our personal lives.

i hung with the anarchists and we voted with bricks through windows and parties in the streets. we were visionaries and we were mad and beautiful. now i hang with the anarchists and we vote with our shovels and forks and rakes and carrot seed. we vote with how we take care of each other and every aspect of our lives except the ballot. there are a lot more of "us" now then i can ever remember there being.

but amidst it this is the first time in my life that i've ever allowed myself to get genuinely excited about a presidential candidate. it reminds me so much of my mom's stories about the kennedy campaign. i find myself reading old tom hayden books and imagining what would happen if more alliances between the progressive democrats and the radicals of many stripes started happening. how much more could our movements and radical communities flourish if the boot on our necks was lifted just a little. and if the warring factions of the "left" buried their differences and found common ground with people on the "right", and then it started to become clearer and clearer that the whole thing was a social construct that is crumbling around us along with the whole notion of "nation states" in an era of global capital.

from where i'm standing it feels like such a mystical riddle, no one could have written a more interesting story: the cold war that became the war against terror nightmare puppet show, the neoconservatives are old trotskyists, the oppressed become the oppressors, the blacks and the jews actually have to figure out how to talk to one another about what went down in the late 60's, all the political prisoners and ghosts from put down rebellions waiting in the sidelines, a generation of mad kids struggling with monocult voodoo labels and psych drugs communicating with lightspeed technology...

and i tell you straight up: i will campaign door to door for barack obama because it's an excuse to talk to my fellow americans about race and community and we need to be having those conversations about race and community! and we need to have some fucking hope that things can actually get better, that we can find common ground with our neighbors, that we can rise above this nightmare and evolve into something new together.

because the alternative is some ugly corporate fascism, the alternatives are the dinosaurs and the death culture.

but this is the point of my (admittedly sleep deprived) post:

i had kind of a epiphany today when i was talking to my mom and she expressed fears about obama getting assassinated. there's still so much trauma in our society left over from what happened 40 years ago when all the leaders started getting taken out.

what if, somehow, amidst this election year, we the anarchists managed to start articulating a vision of a movement where there were no "great men" -- where a man like obama really was just a symbol of hope but the real force was actually in the people?

that way they could kill our leaders and we'd just get stronger. is that a crazy idea or what? can we even imagine what that would be like? it's not like we haven't been talking about it for long enough.

there's so much lucking in the background just waiting for us to reclaim as ours. so much great history. what if we flipped the script and there were no more "great men", just human beings that were all connected to one another, and a history of struggle and respect for the freaks and outlaws and rebels who held on tight to the history through the hard times?

The Audacity of the Mad Ones.
i'm going to sleep before i start getting into trouble.

_________________
"Bipolar I with Psychotic Features", but somehow that just doesn't seem to capture the essence of the whole dilemma.
https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/blog/scatter