Re: Building a Movement That Outlasts the Occupation

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

>  If the media is actually willing to report this
> story, what good does it do for the left to say "Ah, that's nothing,
> think about the prisons in the U.S., and the School of the Americas,
> ...." etc.?

The "left" has the responsibility to address and expose the
long-range systemic ills. It's encouraging that the corporate press
is interested in this story. But the hoopla will fade as quickly as
the hoopla over the final episodes of "Friends" if the left doesn't
hold the context.

Frenzied exposure in the media of these kinds of horrors clouds other
issues. I think a case can be made that the college turmoil over
Nixon's bombing of Cambodia and the exposure of the Mi Lai slaughter
didn't have as much to do with ending the Vietnam War as did the fact
that US draftees were fragging their commanding officers, despite
widespread media coverage of the first two and none of the last. The
media still allows a faux-issue like "the Vietnam Syndrome" to be
discussed as though it were meaningful because the left failed to
address the larger, systemic issue, namely, the placing of one
younger, poorer segment of the population in coerced jeopardy by
another richer, older, whiter (but exclusive) segment. Fragging was a
direct attack on that system by its very victims.

The current media attention is really about "getting caught" and not
about the fact that this kind of shit is what us Americans have built
into our basic structure. Fragging made the draft (temporarily)
obsolete. But the "club of induction" (Gen. Hershey's phrase for
social engineering by the draft) was replaced by the "club of
economic betterment" (my phrase for joining the military to get out
of poverty).

We've always got to give space for the corporate media to do the
right thing. But we shouldn't let up on the long-range task of
pushing for a more meaningful discussion (and correction) of the
underlying systemic ill.

The first step to recovery is, alas, admitting that we ain't who we
pretend to be.

Dan Scanlan