I remember when I first realized the political process has failed...

[oxbow]

I was in my undergrad Art and Social Action class, a few months after Hurricane Katrina, when the full horror of the event and the full impotence of the response process was finally sinking in. I was listening to one of my co-professors, a bright Brooklyn social activist of old, and she said that real social progress always comes from changing the culture, the way people look at the world and what they fundamentally expect of the society they live in. She argued that Art was one of the most profound and primal ways to communicate effectively to the culture, thus laying the groundwork for bottom-up changes in the political structure/process. Uncle Tom's Cabin and Atlas Shrugged have both changed the society we live in in ways that are both beautiful and a little scary. The relatively charmed relationship between http://warisacrime.org/content/video-hollywood-war-makers">Hollywood and the military is a modern day example of how this principle is utilized.

Fast forward half a decade and I see new hope in the political process springing up, being tempered or downright extinguished in some, and the same political process chugging forward, albeit with a more frothy head of incipient http://www.good.is/post/americans-are-horribly-misinformed-about-who-has-money">class warfare brewing in there. It is a problem that Americans are horribly misinformed about the extent of the wealth distribution imbalance we are collectively bearing. It is a problem that the political process has been subjugated to the interests of the highest bidders in the highest moneyed percentile who are so readily benefiting from this state we are in. This problem is further compounded by the erosion of more bottom-up http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/12/07/lind_american_people">mass membership organizations like Labor and the United Way, in that no check exists against this perversion of the democratic political process.

So I see two prongs here: Firstly, It seems that sponsoring local organizations and focusing locally will be very important in the future. It will take time to restore the ardent forest of mass membership that once existed to transmit the needs and values of the American people upward. The internet provides a great tool for connection and communication that did not exist in those days though, and perhaps nature abhors a vacuum badly enough here that it will self-assemble somewhat effortlessly once the ball gets rolling. Aiming for a local effect allows us to speak from our hearts, of course, to our people in our neighborhoods. Art is also about speaking to the heart, which is the greatest bullshit detector ever made. When you communicate to the very best and brightest in people, you will find a deep resonance in there that returns your call. And through the wonders of mass communication, Art can now can speak to a very large number of people. The same mass-communication apparatus we now enjoy, when combined with mass-membership organizations, makes it possible for them to connect and network in a way their predecessors never could. Coordinating strategies, sharing news and videos of speakers and cultural/artistic performances are some possibilities that come to mind. Artistic and local growth may seem like a longer-term solution to present political worries, to be sure. It seems like a more organic approach is how I think of it, though. If you nurture it and allow it to grow, it could grow quite big by itself in time. It's all about having your heart in the right place...


In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak."
-James Russell Lowell

[Skittles]

1. actually

the real obvious point of failure was when the Supreme Court installed an incompetent piece of SHIT as "president" - the wreckage was a natural result of that travesty