I get it. When the majority disagrees with you and you are completely awash in your own politics, performance art becomes a choice for political action. Whether it be wearing a gas mask in Congress, kneeling in reverence, storming the capital, or any number of acts, that are meant to be memes for action.
The endless loops of reaction that are the results of culture wars and media platforms and outlets is quite the fetish, as well as, fun and entertaining. Entertainmnet the peculiarly capitalist way of informing, demonstrating, and “changing” things.
What a bunch of punks. Weirdly the far right and the Republicans have become the disruptors and rebels reminiscent of the punk movement in the 1970s in the 1980s, with their constant protests, legislation and performances protesting any sort of infringement upon American freedom, even if there is a once in 200 years pandemic.
Marjorie Rotten and company – Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Rand Paul, et al., form the conservative Clash of anarchy, rebellion and immaturity that makes them such punks. And from a party historically known for clamping down on so many individual freedoms, it ain’t funny.
Lefties, raised in the most capitalistic of times – the second Gilded Age of absurd wealth, where the working-class is now also the service class, and Marxism no longer has anything to do with the working-class, replaced by a Marxist academia, long ago, concerned, not with class anymore, but race, gender and religion first.
When, after a hurricane and a tropical storm, they drowned many people in their basements in Queens, AOC and Deblasio visit the neighborhoods to promote their ideas about global warming, and the neighbors, largely democratic, immigrant and working class, repeatedly yell out to them to do their jobs. They had been begging for many years to mitigate the flooding by doing simple things like cleaning out the cash basis, but, apparently that became a viewing platform for ideas and not what basic government is about which is providing basic services and heeding the wishes of your electorate.
The big things like social change, that normally only occur when things get pressured enough to do so, resort to performance strategies, because the base and its anger just isn’t there yet, and that would take big important events like the murder of George Floyd, in order for folks to coagulate around an idea of change, that would also unite disparate groups. History proves this.
We can do better. The IP crowd cries for inclusuin of works that can exclude all cultures but their own, and god help any one outside that identity who,useing the themes of our times, represent thaeir struggle, even sympathetically, of another grouip. Holding two mirrors or cameras facing each other produces the same effect as PC and IP culture tends to do. It’s built to further amplify the concerns of identity politics, and, in my opinions we, who are healthy, can still do better.
