Summer Politics: Cut and Dried
On the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, people reminisced about large public gatherings in open spaces. Central Park used to be a mecca for such events. On June 12, 1982, a million people assembled in the park to protest the nuclear policies of the Reagan Administration. People traveled to NYC they did so because they considered it a visible celebration of democracy, a patriotic way to send a message. Shortly after they convened, Reagan opened nuclear arms talks with the Soviet Union and the Cold War waned. To date, that Central Park protest remains one of America's largest.
But will grassroots assemblies be banished in the future? After three years of "contentious litigation" over the use of Central Park for peaceful protest by several left wing groups, prior to the Republican National Convention, last year New York City agreed to study "the optimum and sustainable use of the Great Lawn for large events".New York City's study, released this month and conducted by soil scientists, plant pathologists and groundskeepers, suggests limiting the use of the Great Lawn in Central Park to 55,000 people for safety reasons and to protect the grass. The Great Lawn cost millions to restore, but the decision rankled some. A lawyer for the Partnership for Civil Justice told the NYT: "We would call it junk science except that it's not science". Rather she said, the report supports: "a political declaration of intent by the mayor to limit free speech rights by New Yorkers."
Grassroots Change
Central Park historian Sarah Cedar Miller once told a reporter: "Parks are a gathering ground and where democracy happens. Literally, the grassroots happen on the grass." 1 Barack Obama has often talked about the importance of grassroots action to motivate change, though he hasn't been explicit about the turf. In "Dreams From My Father", he wrote about his decision in 1983 after graduating from Columbia College to become a community organizer:
"....There wasn't much detail to the idea; I didn't know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."
Twenty-six years later Obama resides in the White House after campaigning on a platform of Change. In his acceptance speech he attributed his victory to a strong grassroots campaign. He assured his supporters that corporations wouldn't have all the seats at the table and urged them to continue the grassroots fight for the causes he would champion during his presidency.
Grassroots From the White House?
But of course Barack Obama also won the presidency because his campaign implemented well-organized fund-raising which corralled large donors and bundlers. Now, as constituents, stakeholders, and lobbyists wrestle over American healthcare, headlines detail the president's efforts to appease these interests.
Last week, we heard news about the executive branch's concessions to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). These agreements supposedly involve White House concessions like opposing drug importation, in return for a hazy promise from PhRMA about "up to" 80 billion dollars in cost cuts. Last weekend Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius asked people not to focus so much on the public option, leading the media to think the public option is off the table.
All this leaves grassroots Obama supporters to wonder, who is occupying the seats at the table? But wonder though they might, when it comes to healthcare, Obama's 13 million strong grassroots organization remains busy with their busy lives. Who among them has time, attention, or money to speak out on each of the plethora of issues that the Obama presidency tackles? Furthermore, if the president's supporters did have time, and knew what they were supposed to be rooting for -- a viable public option, details to the proposals, direct answers, and available talking points -- how would they express their interests? Are we really even a "grassroots" kind of country anymore?
Is It Astroturf or Have We Changed?
Public protests and large gatherings of past decades can't be idealized. They've always been contentious affairs, with riot police, shootings, covert and overt suppression. There was a certain community achieved by those Central Park protesters in 1982, who all gathered in one place to express the collective hope for a safer better, world. But that was almost three decades ago. A different place and time, when, as some New Yorkers say, Central Park was overgrown and scary and New York invited anyone to occupy the space to keep worse elements at bay. Today, large protests are not necessarily seen as viable options to petitioning government. The Department of Defense recently labeled protests "low-level terrorism".
Perhaps businesses that surround Central Park wouldn't appreciate their view being a bunch of protesters with idle time on their hands agitating against ideas that challenge the premises of the business deals their executives negotiate at a frenzied pace eighteen hours a day. They may want to assure that their backdrop is lush, peaceful, untrammeled grass as far as the eye can see, a copacetic business environment. But does an insistence on pretty lawns discourage the public's inclinations to join a peaceable protest? To express views about the government?
Perhaps grassroots protest is a bygone era and nothing is lost by limiting people's right to protest on public greens. Even those who traveled up to Woodstock write about the event forty years ago for the NYT with detached amusement, as if obliged at a family gathering to watch sibling antics on a scratchy home video before quickly snapping that dusty box shut.
A manicured law is an asset too. And determined agitators can always be relegated to highways or still unkempt DC malls. If in 2009 public protests are limited on Central Park's Great Lawn, perhaps they will continue to flourish at "town halls".
Townhalls -- "A Dip In A Cool Stream?""
Town halls, afterall, can be an idyllic way to exchange ideas. Obama wrote about his experience when he was an Illinois State Senator in "The Audacity of Hope":
"One of my favorite tasks of being a senator is hosting town hall meetings....And as I look out over the crowd, I somehow feel encouraged. In their bearing I see hard work. In the way they handle their children I see hope. My time with them is like a dip in a cool stream. I feel cleansed afterward, glad for the work I have chosen"
You may say that today's town halls are a quite different brand of love-in than Obama's. Today, there may be some heart-felt questioning, but disenchanted Americans drown it out by ferociously confronting their representatives about strange apparitions they've concocted pertaining to government. Now they decry the scurvy of government run healthcare. Next week they may be yelling about jobs the upcoming the energy bill.
Fox News insists that this "anger's not 'manufactured' it's REAL". However, others say that corporations, perhaps even oil companies, are contributing to town-hallers' messages against change. No matter, it's a different beast from the cool stream Obama described. Some representatives may be wanting to shower after the events.
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says the Democrats running town halls can handle it, but they need to "know the difference between grassroots and Astroturf." Television news, however, does not necessarily differentiate between Astroturf and the more plebeian, grassroots protests, it duly broadcasts discontent. To us, it seems that whatever was The Matter With Kansas has gone both viral and national. Unfortunately but importantly, whatever the source of townhall agitation, everyone's paying attention to it.
TV Cameras on the Ruckus -- The Limits of Technology
The internet remains an alternative grassroots medium mobilized to good effect by MoveOn.org and the Obama campaign. But even if Obama's grassroots organization were to see fit to mobilize and use the internet to it's previously powerful effect, it would be a quiet effort.
As Obama said last week "TV loves a ruckus". Email campaigns don't attract television cameras the way even the smallest collection of agitated people waving scrawled signs do. Face it, that's why businesses oppose 200,000 people gathering in Central Park and why some send people to town halls. Even if we had a million emails it still couldn't make a televisable ruckus.
Woodstock is overrated, they write forty years later. Too much mud, not enough sandwiches, and mind-boggling traffic jams. But how will current brand of town hall protests look forty years from now? If pundits and participants don't think back fondly on Woodstock today, how will they recall the shouted, spit-laden confrontations from people insisting that healthcare reform is facism, death panels, and communism all wrapped up in one ideologically impossible hairball of anti-reform? Not "Change!" or "No Nukes" -- but "No-Change!", ie: "Long-Live the Uninsured!" -- delivered with a swagger that only a pistol strapped to one's leg can insure?
I'm not trying to idealize the old, flowers in your hair days that I didn't even live through. But is something lost if we've reached an age when the TV news may never capture a million people gathered in a park with a vision of a changed and better world? When "Astroturf" -- always capitalized for the always capitalist world, and working mostly to prevent Change and progress -- is for all intents and purposes the only "grassroots" we know?
1 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 17, 2005
