Brad Will In Rolling Stone – Some Thoughts About That Article, Another One, and Other Stuff
Posted by Richard S. on January 24, 2008
So, apparently there’s a cover story about Brad Will in Rolling Stone. I haven’t seen the issue (maybe it’s not out yet), but through some other sites, I landed upon a page from a Crimethinc site that has the story in its entirety. It also has some dialogue about whether or not it was a sellout for a friend of Brad’s to write a story like this for a corporate-run paper, etc.
Personally, I don’t care about the sellout problem (though it would be awfully nice to earn big bucks writing about such matters, if only I’d learned how to play the game)…but I would argue that when it comes to stories about contemporary anarchists, only one kind of article makes it into the big, corporate-run magazines (at least where the supposedly “positive” stories are concerned). That’s the human-interest, anecdote-filled, bio-type piece. And with all due respect to the writer of this story, this typifies such a piece in the way it’s written, organized, the whole general style.
I remember some years back when I was deeply involved in the organizing of a New York City event called the Intergalactic Anarchist Convention… Brad was part of that, and Priya/Warcry (also mentioned in the Rolling Stone piece) was considered the sort of leader of that. I think I did more work on that event than she or anyone else did (though Warcry would probably argue with that), but the sloppy journalist who reported on the event didn’t even mention me, because she based most of her reporting about the benefit on one night out of the three days when they had the big party (which I actually skipped because I was exhausted) and just reported it as though everybody involved was at the party, the things that they said were all that mattered, and it wasn’t necessary to do any fact-checking. The article was also mostly a star piece for Warcry, which pissed a few people off. But none of that bothered me so much as the style in which it was written, and its emphasis. It was just dripping with that “human interest” biographic flavor.
The Village Voice story also deliberately created a picture that would conform to certain expectations and stereotypes. Such as, the idea that this event was run by, and populated by, lovably naive and very young idealists. Of course, that’s not entirely true. There were certainly a few older people involved, especially behind the scenes, but the journalist wanted to create some dramatic picture of the next generation of super idealists being passed the big torch. So… Overblown generalizations coated in lots of sweet stuff (which some considered positive but might also have been considered condescending), without much word about the concrete ideas that people were committed to and the actual debates taking place.
The story on Brad Will in Rolling Stone is good for what it is, probably much better than that Village Voice thing. But while it talks about anarchists, it doesn’t really say a whole lot about the concrete ideas that different anarchists believe in and the reasons they were commiting themselves to certain things. It doesn’t say a whole lot about the situation in Oaxaca, either. (OK, it touches on this stuff – I’m realizing now upon a second reading, but not a whole lot and not so prominently. It’s all just sort of buried under the human-interest stuff.)
And one more thing - I’m sorry to say this, but it seems that some of the things said in this article aren’t really so accurate. Some of the things here are slightly off, from what I remember, and seem to have been described in certain ways specifically for the right dramatic effect.
For instance, the first paragraph of the story seems waay off to me:
Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens.
I’m sorry, but I don’t remember things this way. Did people really “revere” Brad in this way for doing those particular things? He was offbeat, he was eccentric, he was quite a hippie, he was very knowledgeable about certain tactics in civil disobedience, and maybe some people really liked him (while some really didn’t), but I don’t remember the Che Guevara quality being added to his public persona until after his death. (And by the way, as I said before, I got to like Brad… Not for the big antics that occurred at big events, but for a couple of thoughtful conversations that I eventually got to have with him, when we had a chance to sit down and talk sometime. To his credit, I think people liked him for those personal interactions, not because his activities at big events made him into some kind of rock star.)
Anyway, the tearing down of the squats was very dramatic, and lots of people chained themselves to objects like fire escapes, etc., while the police stormed the places dressed in all sorts of crazy gear. (Actually, I wrote my own little journalistic-type piece, which I spread around the Internet, about a young woman I knew who’d chained herself to the fire escape of the squat known as Dos Blocos, while the police emerged from some kind of tank they’d brought in, dressed in these germ-warfare-type outfits that looked like something from The Andromeda Strain.) So, of course there were very strange and dramatic moments (with quite a few people dressed in black hoodies), but I don’t remember anybody getting ”revered” for these scenes. (That’s my perspective, of course – anyone is free to tell me that I’m wrong…)
The gardens events were places where quite a few people dressed up in big, ridiculous costumes, usually as vegetables or flowers. Brad did nicely with his sunflower costume, but I don’t remember this being something he was doing that set him apart from everyone else. In fact, there was another guy I know of there who had much more of a reputation for dressing himself up as big flowers and that sort of thing. And (gettng to another line in the article, somewhere else) that other guy was more the guy who organized people into the “media-savvy civil-disobedience corps.”
Not to take anything away from Brad’s legacy, but… If the writer of this article wanted to create an accurate picture, why didn’t he mention that there were many, many people who sported these big costumes, precisely to get attention from the press? And why did he phrase it as though Brad was the chief organizer of the gardens protests when he wasn’t? (I guess that would detract from the dramatic center of the story, or something like that?)
So, anyway, in the first paragraph and in some other places, we’re given a picture that isn’t exactly, well…complete, not from my first-hand memory of things.
But it always seems to me that there’s some distortion or other to contend with whenever I read articles that try to create some human-interest drama based in this scene that I experienced that relatively few other people know about…
And, I’m sorry, but to sum it all up, this kind of article just kind of annoys me, sometimes a whole lot… I wish that some of these stories about radicals, anarchists, etc., could be written a little differently, without so much concern about creating the right (and familiar) dramatic effect.
I wish somebody could write an article in the mainstream press – and in some big magazine, not just a newspaper that’s going to disappear the next day – that discussed some of the nitty-gritty stuff that went through people’s minds during radical protests, the ideas, the differences, the arguments, etc. If they wrote about all this other stuff, it might not be as ”positive” as these human-interest pieces. But to me, at least, it would actually be more interesting, because it would be different from the sort of story that we see in the big press again and again.
For instance, I think it would be a lot more accurate – and more interesting to me, at least – if somebody actually wrote something about the three-hour meetings full of contentious arguments that went on before, say, an anti-globalization protest, rather than just depicting spontaneous actions of lovable young idealists (or crazy, violent young idealists, depending on the perspective). Or even better, when people put on a benefit… If you want to write an article that’s positive about the people involved in putting on the thing, how about talking about all the work that went into it, and all the arguing, and all the complicated logistics, and the exhaustion that they got through – all the real stuff that the real adults who did stuff had to contend with – rather than making it look as though everybody was just having some barely planned 21st-century love-in?
Anyway, I guess I’ve ranted enough… I just had to get some of this “out of my system” (haven’t had a chance to be a curmudgeon – not a REAL curmudgeon - for a while).
Jeff Sharlet said
Curmodgeon — I’m sorry you didn’t like the piece, but I’m tremendously grateful that you gave real reasons. The sharpest critics at CrimetInc ranted against the piece on principlle without attention to the piece itself. As it happens, I agree that the question of biography vs. ideology is a big one for writing about radicalism. I mainly write about Christian fundamentalism, and on that subject — even in Rolling Stone — I have a much freer hand to write about the ideas and arguments within various Christian Right movements. That may be because a) the basic premises of the overal movement are already familiar to most readers; b) on its nuances, I’m pretty well established as some kind of “expert” after years of publishing all over the place on the subject, and in much wonkier places than Rolling Stone; c) Rolling Stone readers don’t want to be like the Christian Right. But they might want to be like Brad.
From the beginning, that was the compromise that was the basis of the piece: Brad Will was a person who lived a life that a lot of 15 year old kids might want to live, or a lot of 60 year old men wish they had lived, or prisoners respect for its general defiance (there, in a nutshell, is the RS demographic). They might not have known they wanted to learn about anarchism or Oaxaca, the two subjects that drew me to the story (I wasn’t actually a friend of Brad’s). But they are willing to learn, if they’re drawn in by this character with whom they identifiy in some small way. That seemed to me like a worthwhile trade. Of course, I wrote more about Oaxaca, and I spent a solid month reading a lot of anarchist writers I’d long been interested in — Kropotkin, Graeber, Peter Lamborn Wilson — and I talked to about 40 of Brad’s friends. And for that work, I got to write a few paragraphs. I don’t think it’s a bad trade. Others might disagree.
But for what it’s worth — I still don’t think the story is typical of the genre. One of the magazine stories that has guided me for years — in reaction against it — was David Samuels’ late 90s Harper’s piece about anarchists in the Northwest, in which he reduced a whole assembly of ideas and movements and people to a Freudian fuck up, kids upset by their divorced parents. That’s just dumb. The other blueprint for such stories — besides the wholly negative “Anarchists are coming!” freak out — is the story that casts all anarchists as young, naive idealists. THe sort of bemused take. I wanted to write a story about an anarchist that showed him as the thoughtful, actually political person he was — someone who started out young and naive, because we all do, and paid attention to the world around him and developed into a fine journalist, activist, and organizer. I don’t think there are a lot of stories that do that, and I give credit to Rolling Stone for letting me try — my editor at one point said, Isn’t he sort of a “into the wild” guy? I said no — Brad was just the opposite, a 36 year old man who knew what he was doing and why, and got killed for it the way any other journalist, or, for that matter, soldier might.
Which still leaves the issue of what you is my apparent glorification of Brad. I didn’t mean to do that, but it may be partly true. For what it’s worth, I talked to a LOT of Brad’s friends — and if he didn’t have the che vibe before he died, a lot of them remember it that way now. Which was the point I was trying to make — in death, as is so often the case, he has become larger than life — a lens through which we can catch a glimpse, however rough, of the development of an interesting political thinker and activist.
But yes, it would have been much better had I included the 2,000 words I wrote about Oaxaca. Well, I trust my editors to have a better sense than I do of how long readers will stick with a particular subject. Previous issue they ran a very decent, 10,000 word plus open assault on the absolute stuipidity of the so called drug war. THe editors at RS who deal w/ politics are no rightwing tools, and on occasion they’ve done more to challenge corporate power than most Indymedia activists. I don’t mean challenge in the sense of integrity — I mean nailing some evil motherfuckers in such a way that readers say, The problem here isn’t “corruption”; it’s the system itself.
That may be a sad fact of resorces, but there it is. The door is still open to a piece dedicated particularly to Plan Mexico. Maybe that’ll happen. If it does, though, an editor for RS will likely ask for a central character. It’s a genre convention, and one I don’t adhere to in my writing for other forums, but it’s not a bad one for the readers who believe in it.
asfo_del said
I agree that the article creates an aura of glorification, not just of Brad but of the movement itself, that is not entirely accurate, and that may not in fact explain the appeal of anarchism or political activism to isolated 16 years olds in the way that the author says he intended. In a way, it makes the social justice movement seem too removed or abstract to someone who might actually be interested in joining the struggle if they were only told that all it takes to start becoming active is offering to volunteer at a radical bookstore or at their local Food Not Bombs. One doesn’t have to travel the world and risk one’s life just to take a positive step.
But to the author, I very much admire your willingness to discuss the article with people, here, on Crimethink, and on Angela’s blog (I used to know Angela and I think you were very reasonable and thoughtful in responding to her accusations, some of which seemed to come out of left field). And I respect the article though I take issue with some of it, for many of the same reasons Richard already touched on.
I knew Brad, not well but we were friendly and I talked to him many times. I hadn’t seen him since 2001, and only exchanged a couple emails with him after that. What strikes me as dissonant in reading about this Che-persona is that Brad was kind of geeky. I don’t mean that to be disparaging in any way. One of the first times I met him, the two young women I was with whispered to each other that they didn’t want to tell him where they were going later on because they said he had a tendency to tag along. They weren’t swooning for his company, as the article would lead one to think they would.
But that was one of the endearing things about him, that he was maybe a little bit awkward. More to the point, he was a kind and decent man. His death is a tragedy not just to the movement, but also and perhaps more importantly because he was a good person.
Richard S. said
Asfo_del, thank you for a comment that says better some of the things that I meant to say.
Jeff Sharlet, thanks for writing to me regarding my complaints. You make some good points… The genre convention itself is one that I find to be flawed, and also destructive toward any anti-auhtoritarian movement. This is because, if we are supposed to be a movement opposed to hierarchy, then we shouldn’t be promoting hierarchy by encouraging people to compete for the chance to become celebrities and stars, especially not the kind that the whole movement would be centered around.
I have found in the past that quite a few anarchist activists were overcome by the drive to become a big star in the papers, and there was actually a lot of competition between a few wannabe stars during major events such as protests, especially in New York. Ironically, this was even much more a problem in the anarchist community than in other communities that I’ve wandered into, maybe because some people saw a great chance to be a big fish in a little pond.
An article that was genuinely supportive of an anti-hierarchical movement – meaning supportive of the whole idea behind the movement as well as of the people involved – would reflect its anti-hierarchical ideals, showing how every person’s contribution can be important to the collective struggle. The tendency to center the whole story around one great person is diametrically opposed to this.
And then there is the other problem, the fact that I would really like to see reportage of the simple and accurate truth.
I believe you when you say other people made Brad bigger than life when they related their memories of him. It’s true, people like to create a big story. They’re socialized again and again throughout life to promote or appoint grand leaders, stars and celebrities, and sometimes they seem to think that if they make a much-larger-than-life hero out of somebody they once knew, then that acquaintance with such a figure will make them look bigger also. And, of course, there are many people who just want to create a Che-like character because they think it will help their cause. Even among anarchists…
Now I wonder, if you do need to tailor your articles to a market, whether you really could ever write an article that takes the right approach (talking here, of course, from my perspective) and still get it published in a big magazine like Rolling Stone. That’s the problem with the existence of corporate-run publications and the idea that writing for them is supposed to be a higher achievement (one that also gets much bigger rewards) than other endeavors. The question is, what actually succeeds in the major markets?. Personally, I could never stand tailoring my writing to market; that’s probably one of the reasons I gave up the idea of writing for even a partial living some years ago. And I would much prefer it if people who wanted to criticize those who write for the corporate-funded markets focused on problems such as the limits placed on content, rather than indulging in the simplistic condemnation of such success just because that supposedly makes you a Yuppie.
Finally, regarding Rolling Stone as a magazine… Your points about its demographic are interesting. So, it mainly is aimed at 15-year-olds and 60-year-olds? Maybe I never took to Rolling Stone in a big way exactly because I’m in my 40s. I came of age with the first waves of punk rock, when Rolling Stone seemed more a vehicle for aging hippies. Now they seem to be hipper than most smaller and trendier outlets in a good way – at least in their rock criticism. (And I say this from the perspective of someone who was a part-time rock critic for a number of years, reviewing CDs and performances for magazines like Option and Alternative Press.) As for their political criticism, I have to admit that I haven’t been following it too much. But I believe you when you say that “they’ve done more to challenge corporate power than most Indymedia activists.” To get more into the reasons for that, though, I would have to start critiquing Indymedia – which would just open up a whole other can of worms.
Jeff Sharlet said
Thanks. This is a good discussion. The irony of Richard’s original point — that a more revealing and accurate picture of a movement could be given by writing about the give and take of, say, a three hour meeting before an anti-globalization protest — is that the one time I met Brad, if I recall correctly, was at just such a meeting in the midst of the Washington anti-globalization demonstrations in 1999 or 2000. To be honest, I thought it was boring as hell — I’d spent many, many hours in meetings over the years, and I was getting burned out. Any longtime activist knows what I’m talking about — the dilemma of how to balance full participation by everyone, including those new to the scene and the ideas, with the need not turn the brains of more experienced activists into mush. From what I’ve been told, Brad was good at hitting that balance, but not at that meeting — he cut short an endless discussion of whether cops should be invited to join the protest (fresh-faced 18-years-old thought this a wonderful idea, and could not be convinced that it wasn’t realistic) by announcing that he was going to lock down at a given intersection and that anyone could follow him who wanted.
Man, I get bored just writing that paragraph. I’ll readily admit that this may be a weakness of mine as a writer, but I don’t see the narrative elements that interest me as a writer in that kind of scene. I wouldn’t mind reading an essay about questions about meetings and democracy, but not narrative. I chose to write about a person not to create a hierarchy, but because I’m most interested by the tensions between biography and ideology. I understand ideology best when I approach through flesh and blood. I can read theory, but I’d rather read story.
One response to that would be to say, as some theorists have, that narrative is inherently hierarchical. I see that point, but I don’t think it’s ultimately true. In fact, I find more radical potential in deeply traditional narrative structures than in experimental narrative — nothing is more subversive of the way we know and engage with the world than the story we recognize and find alien at the same time, “the word made strange,” to borrow a phrase from some radical theologians.
That was what was interesting to me about Brad’s story — on the one hand, it’s a very recognizable tale. Indeed, as I wrote, my editor (and a lot of writers, including radical independent writers) immediately filed Brad’s life and death in the same category as that of “Into the Wild.” At a glance, the stories might seem similar. Upon examination, Brad’s story, while not remarkable, is both very familiar — someone coming into his own and stepping up to what for him is an unprecedent challenge –and alien to conventional wisdom — Brad finds maturity and accomplishment in a politics and subculture assumed by outsiders to be defined by youth, anger, and/or naivete, and celebrated by many insiders as about youth, integrity, and independence. But none of that turned out to be true in Brad’s case.
It surely wouldn’t be true in the case of many anarchist activists. But Brad was killed, and that is a story. I’d be more than happy to write a 10,000 word piece about the life and times of an ordinary anarchist or ordinary anybody (Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor is one of my favorite texts from the last couple of decades), but I do want the story to be read. I tailor to market, yes, for a variety of reasons. But I also tailor to the readers with whom I want to communicate. Everybody does. Anarchist writers as much as anyone else. The difference, I suppose, is that I believe in doing so and embrace that process, for aesthetic reasons, mainly, but also for political reasons. I loathe “purity” — aesthetic, political, intellecual, romantic, whatever — more than any thing else. I like mess and the overlap of languages and arguments and styles. I write in academic venues, for magazines like Harper’s and The Nation, for magazines like Rolling Stone, and in my books, however I like. There are some ideas I think worth exploring in all these different venues, the process of radicalization being one of them. How to do so without abandoning or burying the very questions which motivated you in the first place is a different question, and one to which I’ve certainly not yet arrived at a satisfactory answer.
ansfo_del: On Brad and geekiness: I tried to suggest as much, apparently not adequately. I spoke to a great number of women who did find Brad very attractive.Most of those who fell for him were a bit younger. I can easily imagine an older or more self-confident woman avoiding his attentions. Tried to imply that, too, without declaring “Some people thought Brad was a geek and annoying.” Some did, many didn’t, most now glorify him, none more so than Oaxacans, who for a variety of reasons celebrate him as a martyr.
Richard S. said
Thank you, Jeff Sharlet, for taking the time to write back so much!
Right now, I’d just like to clarify a couple of things on my perspective, considering Jeff’s latest comments. (And now, I guess I should add (for those few people who might still be following this), I’m going to get into much broader thoughts. For the time being I’m going to move away from the initial conversation about Brad Will.)
First of all, I love an overlap of languages, cultures and styles. But do the commercial markets really make room for the kind of innovation that would break boundaries between styles and, especially, genres? (Once in a while it happens in music, though rarely. Yea to Rolling Stone for giving M.I.A. the number 1 album spot! But that’s for another blog now…) For writing, from what I’ve seen, the corporate-funded markets in the U.S. are incredibly conservative. (That is, those that even have room for real writing. Most slick magazines these days consist mostly of photos and ads and lots of visual style but scattered and anemic writing.) Jeff himself said that Rolling Stone demands a certain genre convention, and I think his article fits well within that. But as I said, I, at least, would like to see something different from the usual…
And maybe I’m strange, but I personally find a lot of works that actually delve into social and political ideas directly (I guess this is “theory” if you want to call it that) to be just as moving as most fictional or story-telling, character-centered narratives. In fact, I prefer nonfiction works on politics and theory to fiction and conventional story-telling. This is partly because I was a big fiction reader and writer all through my 20s (and then a small press editor in my 30s) and I mostly burnt out on story telling, especially in the written word. (But I still enjoy some fiction now and then – not with deeply traditional narratives, but not completely experimental and anti-character or anti-linear either. (I could give examples – started to, in fact – but that would take us on too much of a tangent, so let’s leave that for another time.) Jeff’s description, “the story we recognize and find alien at the same time” fits a lot of the things I like best. But maybe we have different ideas about what, exactly, that means.)
I also would strongly disagree that works that discuss political ideas and theory lack the “flesh and blood” of a story-telling narrative. In many ways, nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe some of the more abstract texts of postmodernism or post-structuralism might have such a (lack of) quality (or maybe I’m just looking at them with my own theoretical prejudice), but there’s plenty of flesh-and-blood description of human beings and the human condition in, say, Marx’s Capital Volume I (and, I think, in The German Ideology Part I) or the collected works of Bakunin or Rosa Luxemburg (even – or maybe especially – in her great theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital), or Lewis Mumford, etc. Even some of the political writers who do manage to get their stuff published in large markets today, such as Mike Davis, or Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, etc., can give us very vivid, flesh-and-blood pictures in their nonfiction without writing in the narrative convention that creates a traditionally dramatic story around a single character, etc. (Of course, some of them do do that sometimes as well, but that’s beside the point. And by the way, I’m thinking of nonfiction writers right now who manage to get stuff into magazines. There are others who’ve written well-published books that I find more compelling than most hero-centered novels. Piven and Cloward have provided some examples that I’ve enjoyed reading fairly recently.)
At any rate, I think I better leave it at that for now; I may return to say a couple more things in a little while. (Started to write more, but deleted – far too much for the comments section and the limitations in time. Hats off again to Jeff for writing so much interesting stuff to my little comments section, where he definitely is NOT getting a very wide readership and $1.50 a word!)
Richard S. said
A few final points in response to Jeff’s last post – and then I’ll end it at my end unless I hear more, because I’m probably talking to myself at this point…
Long meetings are incredibly boring, but the things that you can learn about both ideas and dynamics behind them are not. I find it much more interesting to read about the ideas that motivate people to get involved in these things, the political circumstances, the things that bring people together and that push them apart, the expectations and shortcomings (and unfortunately, I have seen a lot of shortcomings, as people know) and the dynamics that develop…than to read another regular human-interest character portrait that doesn’t really give much information regarding why people are involved in this stuff in the first place. And it’s more interesting to me to look at how a number of “ordinary” people interact within a movement/group than to look at yet another portrait of one single, exceptional character that tries to turn this person into a saint.
Yes, Brad died for a cause, but is this glorification really a good thing? Should people go around exaggerating who he was in real life? I don’t think the best way to remember someone is to forget how that person was as a human being and try to turn him or her into a saint.
I did think for a second about how I have the picture of a famous martryr on my blog, i.e., Rosa Luxemburg. But I’m acknowledging Rosa for some of the books that she wrote, her political articles and her theory, which actually do form the basis for a lot of my own political thinking. She lived a great drama and died horribly, but I never cared for the writings that dwelled on her martyrdom, trying in some single-minded way to portray her as a saint of communism, etc., without even fully discussing her ideas.
So, yes, I have to say that I am opposed to glorification – because it is by nature inaccurate and because it usually leads to a picture that’s inadequate.
kitkat said
hey richard,
i agree with a lot of what you wrote about the RS piece, although i haven’t the patience to read all of the comments. the RS article annoyed the shit out of me, precisely for its overwrought purple prose and completely annoying mythologizing of brad will, a person i liked, but certainly did not revere.
i hope queens is doing right by you!
kittie.
Richard S. said
Thanks, Kittie. Comments like yours have helped to provide a nice reality check.
Queens has been treating me OK. A couple of things happened to threaten the stability of my place at the east end of Woodside. First, my roommate had a family situation that might have required him to kick me out and move someone else in. I found a different share, with a much better room, about a mile and a half northeast of me, near 88th Street and Northern Boulevard. (Perhaps you know the nieghborhood?) However, I didn’t want to give up what I have because it’s been ideal in terms of privacy, lack of hassle, etc., a lot like having the place to myself compared to other shares I’ve experienced. So when it turned out that my roommate did not have to move someone else in here after all, I chose to stay, though it cost me a few hundred dollars for nothing.
I’m also a little concerned that my loss of my regular wage job might threaten my ability to pay rent. But it’s going to be OK for a while whatever happens, so probably I’ll be staying here.
I’m not quite as high on my walks through Jackson Heights as I was when I first moved in. Yes, I can buy so much good food and music there (as well as clothes, etc., along the way), but the picture is a little different if you don’t have so much money to spend anymore. A little reminder that capitalism cannot replace real community…
I wish there were some radical politics or some kind of grassroots organizing going on in the area. With such a diverse population, you’d think there would be but these are not good times for the kind of politics that would really cause some change… And the few remaining places with any claim to radical politics are, of course, located in trendy neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
I’d love to hear about anything interesting happing in my general area, if ever you hear of something.
Anyway, a long comment back as usual. If you weren’t able to read all the way through, that’s OK. Thanks for stopping by.
Juan said
Reading this now, some months later, the self righteousness and irony of what it purports to evidence of it shines through, given the total lack of action by the writer on any facet of: Brad’s murder, Oaxaca, ongoing violence, etc etc. A world of American zombies, the diametric opposite of Brad Will.