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).
