After I graduated from college and before I went into my current work, I spent a little less than two years working for a troubled youth treatment program in Pennsylvania called VisionQuest. It seems like a dream now, and not just because it was twenty years ago. VisionQuest, in both the camp and wagon train components that I worked, was simply its own culture and universe, far removed from the mainstream of conventional life. As a work experience, it was exhausting and exhilarating in the way that only those unsustainable experiences of time-bound collective mission-defined jobs are. I guess this period was my version of going “into the wild”—a common experience for my generation of privileged, idealistic, and discontented college-educated young people. (I like to tell people that had our guy Christopher McCandless made it back across that river, he probably would have been back in grad school in the next year or two.)
Anyway, at that time the VisionQuest treatment milieu was a combination of boot camp, summer camp, circus parade, inner-city youth mentoring, and staff party scene. The youth were mostly from Philly and Pittsburgh, with a few individuals from Erie, random suburbs of the big cities, or Trenton, New Jersey. They were sent by courts, not parents. They weren’t “at-risk”; they were already in trouble, some of them pretty seriously. The company’s treatment program was known for its tough love and spiritual philosophy—emphasis on both the “tough” and the “love.”
The youth were both: tough and loving. I grew to respect these kids, for their survival skills, their loyalties, and most of all, for their amazing intensity. From a distance—when I didn’t have to deal with their shit, right in my face—I even regarded them with a kind of awe, and still do. Some of these kids, who’d grown up under unbelievably challenging, violent, and amoral circumstances on the streets of North Philly or The Hill in Pittsburgh, would die for you, I am not kidding. But that is, only if you had gained their trust and proven yourself. Which is of course the hurdle most adults never got over in relation to these kids. Especially the white liberal educated people who came to work as staff—not all, but almost, at least in my time there. The black and/or working class, less educated, ex-military, ex-law enforcement, ex-semipro sports staff tended to relate better, and could occasionally match the intensity of these youth. Those of us who succeeded at VQ—and, believe me, anyone who worked there for a year or longer qualified as having succeeded—mostly were of the latter demographic and social origins.
I, with my high falutin’ college degree and traveling box of books, was unusual among the “senior professional staff,” an internal earned designation for the reliable employees who had demonstrated an effective rapport with the youth, meaning, the staff who were committed, who weren’t going to be quitting by dashing out in the middle of the night and leaving the kids with just another experience of broken trust. Many of the elite-educated hires ended up leaving in disgust or horror after witnessing one too many incidents of physical restraint. In truth these incidents could be rather violent in a rough, boys-on-boys kind of way. After all, we’re talking about some big, thuggy sixteen, seventeen, and sometimes eighteen year-olds. Kids with scars, muscles built from playground basketball and detention push-ups, and sometimes a gunshot wound. Who each, nearly to a person in my experience, anyway, had hearts of gold, not to mention unbelievable potential. Restraints typically ended in hugs, and occasionally in tears and therapeutic breakthroughs. That was only the most dramatic form of visible love. Affection and care permeated the program and camp environment in lots of other ways.
The successful staff tended toward the profile of the youth in other ways, perhaps unsurprisingly. For one thing, a lot of the staff were somewhat unstable in their own personal lives. Cheating lovers, recreational drug use, too much drinking, borrowing money with no intention of paying it back—these are run of the mill behaviors in many corners of the adult world. But among the Senior Professional Staff (SPS) of a youth treatment/placement agency? Not ideal, at least in the conventional thinking. But VisionQuest was anything but a conventional culture, and that was the strength of the company and its treatment model. The dysfunction sometimes extended to the staff, but the fundamental integrity—the kind you can’t fake, especially under the scrutiny of some of the street-smartest kids in the world—was there, too.
To this day I continue to believe in the VisionQuest way; in my short time there I saw too many transformations to not be convinced that we were doing something very right. I still treasure my earned status as SPS, symbolized by "the button on the leg," inspired with permission by the Bishkawaliki tradition of the Crow Indians, an unforgettable detail to anyone who passed through the VQ world. Though I really do not know what the camps and the work is like now, the company’s website reflects much of what I recall of the VQ culture.
I have only ever spoken in public about my time at VisionQuest once, at Mess Hall about six years ago. The reason I am thinking about all this now is because I just did what people can do now with the web, which is search for names from our pasts. In a moment of nostalgia for the past, I searched for a few of the distinctive names that populated my world back in 1991. One of these names was Tony Zasa, a VQ veteran who even then qualified as one of the old guard. He led my staff training group and inspired me to tough out the first few weeks of what I now realize was the most challenging job I’ll ever have. He was no-nonsense, a straight shooter who had helped quite a few youths over the years in the VQ tough love way. I credit my positive experience at the company in part to having been trained by him.
So you might imagine my shock when a search on his name returned this old news item. 466 pounds of cocaine and 75 pounds of meth? That is not somebody having a weekend party. My god, Zasa, what happened to you? Take off that button.
Video documentation of the panel conversation from the book release event that happened the other night in Chicago, right here. Micah and Peter were terrific, check it out.
On Wednesday evening I’ll be at the book release for We Are Wisconsin at the Chicago offices of In These Times, in conjunction with the exhibition of Wisconsin Uprising posters and signs now up at Art In These Times. The evening opens at 6:30 PM and the speakers begin at 7:30 PM.
Erica Sagrans, the editor and coordinator of the book, will open with an introduction. Then three contributors, Peter Rickman, Micah Uetricht, and myself, will each take a few minutes to make some remarks.
Erica sent around a prepartory email to the three of us with a useful bundle of questions, intended as starting points for the discussions that will undoubtedly last into the fall season. They are worth posting here, for all who have invested time, labor, and spirit in the Wisconsin movement to consider.
What is your vision of the strategy for going forward in Wisconsin or with this fight more broadly--with a Walker recall, 2012 elections, other electoral or non-electoral strategies?
-- What did the media miss in telling this story?
-- A pervasive theory about the 2008 election was that progressives hit a ceiling with involvement and massive turnout of the Democratic base and young people and people of color. During the Wisconsin protests, lots of new people got involved--were these people who hadn't been involved in '08? What would we have to do in 2012 to get these people involved and active in elections?
-- Was the Wisconsin fight fundamentally about labor rights and unions, or something else?
-- A remarkable thing about what happened in Wisconsin, and particularly with the recalls, was alliances between groups on the left that otherwise wouldn't have worked together--how do you think that happened, or do you see that continuing? What have been the benefits as well as the challenges to that?
-- We know about the incredible protests that unfolded in Madison, but less talked about is what happened and is still happening around the state. Can you talk about how a movement was built statewide with less likely people and places involved?
-- One of the defining aspects of these protests was how many people who had previously not been at all political got involved and got politicized or radicalized. Also defining was the re-politicization of many established institutions and unions. How did that happen?
-- How do you think the half a year of this movement compares with the timeframes of other social movements? Is this the birth of a new social movement, and can social movements have geographic components?
-- How are groups in Wisconsin planning to counter the influx of corporate money that has influenced the recent recalls and will influence the Walker recall effort?
-- What role did technology and the internet play in driving action, distributing information, and telling the story of the Wisconsin protests? How did online and offline work together?
So it seems that a group of mostly freshmen Representatives, with the quickest draw in the Tea Party midwest, Michele Bachmann, often playing their face, are hell-bent on acting the idiot’s role into reality. If one precondition for brute fascism is that the actors forget when to stop performing, based on these people we are about there. Even Speaker Boehner is fed up with them. Forcing President Obama to dance was all fun, but they made Boehner shimmy, too. The Speaker didn’t kiss all that ass for that many years only to be saddled with a non-compliant majority. The progressive Left, which came back into the electoral field after at least two decades of irrelevance with Obama’s winning coalition of 2008, has nowhere to go, other than cheering on the few sane voices in Congress ever allowed to reach the national media, ie Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, and a few others. Anthony "the Torso" Weiner did not help the progressives with their visibility problems.
Besides bemoaning the smallness on display and dreading the real hurt that the working classes and all things public will suffer should this systemic dysfunction continue to play out as mindlessly as projected, for some there is the schadenfreude to be gathered while witnessing the establishment go into crisis-management mode. How many times does your average lefty intellectual use the word ‘crisis’? Me, I practically live on the word. For reasons of easing the alarmism, I always like to say that the crisis is not something that arrives, but rather is a time that we are living through. We have already gone over the environmental/economic edge in terms of guaranteed massive change, but it unfolds over decades, not weeks. It is not a news story. And yet here is exactly that, an alarm situation, a newsmedia play-by-play that has gotten the credit ratings agencies seriously involved and the markets spooked. All delivered by a bunch of pukes who rode into office only because the black people and the young people conveniently fell back into their traditional indifference, not showing up to vote in last year’s mid-term elections. Elections have consequences. That’s the new favorite line from conservatives around here, and they are right. For today’s conservatives, election victories are a readymade line absolving them of any and all responsibility, spoken in defense of both Republican intransgiance at the national level and their extremism here in Wisconsin.
So I’ve mentioned Wisconsin. What happened to the Wisconsin movement? No more demonstrations—did those people just disappear? What do hundreds of thousands of mobilized citizens do when the protests are over? Was it a purely foul-weather movement? No, it was not. The mobilization has dispersed throughout the state, leaving Madison a quietly angry summer town. Even though we know now that the Wisconsin Republicans were busy drawing up their ridiculous and transparently vindictative redistricting maps even then, by the time the weather had warmed I sensed that conservatives, too, were worn down by the fights that went through the frigid winter and into the muddy spring. But here we are, in the dog days of a lush and humid midwestern summer, re-energized for the August 9 elections, aka the ballot machine/creative counting event, again with chaotic events reverberating globally in the background, as in the winter and spring.
The last time I reported on the Uprising in any detail here, the movement was in re-group mode. The stolen election of April 5, for a key seat on the state Supreme Court, was still very fresh and a reminder of to what lengths the party of thievery will go to retain power. The impending early summer signing of Governor Walker’s bills was nothing to look forward to, and the recall elections seemed far off, with plenty of time still for the Republicans to pull more abusive moves from the Capitol. The mood was negative, but true demoralization was kept at bay by the constant reinjection of outrage, thanks to the regular pace of variously targeted attacks emanating from the offices of either the governor or state Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald. From assaults on Wisconsin Panned Parenthood that will end up limiting affordable women’s health screening services, to a horribly conceived and written Voter ID law, to the attempts to open up a four-county stretch of northern Wisconsin less than thirty miles from Lake Superior to new mining, and more—the Wisconsin GOP guaranteed that people stayed motivated and involved. They supplied the opposition with fuel for anger, outstripping their own best weapon: despair and paralysis. Top Republicans had been confident that once the bill and budget were signed and implemented, the people of Wisconsin would forget all about the fight and accept the new reality. As many of us probably would have, had the attacks stopped then. But they didn’t. In northern Wisconsin, the fast-tracked move toward mining raised such concern that citizens organized quickly, broadly, and angrily--enough to apply the brakes. Such extraordinary motivation can be found across the state.
Not to be underestimated, the Governor continues his missteps, mostly due to blind spots. Walker mostly certainly has them, that much we have known ever since the “David Koch” prank call back in Week 2. What we have seen over the last several months is a politician who frequently cannot adjust, neither ideologically nor strategically. His failure to read the whole media landscape is encapsulated in one repeating scenario that has become an established pattern over at least five or six occasions since April. Either it is leaked or announced that Walker will make an appearance at a given site, visiting a company, a school, or a ribbon cutting ceremony. Word circulates through social media, with emphasis on the outrage inherent in this governor’s daring. A recurring theme is his daring to pretend all is fine, making pro forma celebratory and laudatory remarks on the site of a public institution or public works, while in reality cutting the legs out from under the public sphere.
For example, Walker tried to speak at the centennial celebration of Gateway Technical College—a public college facing massive difficulties after Walker passed his budget, cutting $30 million from the already barebones and affordable technical colleges. For this kind of insult, people turn out to boo at the top of their lungs. Each such appearance gives activists an occasion to make the negative connections between the Walker agenda and wherever the place his appearance happens to be. Protestors show up, footage of the demonstration gets returned to social media, and the best of the videos—the ones that capture anger, hurt, sincerity, cleverness, and commitment—get thousands of views. Seeing images of people birddogging Walker in a new location every two or three weeks has provided the mobilized with a constant new infusion of morale, motivation, and yes, entertainment.
And the best one, from a few days ago:
These repeated victories in the war of images filter through to the mass media and therefore have something to do with Walker’s declining approval ratings, helping to associate the carefully groomed and disciplined Walker brand with controversy, unhappiness, and general negativity. And yet the man continues to stake his career on the conventional playbook, believing that by making public appearances he is projecting normalcy, showing people that he is not afraid, not rattled, and will not deviate from his agenda. To the many tens of thousands now dedicated to opposing him, such images are read quite differently, as the picture of entrenched defiance against popular opinion, an ideologue so committed to his program that the term “weapon of mass destruction” reasonably applies. Walker’s minions, from Prosser to Hopper, also continue to screw up, undone by their own essential asshole-ness, apparently. On the day these scoundrels are turned out, we will have the Governor and his troops to thank in no small part.
The truth is, the Walker agenda may come to a halt, more or less, after tomorrow, August 9. That is the hope. Voters in six state senate districts will go to the polls to vote on their recalled Republican state senators, all of whom supported the Walker agenda. The opposition needs to capture at least three of those six seats and then hold their two Democrat seats in another two district elections a week later. This round of recalls, including the inevitable efforts concerning Walker himself, may ultimately require as many as 22 elections. Factor in the weaponization of redistricting, in which the current Repubican-controlled legislature deliberately mapping some of the Democrat challengers out of the districts that they would be representing should they win. That, and the massive inflow of national money, the possible disruptions (for example, a suspicious fire last week that destroyed a building that included the La Crosse office of We Are Wisconsin, a group coordinating the recall effort targeting Republican Dan Kapanke), and what we have is a state-level display of American democracy in a vital and almost electric, but heavily degraded condition, in what had been for decades one of the cleanest and most straightforward political systems out of the fifty states.
With the movement’s attention and activity channeled into this avalanche of recall elections, we have another occasion to feel all the excitement, trepidation, and despair about electoral politics as a direction for a social movement. Instead of the usual voting vs. non-participation debate within leftist circles, I propose that we judge electoral politics on the basis of a different kind of efficacy. Today the exercise of political power is equally legitimate, compromised, and problematic at every level and in every mode. The reformism vs. radicalism debate is not relevant when, for the change Wisconsin and the world needs, voting is necessary but not sufficient but the same can be said of any other kind or instance of political engagement.
The alternative criterion is this: any particular exercise of democratic power gains in surplus political potential when it also unleashes a process of rewriting social relations. By this measure, most instances of electoral engagement stay very much within their pre-determined bounds of possibility, ie everybody from candidate to campaign manager to volunteer canvasser to voter has their strictly limited role to play. The same is true of most large and established activist organizations—ie the professionalized left and the non-profit industrial complex. In the context of an evolving social movement, however, in which a campaign for office is not entirely under the control of an official campaign, often some social creativity overflows the expected bounds. This has been true in the season of Wisconsin recall elections. Partly because each of the recalls was started as a citizen-initiated grassroots effort, these efforts have been far less conventional in their social aspects, with truly promising communities of social action appearing in some of the contested districts, out from the previously undifferentiated citizenry blob. Based on this criterion, for example, the Playground Legends—a grassroots squad doing creative voter education in the African American sections and documented confrontations in the ultra-conservative parts of Alberta Darling’s state senate district —is as valuable a contribution as the Capitol occupation was, as is the ongoing Solidarity Singalong. New social forms, all. If the Singalong and the related Heart Balloons Rotunda action still fall into the category of “cute activism,” when put under the duress of Wisconsin’s “cute” tyranny (see the story of the locally infamous Heart Balloon Assault of several weeks ago) they nonetheless have the effect of knitting people together in a new and meaningful sociality.
Yes, we need progressive legislation. The regressives put their money and organization into the electoral process because they know that nothing legitimizes like an electoral and consequently legislative veneer. And yes, we need to apply pressure through creative disruption, to carve out the political space for meaningful change. But, above all, our worlds need different social relations, cultures of new value systems built up in a political context. No matter what the results on Tuesday, no matter how they resonate nationally or don't, those of us who identify with the movement must continue our activism such that the organic and immanently energetic social formations that have come out of the Wisconsin Uprising continue to grow and proliferate.
