General

508 is a show about Worcester. This week’s panel is Brendan Melican.

 

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On June 14, 1969, I won a prize for an essay called “What the Flag Means to Me.” Years in the Boy Scouts informed me of the symbolism in the American flag and taught me flag etiquette. I knew red stood for the blood of American patriots, white stood for the purity of American ideals, while blue stood for the glory of her achievements. I knew you should not fly the flag in the rain or at night, as well as how to fold it smartly into a triangle. I saluted it daily in school and believed that it must never touch the ground or be held in a parade at a lower level than another flag. I had seen enough movies to know that the Stars and Stripes coming over the horizon meant rescue from harm and the restoration of justice. I was proud to wear an American flag patch on the shoulder of my scout uniform.

I was confused by newspaper images of Old Glory being flown upside down (a sign of distress) outside the crown of the Statue of Liberty by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I was no fan of Abbie Hoffman’s American flag shirt or Peter Fonda’s American flag helmet in Easy Rider. I saw these things as disrespectful.

Then, in 1975, I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and learned how, in 1864, six hundred Cheyenne, two thirds of them women and children, were massacred, after they sought protection under an American and white flag. When American troops questioned orders to kill even the infants, the commanding officer, Colonel John Chivington, said, “Nits make lice.”
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Pie and Coffee classic: The Real Saint Patrick, starring the Duffy Bros.

Cargo Cult Activism
New essay on Pie and Coffee; somehow marked as published a week ago, rather than yesterday. Didn’t want you to miss it.

Google Fiber, Worcester, and the Broadband Market
Worcester, like many communities, is working hard to bring the Google Fiber for Communities pilot program to the city, so residents and businesses can get Internet access “more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today.” Yochai Benkler, one of my intellectual heroes, headed a recent Berkman Center study of America’s screwed-up Internet market, and the mediocre Internet access we get as a result. If you’re wondering why cities are begging Google to bring them services that phone and cable companies won’t, this interview is a clear and detailed intro to the subject.
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Richard Feynman explained “cargo cults” in the classic essay Cargo Cult Science:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.

Activists can think this way, too. We’ve seen something work in the past, and so we try it again. Sometimes the underlying situation, power dynamics, and participants are very different, so the tactic or strategy doesn’t work. If we understand why it worked the first time, we can modify it to work in the present. But too often, if it doesn’t work, we just try it again with more passion. I mean, it worked for the Civil Rights struggle/labor movement/Gandhi/right here in this town in the 90s. Why wouldn’t it work for us today?

The South Seas cargo cultists didn’t realize that the important thing about a radio was what was inside, not what was outside. We should step back more often to analyze what we’re doing, to create tactics and strategies that work like the effective ones of the past, rather than just looking like them.

I’d bet we can avoid some of the worst of “cargo cult activism” by asking a few questions of the next thing we’re planning to try. Why do we think this will work? What’s a recent example of this working? How well do we understand that example? Did it work the last time our group tried it? If not, why not?

See also:

• Failure is overrated, a redux
• How to hold a demonstration

This post was inspired by a conversation we had during a 508 podcast:

Yesterday was the 12th and final day of the fast. It was spent, by many, in jail. For the others, it was a day of cooking food, roaming the corridors of the courthouse, and tidying up outreach.

This morning, three of us went down to the Japanese Buddhist temple for drumming and chanting.

“If even monks become weary and sloppy in saluting with joined palms, then no one will perform raihai. One would no longer salute parents, children, wife and husband, neighbors or laborers with palms together.”
–Nichidatsu Fuji

Which suggests one value of Thursday’s actions. If Catholic Workers aren’t creating illegal memorial services for dead detainees in the Capitol dome, then who will perform them?