PATAGONIA

For the past month, I have had the privilege of traveling with a friend through Patagonia, a gorgeous region with scenery and colors that seem to stretch far beyond human understanding and imagination. The long rides and hikes through endless landscapes and blue skies have served the perfect backdrop to reflect on life and these changing times; on current crises and burgeoning movements like OWS; on the work that fellow friends and activists and I have been involved in over the past year to fight for jobs, public sector services and free education in London; on where we’re at, what we’ve accomplished and where we should be going…

ANGELA

These reflections have been nourished by Angela Davis’s totally badass autobiography, written at the very young age of 28, that I’ve had the pleasure to read along the way.

The book is a beautiful personal insight into a time when the struggle against racism in the African American community was at a boiling point (1960s-early 1970s) in as disparate places as the  Jim Crow South, the east and west coasts of America,  as well as in other parts of the world such as Germany and post-revolutionary Cuba.

Davis takes us back to Birmingham, Alabama, where the author is from, and depicts in vivid detail a time when segregation was alive and kicking and Black families ran the risk of having their houses blown up (on “Dynamite Hill”) for moving on the white side of the street. Her recollection of the brutal murder of 4 black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 is gut wrenching and extremely powerful as she takes us beyond the now well-known historic headline to describe her friends robbed of their childhoods while trying to navigate a world hell-bent on destroying them and the budding uprising of Black people in the South. Ultimately, it is not, as Davis explains, a couple of “bomb-wielding racists” that were responsible for their deaths, but “the whole society [that] was guilty of this murder” [...] “the whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also guilty of this murder.”

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable.

Great movies and novels tap into our dreams and help bring our deepest desires to the surface. Even not so great movies accomplish this task. They provide a break from reality and an entry into imagined worlds, often giving life to our most absurd and explicit fantasies. So why should Dr. Pop celebrate these avenues of escape? Is not delusion an enemy of transformation? Isn’t Dr. Pop all about helping people to face reality? And to actually do something to make it better?

The short answer is: Yes and No. We at Dr. Pop are 1000% committed to positive social transformation. There is no question about that. Yet we believe that in order to be 1000% committed to anything requires radically embracing our fantasies, our dreams, and our deepest desires. In fact, we believe that ethical illusions can be used to draw people closer to their actually existing surroundings. This means embracing storytelling and seeing fiction as more than just a form of weekend entertainment. It means creating and discovering ways to bring the world of fantasy into our political lives.

This is precisely what Stephen Ducombe calls for in his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. In the book, my latest favorite work, Ducombe challenges progressives to embrace spectacle as a way to manifest our ethics of fairness, justice, and equity. The ballot box, conventional protest, and enlightening panel will never be enough to transform our world, precisely because these political methods largely fail to tap into our dreams the ways that movies and novels so easily do. Instead, Ducombe argues, our politics must take on bolder and more fantastic forms. Our streets must be reclaimed, our stores must be occupied with song, and our imaginations must be channeled in ways that well-reasoned arguments will never achieve alone.

Among his key points, Ducombe claims that truth and power belong to those who tell the better story. To make his point he frequently points to the Bush administration which was able to maintain incredible power for eight years despite its obvious lies and deceptions. Yet what the Bush administration clearly understood is the need to entertain and to create spectacles that can be exploited for political ends. If these methods are bound to be used, the question then becomes – toward what ends?

Make no mistake, Ducombe is aware of the dangers of such fantastic methods and he cites Nazi Germany as a clear example of how political spectacles can facilitate real-life horror stories. Yet just because stories and spectacles have been used a vehicles for hateful destruction in the past is no reason to abandon such methods outright. Like Dr. Pop, Ducombe asserts that imaginative political acts can actually be filled with enlightened ethics and expressed in ways that expand democratic participation rather than augment dictatorship. For beautiful examples of these possibilities, look no further than Antonus Mockus, the former superhero mayor of Bogotá and unofficial muse of Dr. Pop.

What Mockus understands – and what all successful progressives must come to grasp – is that politics cannot be separated from human motivation, from the actions and events which speak to our inescapable irrationality and satisfy our emotional needs. And so we must learn how to mobilize human motivations in ways that increase transparency, expand social consciousness, and deepen participation. Only then can we expect to build a social movement whose events are deemed a better use of people’s time than NetFlix, Twilight, and Gossip Girl. Indeed, only then can we help people to find the courage to face reality by diving into the romance, honor, sacrifice and mystery of social change efforts.

In summary- Accomplishing goals as lofty as justice for all, means being comfortable with lofty methods. It means organizers becoming unafraid to don superhero capes, politicians daring to share fantastical visions, and everyday activists creating new, risky ways to shine light on the worlds around them. If you know of great examples of such courageous dreams in action, please share them through your comments below.

One of my favorite movies growing up was Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994). I still remember when I begged my parents to let me go to the movies by myself at Universal City walk while my siblings went to go check out an action movie. The movie still continues to be one of Spike Lee’s most underrated movies, probably because it was one of his first films without blatant race commentary. It is nonetheless an incredibly poignant story of a working class family living in Brooklyn, of course, and life on the stoop—the centerpiece of urban life in New York City. You have the neighbors who think they’re too good for life in the ghetto (yet they live in the ghetto); kids playing and teasing each other; and various odd characters that may or may not be up to no good.

The main character, Troy, a tough girl with four rambunctious brothers, was and is someone I could relate to as she’s always trying stick up for herself both inside and outside the home. She also seems to be the one most aware of  the financial problems of her parents, who are constantly fighting about not making ends meet.

As a kid who didn’t know much about how folks live outside the city, one of the most interesting parts of the film is when Troy is sent to stay with family in the South. The South is a whole other world for Troy–structure, order, and definitely no stoop. When her aunt Song, criticizes the way her mother does her hair, Troy goes from having braids to getting her hair pressed for the first time. Her experience in the South becomes part of a major turning point for Troy as she soon finds out that her mother is ill and then must return to Brooklyn.  Troy then steps up as the matriarch, not realizing that she’s forcing herself to grow up without mourning her mother’s death.

Despite the hardships the children face–poverty, instability, the loss of a parent–Spike Lee manages to still remind us that while things although might not always be perfect, let alone easy, life in the city does not have to be tragic.

I’ll often say this when I’m on a panel about writing mysteries; I’ll mention that any student or fan of the genre should read the Maltese Falcon by Samuel Dashiell Hammett who went by his middle name as a writer.  Originally serialized in Black Mask, a pulp magazine where several well-known mystery writers got their start, the novel was published in 1930.  Now the titular hero of the book, private eye Sam Spade, only appears in this novel and a handful of short stories.  Hammett wrote far more stories and two novels with his nameless private eye, the man known only as the Continental Op.  This short, pudgy balding man worked out of the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco, also the home of Spade.

While the Continental Op stories are not chopped liver, but for my money, the Maltese Falcon is the template for the characters and situations that come along decades later, even today, in mystery and crime stories.  The patter, the cynical PI (“He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” Hammett wrote), the duplicitous femme fatal, the quixotic villains, and the fabled dingus that everybody is willing to do everything to obtain.  For a couple of years not too long ago, me and writer Eduardo Santiago taught several reading and discussing the classics classes to incarcerated youth.  This was part of a project by the Children’s Institute — our friend and fellow novelist Nina Revoyr who works there brought us onto the gig.  The goal was the bring the love of reading to underserved communities, and you can’t get more underserved than young men in the joint.

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Asking me for the title of my favourite book is like asking a moth for its favourite flame. The fascination seems the same to me, though I don’t gloriously expire in a flash of light when I get too close. Or maybe I do, it is certain that you’re never quite the same again after reading a great book.

I loved Science Fiction most when I was younger (and still, now that I’m older). I loved monsters and adventures and descriptions of entire new worlds that provoked me to imagine things I had never before imagined. That is my own favourite brand of happiness. I spent a lot of 110 degree summer days in front of a fan imagining things. But I still remember reading The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner when I was 15, and that is the book that first really blew my mind away, made me want to write. The phrase ‘Caddy smelled like trees’ still sings in my head, like Quentin’s never-ending sentences from a mind that just cannot cannot stop thinking and carries you on and on inside of it racing disjointed until it is forced to stop itself. That ride made my heart stop a moment, and then beat faster. It was like language itself opened up to me, the way it could drag you into another point of view, another life. The way it could be every bit as pivotal to a story just by itself, just through the wonder of it, and not simply as a way of describing things.

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