The original meaning of the word
‘protest’ in old French was: to make a solemn declaration, and even before
that, going back to Latin, to witness, to declare publicly.
It’s also true that at the solitary end
of the continuum of protest are single human cries of helpless outrage, the
hotel maid being molested by Harvey Weinstein, the Muslim refugee assaulted by
a mob of white nationalist thugs.
Expanding from individual to the group takes
us into the controversial realm of identity politics, where each separate
religious or ethnic or racial category asserts its justification for protesting
threats to its essential dignity.
For example, Black Lives Matter. In the
light of the deep structural racism in the United States, it’s impossible, for
me at least, not to identify and sympathize deeply with the Black Lives Matter
movement.
Whether we subscribe to identity
politics or not, every time the police shoot a black man or boy under murky
circumstances, it gives a new lease to the polarization between races that has
been a fundamental theme of American history from slavery forward.
Meanwhile we remain in this awkward
in-between state in race relations where Black Lives Matter is often countered
with the obvious bromide that All Lives Matter—as if Black Lives Matter and All
Lives Matter were somehow in conflict.
What’s really in conflict seems to be
various modes of identification. Am I an American citizen first and only then
someone of a particular race? Of course it would be healthier if we got to the
point where all of us could identify first of all as Americans. This was
clearly the vision of Martin Luther King.
An even larger context of identification
is available, and necessary at this moment in time—the indisputable fact that
we are one humanity, living on one small planet—where, someday, racism will be
seen as a tragic illusory social construct that obscured this deeper unity.
Going even beyond the human, we might
ask, who will protest for natural phenomena, for rivers that have become
polluted? In Ecuador and elsewhere, rivers are now given constitutional rights
to flow freely and cleanly.
Our biggest international challenge has
become climate. Even nuclear war has been redefined, by nuclear winter, as a
way to effect climate change suddenly rather than gradually.
In the case of our own heavy use of
resources in the advanced industrial countries, as Pogo said, we have met the
enemy and he is—us. Our own choices are intimately involved in solutions. How
do I protest the size of my own ecological footprint? And how, or where, do we
protest overpopulation in the advanced nations, where each person uses multiple
times the resources of people in developing countries?
In any case it is becoming clearer every
day that our materialist, consumerist values are not working for us. They are
unsustainable.
In his watershed 1967 speech at Riverside
Church shortly before he was assassinated, Dr. King took the considerable risk
of connecting domestic conditions in the United States with the Vietnam war,
which allowed him to show the interrelationship of racism, militarism and materialism—our
nation’s continuing trefecta of original sin.
King dared to connect American racism
toward blacks with racism against Asians. This continues in the racism of
western cultural attitudes toward peoples in places like Iraq, Afghanistan or
Yemen.
50 people blown up by terrorists in
western countries is front-page news for weeks. 50 people blown up in
Afghanistan elicits a shrug and a yawn in the western press. Here might be a good
place to apply the slogan “All Lives Matter.”
King was inspired by Gandhi, and Gandhi’s
civil disobedience tactics in turn by Thoreau and so on back to Magna Carta-type moments when the absolute rights of kings and emperors were first
called into question, all the way back to strikes of workmen building the
pyramids.
The mansion of protest has many rooms, depending upon whether one grows up as
male or female, or privileged white, or not so privileged black, poor or hungry
or wheelchair-bound or transgender or Muslim.
So many contentious issues and
questions arise. Should abortion be restricted? Who decides that? Are corporations
people? Is money speech? Is the supreme court above politics? In each case one’s
personal spectrum of indignation, or loving activism and witness, is going to
be different.
There was a recent controversy over
whether the white female artist Dana Schutz has the right to make a painting of
the black civil rights martyr Emmett Till.
It is difficult to understand why people spend energy on such a seemingly artificial
controversy.
In the Marlon Brando film about biker
gangs, “The Wild Ones” someone asks him what he is rebelling against. He
replies “Whaddaya got?”
My own primary issue for the past fifty
years has been nuclear war prevention.
If one is going to protest something, I
would assert this is just a touch more significant than whether a white artist
has the right to paint a painful event in black civil rights history.
Brian Swimme’s “Journey of the Universe”
addresses the great story that is the context for our human presence, the 13.85
billion year story of the evolution of stars and galaxies, planets, life, and
self-conscious life that now has brought such dire peril upon itself.
From the perspective of this story,
self-aware life arriving at a level of technological sophistication where they
can utterly destroy themselves constitutes an event of cosmological
significance.
I’d like to advance the notion of the
Trident submarine as a quasi-cosmological event, which might seem an odd way to
think about it.
The Russians were the first to combine a
nuclear submarine with a nuclear ballistic missile. The American equivalent, the Ohio class
Trident, is a 560 foot technological marvel. It contains 24 multiple warhead
nuclear missiles with a greater combined firepower than all the weapons used in
both world wars. In fact, it may be possible for one such
submarine all by itself to cause a planetary nuclear winter. The British and the Russians and others
have equivalent programs.
The theory behind such weapons is of
course deterrence, which contains a built-in performative contradiction: so that they will never be used, they must
be kept ready for instant use. This requires that we gloss over the reality
that every weapon ever invented, including nuclear weapons, has ended up being
used in war.
Not only global security, including our
own, but all human existence, including our own, depends upon no one among the
nine nuclear powers making a mistake, no one ever misinterpreting an incoming
signal, no piece of electronic equipment malfunctioning or becoming vulnerable
to cyber-attack.
Simple logic and basic probability
theory tell us that such perpetual flawlessness is far too much to ask of
complex systems and fallible humans. Nevertheless governments
enthusiastically accept this devil’s bargain and we citizens passively put up
with it.
My partner and I were showing our
grandchildren around Washington D.C. the same week that Trump gave his bizarre
speech to the boy scouts.
A congressional aide was giving us a
tour of the Capital building. At one point he paused to confer with an aide to
the president. I figured this was as close as I was
ever going to get, and so I cast aside my inhibitions and risked asking the
question that has been on a lot of minds: just
how accessible are the nuclear codes to the President?
The aide gave me a frozen stare and
reminded me that Mr. Trump was the duly-elected head of state.
Later I happened to read Daniel
Ellsberg’s great book about nuclear strategy, The Doomsday Machine.
It turns out it’s a myth that only the
president can begin a nuclear war.
Deterrence could not possibly work if that were the case, so there have
to be others down the chain of command who can retaliate if for any reason the
president is unable to. This seems to be true with
Pakistan’s battlefield nuclear weapons, which are under the autonomous command
of field generals.
The fact is that no individual, no
matter how sane and stable, and no matter where in the chain of command, should
be put in the position of deciding to launch a nuclear war.
It is hard to believe the military in
the various nations are not well acquainted with nuclear winter. On some level
they must know the game is over—forever. Deterrence, with its endless dynamic
of “we build—they build,” offers no way out of omnicide. The 122 nations that
have signed the U.N. declaration against these weapons have accepted this.
In terms of the possibility of effecting
change, it’s always helpful to remember that many nations have endured and
continue to endure much worse than what we are facing now in our country.
At opportune moments small groups of
trained non-violent activists obtain unexpected leverage as they merge with
larger groups of protesters.
One of my mentors once told me that the
actual translation from the Aramaic of “Blessed are the meek” from the Sermon
on the Mount is: blessed are the trained.
Activists have won tremendous victories
against oppression using some of the hundreds of non-violent strategies catalogued
by the great contemporary tactician of non-violence, Gene Sharp. Very few
Americans have heard of Gene Sharp, who was a professor of political science at
U. Mass and lived in East Boston.
Sharp’s tactics have been a bible for
many non-violent revolutions around the world, such as the People Power
revolution in the Philippines against Marcos, or the mothers of the disappeared
in Chile who helped to bring down Pinochet, or the womens’ movement that won
non-violently in Liberia. The overall record of non-violent campaigns is as
good or better as violent ones.
There’s another cosmologically-tinged
event we can recall, complementary to the destructive capacity of a ballistic
missile submarine.
On February 15, 2003, the largest
protest march in the history of the world occurred in 600 cities around the
globe.
Everyone knew that the United States had
decided to invade Iraq, using the shaky rationale that there had to be weapons
of mass destruction there somewhere.
Our government was about to choose a cynical,violent
and confusing overreaction to the horrors of 9/11, the unintended consequences
of which remain with us still.
While that 2003 march failed to stop a
misguided and unnecessary war, it demonstrated a fundamental impulse to unity
and peace in people everywhere, a unity which may still be a dream, but is also
a functional reality. This worldwide march was something new,
not the German tribe or the French tribe or the American tribe, but the human
tribe.
Mass marches can often be festive.
Citizens discover to their delight and relief that many others share their
views.My partner and I walked in Portland,
Maine with her grandchildren in both the women’s march in January of 2017 and
the march for sane gun regulation after the Parkland shootings.
Yes, after the marchers go home, the
business of working for democratic change remains messy, slow, frustrating, and
endless. But witnessing together can inspire us for the more mundane and
necessary work.
Meanwhile many of our would-be kings and
emperors around the world continue to be indifferent to or actively hostile
toward the health of the earth and its billions of striving humans sharing
universal hopes and fears.
We are surrounded everywhere by the
consequences of the violent misuse of power, in the callous slaughters in
Syria, or Myanmar, or the Congo, or South Sudan.
Setting aside actual violence, when the President’s lawyer, Mr. Giuliani, asserts that white collar crime is
victimless, something primal is revealed about the hypocrisy and rank injustice
of established structures of power.
These structures mock the principle that
all are created equal, with a perverse version of the Golden Rule: those with
the gold make the rules.
Of course artists have always lent their
gifts to clarifying such issues. Last year there was a large exhibition of protest art
that went back centuries on display at the British museum.
Last year also we took in a retrospective at
the Whitney of protest art in America in the sixties. It contained many
provocative works documenting opposition to sexism in the art world, race prejudice,
and our endless, futile wars.
The exhibition also underlined the
challenges of making art based upon a response to immediate events and discrete
social issues.
Though sometimes amusing, it felt more
like a thin documentation of an eventful time that artists were compelled to
witness as best they could, rather than an expression of the whole
personalities of gifted creative people.
Back in August, a group of British artists
found out that a London museum exhibiting their works of protest art had held a
reception for a defense company in order to raise cash. The artists protested
by removing their work from the museum—a kind of self-cancelling protest . . .
Even after we have witnessed against the
horrors of militarism, or racial injustice, immutable aspects of reality
remain, including disease, absurd ill-fortune, and death.
This goes all the way back to Job. How do
we protest the absurdity that is woven into reality at a level even deeper than
potentially avoidable injustice? In the old religious language, God’s stern
response to Job’s protestations was, “Where were you when I laid the
foundations of the earth?”
To say it another way, our protests take
place in the context of a power greater than ourselves, whether we end up
calling it God or the Universe or the Tao or Jung’s synchronicity or the
unnamable, a mystery so profound and humbling that the purpose of many of our
religious and cultural rituals is to try to reduce it to something
comprehensible.
The arts are one of the ways to
acknowledge the mystery in all its incommensurability.
Artists often begin in a state of unease
or vague dissatisfaction, what Freud called ‘ordinary unhappiness.’ We label
the ordinary unhappiness of certified artistic geniuses ‘divine discontent’—a
sublimation of outrage or wonder into the clarity of aesthetic form—like Beethoven
composing his late string quartets in a state of total job-like deafness,
illness, and solitude. Still he called the slow movement of the 15th
quartet “a holy song of thanks to the divinity.” In the greatest art protest
and grateful affirmation become one.
Art emerges from the context of our
strange birthright, the beauty and grace that suffuses the mystery along with
absurdity and tragedy.
This beauty, most familiarly experienced
in nature or in erotic or romantic or spiritual longing, can torment us as much
as the worst injustice. At the very least beauty reminds us that the mystery of
life is not defined only by death and ill-fortune.
One of the judges in the Hague
overseeing the trial of Slobodan Milosevic said that to recover his sanity
after a day of listening to the catalog of atrocities he would go to the local
museum and soak himself in the Vermeers.
W.H. Auden said—debatably— “poetry makes
nothing happen,” but art in itself and by itself can protest aspects of reality
that are intolerable.
Camus’s extraordinary polemic The
Rebel includes a brief section on metaphysical rebellion and art, where he
argues that great art protests the unsatisfactory elements of reality by
correcting or completing them. He meant that art does that purely by means of
art itself—by means of the closed system of the novel, the poem, the painting,
where the artist can be totally responsible for the work.
So for Camus, every effective work of
art is a kind of protest.
Perhaps the most complete response to
the strange mix of the intolerable and the beautiful of life can be found in
song.
The composers and songwriters are the
most consoling companions when one needs art that does justice to life in all
its paradox—in our own time songsters like that greatest of American
protesters, Pete Seeger, or Leonard Cohen—or my contemporary Bob Dylan.
Even an early classic Dylan song like “With
God on Our Side” remains timelessly universal and relevant, though Dylan
quickly began to chafe under the limits of being labeled a mere commentator on
the issues of the day. Dylan’s genius pushes restlessly to get
beyond such a limited conception of his own possibilities.
You can see this happening at one of his
early press conferences. A reporter asked the young Dylan how many other protest
singers existed.
Dylan thought, then replied,
"about 136." Dylan’s sardonic smile should have been a warning, but
the reporter persisted. "You say about 136 -- or exactly 136?" "either
136 or 142," Dylan answers helpfully.
Dylan went on to write well over four
hundred songs and counting over a lifetime. Dylan’s music and the poetry of his
words consistently manage to integrate disparate realities, violence and
peacefulness, politics and private life, innocence and corruption, loving
kindness and rank hostility.
I thought the Nobel award to Dylan was
inspired—though it was amusing to hear Philip Roth quip, with a nice edge of
Rothian bitterness, shortly before he died: “Next year maybe it’ll be Peter, Paul and Mary.”
Fifty years later Dylan is still writing
gorgeous pieces like “Mississippi,” “Not Dark Yet,” “Things Have Changed”— rueful
musical protests of life’s inevitable outrages.
Simply presenting a new vision of what
ought to be can be a powerful form of protest. We protest injustice and cruelty
because we sense, by way of the truth, beauty and goodness in nature or the
arts, or in the people we love and admire, that a more just world is possible.
The success this past summer of the
documentaries about Fred Rogers and Ruth Bader Ginsburg testifies to this
longing, which is especially strong right now.
No less than Jesus himself taught that
we should “resist not evil, but overcome evil with good.”
In a similar vein, Buckminster Fuller thought
it was as important to create an attractive new model than to tear down an
obsolete or corrupt one. Don’t waste energy, he said, trying to destroy the
dinosaur, but instead focus on creating the gazelle.
I volunteered for 30 years for Beyond War,
an organization that believed that education and building relationships with
adversaries was a better use of one’s time and energy than protest. Obviously protesting
and building relationships with adversaries doesn’t have to be an either/or. It
can be a both/and.
Beyond War used to get sniped at by both
the left and the right. The left thought we weren’t angry enough, and the right
thought we were a bunch of idealistic commie pinkos.
But I am proud of how, in the 1980s, Beyond
War brought together teams of high-level scientists from both Russia and America
to write a book about accidental nuclear war and how best to prevent it. The really important element of the book, called "Breakthrough," was that lasting relationships were formed between Russian
and American scientists. The Russian team included Gorbachev’s science advisor,
and so Gorbachev himself read it.
Wallace Stevens defined one of the
subtlest forms of protest in art when he said in a poem called “Man Carrying Thing,”
that “a poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully.”
What that might mean is that popular
entertainment is full of formulaic manipulative tropes which confirm easy
assumptions about violence, heroism, patriotism, and most of all love.
The world of authentic art challenges such
assumptions with ambiguities, putting us back in touch with the depths of
mystery by undermining our tendency to understand too quickly.
Here’s a quotation by Lewis Hyde I like
which corraborates my assertion that all good art is protest art.
“Art does not organize parties, nor is
it the servant or colleague of power.
Rather, the work of art becomes a
political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is
a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective . . .
So long as artists speak the truth, they
will, whenever the government is lying, or has betrayed the people, become a
political force whether they intend to or not.”
If I had to pick one novel that in my
judgment paints an accurate picture of how things are in all their complexity, it
might be Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” It satisfies both Lewis
Hyde’s and Camus’s criteria for truthfulness.
As for the visual arts, the great
flourishing of action painting and sculpture in the fifties and sixties in Manhattan—art
which refused to be easy and accessible—was in part a response to the condition
of potential atomic extinction with which most of us have been living since we
were born.
The work of greats like Louise Nevelson and
Jackson Pollock swept aside the leftist socially engaged art between the world
wars in favor of all-out statements of artistic identity.
Mark Rothko asserted that only art on
the level of a new myth could constitute an adequate response to the threat of
nuclear annihilation.
This is where the heroic effort of a
painter like Giorgio Morandi becomes interesting in its apparent unwillingness
to become socially engaged. What could be more harmless, more
utterly useless and irrelevant, than Morandi’s lifetime involvement with his
pathetic cast-off bottles and bowls? And yet his work as a whole provides an
immense spiritual reservoir—especially for his fellow artists.
A painter like the late Neil Welliver,
one of the finest artists associated with the Maine landscape, was a protest
artist in at least two senses. First, he endured a horrific series of
personal tragedies that included loss of more than one of his children, and a
fire that destroyed hundreds of his paintings.
After his son was apparently murdered in
Thailand, Welliver did a series of eloquent late paintings of burnt-over
woods—though he said he didn’t know whether the death of his son had influenced
his choice of motif. The cogency and serenity of his work is an implicit protest against and creative response to his Job-like personal
trials.
Welliver’s depiction of the power and
beauty of untouched nature is also one long solemn declaration as to what’s at
stake in the assault on the biological world, our environmental support system.
The art of visionaries like Morandi or Rothko
or Nevelson or Welliver becomes valuable insofar as it speaks of worlds and
possibilities that may be uncapturable by the headline news. The serenity of a Morandi painting protests
the tiresome, banal drumbeat of historical catastrophe with a human wholeness.
To return to the political, there is one
other form of solemn declaration, of protest, that fortunately is available to
us, and that is to vote.
I’ll end with the last stanza of the
great Auden poem of protest against fascism, “September 1, 1939.” Unfortunately,
it remains all too relevant to our situation today:
Defenceless
under the night
Our
world in stupor lies;
Yet,
dotted everywhere,
Ironic
points of light
Flash
out wherever the just
Exchange
their messages:
May
i, composed like them
Of
eros and of dust,
Beleaguered
by the same
Negation
and despair,
Show
an affirming flame.
