Highway To Hell Part 1 ft. Matt Christman
Canada's reckoning with its right wing "uprising" continues, so Riley and Dan brought on Matt Christman to talk about the meaning civil unrest takes on in an age of extreme alienation, how the Trucker became a symbol of the libertarian ideal in the (North) American consciousness, and how it came to be that the mass lumpen Canadian right will only accept Donald Trump as their Prime Minister.
In Part Two, out next week on www.patreon.com/dabottlemen , we discuss how the way we protest is a product of media consumption and "politics" as a civil religion, and what it looks like when a state slowly loses legitimacy over time. Also, the George Romero film "Land of the Dead."
Comments (4)
I am deducting one point for no reference to the king of maudlin CB trucker songs, Red Sovine. "Teddy Bear" is one of the most insane songs of the genre: "This was my dad's radio", the little boy said "But I guess it's mine and mom's now, 'cause my daddy's dead!" "Dad had a wreck about a month ago He was trying to get home in a blindin' snow Mom has to work now, to make ends meet And I'm not much help, with my two crippled feet!" "She says not to worry that we'll make it alright But, I hear her crying, sometimes late at night
Matt describes BLM as being as part of a culture war, where police brutality is simply an shibboleth placed in contraposition to, say, being antivaxx, and that on "both sides" of this war the combatants are unable to really articulate what they're fighting against. This does not comport at all with my personal observation and analysis of (at least the local) BLM movement, where many people are readily able to identify the interconnectedness of the causes and effects of these issues and their relation to capital. Watching MSNBC coverage or whatever wouldn't give you that impression, but watching on the ground interviews on like, Unicorn Riot -- or otherwise being there yourself -- would. I've been in crowds chanting "This is a motherfucking class war!", which is certainly aspirational rather than descriptive.
The follow up that without having an organised "voice", these movements instead follow where the money is, because money can self-direct, *does* match what I've seen. Organisations like Black Lives Matter National, i.e. the institution and not the movement, or the local TCCJ4J, have been very effective in blunting the movement they supposedly stand for. They do this because their being legal organisations that persist over the span of years places constraints on what their tactics can be, and what they can advocate for. Outside counterinsurgent tactics were also, after a week or so, quite effective in sapping momentum from the protests. When I participate in these moments, I see a lot of people who are willing and ready to take part in "direct action", applying real tactics to fulcrums of state power, but who are guided only to gather around a plaza, chant for a while, and then go home, by these co-opted organisations. And there is no real organisation who is serious about all this -- the FRSO, for example, waves their red flags during the marches and has all the energy and presence of people asking you to join their book club. The people on the ground, constituted as a sum of disparate individuals, generally know about what the problems is, but they don't have any idea how to change it, and they're being placed in an environment where they're unable to develop new tactics and tools and theory to apply.
Damn has Milo always been the producer? I assumed it was Nate