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The New Day of Mourningand a New Era of Serenity
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The New Day of Mourning
Today, I found one more sad indicator of the state of progressive politics in America. Do you remember the Day of Mourning? It was held about one year ago, on the date of inauguration of George W. Bush's second term as President. There were large protests all over America, and huge numbers of people stayed home from work.
A great deal of the coordination that led to those protests took place through a web site called, appropriately Day of Mourning. Well, I was maintaining some Irregular Times pages, recently, cleaning out old dead links, when I found out what has become of the Day of Mourning site over the last year.
Look to your right and you'll see. The Day of Mourning web site, which once led political action against the policies of George W. Bush, has become a slippery patchwork of soap, sex and spam,
The soapy aspect to the site was disappointing, if not downright negative. Everybody deserves to get clean. But, the marketing is terrible. After all, who but the severely mentally ill associate mourning with soap?
Well, the marketing looked terrible until I saw what the new Day of Mourning site was really about. It was all about the spam. Interspersed with talk about soap were links to pornographic web sites, with the hope that a click here and a click there would earn the person hosting the site some money in referral fees. The marketing made perfect sense now. No one was expected to buy any soap. The soap was just a way to get people to visit the site and get tempted by some "free sex viedo".
I don't begrudge people wanting sexual satisfaction. It doesn't bother me that people want to get clean in a nice way sometimes. It disturbs me a great deal that a leading progressive political web site would allow itself to devolve into crass hucksterism.
I worry that the change in the Day of Mourning web site reflects a change in the American progressive community. Has progressive activism sunk down into a hot bath of sudsy somnolence?
The motto of the Day of Mourning spam site is particularly haunting to me. It promises, if you follow along, "a new era of serenity".
It's a false choice to say that we either need to be grubby and pure, marching in the streets, or clean and inactive in our bathtubs, listening to the sound of tinkly water after enjoying some choice pornography. If I can't get clean, I don't want to be part of your revolution. I get it.
But, a year after the inauguration, our President has declared himself above the law. He has taken the power to snatch Americans off the streets and throw them into prison without access to the courts. He has responded to a law passed by Congress outlawing torture with the declaration that he does not have to follow that law, and can keep on torturing people whenever he wants to.
If ever there was a time for marching in the streets, and speaking out against George W. Bush, this is it. Yet, most Americans don't seem to care about it much. They're more concerned with whether the Seattle Seahawks will win the Super Bowl.
So it is that just a little over one year after the national Day of Mourning, Americans are signing up for a new political movement. Only, this political movement is different. Instead of being organized through the grassroots, it is orchestrated by a corporation, a chain of fast food restaurants.
The White Castle hamburger chain is organizing a pseudomovement to petition the government to make the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday a national holiday. It's unfair, they say, that people who stay up late to drink beer and watch the Super Bowl should have to go in to work the next day.
Yes, I know. They're being funny, ha ha. I'm not laughing. If there were a strong political movement to regain liberty for American citizens, then I would be chuckling. But, there are no mass protests this year. Americans are not, for the most part, up in arms about the Bill of Rights being stripped away. As much as we try to motivate and persuade Americans to do something to defend America's traditional values of civil freedom and the rule of law, the reaction that we get from most Americans is a shrug of the shoulders and a resigned comment that there's just nothing we can do.
No one can turn out for a political protest against the loss of our freedoms. They're busy. After all, the Super Bowl is coming up. Like White Castle says, it's what you crave.
I could make some comment here about football being the new opiate of the masses, but let's face it: In a land filled with halftime hookas, no one cares a fig what I say.
With a beer in hand, and a funny commercial trying to sell you more beer in view, who could be mournful for the death of American liberty?
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