Report on yesterday’s “One Nation” rally

To start with, I have to confess that I didn’t attend the entire rally. At around 2:30 I decided that I had heard enough blather for one day and took off. As might have been expected, the speakers were handpicked in order to satisfy the main organizer’s “One Nation” theme, which has largely left them helpless before the unrelenting bared fangs approach of the Republican Party. The NY Times put it this way in its coverage of the rally, drawing a contrast with Glenn Beck’s:

Significant areas of the National Mall that had been filled during Mr. Beck’s rally were empty. In a broadcast on Thursday, Mr. Beck criticized the liberals’ march, saying his supporters paid their own way to drive to Washington, while labor unions chartered hundreds of buses to ferry demonstrators to Saturday’s rally.

Mr. Beck’s rally resembled a religious revival, but Saturday’s event was overwhelmingly a political and policy pep rally, although it largely avoided partisan language.

Avoiding partisan language, indeed. Accepting beforehand that this would be a pro-Democratic Party event, I was amazed at the flabbiness of the speeches. Mostly there was a pleading quality to them, along the lines of imploring the Republicans to play fair. There was nobody like Bill Maher or Michael Moore who was capable of hitting below the belt. God knows with all of the cretins running for office on the GOP ticket, there’s plenty of cannon fodder.

I wondered how big the rally would have been without the unions shelling out the dough for the buses and laying down the marching orders to the ranks. Coming home on the train, I found myself sitting a row behind what appeared to be some UBEW business agents. They talked shop for about 15 minutes until I decided to move my seat before I lost my temper and challenged them about what was happening to the trade unions. What a contrast to the European labor movement.

When I was leaving, I’d estimate that there were maybe 50,000 people there. As I headed back to Union Station with my old friend Jeffrey, we saw people streaming toward the rally. My guess is that perhaps the crowd might have doubled in size by the end of the day. Jeffrey, who I would describe as a chronic pessimist, shared my disgust with the speakers. Although he is susceptible to “lesser evil” arguments, he decided not to vote for Obama, who he considered a fraud. He too would have enjoyed some “red meat” demagogy from the speaker’s platform, but alas all we got was tofu. Even though Jeffrey is a vegetarian, his hunger was not slaked.

If the organizers had made a systematic effort to turn the rally into something resembling a movement, perhaps the outcome would have been different. If it had been up to me, I would have made a systematic effort to recruit unemployed people. Imagine the impact of 10,000 “99’ers” marching together toward the rally. And even more powerfully, imagine if they had set up a shantytown and stayed at the Lincoln Memorial until the cops had forced them to leave. But then again, I am the unrepentant Marxist and not a repentant liberal.

The organizers have set up a website at http://www.onenationworkingtogether.org. It aspires to keep people active in local events leading up to the elections in November, including a meeting billed as “Put Hate Aside” in Tulsa, Oklahoma on October 6th. I don’t know. I think a bit of hate is required in the situation. Alexander Cockburn, whom I love more days than I hate, put it this way in yesterday’s Counterpunch in reference to Ed Miliband who is shaping up to be Britain’s Barack Obama:

Which brings me briefly to Ed Miliband, now chosen to be the leader of the British Labor Party. The last time I saw Eddie he was an intern at the Nation in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Round the corner from the Nation when it was on Fifth and 13th st in Manhattan was Zinno’s restaurant and amid a pleasant lunch with JoAnn Wypijewski, my own intern Richie McKerrow and Eddie, I asked the future leader what I asked all interns as a matter of form, “Eddie, is your hate pure?”

The man who first asked me that question was the late Jim Goode, editor of Penthouse.  Like Playboy, Penthouse would pay good money for long articles about the corruption of America, thus giving the pointyheads an excuse to thumb through the pinups, and the editors some elevated rationale to their domestic partners for their place of employment. Goode, tall and cadaverous,  was gay, clad in black leather as he crouched on the floor of his office, gazing morosely at hundreds of  photos of bare-breasted women. As I entered with some screed about corporate and political evil, he snarled, “Alex, is your hate pure?”

“Yes, Jim, my hate is pure.”

It was a good way of assaying interns. The feisty ones would respond excitedly, “Yes, my hate is pure.”  I put the question to Eddie Miliband. He gaped at me in shock like Gussie Fink-Nottle watching one of his newts vanish down the plug hole in his bath. “I…I… don’t hate anyone, Alex,” he stammered. It’s all you need to know. English capitalism will be safe in his hands, assuming he ever grasps the levers of what passes for power in 10 Downing Street. It is very hard to imagine him as prime minister. He’s forever Fink-Nottle to me.

Perhaps the one thing that is most needed in the fight against the right, in addition to hate, is the political leadership that can let the grass roots know exactly what is going on the country. MSNBC, like Air America—its radio counterpart, is not doing a very good job it would seem in educating its audience—at least on the basis of a poll reported on by op-ed columnist Charles Blow, an African-American reporter always worth reading.

Big-city liberals and their blogging buddies love to paint Tea Partiers as yokels with incoherent candidates and language-mauling signs. (Some have even dubbed their misspellings and grammatical gaffes “Teabonics.”) On some level, this may be true. But there is also a certain hypocrisy to these taunts.

The unpleasant fact that these liberals rarely mention, and may not know, is that large swaths of the Democratic base, groups they need to vote in droves next month — blacks, Hispanics and young people — are far less civically literate than their conservative counterparts.

Therein lies the hurdle for the Democrats: How can they excite this part of the base that is not engaged and knowledgeable in an off-year election? How can they motivate these voters to help Democrats maintain their Congressional majorities when, according to a poll released this week by the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of blacks, 42 percent of Hispanics and 35 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 years old don’t even know that Democrats have a majority in the House? It’s sad. Pathetic, really. But it’s a political reality. (Only 71 percent of Democrats overall knew that Democrats had a majority in the House. By comparison, 82 percent of Republicans knew it.)

We are condemned to live in a period of history when liberals have lost their ability to rouse their base either through raw emotions or through political education and analysis. But on the upside, this vacuum creates a possibility for the radical left to get a hearing. Let’s hope that as the crisis deepens, we find it in ourselves to rise to the occasion.