Anonymous: Shall I just go ahead and you’ll just ask me questions if I’m unclear?

Sam Gould: Sure, sure. That sounds good, and if I have any questions I’ll bump in.

A: So, this incident happened in 1988. And I had just dropped out of a PHD program at Columbia. I used to go up to 42nd St. a lot, because I was a member of some sort of club there. At 42nd St. & Times Square back then, I don’t know if it is still around, the US Armed Forces used to have a booth for recruitment there. It was on that little island, right on the middle of 42nd St. I don’t know if it’s still there. This is all before it got cleaned up of course. It was kind of a run down little booth, and one day I just decided to go in there just to see what they did in the there. And at the time I was an Iranian citizen here on a student visa. I actually didn’t even have a Green Card… Sam, I just realized something, I’m about to tell you about a few illegal things I’ve done…

SG: Oh…

A: …Maybe we can think about changing the name at the end of all of this?

SG: Sure, no problem.

A: So I walked in there, and I sort of poked around, and they said that basically, “if you’re interested in joining the army, or the navy, or the air force, you can take a test, and based on how you do we’ll get back in touch with you. You seem very enthusiastic.” At that time I had acquired the persona of another person who was an America citizen. The way that I had done this was that I had bought this guy’s identity.

SG: (Laughs)

A: He was this guy who lived on the streets who I knew a little bit. So, he wasn’t going to be using his US passport, can I just get your identity so I can get a passport in your name. And, so, he sold me his entire identity. For, I can’t remember, like two hundred bucks or something.

SG: Wow.

A: I had his Social Security card, and I had his Birth Certificate, and I had an ID in his name. I didn’t have the passport. So, when these people at the recruitment booth asked me whether I’d like to take the test I gave the name of this other guy whose ID cards I had, and I sat down, and I took the test. I guess most people who probably walk into that recruitment booth on 42nd St. are probably not, sort of, groomed… ah, you know, not sort of officer material. You know, groomed to do well on these tests. And I didn’t better than the average person who walks in.

SG: I would imagine they might get more impetuous people…

A: Yeah. So, they were very excited. They kept calling me. They wanted to get me into this program in the navy. It was the thing that they thought fit me best. Fit my profile best, fit my talents best. They had a whole package set up for me. They had my home number so they kept calling me, at that home number, trying to get me to come down and sign the paper officially, to enlist.

SG: Had they asked you anything about your citizenship up until this point?

A: They hadn’t asked me. I’d just given this guy’s name. I’d given them his Social Security number. I just sat in at this guy. I know that they ran some security checks, and I guess this guy came up clean. He hadn’t done anything, he was just a homeless person. They did some tests, some background check-up’s, and once that came through the called me and said, “the check-up’s went through fine, and we’d love to have you in this program.” It was quite a high level program in a nuclear submarine program.

Finally, you know, this guy kept harassing me. He kept calling me. Over about two, three, weeks after the final test, and they’d done their security check and it had gone through. He’d call everyone other day, every third day. And I final told him I was going to go to Florida, which was true, for a couple of weeks and think about it. When I came back I finally found the gumption to call the guy up and tell him. “you know, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I want to do this.” I slowly felt that I was sort of being peer-pressured into signing these papers. I’d also taken up a lot of this guy’s time. I learned a lot from it, and found it fascinating, but I wasted the guy’s time quite a bit. I thought that at some point they would catch up with me, after I did enlist, and realize that I’m really not this person. And then my other fantasy was that this was before, of course, 9-11, but of course there was that whole Iranian scare that was still very much part of the American psyche. And, I’m an Iranian. And the idea of an Iranian whose basically… fully penetrated the nuclear submarine program of the…

SG: It’s kind of compelling…

A: …by the simplest possible means, by just buying an ID card off the street of somebody, and having become somebody by having just spent two or three hundred dollars, it was kind of interesting to me. I thought I’d write a book at the end of it all about how shoddy American’s idea of itself as a fortress was. But then, as I said, I basically came to my senses, and realized that this will either end with me being court-marshaled and sent to jail, or tried as a spy, or even if they never found out I’d be stuck in this submarine program for a long, long time. I don’t how easy it is to walk away from these kinds of jobs.

SG: Not easy.

A: I finally said no. He called me a couple of times, I think once or twice after that, and asked me if I had changed my mind. But, that was the end of it.

It’s not a story of enlistment, but it’s a story of almost-enlist via fraudulent, weird, circumstances. But, I haven’t told this story in public before, so now I just realize that I really would like to have the name changed somehow.

SG: Absolutely.

A: (Laughs)

SG: What made you go inside in the first place? I think when we spoke earlier you had mentioned that it was a really intriguing setting, but was there more than that?

A: Well, part of it was that back then there were a lot of porn palaces, and cinemas there. Back in the 70’s and 80’s – well, it wasn’t as seedy as it was in the 70’s – but it had a feel to the place that I quite liked. This (the recruitment station in Times Sq.) was like a beacon of the, I don’t know, the American Empire in the middle of all this. It was a little shabby booth. That was what was intriguing to me. You had what was the most well endowed armed forces that the history of the world has ever seen, and then in the middle of the heart of the heart, in the middle of New York City, they have this shabby little booth, with old posters that were fading. The kind of propaganda, the visual appeal of this thing, was really rickety. They weren’t doing a great job of – you know they’ve gotten a lot better with their ad’s – they’ve managed to kind of understand what it means to use the appeal of advertising in a different way now to appeal to some people. But back then there was just this shabby booth. I liked that the back end of this mighty operation that the whole world feared, was kind of like, this little booth in Times Sq., with this guy behind a desk, sitting for people waiting to come in. That was amazing to me. And also what was interesting to me was that it was set up there in order to catch the many desperate people who were there, on the edge of some abyss, where they thought that going into the army would help them to have to face. So it was a trap that was set up, in some ways rather cleverly, but in some ways they hadn’t quite figured out the appeal of a certain kind of text/word combination. They were not as cleaver as they are now. It was this weird little shack, almost. I hardly ever go up to Times Sq. anymore. Do you know if it’s still there?

SG: I haven’t been to Times Sq. in such a long time.

A: Do you remember this booth?

SG: Oh yeah, absolutely.

A: It was this little island. You had to cross the street and be on this little island. You know it was thinner at one end, and longer at the other. The booth was the only thing on there. It was this little tiny building. I just walked in. I didn’t have a full on plan when I walked in. I walked in wanting to find out more about what the hell happens here and what the procedure is, and what’s going on. Slowly I got intrigued by the guy’s schpeel, and any times someone offers me a test, I find it kind of intriguing, so I took the test. It was a plan that I didn’t hatch all the way from the beginning, but it slowly fell together in the way I told you. I didn’t go in thinking I would go all the way to the end like I almost did. It’s only when I came back the second time, and the guy asked me to write down my name and all this stuff; it happened almost organically in some sense. It’s kind of like spinning a yarn on the spot.

SG: Do you remember the name of the guy’s identity that I bought?

A: I do. (Laughs)

SG: Do you want to reveal it?

A: What if he’s… who knows, he may still be alive too. I would say he was probably in his thirties at the time. I liked him. Every time that I saw him I would talk with him a little bit. At the time it was very hard to travel with an Iranian passport, because getting a visa, which a lot of countries asked of Iranian citizens, was almost impossible for a lot of European countries. And so my plan had been, this guy’s never going to use his passport. Would it really hurt him if I get his passport in his name with my face on it.

SG: Yeah, like is he really going to be using it?

A: The idea was that I’m not taking anything away from him. So I got his basic ID’s from him, which he could replace, of course. If you ever wanted to know how exactly to do these kinds of things you should read… this is what I need, when I was an undergraduate at Princeton I was procrastinating in the library, and I came across the court cases that Timothy Leary ended up in when he was caught smuggling drugs up from Mexico. When the caught him he had something like eight different passports – all different names – and his face. So did all the other people in the car. So, there’s a section of the trial when the head of the passport office, a woman called Mrs. Knight, testifies to exactly what the loopholes are within the passport system in this country, and what exactly would need to be done in order to close these loopholes. And she basically say’s it’s impossible. It’s impossible for us, at this point, in this country, with a very shabby correlation of data that we’ve set up in the very beginning, where states don’t talk within one another, where the birth and death certificates aren’t correlated, to know who’s died. So, this is the main way that Timothy Leary did this. He would go into newspapers, maybe not him personally, but, the group, they’d go into newspapers and find out who’d died, who would have been roughly a similar age had the person lived. And then you can back track and get this persons birth certificate, ID, etc… And also you can take living persons who decide not to use the stuff.

Most countries have what they call and National Register. I know in Sweden they have it. In England they have it. When you’re born you’re assigned a number in the registry, and when you died, in that same national register, they correlate the two of them. Birth and death certificates in this country are even necessarily in the same building. And the states don’t necessarily correlate with one another. So, if you’re born in New Jersey and die in Alaska that is like the person… the person can’t be verified as the person in New Jersey. This was still true in the 80’s. I don’t know if things have changed since then. Mrs. Knight said within the trial that there is no way that we can go backwards and correlate all this information maybe going forward at some point we can figure out a way to do this. And, of course, the 80’s, computers were not as digitized as they are now.

SG: So, going into the recruitment center, it seems like you almost viewed the place as, well, kind of romantic.

A: Well, it wasn’t romantic, but it was intriguing to see this little representation of the armed forces there in such a strange place. This club I was a member of, I went there to go to the gym. I went there something like two times a week. I went past this place quite often, and I never ever ever saw a person in there. I never saw anybody trapped within this little trap that they’d set up. So part of it was trying to figure out what goes on in there. Part of it was the fact that no one ever seemed to want to go in there, so it made me want to go in a see what happened in there. And, I guess, part of it was just simple curiosity, ideal curiosity, or some such, just to find out more about it.

All the sort of political things that I’m talking with you about, like, maybe how I could write a book about how an Iranian could, using two hundred dollars and very little else, penetrated a very secret part of the US Navy. All of those things were afterwards, created afterwards, thinking, what could I have done had I followed through. I didn’t go in with those ideas. It was much more impulsive. Maybe that’s romantic. I’m not sure. So, as I said, all this stuff about a book and whatnot came later, as he became more persistent, and he spent more and more time, and money on me; grading the test, sending me stuff, they sent me all these videos, then doing the security check you feel like his grip was tightening. I just felt like I couldn’t look him in the eye and tell him it was all a joke, I had no intention of ever joining, and the truth is I’m an Iranian citizen. I lied about all the other stuff. I couldn’t look him in the eye and even tell him, “hey, I’m not that interested.” I had to play the game of seriously considering it, both for the game to drag on and for me to extract myself for it to seem natural to him. I also, of course, worried a little bit that they may follow up and wonder why I did this. I got paranoid a little at the end there that they may follow and find out who I really was and why I had sort of done it this way. They never did, and I think probably a lot of people get close to joining…

SG: Oh yeah. But, then there are a lot of people who they get close and then they bring’em right in. And then their stuck for years.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Mikey Merrill -

My actual recruitment into the Army is a little anti-climatic. I knew what I wanted, and I approached the recruiter. Initially I talked to a Marine recruiter who kept trying to talk me into an ultra-elite badass program where I’d get to shoot people in the face. He was really intimidating and didn’t ever listen to what I said, so I stopped talking to him and stopped answering the phone when he called. Then I talked to this Army recruiter who was very bookish and nerdy and didn’t try to push anything on me. I told him what I wanted, and he handed me the paperwork.

The problem actually came later. I had this whole plan that I had created: Join the Army as an MP, then get out and go to college, and then join some federal law enforcement agency and eventually I’d be like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. Primarily inspired by my Dad who was a State Trooper and also by television and movies I thought I wanted to be a cop. I slowly learned that the people who chose law enforcement as a profession were not the people I wanted to be around. The thing about the Army is, of course, that you never get to quit. Having been guaranteed the MOS of 95B (MOS is Military Occupational Speciality, AKA “job” and 95B is Military Police) I had signed up for a five-year stint.

The unfairness of this system still pisses me off. I was 17 and I was choosing my job for the next five years? What person at 17 knows anything about the next five years of their life? You shouldn’t be able to enlist until at *least* 21. And the idea of not being able to quit seems like such a giant pile of ludicrous bullshit now. That should have been a warning that I was being tricked.

And of course this was all during peacetime. I can’t imagine the lies and tricks they are telling people now. Here are a couple of things to remember:

1. There is no reason to join the Military. I grew up in a small town in Alaska and I wanted to get out of the state and be my own person. The military cripples you and makes you dependent on them. You are better off driving to a big city and getting a job for minimum wage. You’ll learn more and be around better people.

2. If you do join, you’ll learn very quickly what things are like (hint: shitty!). Military life isn’t that different from boot camp, there is just more alcohol around. There is a period, I can’t remember how long, where if you quit boot camp it’s like you were never enlisted. So if you are in, quit!

3. Better to be in control of a shitty situation than not in control of a slightly less shitty one. When I got out of the Army I worked for minimum wage at a fly-by-night security company and that was so much better than being enlisted. The only job I ever had that was worse than being in the Army was a short stint on the midnight shift at a sketchy convenience store. And so I quit that job!

4. A lot of the people I met in the Army were there because they felt they had to be. Some were trying to escape bad situations, some had family obligations of military service, and some were just using it to run away. Rarely did I meet anyone that actually *wanted* to be enlisted. And when I did, they were pretty disappointed with what the Army was actually like.

5. If you really want to be in the military, go to college and enter as an officer. Not only will this put you a lot higher up the food chain, but I bet after four years of college you’ll have a lot of better things to do. And do the reserves or National Guard, you can always choose to go full time, but you can never choose to go part time.

6. You have the internet at your disposal! Look at all the people who say “Yay, the military is great!” vs. the amount of people saying “Boo! Terrible idea.” Clearly there is something to this whole “The Military Is Not What You Think” thing. They put so much effort into recruitment, but they do the bare minimum of upholding their end of the bargain (The whole Walter Reed scandal, the college money joke, etc).

I could probably go on for a long time and even delve into some personal stories to highlight the comically tragic idiocy of my time in the Army, but the point is that I was very lucky and I should have listened to my friends. The military is a lie. It’s nothing like what they are promising you, and they will never let you out. It’s a terrible environment that will literally brainwash you and it takes a long time to recover.

Ever thankful for the opportunity to bask in his presense, we had the good fortune to spend two full days with Dan S. Wang as he discussed issues of migration - both cultural and regional. The first iteration of this strain of discussion revolved around Continental Drift within the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor (MRCC).

The MRCC is a loosely defined area of the Midwest demarcated through a series of allegences, histories, and future possibilities, which links together the interests of a grouping of cultural workers within the region, and any and all who wish to join them.

In the summer of 2008 a grouping of ten inhabitants of the MRCC - in conjunction with the traveling consideration Continental Drift - traveled around the area to observe and discuss their experiences. They visited contested zones within the Chicagoland area, many farms, and cooperative ventures of the likes of Dreamtime Village.

On the following day a group met under the clock within Grand Central Terminal to partake in their own micro-drift around a migratory zone - Main St. in Flushing, Queens NY. We traversed the streets of Flushing discussing cultural migration, race, and the intersections developed through food and the table.

Apart from some vigorous speech we stuffed ourselves. Eating “small dishes” at no less than six restaurants along the way.

Expect a full report in part two of Issue 6 of the JRS.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

The evening of the 21st kicked off our residency within the Park Avenue Armory, and marked the first iteration of The Battery Republic.

In a festive mood we decided to drink some beer and make masks, asking the questions:

“What does a politician look like?”

“What does a radical look like?”

“What does a citizen look like?”

Guests to the tavern took to mask making easily, cutting out shapes, gluing on tufts of steel wool to make flowing beards. Speeches were spontaneously proposed, from citizens, radicals, and politians alike. They offered confusion of gender roles, a desire to be both a citizen and a radical simultaneously, and a sense of sorrow that a citizen is froced to wear a mask, in public, if they desire to speak their conscience.

What is one to make of it?

Sam, Zefrey and I took a stroll down the Upper East Side towards the UN to stake out the scene in anticipation of tomorrow’s George Bush visit to the UN. Figuring that we wouldn’t get as close on Tuesday, we strolled as near as we could. Most of the street was guarded by cops, Secret Service, fences and Snipers (!). Seemed pretty half-hearted; almost as if all the action had already passed.

Just as we were about to cross the street, a metal fence was moved to block us, and a way was cleared for traffic to leave the UN. There were only a few of us on the corner watching the parade of towncars zip by. I did my best to peer into the cars, obscured by tinted windows, hoping to see a Senator I’d recognize or who knows. Cheap gawking at best.

In the 4th car I noticed a man with a slight beard lean forward and look at us, as if he were trying to see who was staring into his fishbowl. I saw a faint smile and a surprisingly gentle hand wave - almost as if he had recognized me as someone who he’d talked to the day before.

I could feel the chi in my body raced down my spine, cold and electric. It was strange and haunting. Slowly, slackjawed I turned to Sam and saw the absurdly creeped out, amused and amazed expression on his face. We barely articulated the affirmation that, yes, that was indeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Not that we could pronounce his name for the life of us. I know that I’m supposed to have read a book about “the banality of evil” a long time ago, but I never got around to it. What we need now is a book about the “tragi-comedy of evil”. What else could a book about George W Bush and Ahmadinejad be?

We will gather at St. Gabriel’s park at 9:00 am (the location was my idea) and then we’ll head into the protest zone. The Creative Migration crew are coming along to film; it was hard to encourage them since documenting protest art and documenting protest is so entirely different in terms of safety. It would be hardly a pleasant irony to get tased, sprayed, arrested or clubbed only one day before Marissa Jahn speaks about her experience with I Witness video at the RNC. I doubt the response will be comparable on either the protesters or the security’s part. Still, it feels tense to enter a protest in this aftermath.

Gabriel

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This Fourth of July No War U.S.O. (Red76 & Psych(A)P) organized a Domestic DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) in their North Portland neighborhood. The posted notices around the area announcing the “demilitarization,” and asked other - residents and businesses - to participate, by creating a demilitarized area however they imagined that area to be.

Our nextdoor neighbor, Jesse, and I made a mobile shopping cart sound system that we carted around as booth a dj set up, and a town cryer for the occasion. The cart consisted of a few different types of speakers, a cd player, tape deck, mixer, microphone, and Line 6 delay unit. All of this was hooked up to a portable generator that we purchased for $100 from Home Depot and then returned - no questions asked - the following day.

Here’s a tasted of the activities that the cart generated.

I have a fairly complex relationship with the idea of the police. I usually don’t like being around them. I don’t like being around people with guns in general. But then again, on the other hand, there is a part of me that feels exceedingly at home with the police. After coming over to America from Ireland in the late 1800’s my Great-Grandfather became a New York City police officer. My Grand Father joined the NYPD as well. My Grand Father John J. Casey retired from the NY Police Force on my birthday, May 4th, in 1951 twenty five years before I was born.

That said, when I see images such as this, I can’t help but consider how my Grand Father, and Great Grand Father alike, would feel viewing such outrageous treatment. Especially so as it regards my Great Grand Father. Every summer, for sometime after immigrating to the U.S., he would travel back to Ireland with his family to fight against with British with the IRA. My Great Grand Father, “The Terrorist.” If anyone knew about the brutality of the state, and had a desire to do something about it, he did.

Mike Wolf organized a soft spoken and incredibly powerful exhibition and series of get-together’s centered around Art of This Gallery at 35th/Nicollete in Minneapolis starting on August 23rd. Coinciding with the RNC the work within the show quietly, yet adamantly, projected a desire for action, thoughtfulness, and progressive involvement. We were super honored to have been invited to join this group.

We included an invitation for the public to call our hotline number and finish the statement, “Because of the war in Iraq I…” We’ve gotten many response. More on that later, as well as more on the days at the RNC.

That said, in conjunction with The Unconvention, Red76, Mike Wolf, and Courtney Moran organized a rendition of Revolutionary Table within Peavey Plaza in downtown MPLS on Sep. 2nd to expand upon the conversation beginning to be generated at Art of This. We convened the meal, asking people to once again consider the above statement regarding how the war has affected their day to day lives. The meal was free. Anyone off the street was invited to join us, and thankfully many did, taking us up on our offer of delicious food and thoughtful conversation. (As per the outline of the Revolutionary Table series, the conversation at the table was recorded. We’ll post that soon.)

At one point during the meal the topic of the role of the media today arose. Interestingly enough there happened to be a reporter from the Chicago Sun Times at the meal (reporters were swarming all over the Cities this week). So, we got to ask him our questions and concerns directly - how helpful!!

Today we noticed that the Sun Times posted a rather evenhanded and considerate take on the proceedings, in which they also included seven minutes of video. Thanks for doing the documentation that we should have done Sun Times! We appreciate it! Click Here to View Their Coverage…

A little bit of honesty caught off the air of MSNCB concerning the Republican VP nominee.

October 14, 2004

Dear Laura,

Here is my promised letter. Really, it is kind of an excuse for me to write about my experience of having known Paul Wellstone, and maybe get to communicate a little bit of what I saw in this man, and a lot of the lessons I directly trace to my contact with him. After reading this I think you will have a better idea of why I value my experiences and memories of Paul Wellstone so much. Without knowing how this letter will end, I can already say that it will be mostly about me. I don’t feel so bad about that though, because that is an important aspect of the kind of politics Paul Wellstone taught: that taking power includes and is inseperable from knowing and discovering ever more fully yourself. Being politically active or engaged must be in part about yourself. In strategic terms, I believe this personal dimension is an infrequently recognized key to building successful and lasting movements, whether those movements are concentrated and short term, or diffuse and long term. In existential terms, the arc connecting French thought as exemplified by Foucault to a feminist theorist like Marilyn Frye to the new communism of Hardt and Negri, the personal is recognized as the eternal (in not sufficient) fount of political power. So I guess it’s inevitable. This letter is about Paul Wellstone. This letter is about my political education, as well as my present views. All.

The word power is a good place to start on these reflections. As a professor Paul was always talking about power–how to get it and how to wield it successfully. This is not notable by itself. Machiavelli talked about power, too. But given Paul’s values and sympathies, he invariably approached the problem of power from the perspective of those who are assumed to have none, at least according to the conventional wisdom. As a graduate student, he studied and obsessed about the young civil rights workers who turned militant in SNCC. As a scholar, he wrote about the disenfranchised rural populations of Minnesota, first in Powerline and then in How The Rural Poor Got Power. And as a campus figure, he was regularly advising student activists on tactical matters, and encouraging us to think in terms of power–getting us to ask, where is it concentrated in the institution, and who personifies it? Answers, respectively: on the board of trustees, and the college president, of course. So the trustees and the president at Carleton became the targets of campus activism, not out of any juvenile anti-authoritarianism (although there is nothing wrong with juvenile anti-authoritarianism–for juveniles!) but rather out of an analysis of power. Thanks to Paul Wellstone, the student body generally and his students in particular were well-versed in such rational and realpolitik analyses.
One other thing about Paul that is worth mentioning here. The reason that he advised students on matters of campus activism was because he would occasionally sit in on student group meetings and take part in the discussions. I was at a meeting of the student group Coalition for Responsible Investment (a campus group dedicated to agitating for the divestment of College stock holdings in businesses that did work in South Africa) which Paul attended. When the discussion turned to how the group had seemingly exhausted all the formal channels of petition, one student proposed that we consider taking more radical action and forcing the administration’s hand with the spectre of bad publicity that would surround any story of them harshly disciplining the students acting in the cause of justice. I remember Paul reacted by smiling and shaking his head, saying “Who is this guy? Why don’t I know him?!” He loved it when people started thinking that way. Anyway, the point of this digression is simply to underscore the fact that the man was hands-on, and made no distinction between theory and practice.

(And just to finish the story–later that year the CRI students attempted to obstruct the trustees at their quarterly meeting. Paul was there, too, and I can’t remember if he actually sat down or not. [I wasn’t there; probably out getting high.] Either way, he was threatened with dismissal by the new college president, which led to a separate but related flurry of activism. At the next quarter’s meeting the CRI students tried the sit-down blockade again. This time I was there, as was Paul and the radical feminist philosopher prof, Maria Lugones. They were both careful to remain standing, but both took turns addressing the president and those trustees who would listen, speaking in favor of the student action. The trustees snuck out the back and this particular moment was defused. Paul’s relationship was always strained with the president after that, as you can imagine. When Paul went to the Senate and was hailed by the president as a great member of the Carleton community, it sounded more hollow than Trent Lott’s words at Paul’s memorial service. But I have to say, in hindsight I now realize that this was a pretty special time in the history of campus activism, and it’s far from the campus climate of today. Can you imagine today tenured full professors joining with a group of undergrads to confront the trustees over some matter of global injustice? No way.)

Back to the thing about power. So what I’m saying here is that Paul was not naïve to the workings of realpolitik, as progressives are often characterized. I think one of his biggest and most risk-heavy achievements as a teacher was insisting over and over to his sheltered students with do-gooder intentions that politics is in fact an exercise of power, and that a political victory is when you force your adversary to do something that they really do not want to do. This along with other ideas I was absorbing as an eighteen and nineteen year-old made a huge impact on me, but especially because it was coming from the mouth of somebody who, judged only by his moral agenda, would seem a namby-pamby, spineless bleeding heart liberal. This is important because the painting of the liberal, and by extension the whole of the Left, as made up of weaklings was at that time just beginning. (This was in the late Eighties.) Alan Colmes, the utterly pathetic so-called representative of the Left on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes, is the present day result of that recasting. Combatting the image and concept of leftists as people who are constitutionally weak and quisling-like is a project that could learn much from studying the political practice of Paul Wellstone. Because of my contact with him and later my own study, I for one find it impossible to seriously think about the Left–the genuine class struggle, anticolonial, and downtrodden’s Left–as anything but a positive contribution to History’s chapters on generosity and hope, of course, but courage and strength as well.

I took two Wellstone classes, both in my first year. The first was an intro class, in which we mostly read and discussed texts that outlined very current social problems (mostly having to do with welfare-state policy) and offered solutions using competing vocabularies and ideologies. Texts assigned included titles by Charles Murray, Milton Friedman, Piven/Cloward, and Kevin Phillips. An odd thing that I recall is that in class Paul never used the terms “conservative” or “liberal” or “radical” or any such shorthand description for an ideological bearing. Nowadays I wonder was that because he himself just didn’t care for such shortcuts, or was it because those kinds of words hadn’t yet gained such widespread currency as instant markers of different and opposing agendas, ie that the Age of Soundbites wasn’t in 1987 what it is now. What I do remember well about this class was the way that people’s values would emerge through reasoned discussions. I think that’s partly why the students who really took to his kind of politics frequently moved forward as activists in a very confident way–he helped show young people a way to form reasoned arguments that supported their idealism. That fundamental marriage of rationality and idealism, which seemed so natural as a first lesson in what to believe politically is a very important lesson for today, where the Right has almost completely eradicated the rational from the public political discourse. (By the way, I am most hopeful and positive about Barack Obama’s political future when I think of him as an agent for the reintroduction of rationality to electoral politics. In the end that may be his most valuable gift to the political system that might very well consume him.)

Anyway, it was the second class I took with Paul that really opened my eyes to the depths of political activism, and his own understanding of it. This was his annual spring offering: Social Movements and Protest Politics. This was something like a class in grassroots organizing, and it was the classroom milieu in which he was most intent on having his students dissect the specific uses and production of power by groups. Central to his method of teaching this and other primary lessons was a reliance on history. This class was my first exposure to American agrarian struggles in the 1890s, tales of Alinsky-style organizing, and an in-depth study of the Civil Rights Movement, and then the student anti-war movement of the Vietnam era. The class was also a window into the lives and perspectives of a cross section of grassroots organizers, people invited by Paul to lecture or lead discussions. None of them were academics, which was a notable thing in the overly academic Carleton environment. The invited classroom guests served a double function: they allowed for Paul to be somewhere else–usually at a political or activist group meeting or grassroots campaign event.

(Also as an aside, and just to round out the picture, I have to point out that when I was in college it must have been the high water mark for the Movement veterans lecture circuit. Paul’s invited guest teachers made their appearances in the context of a full year’s worth of campus-wide activist/lefty speakers. Just to recall the incredibly inspiring people I heard speak while in college, either in an assembly hall or lecture room: Cesar Chavez, Michael Harrington, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, the peace activist Brian Willson, AIM leader Dennis Banks, ex-CIA agent-turned activist Phillip Agee, earth first co-founder Dave Foreman, founder of Meadowcreek David Orr, Sharon Kawolski’s partner Karen Thompson, P-9 Local labor activist Jim Guyette, Myles Horton, Paulo Freire, Barry Commoner, and David Brower. That’s just off the top of my head–there are others that I’m forgetting, not to mention all the non-celebrity visiting lefties. The only conservative speaker I can remember was James Meredith, the Civil Rights Movement icon of desegregation who later became a staffer for Jesse Helms. It was a good time for education even without Wellstone; I feel very lucky to have caught that moment. Some very few campuses are probaby still good for such concentrated exposure, Evergreen perhaps being one of them, but places like Carleton have become much more mainstream as tuition skyrocketed over the last ten or fifteen years.)

At this point I should also say that all this while I was gaining activist experience outside of the classroom. I was very involved in a number of student political groups. Over my time in college I contributed efforts to a whole range of causes, including those that could then be termed in shorthand, such as “Central America,” “sexual harassment,” “divestment,” “old growth,” and others. For intermittent periods I definitely committed more time, energy, and thought to political activism than to my homework–way more. Being politically active and working to change things just seemed much more urgent than studying. I wasn’t the only one to feel this way; a lot of my schoolmates were on their way to becoming lifelong activists. This was the situation then, when during that second Wellstone class I decided to give organizing a try as a summer job. So the summer after my first year of college I went to Des Moines, lodged with a radical redneck (not a contradiction, just very rare) who was drunk every night, in a broken down old victorian house that was bought from the city for a dollar, and became an ACORN organizer. I was assigned to organize a neighborhood appropriately called “the Bottoms.”

The specific areas in which Paul pushed me to reconsider my ideas were three, and can basically be phrased as the following questions: 1) What really is the political dimension of the environmental movement, and how radical can it get? 2) What, if any, is the relationship between my ethnic identity and my political views? And 3), historically, what was the particular contribution of student activists to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements and why? These are pretty basic questions, and I feel that I’ve had them resolved for myself for many years, but I was eighteen and nineteen, trying to figure out my values while at the same time trying to act on them. Paul was the first of my teachers to really push my thinking in ways that would directly impact my formation as a citizen.

The main point here is that Paul’s classes–especially the second one–engaged me highly because they were relevant to my life in a way that Carleton’s typically too-academic offerings just weren’t. Given my extracurricular interests, that is. In other words, I had real examples and real experiences against which I could compare my classroom political education. The problems faced by earlier agitators, organizers, and activists were often similar to the issues I encountered while trying to gather and exercise grassroots power myself. So the education was three-fold: Paul’s teaching method first instructed students to clarify their thoughts and values as a part of the political analysis, and then for those students who found themselves inspired to take action, the lessons moved into the historical and practical knowledge that a working activist needs. Of course, it was in this second stage of education that we learned that inspiration itself is a tried and tested political tool.

Most importantly, Paul completed those two stages of the education in grassroots politics described above by supplying a third element: that of the practical example. Here is where he was unique. I describe him as having been an experimental political scientist. He didn’t just observe the political landscape as pundit or theorist; he conducted actual experiments in the political arena. Knowing Paul and watching him later, when he was running his first campaign for the Senate, I realized that the campaign itself was an experiment. If it worked, he’d be in the Senate. If it didn’t, he’d write a book about it, and then use the experience in his teaching. Having been provided an exposure to this experimental method, I and many of Paul’s students adopted a particular kind of activist mode: historically-informed, thesis-positing, continually self-educating, and taking action in the world.

The marriage of political engagement and intellectual inquiry makes so much sense to me that I often wonder why more people don’t do this kind of thing. I admit that political operatives (eg the James Carvilles of the world) often use an action/evaluation process, but it is usually without deep history in mind. And hardly any academic political scientists do, including those few who take the progressive grassroots tradition as a starting point. Even more disappointingly, too few of my fellow grassroots political activists understand the approach.

Anyway, I think you probably now have at least some idea of what my student experience with Paul Wellstone was like, at least from the intellectual/activist side of things. It is also important to say something here about the person, because Paul’s force of personality was also very much a part of the campus environment, even apart from the politics. A couple of anecdotes serve to illustrate. One: when in the spring of 1989 the Chinese students occupied Tiananmen Square I one day ran into Paul. I took no more classes from him after those first two, and so only saw him irregularly, but we always had friendly chats. That day he saw me approaching, and before saying hi he yelled, “Dan, how about those students in China? Aren’t they amazing?! What do you think of them?” The guy was not a scholar of China, but was excited nonetheless, and based on earlier conversations and at least one paper, he knew that I’d be following what was going on. I recall this episode because I remember thinking even then that it was mindful and somehow considerate of him to remember my concerns, because I was not in anyway one of his closest students. And this was at the very beginning of his Senate run–in fact, I was going to ask him about how that was proceeding when he preempted me with his excitement and curiosity about my take on the Tiananmen occupation. But this was just like him. Always thinking about the other person’s concerns, and always wanting to feel the other person’s excitement.

Two: His closest campus collaborator was Mike Casper, a theoretical physicist. The two of them had worked together on policy issues for years, and when Paul went to Washington Mike went with him to play the role of advisor and sounding board, especially on matters needing a science background. He returned to Northfield to teach again after a couple of years. It was during the school year of 2001-2002 that Mike suffered a rapid neurological deterioration. The story was that he’d started the school year fine but so quick was the dementia that he couldn’t finish teaching his classes. This disease progression happened to coincide with Paul’s last campaign, which as you know was hard fought. What I later learned was that over the summer, as Mike’s hold on reality ebbed day by day and the campaign became more and more heated, Paul started phoning Mike once everyday, no matter where he was, using the tight campaign as an excuse to engage Mike, and try to help keep his mind from becoming irreversibly unhinged. That was Paul Wellstone in a nutshell. Always looking out for others, even given the huge demands on him. There are many other like-stories from the Wellstone files. Although the above two are Carleton-related, I’m quite sure that the vast, overwhelming majority of them are not. Which in itself is amazing when you consider that he spent a good twenty years at Carleton–a place whose considerable inertial forces fall on the side of insularity.

There is much to say about how still feel the influence today. On the level of electoral strategy, I am reminded almost everyday of how the national Democrats still have not learned the lessons of Paul’s first Senate run. Obama has some of that populist edge to him and again it is proving successful. If the DNC can’t recognize the substance of Obama’s strategy (already far less leftist than Wellstone, especially in the area of support for business) and force him to moderate his progressivism, then they’ll have proven themselves utterly blind twice over.

On the level of grassroots activism, also, I think we desperately need a refresher course on the Wellstone approach. While I applaud the resurgent creativity of political artists and count myself as one of them, I also think we need to make our creativity available to those of the politically active who are actually making demands. Striking workers would be the obvious example, and a strike is perhaps still the only time when people wrest power in a really threatening way. By and large, the scenarios where power comes up against power have basically been conceded by the anti-war movement. The radical/anarchist elements of the anti-globalization movement have stalled by fixating on ever more predictable and ineffective street actions. We’ve let a whole range of progressive benchmarks be defended by the courts and nothing else. In short, when it comes to strategy, today all leftist camps are guilty either of an ahistorical thinking, or a total disregard for evaluation, or a simple lack of courage.

On the personal level, I do feel a responsibility to argue for an infusion of intellectual activity into political activism. Beyond the specifics of my experience is also the larger motivation the memory of Paul inspires: Whatever it takes, we have to do it. Not because there is any great glory in it, but for the far less glamorous reason that we are the only ones here. For that reason also, we might as well make it fun.

This letter is getting long, and is starting to branch out into other discussions; I could spend a lot of time reworking it and adding parts, but I do need to get on with other projects. I cannot think of an easy way to end the letter. Relating my updated political analyses is probably a good way to ensure that this becomes a continuing exchange rather than just me giving you a chapter in the story of my life. So: in the last couple of years I’ve taken as my most profound influence the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein. He is the leading proponent of what is now called “world-systems theory.” In short, Wallerstein argues that capitalism is the present day system, and that from its ascendence five centuries ago to its maturity in the last hundred years, it became the first system to entirely encircle the globe. In the process, the management of capitalism emerged as the basis for most conflict in the world. As all systems do, this one will end, and he argues that we are witnessing the end of it right now, as well as the simultaneous emergence of the next system. The next system is as yet of an open-ended nature. We know what it won’t be (eg monarchist), but know not what it will. That said, we also know that it could be something even worse than what we’ve had for the last century, because we’ve already seen glimmerings of rising forces that could potentially dominate a successor system (like fundamentalisms). The nature of the emerging system is in significant part determined in its emergence, which according to Wallerstein’s analyses usually lasts twenty-five to fifty years. In these periods of historical transition, small inputs create large outputs, meaning that small numbers of actors can disproportionately influence events. This quarter to half century of course falls right on our adulthoods, so we are the ones who need to act in order to ensure that the next system (which after becoming established exists in a state of equilibrium for some time, until its internal contradictions tear it apart) is more humane than our existing world. It is here that the influence of Critical Art Ensemble enters, especially in the notion of the wager. Accepting Wallerstein’s argument of higher stakes still provides no direction as to what kind or manner of political action is best. CAE argues that guarantees cannot be had, and that any move is essentially a gamble given that we live in the age of unintended consequences. All that I learned from Paul Wellstone, then, becomes even more important if we are not to gamble blindly, but rather play the smart odds. That’s about where I’m at, in big picture terms. Any particular issue or problem is a whole other conversation.

I hope some of this has made sense, and that it has not been too boring to read. It certainly has not been boring to write, though parts are frustrating for me to re-read because I just haven’t had the time and full attention to relate the whole complexity of what I want to say. For example, a full Wellstone-Obama comparison is warranted, but just didn’t happen. But that’s okay. In time. Of course, now that I have taken advantage of your generous while as a reader, I am curious about your thoughts and experiences. Not just in response to this correspondence (though that is welcome), but on any other political topics, including your own political education. If and when you ever get around to writing something, I will most certainly read it and respond.

Sincerely,

DSW

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