Democracy, anti-intellectualism, and "proletariat" art

I am watching the Surrealist documentary Europe After the Rain. They are talking about Breton’s argument with the Soviet Union about whether or not Surrealism could be a good representation of the proletariat, being bourgeois art and all. Breton says that to the extent that culture is proletariat, it is not yet culture and to the extent that art is bourgeois it cannot be proletariat.

Now, nearly 100 years later, the irony is that there are entire generations, starting with the Beat generation and those who returned from the war under the GI Bill that allowed them to get college educations, of “proletarian” artists, of artists who have been influenced by Dada and Surrealism, who founded Fluxus and Conceptualism and all manners of avant-garde movements. This is Republicans’ worst nightmare and the reason that they are working so hard to defund education, to stop the teaching of critical thinking, to provide only STEM, not STEAM, to education, so that they can grow generations of educated drones who will do the technical work of society without trying to transform it. What once drove this country was not technical proficiency, but the imagination required to innovate. But that imagination comes at a cost.

Free-thinking people who can imagine other possibilities, will not accept attempts to control them. That’s why intellectuals must be attacked as elitists and made into the “enemies of the people,” much like what was done in the former Soviet Union to the dissidents: artistic, scientific, and political. We now have a “proletarian” art, even if we don’t have much of a proletariat, or working class, left in the United States. All people need to see artists, avant-garde or not, as being on their side, not being “elitists” opposed to their goals, but as allies, working side by side with them to achieve their goals.

The physicist Andrei Sakharov said, "Everyone wants to have a job, be married, have children, be happy, but dissidents must be prepared to see their lives destroyed and those dear to them hurt. When I look at my situation and my family's situation and that of my country, I realize that things are getting steadily worse."

We denounce any attempt to divide and conquer those of us who are not part of the ruling elite. We must stand together against the real enemy, not allow ourselves to be pitted against one another. The “first wave” of this coming together is art, is the avant-garde, those who will prepare the way of imagination so that we can return to creating, innovating, and evolving.

Defending Millennials

I:

I am so tired of hearing "in the real world . . . " as a way of putting down 18-20 year old students and a way of further saying "I don't get that kind of treatment at my job, why should students think they should get special treatment?" It's petty and ridiculous and I will tell you why I think so.

I am on all kinds of education lists on social media. One day the conversation turned to extra credit as it so often does. Now, there are many reasons for and against extra credit assignments, but of course we eventually got to the usual and inevitable "In the real world, you don't get extra credit . . . ."

The fact is that many people DO receive extra credit in the form of bonuses and promotions and other little perks called "incentives." One person questioned if this was really extra credit, but it is credit given to someone over and above their salary for doing extra work. Sounds like extra credit to me.

And if you want to take the remedial view of extra credit, even if you are not doing well on the job they don't normally just fire you, but give you another chance to prove yourself, ie, extra credit. In the "real world" you don't get grades or write papers either. Your boss does not ask you to pull out a sheet of paper and write 200 words on the value of customer service. There is a difference between the conventions of what one does in the so-called real world and in a college learning situation, and I think that's ok. Students are there to learn and instructors, professors, teachers, etc. are there to teach. No one is there to serve a customer or client, help them to see an improvement in their business, stocks, or home investments just yet. Student and teacher. Student and mentor. Period.

This is all more of a move away from education as instilling the skills needed to be a good citizen and a well-rounded person and towards education as a form of discipline and training for corporate America, which let's face it, has also been a part of education for a very long time as well.

Personally, I am for anything that will make students do a little extra work and think harder. The thing about extra credit is that students rarely take advantage of it. Even if you make it available to them, they rarely have the time or inclination to take you up on it. They seem to just want to know that it's there.

II.

Moreover, I can’t help but feel that this is a form of discriminatory resentment, the suspicion that someone else, in this case another generation rather than another race or class of people, is getting something that you aren't. “These Millennials – they not only get an education (which has been leveled against generations at least since the GI bill if not sooner)(and which they have to go into enormous debt for), but also have all of this technology available to them at an early age and NOW they want EXTRA CREDIT when they are not doing well in their classes. What is with these kids? If I had had the kinds of advantages they have, why I would have aced all of my classes in ½ the time they take to text their friends. What nerve!”

This is the resentment of the very future that was promised to us. Now that the Silent or Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, and the Atari Wave Gen Xers (see Strauss and Howe, 13th Gen) are too old to enjoy the full promise of the technology of the future, we resent that others have the opportunity to do so. Or perhaps, like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned us, the future is here, but it has turned out to be what Irving Howe called an un-utopia is his article The Fiction of Unutopia, what we now talk about as dystopia. Maybe it's not as great as promised. For every GPS that helps us find our location, we also secretly fear a Stephen Spielberg-Minority Report scenario in which our car drives us to work following the pre-programmed GPS route or takes us directly to jail. Maybe we didn't want all this technology anyway, and who are the Millennials to not see this? They are naive and blind to the downsides. Who wants all this technology anyway.

III.

It is not that far from resentment of Millenials and white male resentment towards women and “minorities” for affirmative action. How dare someone else get a piece of the pie? Or as it is now, “there’s not enough pie for me, and now somebody wants my already small piece?” I just saw an article on Facebook that said that white people claim more racism against them than people of color do. Everybody wants to be a victim it seems in this society, to justify their feelings of being left out and falsely blaming young people for being spoiled is another way of pointing to someone and saying “No fair. They got something I didn’t.”

“Adults” love to tell young people that the world isn’t fair, but they are the first to insist that Millennials haven’t “paid their dues” and yet are perceived to have the world as their oyster.

The fact is that people have said that about all of our generations.

IV.


The so-called Silent Generation or Greatest Generation was portrayed in popular culture as Beatniks and rebels (without causes) when they were young. They were a threat to the old order and had to be put in their place, which was in the suburbs working newly middle class jobs for the corporations who had been rehabilitated in the wake of America’s defeat over fascism into good corporate citizens offering good jobs to Americans. After all, what is good for Chevrolet is good for America.

Of course, who could have anticipated that the Baby Boomers who came after them would be a bunch of smelly hippies holding sit-ins and teach-ins rather than going the colleges and universities that had only been recently unlocked to them by their parents. What nerve they had, demanding democracy in those very universities, let alone an end to war and a just society. They should just shut up and take their place as the next generation of workers.

Then, when the Baby Boomers took the reins, they criticized the Gen Xers, my generation, for not engaging in mass movement politics as they did. We were all a bunch of apolitical slackers who contributed nothing to society, choosing skateboarding and video games over communes or worse, Alex P. Keatons and Charlie Sheens who had abandoned their parents values altogether in favor of greed. Many of those who did not go that route and chose instead to go their own way rather than working soulless corporate jobs got met with the parents' lament "when are these children going to move out of the house?" I believe that many Millennials are facing a similar lament from their own Baby Boomer and Gen X parents.

V.

Do you see the pattern I am presenting here? The fact of the matter is that the Millennials will find their own way(s). They are dealing with an economy much like the one that I came of age in with little opportunity, but at least 25 or 30 years ago we still had a social contract in place, which appears to be more than we have at this moment in time.

More than that, they have global warming and an America in decline (at least for the moment). Like most young people, they appear to be governed by people who do not share their values. And add to that the fact that many people see them as over-privileged brats. I recently watched a video in which Millennials addressed this perception of them. One person that stands out from the video is the young woman who said she felt so privileged to have to work 4 part-time jobs. I imagine that will also someday be used against her children. “You young people today! When I was your age I had to work 4 part-time jobs!” But let’s hope she has a little more perspective than that.

So as a college instructor, I actually burn when I hear people talk about students and how spoiled they are or how they don’t understand the workings of the “real world.” Of course they don’t. I didn’t either. I asked my teachers for unreasonable things like extensions and extra credit. I cut class. I didn’t understand how the world worked, and I was in the top 15 percent of my high school graduating class and even graduated a year early. I made several embarrassing missteps early on in my working life. I had what adults would call “book smarts” and not “street smarts.” But “street smarts” come from hardship. Don’t we all want our children not to go through excessive hardships?

I can only guess that most “adults” have repressed these memories to protect their own psyches and in order to further protect themselves, they must also vilify all of those lazy, naïve young people that came up after them.

VI.

I remember working in a test scoring center. The students had been assigned to write about a time when they had to overcome something. Most of the students wrote about a hard class or a cheerleading tryout. But some had terrible things, like one who had a friend decapitated in car accidents or more frequently, surviving abuse. I remember our scoring director telling us not to discount the cheerleading stories if they were well-written because she said “a cheerleading competition should be the worst thing for a 15 year-old to worry about.”

VII.

There is plenty of time to figure out the “real world” and maybe even reshape it in ways that the previous generations could not or did not or to at least leave it a little better. Frankly, this business model doesn’t work for us anyway and maybe businesses should look at how education or non-profits are run and take their cue from that, rather than seeing non-profits or education as a place to retreat from the "real world." The “real world” is overrated and should be shaken up and reshaped anyway.

The fact is that at nearly 50, I still don’t understand the so-called real world and if we were really honest with ourselves, few of us do. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so much information available on the web about how to get along with one another, how to get jobs, how to buy a house, etc. No one knows how it works. We somehow all suspect that it’s a secret society to which we don’t know the handshake. And so we resent anyone who we perceive as getting just a little bit ahead of us, whether that perception is correct or not.

VIII.

Are some Millennials spoiled and overprivileged? Sure. Just like there have been spoiled and overprivileged children who grow up into spoiled and overprivileged adults since the beginning of time. I think Cain and Abel could probably be scrunched into that category as well if I were willing to take the time to do so. There were Silents, Baby Boomers, and Gen Xers who were spoiled and overprivileged. And there are those who are smart and conscientious and willing to work hard, and many of those are my students. I have sat by and watched 3 generations of young people vilified by the media all in the same way. I’m not going to listen to or believe it any more.

A HISTORY LESSON, OR GOLDIBOOKS & THE BANKING TEACHERS

I had to write this for my teaching class. It's based on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I had fun writing it and I thought I'd share it and see if it works outside of the context of my class.

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On stage are three classrooms. The first two classrooms are virtually identical. The have a blackboard at the front of stage and seats in rows, full of students. Students should have their back to the audience, facing the teacher, who will stand at the front. The first two classrooms should either have a student in every seat but one or be empty. Student responses are done with voiceovers unless otherwise indicated. The students in these classrooms always speak in unison, whether live or in voiceover.

The third classroom is arranged in a circle and should have a student in every seat but one. The teacher is also seated.

The teachers may be male or female and need not be the same in each classroom. However, three should be a teacher present in each room regardless of whether live students are used or not.

GOLDIBOOKS is the only person who moves between scenes. GOLDIBOOKS can be male or female.

All the lights are down in all three classrooms.

The lights come up on the first classroom. U.S. HISTORY is written on the blackboard. GOLIDBOOKS comes wandering in and sits down in the empty seat (or randomly, if the seats are all empty).

TEACHER #1: There are the important dates you must know. They will be on the test. The United States became a beacon of democracy to the world on July 4, 1776.

STUDENTS: July 4, 1776. Beacon of democracy.

TEACHER #l: The constitution of the United States, which secured freedom for all Americans, was signed in 1787.

GOLDI BOOKS: Excuse me? The constitution didn’t really secure freedom for anyone but white males until much later.

STUDENTS: 1787. Secured our freedoms.

TEACHER #1: The United States has continued to be a shining example of democracy to this day. The United States liberated Europe from the Nazis on June 6th, 1945. June 6th is known at D-Day.

STUDENTS: D-Day. Nazis. June 6th.

GOLDIBOOKS: A lot of other countries were involved.

STUDENTS: Shining example.
TEACHER #1: The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 represented America’s victory over communism. Capitalism, or democracy, won. The small wars we must fight now are against those who hate freedom and resent us for it. But we will prevail, just as we did over communism.

STUDENTS: 1989. Capitalism. Democracy.

GOLDIBOOKS: Capitalism isn’t the same as democracy. There were a lot of factors involved in the fall of communism. What about the complexity of issues in the middle east and the role of the West?

STUDENTS: Hate freedom. Communism. We will prevail.

GOLDIBOOKS leaves and the lights dim, but do not go fully out. The TEACHER continues quietly saying things (these can be nonsense or can be from a book) and the students continue quietly responding. Meanwhile the lights go up in classroom 2. SOVIET HISTORY is written on the board. GOLDIBOOKS comes in and sits down in an available seat.

TEACHER #2: The Russian Revolution was in 1917. This led to the formation of the first worker’s government in the world and was an inspiration to people struggling everywhere against capitalism.

GOLDIBOOKS: Actually there were several smaller revolutions before that one, including the Provisional Government.

STUDENTS: 1917. Capitalism. Workers. Inspiration.

TEACHER #2: In 1945, the Soviet Union helped to win World War II. America often takes credit for it, but without the Soviet Union, the other allies would not have been successful.

STUDENTS: 1945. America takes credit. Soviet Union.

TEACHER #2: After that, we established the Eastern Bloc. To ensure their protection from both Fascists and capitalists, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and part of Germany.

GOLDIBOOKS: But people in those countries weren’t necessarily better off. They were persecuted for disagreeing with the government,

STUDENTS: Poland. Germany. Saved from Fascism.

TEACHER #2: Other countries, like Cuba and China were so inspired that they, too, had Communist Revolutions . . .

GOLDIBOOKS gets frustrated and leaves this classroom too. The lights go up on CLASSROOMS 1 & 2 for a minute or two and the students responses are heard playing over another in a cacophony so that it is difficult to tell what they are saying.

The lights go down slightly, but not completely, in classrooms 1 & 2 and the teachers and students continue talking and reciting. This can be nonsense or can be read from a book.

Lights go up all the way on classroom 3 and GOLDIBOOKS goes in and takes a seat.

TEACHER #3: Ok, class. So let’s talk about what you read last week. What is democracy?

After a brief pause, a student raises his/her hand.

STUDENT: Government by the people.

TEACHER #3: Good. Now, what’s an example of a democracy?

GOLDIBOOKS: Well, that’s a pretty reductive view of democracy. Aren’t we going to discuss it further?

STUDENT #2: America.

TEACHER #3: Very good. Now . . .

GOLDIBOOKS: There are a lot of other examples of democracies. There’s England and . . .

STUDENT #2: Nuh-uh. England is a monarchy.

GOLDIBOOKS: Well, a constitutional monarchy, but it’s still . . .

TEACHER #3: (As if nothing happened) What is communism?

STUDENT #3: Where the government controls production.

TEACHER #3: Very good. Can you name a communist country . . .

GOLDIBOOKS: Technically the workers control the production, we just haven’t really had any examples . . .

(No one reacts. Instead there is an awkward pause as the other students don’t know what to say.)


GOLDIBOOKS: Well, Venezuela is sort of Marxist. And there’s Cuba, and . . .

TEACHER #3: Past or present. (Still no response) Can you think of a country that broke up into smaller countries . . . (Still no response) The S. . .

STUDENT #4: S . . .Soviet Union?

TEACHER #3: Right.

STUDENT #5: I thought they were a dictatorship.

TEACHER #3: Yes, well that’s the way communist countries were run.


GOLDIBOOKS goes running out of the room disgusted and exits. There is no response from students or TEACHER #3. For a minute, the lights go all the way up on all three classrooms and all 3 continue with their lessons at a regular to loud volume culminating in a cacophony so that it is difficult to tell what they are saying. When after a minute or two the cacophony hits a fever pitch, FADE TO BLACK.


In Theatre of the Oppressed, at this point, the lights would go up and there would be a discussion with the audience of the three classrooms and if there is an alternative..