A lot of activists across many issues and many generations have embraced the U.S. Constitution for its much-admired Bill of Rights, for the post-Civil War amendments that banned slavery and created “equal protection” for all while also ensuring birthright citizenship, and even the belated extension of voting rights to women a hundred years ago. I’m not writing to attack the worthy aspects of constitutional law that have expanded rights and allowed more breathing space in a society founded on slavery and genocide. But we can’t forget that basic reality: the U.S. Constitution was a document forged in a specific time and political culture that allowed for human slavery and was acutely focused on expansion into indigenous lands. Slavery and genocide were built in from the beginning, and no amount of blather about the magnificence of the Founding Fathers, the brilliance of the Constitution or the political structure of the U.S. government overcomes that.
The current right-wing hysteria over Critical Race Theory is just the latest tempest stirred up to enforce an amnesiac approach to U.S. history that mostly prevailed for two centuries until unraveling rather substantially in the past quarter century. The intellectually vapid, but politically charged effort to discredit Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’ 1619 Project by creating the widely ridiculed 1776 manifesto failed on launch. But the rabid white supremacist rank-and-file, much larger than any of us want to believe, are fertile ground for truth-denying myths that prop up their fantasies of racial and cultural superiority. Discredited by a wide range of historians and public intellectuals over the past decades, the right-wing self-congratulating version of history won’t go away as long as it provides a unifying narrative to people who see their world slipping away and blame that perceived loss on betrayal by “others” (critical histories quickly become examples of such betrayals). This is the long history of fascism and right-wing demagoguery, played out over and over in the past century. And we are well into the current chapter of this, and perhaps the final chapter of the long-simmering U.S. Civil War, as it unfolds during the 2020s.
The view from Bernal Heights
But rather than further beating this exhausted (and exhausting) anti-fascist horse, I want to suggest that the nearly religious reverence for the U.S. Constitution is at the root of the strange passivity and political impotence that grips the country here in mid-2021. While the insane millions of right-wing zealots are arming themselves, organizing, demonstrating, publishing, and carrying on their efforts to overthrow the simulacra of democracy, where is the outpouring of grassroots energy defending the right to vote, or our supposedly precious democratic institutions? Where is the public clamor for universal health care, radical reduction and imminent elimination of carbon emissions, generalized rights to equally funded high-quality education, a general right to quality housing, etc.? Where are the strikes for new independent unions and a general doubling of wages? Or the elimination of the wage-system altogether?
I live far outside the boundaries of mainstream United States intellectual and political life. I’m a historian, writer, editor, and political analyst, and have participated in social movements all my life, from anti-nuclear and anti-war efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, to persistent labor agitating on and off the job (especially with Processed World magazine in the 1980s-90s), to the Critical Mass bicycling movement that propelled me into a role in new urban movements in Europe and Latin America during the 21st century. I write semi-regularly on this blog and I’ve published ten books with various publishers, all known to be on the “Left” (Verso Books, Pluto Press, AK Press, City Lights Books) or my own imprint, Full Enjoyment Books. I’ve had several titles translated and published in Italy and one in Brazil. My blog is read by a few hundred people, my books sell in the few thousands, and I have friends and fans from San Francisco to Santiago to Sao Paulo, Berkeley to Bergamo to Buenos Aires, Portland to Puerto Alegre, Mexico City to Milano, Toronto, Rome, and Guadalajara and points in between. I am proud of this, and it makes me happy and hopeful.
Coyotes, an ever more common sight on Bernal Heights, seen here at dusk on April 21.
I am far from silenced, and by many measurements I’m a modest success (even if I haven’t been able to economically support myself writing). But still, I’m a sublebrity (hat-tip to Brian Awehali for this great neologism) at best, and just another invisible “content producer” to most people. I’ve made no effort to get a “real job” since I was in my mid-20s, and have never tried to get my work in front of the big New York publishers, never connected with an agent, nor have I tried very hard to break into big circulation periodicals (a couple of tries led nowhere).
I’ve never officially made more than $25,000 in any of my 45 adult years, but I’m debt-free and even have a bit of savings, and with my very low Land Trust rent, my sweetheart and I live a materially comfortable life.
You could say I lack ambition. But actually I am profoundly ambitious with regard to my own goals, some of which I’ve had all my life (overthrow wage-labor and capitalism; live well now and work as little as possible), and others that have taken shape as I’ve gotten older:
• produce a dynamic archival space for recording and debating our shared history;
• participating in unfolding movements of techno-scientific workers to reclaim the purpose and design of their own work, and redirect the technosphere to a radically different way of life;
• adapt urban life to natural systems that undergird our existence, especially, perhaps, someday, redoing our relationship to fresh water, personal mobility, and public space;
• live to see the decommodification of housing and the reinvention of neighborhood life/politics.
• etc. etc. etc. …
Yes, I can keep adding to this list, but as a relatively isolated voice, not involved at the moment in any movement or political organizing effort, what’s the point? I like hearing and seeing my voice—if I didn’t I wouldn’t keep writing. But I am self-aware enough to know that narcissistic satisfaction is not an adequate reason to add more words to the empty, always urgent cacophony that is already burying countless intelligent ideas and vital critiques, including, presumably, my own!
We’ve all trekked up and down and all over Bernal countless times during this past year… but I still feel blessed that it is just a 25 minute walk from home.
With this predicament as my daily starting point, I ponder new books I want to write (and add to the tidal wave of new work always crashing over any of us trying to “keep up”), including a prequel novel to my previous After the Deluge, and two more histories of San Francisco covering 1957-67 and 1980-2020… or should I pursue a systemic reworking of our unique digital archive at foundsf.org to adapt it better to current stylistic preferences for online presentations, including adding a map interface?… or should I pursue building a solar energy commons, starting with our co-op building and reaching out to all the neighbors whose backyards connect in this large urban block in San Francisco’s Mission District, and pioneer a model of urban grassroots reinvention?
One or more of these projects will certainly reach fruition in the next years, maybe all of them! But I have to admit I kind of liked the Covid hiatus. It fit with my well-cloaked agoraphobia, removing any expectation that I would be going to events or seeing people out in the world. I have been quite content walking and biking on my own, seeing people very occasionally, hosting walks and tours outdoors during these months, and having hours every day to read, devouring dozens of books, following my curiosity and interests wherever they led me. I love being a completely independent public intellectual!
Yesterday my daughter turned 37; her daughters are going to turn 4 and 1 in another month. My dad hit 89 in January, and I made it to 64 in March… With these markers in time, it’s impossible not to notice how short our lives are. I’m already past the age that most people made it to a century ago. My mom died in late 2019 at 83, and my dad is still going, with expectations that he’ll make it at least to his mid-90s since he’s still mentally perfectly sharp. His mobility is severely compromised, and his hearing is going, but otherwise, why not? Meanwhile, my granddaughters are bursting with life, and my daughter is thriving as a mother, a public intellectual, an activist, and on the cusp of putting herself into the maelstrom of public school teaching for the first time. It’s all so darn interesting! And encouraging!
With age comes a deepening sense of the passage of time, but also of its immensity. And with new histories being written, reinterpreting or rediscovering histories that stretch back to times in the distant “pre-historical” past, the blip that constitutes our moment in time shrinks towards its eventual obscurity. All of my own writing and thinking are a product of the peculiar decades from the 1960s to the present (I was born in 1957). In my last post I mentioned the odd feeling of seeing government money being widely distributed, putting a thin tiny patch on a beleaguered and discredited social safety net. My whole adult life has unfolded in a time of aggressive capitalist assault on living standards, aggregate wages, the environment, and life in general, with the United States in particular responsible for a couple of dozen wars and literally millions of dead.
The persistence AND paucity of meaningful resistance also characterizes this period. I’ve been part of countless demonstrations, movements, and counter-cultural efforts to shift the values and priorities of this society, but the real experience of the past 40 years is one of continual loss, shrinking expectations, growing pessimism, and a broad collapse of empathy and solidarity all around me (albeit with many people trying their best to resist and reverse those trends). The dominant reality of being in the heart of the most militarized empire in world history, and seeing the wars and mayhem imposed on other countries either enthusiastically supported or blithely ignored, makes me feel a bit crazy. Seeing that culture of war and domination gradually engulfing daily life “at home” is enraging too, even if it’s impossible not to feel that some of those mass shootings, misogynistic violence, and police murders represent the (militaristic) chickens coming home to roost. But we know who suffers from this, and there’s no pleasure or even schadenfreude when the actual human consequences are part of the picture. As I write this, police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of George Floyd’s murder, better than not for sure, but such a rare occurrence with so much attention only underscores how out of whack the whole system is. No doubt the mass demonstrations last summer, combined with the numerous eyewitnesses and witness videos were what produced this exceedingly rare case of accountability for police murder.
Perhaps years from now we’ll look back on this as a turning point, perhaps in combination with the repudiation of Trump and his racist followers, where we finally began the actual process of reconstruction and reparation that will take generations more, but maybe at last we’ve moved irrevocably onto that path. Let’s hope so, and do all we can to make it so.
Made it on 35-mile ride on our new e-bike across the Golden Gate Bridge and San Rafael-Richmond Bridge from where this photo was taken… nice views!
