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Books•Surmountable

Remembering Todd Gitlin

February 25, 2022 by briangruber No Comments
 

I was greatly saddened to read of Todd Gitlin’s recent passing. I interviewed Dr. Gitlin in his Columbia University office for Surmountable, co-authored with Adam Monier Edwards, in 2019. It was a memorable experience and an advanced education in the art of effective activism and citizen engagement in a liberal democracy.

Gitlin will have missed the current Russian incursion into Ukraine but his counsel for protestors and activists remains potent and relevant. He and I shared intense opposition to U.S. military incursions like Vietnam and Iraq — then and now — and as such had no hesitation condemning imperialist behavior by Russia or any malevoTodd Gitlinlent player on the world stage.

Here, in tribute to a great American, are excepts from the book.

Gitlin’s office is a stone’s throw from Columbia University’s Low Library administration building and Hamilton Hall, both occupied by student protesters in 1968. He is serving as professor and as chairman of the Ph.D. program of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, considered one of the world’s preeminent academies of the craft. Gitlin is a prolific author, having penned eighteen books, and is both a public thinker on the matter of protest and public assembly, and, from an early age, a front-line activist, having served as third president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963–1964. He organized the SDS march on Washington in March 1965.

Were the freedoms codified in the Bill of Rights revolutionary ideas in their time?

“They were absolutely revolutionary,” according to Dr. Todd Gitlin, professor and Ph.D. program chair at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “And before the American Revolution, before the overthrow of the crown, a number of the colonies adopted guarantees of the freedoms.”

The American colonies derive most of their constitutional and legal systems from England, including the selective freedoms granted to white male landowners. Most of the original colonies include a declaration of fundamental rights and liberties in their constitutions.

“When you ask people what’s in the First Amendment, they’ve heard of freedom of speech, of the press, of freedom of religion,” Gitlin says. “They don’t know the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.” Gitlin, author of numerous books on the history and dynamics of protest, refers to his emphasis of the issue in Occupy Nation. “There is so little jurisprudence, there’s so little even legal discussion either in the courts or among the law schools about this phenomenon of the right to assemble, it’s really quite extraordinary. I mean, it’s like it there’s an actual collective forgetting.”

The idea of petition comes from the Magna Carta, a charter of rights agreed to by King John of England in 1215. Heavy burdens in blood and treasure were imposed on barons to fund foreign wars and they revolted, capturing London and forcing the king to negotiate at Runnymede. The most famous clause, still codified in English law, gave “free men” the right to justice and a fair trial, though most citizens were unfree peasants, chattel lorded over by landowners.

“I don’t think there’s anything in the Magna Carta about assembly,” points out Gitlin. “There is about petition. The law professor Ronald Krotoszynski, of the University of Alabama, wrote a smart, important piece about petition; the nobles, and eventually the commoners, had a right to actually go and deliver the petition to the king. It’s a face-to-face operation.”

“When cities hosting political conventions started sequestering demonstrations like in Boston — a compound was set up far away from the (2004 Democratic National Convention) arena — he stated that should be held unconstitutional, that defies the spirit of petition. Petition is like serving you with papers. And if you put me in a cage a mile away, that won’t pass muster. A very interesting notion. And we don’t have much conversation about this.”

For Gitlin’s full interview and that of other thought leaders and activists across four continents, read Surmountable: How Citizens from Selma to Seoul Changed the World.

Assessing Impact

When asked for an assessment of impact of Columbia University’s highly publicized stretch of building takeovers, student demands, and police intrusions in 1968, Professor Gitlin changes the subject.

“I’m going to dance to the side of your question. What is a protest? What is it we’re talking about? Is a protest a picket line or a sit-in; or is a protest an element in a long-running campaign whose scope outreaches the immediate goal or the immediate professed goal, or what some people who organize the event think is the professed goal, but then enlarges and rolls into something else? It all depends on the time-frame we’re asking about.

“So, was the Montgomery Bus Boycott a success? Rosa Parks got arrested on the day after. I don’t know what she felt. But some people probably understood that this was a moment in a campaign, and others might have felt like, ‘God, they just did it again. They threw the black lady off the bus,’ and so on.

“It wasn’t clear for more than a year that the bus boycott would succeed in costing the bus company so much money that they would end up caving in, and even when that was achieved, can we say that the campaign was a success? Yes, one bus line was integrated. Others had been quietly integrated without anybody really noticing around the South. But we think of that as a benchmark, because it takes its place within this whole sway of activity that we call the ‘civil rights movement.’

“If you go around and you find people who were at this or that demonstration, and you ask them, ‘What do you make of it after this time?’ it’s going to depend a lot on who you’re asking. Are you asking somebody who was in it for the duration, or somebody who just came in, went to an event, came to a certain conclusion about it, and then went away? You’re going to get very different takes on the experience. That’s the first element. It’s sort of elementary.

“Let’s think about the movement against university investment and other investments in South Africa in the ’80s, which I was involved in as a faculty member at Berkeley and as an alumnus at Harvard. There was a lot of clamor, a lot of activity for a year or two, depending; it was a national movement. Did it accomplish the goal of getting university and some other funds to divest from South Africa investments? Partially.

“Did it end apartheid? No. Did it contribute to a process, which did undermine apartheid and help end it? Yes.

“You can actually trace a trajectory, which starts on a modest scale on a campus like this one or Berkeley, and then it snowballs. That’s a very typical kind of protest that you could say, yes, it does succeed, but not in the first instance. That is to say, it’s rare that somebody protests something, and then the next day, a change is made.

“Part of what you will find is that your sense of the meaning of the event or events is contingent on your sense of the time span. Are you playing a long game? How impatient are you? So, most protests, in the short run, fail.

There were massive protests against the 2003 Iraq War. There was and is a widely held belief that money has so saturated American politics that elected officials pay more attention to their funders than to their constituents. Thus, Bush and Cheney went ahead and did what they were going to do. Why were those protests ineffective?

“I think that analysis is very shallow,” argues Gitlin. “As you suggested in the second part of your question, Bush was going to go to war. Everything was riding on it. His balls were riding on it. His daddy was riding on it. His ‘weak in the knees’ after September 11 was riding on it. I can’t imagine a scenario that would have truncated that war or even nipped it in the bud.

“All wars are political situations, and had a different administration been in power, had there been wiser judgments on the part of many politicians, then the war, which was unnecessary and stupid from the beginning, as well as sinful, would not have materialized, but there was no way that war was going to be blocked.”

Gitlin has a handy answer when queried what he would say to a young activist — his full-length book on the subject, Letters to a Young Activist, perhaps a political homage to the Rainer Maria Rilke classic Letters to a Young Poet. Gitlin has loads of copies lining an upper shelf of his office and, in a dangerous act of generosity, stands on the verboten upper step of a small ladder to fetch one. Apparently, the professor had some choice words for former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, which were not well received. So, Nader, finding the book on remainder, buys a thousand copies and ships them to the author as a sort of spite purchase. Gitlin takes a moment to sign a copy with the inscription, “In the ecstatic search for decency.”

The book’s conclusion neatly tracks the author’s reflections on the Vietnam War.[i]

Each challenge is unique and each is identical — to do what’s possible by finding out what’s possible and, in the process, overcome what seemed possible.

Some borrowed wisdom.

From Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

From a civil rights song: “Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”

 

You can order Surmountable: How Citizens from Selma to Seoul Changed the World here.

Subscribe to co-author Adam Monier Edwards’ innovative Surmountable project newsletter by visiting https://www.surmountable.co/. Yes, that’s .co. The initiative tackles citizen engagement on issues ranging from affordable housing to zero waste.

For information on Brian Gruber’s five published books, go here.

[i] Gitlin, Todd. Letters to a Young Activist (Art of Mentoring) (p. 170). Basic Books.

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Reading time: 8 min
Koh Phangan

Panel on the Myanmar Coup Set for March 6 at Karma Kafe on Koh Phangan

March 5, 2021 by briangruber No Comments

I will be moderating a panel with three Myanmar political activists at Karma Kafe in Srithanu, Koh Phangan Saturday night, March 6, at 8pm. I will share my experiences holding a “writeshop” with a social justice project in Yangon, and leading a tour of NGO initiatives in country with senior EU reporters (including forums on journalism and the rule of law), in conjunction with the European Journalism Centre. 

We will also host a presentation by the Amnesty International campaign leader for Myanmar. 

The event is being put on by the restaurant’s proprietor, Brogan Dinsdale, and Roxy Nagarwalla. 

Please join us! The event will conclude with specific ways to support the Myanmar community on the island and their efforts to restore democracy back home. 

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Reading time: 1 min
Books•Surmountable

New Article on the January 6 Insurrection Attempt Published in International Policy Digest

February 27, 2021 by briangruber No Comments

The International Policy Digest published my article on the January 6 insurrection attempt at the United States Capitol, along with a solid dollop of promotion of the “Surmountable” book. Here is an excerpt with a link to the full article. 

How Americans Surrendered the Mantle of Artful Peaceful Protest

FEBRUARY 27, 2021

We Americans, a hubristic lot, imagine we are exceptional at most everything. Even our name is a conceit, one nation in the Americas, and nah, we are the real Americans.

There is certainly a huge dallop of delusion in the notion of America as a beacon of human rights, civil liberties, peace and freedom, leaders of the free world, standard-bearers of democracy, guardians of the rule of law, and the separation of powers. Still, as I travel the world, I am continually impressed by the deep and abiding admiration this country commands, large, radioactive warts notwithstanding. Especially the two-fifths of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution that guarantee that Congress shall make no law abridging the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Peaceably.

On the 6th of January – already that date bursts with meaning and imagery – the utter failure of Americans to grasp its own traditions came home to roost. “Patriots” violently intruded on the lynchpins of constitutional freedoms. The five dozen court rulings, the validated elections of the 50 states, the establishment by state and federal election officials that there was no evidence of fraud, were all repudiated and scorned in an orchestrated attack on the Congress, with murderous intent, cheered on by the President of the United States.

These conservative standard-bearers, who never saw a protest they didn’t disdain – Black Lives Matters, women’s rights, climate change – bastardized the notion of protest into, “We take what’s ours.” Ours being predominantly white, male, and Christianist.

I recently traveled around the United States – and four continents – to visit activists and thought leaders who witnessed or analyzed 13 iconic political protests, from Selma, Standing Rock, Occupy, and the Bonus Army, to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, Ukraine’s Euromaidan, and South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution. What struck me repeatedly was the fresh, passionate convictions of overseas protesters, religiously nonviolent, and vividly aware of the U.S. tradition of people’s governance, as a contrast to the declining understanding at home of the need to protect and nurture our political traditions. Our history of native genocide, slavery, and endless military misadventures aside, they struck me as more appreciative of American civil society than Americans.

In the printed chronicle of that trip, Surmountable, co-written with Adam Monier Edwards, we document a litany of absurd gaps in citizen education. 

To read the entire article, go here.

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Reading time: 2 min
Books•Surmountable

My Howl Performance Plus an Interview with City Lights Bookstore’s Elaine Katzenberger

September 27, 2019 by briangruber No Comments

Mark Phinney’s epic weeklong Koh Phangan Man event, the second in a series, concluded this week. One of the joys of living on the island is the presence of numerous artists, entrepreneurs, and idealists innovating new modes of living, entertaining, and transforming.

 

With the talented Gabrielle Leon providing the background tunes, Liz Griffin and I performed the entire 3,000 word poem Howl as part of a playful sunset poetry happening we organized, “Filthy Sunset.” I also read Love’s Victim from  Ovid’s “Amores.”

 

 

Earlier this year, I visited City Lights Bookstore, the scene of the legal battle to publish Howl six decades ago, and talked to the store’s manager Elaine Katzenberger about that unique fight for First Amendment free speech protections. Here are excerpts from that interview, parts of which will be used in my upcoming book on the art and alchemy of successful political protests.

 

 

There is a museum at the intersection of Broadway and Columbus in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborh0od dedicated to the beats. It’s worth visiting but for my money the sacred epicenter of the social movements that shook the youth of a nation for decades is across at the street at City Lights bookstore. Any bookstore is magic, the holder of promised secrets and a slice of the grand history of human knowledge. City Lights, with its mythic origins and tumultuous past is one of a tiny subset of literary shops that holds something more, something sacred. I walk in and a mother stands at a respectful distance while her pre-teen boy engages the cashier in a line of questioning. Do you have this book, where can I find books on that subject, mom knowing some of the answers but choosing to allow the experience of discovery.

 

I met the manager of City Lights bookstore (and publishing house) some years back when I video recorded and livestreamed some of their author events for FORA.tv. Elaine Katzenberger is, as you might imagine, a thoughtful and interesting woman, two attributes required to choreograph the visitor experience and keep it relevant as one of America’s important bookstores. On this weekday morning, the place was packed buzzing with visitors, the out-of-town tourists, the loyal locals, and no doubt one or two devotees of the faith, the never-ending pursuit of that one new book that will crack open the universe in some new way.

 

Gruber: Why is City Lights such a quintessential part of San Francisco’s civic life?

 

Katzenberger: Well, I don’t really think of it as belonging to San Francisco because people who don’t live here come for the same reasons that you do and that I was originally drawn here. San Francisco was the place Lawrence birthed City Lights, but it has transcended that, it’s more of a world location and it holds something that people need. It also may sound a bit abstract or metaphysically corny…

 

Gruber: Keep it coming.

 

Katzenberger: It has to do with ideals, feelings of integrity; there are a lot of interpretations that have been layered over the founding stories. Some visitors are just tourists, and some are clearly making a pilgrimage, but everybody is looking for the same thing on some level.

 

Gruber: And what is that?

 

Katzenberger: People would use different words – it’s a large stew – but it’s that creativity trumps capitalism, and that the human spirit is somehow communicating with other human spirits in this way that is authentic, and not subject to the rules that the rest of the economy is playing by. Maybe that’s why San Franciscans who have lived here a long time want to claim it, because the city used to talk about itself that way, it was an illusion, but a lot of people came to San Francisco for the same reason that people come now to City Lights.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Gruber: Lawrence is about to have a big (100th) birthday. Can you articulate what was the ethos at that time, the ethos of the beats that motivated Lawrence to publish Howlin 1956? What was happening then, particularly in the context of how that might be relevant now?

 

Katzenberger: Lawrence always talks about how, first and foremost, he wanted to publish it because he identified it as groundbreaking poetry, he thought that Ginsberg was doing something that no one had done, and that had to do with poetics as (much as) anything else. And then, in terms of the content, the way in which the poem decries capitalism and militarism, that is what the counterculture in the 1960s was trying to talk about, rebellion against conformism, against the celebration of what capitalism was supposed to bring to quote, unquote average Americans. It meant reaching for freedom outside of that, somehow captured in this poem, which was especially exciting to him (Ferlinghetti). It was also the shared declamatory nature of it, very much talking about making poetry some form of actual communication, and that was part of what the beats were about, poetry as speech, poetry as a way of actually getting the message across.

 

Gruber: A key focus for the store is books on progressive politics. What does it mean to be progressive?

 

Katzenberger: Another big question. Something to do with putting the social contract with other human beings and other life forms on the planet before profit and power.

 

Gruber: One of the premises of the ’56 trial was that Ginsberg and, by extension, Ferlinghetti, were subversive. Do you think that the acts of protests of Ferlinghetti and the beat poets and the kind of literary explorations that City Lights does are patriotic, are aligned with what the founders had in mind in terms of how citizens need to be engaged politically?

 

Katzenberger: Obviously. If you want to be able to participate in a democracy, you need to be able to not only be informed, but to form opinions based on critical thinking, all of those things are part of civic life and a healthy democracy.

 

Gruber: When a visitor walks out of your store, what do you hope they leave with, in addition to a large handful of books? What’s the experience?

 

Katzenberger: I hope they feel validated in being part of a community of interesting, thoughtful, sensitive human beings. That’s what books have always given me. That’s what I hope that books give other people too.

 

 

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Surmountable

Greta Thunberg is a Tool of Outside Agitators and Other Boilerplate Myths

September 24, 2019 by briangruber No Comments

In my visits to scenes of historic protests for the Surmountable book project, there are certain themes that are near universal when political and media institutions resistant to change seek to affect public opinion.

The activists are tools of outside agitators.

They have ulterior motives.

They have personal flaws to be exposed and attacked.

There is a problem (racism, pollution, social injustice) but be patient, now is not the time to act.

Protests such as strikes or missing school days are rude and disruptive, thus unacceptable.

 

These objections are, in most, cases, nonsense, and attempt to obfuscate important messages and block action on public issues.

 

Have a listen.

 

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Brian Gruber is an author, writing coach, and marketing consultant living on the Thai island of Koh Phangan. He has spent 40 years studying, leading, and founding new media companies and projects.

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