Move over, all you inheritors of Eugene Debs and Rosa Parks. Because the "Industry" has got this covered. It's all under control. You see, the newest role of famous actors and musicians and other media personalities is to turn the often bloody and violent struggles for racial justice and workers' rights and human rights into one star-studded entertainment diversion after another. Rather than protest in the streets yourselves, all you have to do is sit back and watch celebrities pretend to do it for you on TV. And if you're very lucky, you can even be a member of the live studio audience or even an extra on the stage.
Just as the Women's March franchise was partly the brainchild of affiliates of the Conde Nast publishing empire, the wider #Resistance (to Trump, the whole Trump, and nothing but the Trump) is itself the product of the Media-Political-Entertainment Complex.
To that end, a gaggle of glamorous millionaires is staging a "People's State of the Union" as an alternative to Trump's speech to the Congressional Joint this Tuesday night. So as not to deflect attention from centrist Democrat Joseph Kennedy III's official rebuttal to Trump, the A-Listers are holding their own "prebuttal" event on Monday night in New York City, where a lot of them were already in town for the Grammy Awards.* To be fair to them, though, they're not actually marketing their gala at the tony Town Hall venue as a protest, but as a "celebration." It's an occasion for all virtue-signalers to bask in the solidarity, narrowly defined as their mutual hatred for Donald Trump.
As progressive actor Mark Ruffalo dished to the celebrity gossip rag People, the restrictive purpose of all these celebrity events is to get out the vote for the Democratic Party, which only recently purged people-intensive populists from all its leadership positions.
“In essence,” Ruffalo tells PEOPLE of the event, “it’s a better reflection of our state of the union based on a more populist point of view, based on the people’s point of view. I think it’s important because we have a president who has a difficult time with the truth, who has a radical, divisive agenda, and spends an enormous amount of time focusing on the negative and hopelessness and despair.”The agenda, therefore, is not for the wealthy entertainers to demand protections for the most vulnerable people, but to help the most vulnerable people feel better about their situations, possibly by viewing more movies and TV shows about vulnerable people prevailing over hatred, discrimination and poverty through dint of their own humor, hard work, and all-American pluck.
Above all, the #Resistance events are about the activist Beautiful People celebrating themselves:
“We want to celebrate this moment that we’re in of what is now probably one of the most influential and powerful and really beautiful movements to come into play in the United States since the civil rights movement,” Ruffalo explains, going on to describe the event as “a celebration of the power and the beauty of this movement, but also of our accomplishments and to focus on what’s to come in the immediate future.”"It's the Mother of All Movements," he added modestly.
The announced host of Monday night's Celebrity Activist Apprentice reality show is yet another Democratic Party offshoot called We Stand United (not to be confused with the main financial backer, Stand Up America, a 501 (c) (4) bankrolled by the Facebook wealth of failed billionaire carpetbagger Sean Eldridge.) For the full A-List roster of performers, check out the People link above, because the last thing that these People probably need or want is more publicity, even publicity on an obscure little lefty blog.
Led by a former Clinton campaign operative, Stand Up America was also at the "grassroots" forefront of urging Congress to establish an independent commission investigating Russian "election-meddling" in the wake of Trump's firing last year of FBI Director James Comey - who had only recently been evoking the wrath of Clintonites for dredging up the private server-Anthony Weiner mess just weeks before the 2016 election. The enemy of their enemy so conveniently becomes their friend in the interests of the fortunes of The Party.
Meanwhile, what would commercialized protest be without the solidarity engendered by shopping? No anarchist black hats or Guy Fawkes masks will be tolerated at any sanctioned and capitalized
Then the commercial resistance marketplace seems to have run out of righteous steam in a hurry, because all I could find were shirts and buttons and bumper stickers labeled with "Resist" or for double the fun, "Resist. Persist." For only $24, you can score the Lady Liberty super-saver combo package, complete with a quartet of Resist buttons plus a shirt to pin them on for the sake of patriotic redundancy.
Meanwhile, you will be happy to learn that the Women's March anniversary souvenir book "Together We Rise," is now ranked #5 on the New York Times bestseller list. I was lucky enough to be first in line to score my free ebook version (via the New York Public Library and its crushing partnership with the ubiquitous rentier monopoly Amazon) of the $30 list-price volume.
Sadly, though, I have been unable to complete my reading to give you a full review at this time. Maybe it was the immediate shout-outs by the Women's March organizers to Facebook and Google, which helped jump-start the Operation Headcount "efficiencies" of the event. Maybe it was the fact that the protests were planned in the pricey Watergate Hotel and underwritten by Conde Nast, also the publisher of the new book. Maybe it was the hat-tip to professional MSNBC Russophobe Rachel Maddow, who supplied a huge chunk of the corporate-sponsored publicity. And since, for security reasons, only clear plastic backpacks were to be allowed at the D.C. event, the ubiquitous rentier Amazon quickly came to the monopolistic rescue and sold millions of cheap plastic backpacks to the marchers. Don't even get me started on pink pussy hats and the pink yarn shortage, which caused a big price spike for that color. Because, capitalism.
At least the organizers admitted that the initial, if not the core, purpose of the march was to give Hillary Clinton voters their moment of catharsis.
A few quotes in the intro jumped right out at me, and not in a particularly good way:
"I kept running into Trump supporters and many Russians in the hotel and thought, Is this real?" remembers one organizer."
"Hillary asked us 'How can I be helpful? Can I tweet in support of the Women's March?' We said, 'Absolutely.' So that day, she actually tweeted in support of us."
Now, to be fair, Together We Rise does flesh itself out with quite a few previously published or re-purposed essays by feminists, so I'll refrain from passing too harsh a judgment on the book until I've developed enough resistance to lurking treacle to finish the whole thing.
Sadly, I didn't see anything by Nancy Fraser or for that matter, any radical feminist, in the table of contents. So as an alternative, I would highly recommend her Fortunes of Feminism for a collection of scathing critiques exploring how the feminist movement has both been hijacked by, and has willingly colluded with, the profit-intensive ideology of neoliberalism. This current "wave" of anti-Trump feminism remains true to valorizing "the politics of recognition" over struggles for economic justice. The commercialized #Resistance is also virtually identical to the platform of the centrist, corporatized Democratic Party, in that both studiously ignore the need for redistributive economic policies, a fight which was at the very heart of the original leftist feminist movements, both in the US and internationally.
"The two-dimensional character of gender wreaks havoc on an either/or choice between the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition, because it assumes that women are either a class or a status group, but not both," writes Nancy Fraser.
Rather than simply "resisting Trump," the Left, what's still left of it, must not only resist getting sucked into the anodyne Hollywood version of protest but also embrace Fraser's suggested motto: "No redistribution without recognition, and no recognition without redistribution."
When the rich and the famous and the powerful posture as agents of social change and protest, everyday people and their everyday concerns are tacitly left out. The idea is that we can simply watch everything on TV: switching channels between the odious Trump reality show, and the mind-numbing liberal reality show.
Take, for example, the Democratic Party's choice of the person to officially rebut Trump after the State of the Union spectacular. Rep. Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts will make his national TV debut as the party's latest rising star and savior. (Oprah bowed out.) He's certainly got the name and the looks and the bathetic dynastic mystique. Other than that, he has refused to co-sponsor the Medicare for All legislation now pending in the lower House. He is also a fiscally conservative deficit hawk in the vein of the oligarch-friendly Clintonian Third Way. And why not? Young Kennedy has collected more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the shadow banking lobby, with his top individual donors listed on Open Secrets as Harvard University, Crescent Capital Group, Nixon Peabody, Bank of America, and Bain Capital.
So I think we can probably forget about any talk of economic redistribution during his rebuttal. As a matter of fact, his speech should mesh quite nicely with those delivered by the celebrity-soaked "People's" State of Union event on the preceding night.
Stay tuned, and don't forget to pass the stale popcorn. Even better, consider cutting the official content/delivery cord to give your brain a fighting chance to actually think.
* Update, 1/29: The surprise guest star of last night's Grammy show was Hillary Clinton, reading a selection from the anti-Trump breviary, Fire and Fury, and of course appealing to the mainly young TV audience of potential voters. This attempt at hipsterism worked out so well for her when Jay-Z and Beyonce threw her that election eve concert in Michigan! But make no mistake: Hillary is still the heart and soul, not to mention much of the monetized power, of the Democratic Party and its "resistance" franchise. Don't ask me why this is, because I honestly don't know. She maintains her access to the public stage as some sort of great national feminist symbol, even right in the wake of some old but embarrassing news about a predatory campaign faith adviser she once slapped on the wrist. So it's more than apparent that Trump fans are not the only ones plagued by a cult mentality of authoritarianism. This is the thing that the citizens of this country must actually resist.
