Tipping Points and a “No Fly Zone” in Libya

Posted on March 23, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The Arab Spring has played out differently in each country in which it appeared, largely a function of just who is willing to defect from supporting the regime and throw in with the dissidents.  In Egypt, the military was willing to cut off President Mubarak, such that he really had no viable alternative but leaving power.

When the military moves to opposition side of the see-saw, it makes it safer for others to join in the opposition, and somewhat harder for a more diverse opposition to define consensual objectives.  In any situation, there are some people who are so committed to one position or another that there’s little calculation about what’s most likely or most safe–but in a revolutionary situation, they comprise a small share of those who are active.

Unlike the see-saw, the fulcrum of protest politics can move, and tipping points, as we’ve said, can tip back the other way.

Others make judgments about how safe protest (or support for an embattled regime) is, and how likely political change is.  Every decision can influence the decisions of others: it seems safer to go out into the streets when others are out there; it’s less risky to defect from the regime when you’re not alone–and you think the regime is unlikely to last anyway.  And judgments are subject to revision.

And in Libya: Once a coalition of military powers starts military action, justified with relatively broad and vaguely defined aims, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s political survival appears less and less likely.  Western politicians have been heavy-handed in warning others in the regime that they will face consequences when the regime falls, trying to hasten that process by promoting defection. Words, intelligence, money, and military aid all work to tip the balance.  And, obviously, some things matter more.

Dissidents who were vocal some weeks ago, quieted when Qaddafi’s forces made military gains, but they’re starting to talk again.  Most media reports in the US still disguise the voices of opponents who are interviewed, but that will also change in time, if people become more convinced that Qaddafi will fall.  The military intervention is a heavy thumb on one side of the political balance, and as that balance shifts, more factions will join the regime’s opponents.

At the same time, Qadaffi himself, apparently with few allies in the Arab world and no visible prospects for a safe exit, can see little choice but to hunker down and make his fall as difficult and costly as possible.  He can end the conflict by leaving power (as Secretary Clinton says), but where can he go?  It’s unlikely that he, unlike President Mubarak, can live out his days in comfort in one of his palaces in Libya.  Somewhere, someone in the opposition is trying to find and sell a safe exit strategy to the dictator, but it’s got to be a tough sell.

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Where’s the Peace Movement: The Problem of Urgency, Exhibit B

Posted on March 21, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Antiwar activists have had a hard time agreeing on goals and strategies and commanding public attention.  This is striking, particularly when President Obama has just engaged American military forces in action in Libya, while the wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are allegedly winding down, or at least American participation is supposed to be–even though tens of thousands of American troops figure to be deployed for years to come.  And the intervention in Libya is under the auspices of an international commitment to defend civilians against a truly horrible dictator, who has promised to fight down to the blood of the last Libyan.

President Obama’s expressed commitments to end the wars (even if belied by his actions) and to intervene only with international support have made it more difficult for peace activists to hang a target on him.

Consider the case of Bradley Manning, an enlisted intelligence analyst in the Army who apparently leaked more than 200,000

Bradley Manning

documents to Wikileaks.  Manning has been in prison for nearly a year under very harsh conditions.

On Sunday, an estimated 400 people demonstrated outside the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, where Manning is being held.  More than thirty people were arrested for staging an impromptu sit-in in the middle of the road after the demonstration was supposed to end.  They were frustrated that police were preventing them from placing flowers on an Iwo Jima memorial in honor of Manning.  The arrested included Daniel Ellsberg, who four decades earlier, leaked the Pentagon Papers.  (There was a sympathy demonstration outside the US embassy in London.)

Ellsberg has compared Manning to himself, a young and confused man who leaked documents to expose malevolent and anti-democratic policies, and compared the government’s treatment of Manning to the harassment he faced.  These are disputable points; see the commentary by first amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams, who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case.

For the moment, the striking thing is that the pro-Manning demonstrations got limited support from some of the largest anti-war groups.  Code Pink and International Answer supported the demonstrators–and Manning’s cause, but it’s been a lower priority for other groups.

The peace movement in the United States has always included people who opposed war in general and/or America’s role in the world, and others who questioned the morality and wisdom of particular wars.  Manning is a problematic poster child for a movement that wants to reach that latter group, and to put its focus on the wars.

But the antiwar movements have had a difficult time finding any other focus that commands large scale public attention and activism.

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GLBT Fundraising Falters: The Problem of Urgency, Exhibit A

Posted on March 20, 2011 by David S. Meyer

It was a good year for the gay and lesbian movement.  The last few years have included policy victories: the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military, a few favorable court decisions, and the institution of same sex marriage in several states.  The Obama administration has declined to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in a federal court, and the issue of same sex marriage will surely reach the Supreme Court in the next year or two.

Perhaps even more significantly, the world is changing: as support for gay marriage grows across the population, it is becoming so accepted among younger people that it’s almost not an issue.  This is true among liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats.

Note, for example, young Barbara Bush’s video for marriage equality in New York, in addition to Megan McCain’s somewhat longer term support for the issue.  McCain, at least, wants to make the Republican Party a more hospitable place for gays and lesbians, and even more, for younger people.

The tides of history certainly seem to be moving for gay and lesbian equality in America–and world-wide.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that the movement has won or that there won’t be significant setbacks over the next few years.  Even if our reading of the tides is right, there are plenty of cross-currents, riptides, and eddies along the way.

Here’s the challenge:  As the movement seems to be winning, its core organizations are having a harder time in raising money.  According to Shawn Zeller (Congress.org):

From 2008 to 2009, 39 of the largest groups saw their revenues fall on average by 20 percent, from a combined $202.7 million in 2008 to $161.3 million in 2009. That level of funding didn’t even cover expenses, falling short by $4.3 million.

The numbers were compiled by the Movement Advancement Project, a Denver-based think tank, and this is the first time such a tally has been released publicly.

Final revenue figures for last year are not yet available, but the report says the 39 groups responded to a bad 2009 by slashing their budgets last year to $135.4 million, 21 percent lower than in 2008. Among the groups participating in the survey were stalwarts of the gay rights movement such as the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

“The revenue drop reflects two things: the economic climate and some frustration at the pace of change in 2009,” says Ineke Mushovic, the Movement Advancement Project’s executive director. She expects that the burst of policy gains in late 2010 and early 2011, combined with a recovering economy, may create a better picture when the report is next updated.

I’m only halfway convinced by this analysis.  The faltering economy, to be sure, puts a strain on donors, and all sorts of political and charitable organizations suffered through the recession–and beyond.

But it’s more than that: people are most likely to give of their time and money when they see an issue as particularly urgent or promising.  Paradoxically, the great progress the gay and lesbian movement has made over the past few years undermines the feeling of necessity for many donors.

Of course, some large (and small) donors make long term commitments to particular causes.  But many people drift in and out of movements, depending upon personal and political circumstances.  People who saw glbt issues as most pressing three years ago may now see reproductive rights, education reform, nuclear power, or health care as more urgent at the moment, and direct their discretionary $30 or $100 accordingly.

Environmentalists do best when the administration is hostile to their cause.  Abortion rights and anti-abortion activists wait outside the Court for every decision, ready to announce defeats and urgent threats to stoke their supporters.  And the anti-deficit crowd got much more crowded and active when a Democrat took office.  (It’s not that President Bush governed as a fiscal conservative; rather, he just wasn’t as threatening an image to their supporters as President Obama.)

Organizations face the dilemma of claiming credit for their victories in such a way that it still seems absolutely urgent to keep supporters tuned in, ready to turn out, and to open their wallets.

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Global Antinuclear Revival

Posted on March 18, 2011 by David S. Meyer

No nuclear plant outside Japan is less safe today than it was before the horrific earthquake/tsunami combination that unleashed an unfolding nuclear nightmare in Japan.

Antinuclear activists protest in Germany

But the accidents in Japan underscore the risks of planning only for crises that might occur every one hundred years.  An earthquake that registers 9.0 on the Richter scale is an exceedingly rare event–the largest quake to hit Japan since such things have been monitored.  We can understand why a politician or bureaucrat would balance the promise of nuclear power against a relatively small risk–particularly in the limited time frames of an electoral cycle, tenure in office, or even a life.

Until the rare event takes place.

Antinuclear activists elsewhere in the world aren’t waiting for their own domestic disasters.  The reactor accidents in Japan have underscored the urgency of those who are already committed, and bolstered their chances of reaching people who were less convinced that nuclear safety was the critical issue to engage.

Turkish activists protest against nuclear power

Protest campaigns have percolated up around the world, including Belarus, which plans to purchase its first nuclear reactor since the Chernobyl accident (when it was part of the Soviet Union), France (which gets roughly 3/4 of its electricity from nuclear plants), India,  Indonesia, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey.

Thus far, the protests have been the largest in Germany (see video), which has a long history of antinuclear activism, and a government that has been compelled to respond to the activists.

The protests aren’t spontaneous; they’ve been organized by groups that have been trying to organize and mobilize for years.  Suddenly, however, their message started coming across more powerfully.

It’s not that the antinuclear activists have changed their rhetoric or tactics, so much as that a critical event has suddenly added exclamation points, amplification, and credibility, to everything they say.  Like the umbrella salesman working on a busy city street, circumstances outside his control have a great deal to do with how he’ll do.

Transnational groups, like Greenpeace, will support, and more importantly, publicize, activism everywhere, and activists will take their cues from each other.

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Out of the (Sesame) Street and into the Capitol

Posted on March 17, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The Sesame Street cast and crew appeared in Washington DC yesterday, to lobby against cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The House has already voted to zero out the appropriation, which totals about $420 million dollars.

Although that’s a lot of money for most of us, in the scope of the federal budget (and deficit), it’s not quite even rounding error.  And let me confess: I love Sesame Street.  No parent who has spent much time on the sofa watching children’s tv would suggest that the private sector (e.g., Nickelodeon, Disney, Cartoon Network) offers programming comparable to what’s found on PBS.  (Favorites in my house have included Sesame Street, Between the Lions, Arthur, and Fetch with Ruff Ruffman.)

Grover, Maria, Gabby, Luis, Oscar, Joan Ganz Cooney, Elmo, Susan, and Gordon

Most of the media coverage has, to date, focused on National Public Radio which, critics claim, is leftist.  The only specific examples I’ve seen cited are the controversial James O’Keefe tape (which has been taken apart on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, and discussed here) and the firing of Juan Williams, but the bias charge has remained largely unchallenged (see On the Media’s take).

When Elmo and his neighbors leave Sesame Street to lobby in Washington, they are trying to offer an alternative image of public broadcasting.  They are also using their celebrity, and the residual goodwill surrounding their public image, to build support for public broadcasting. Although I doubt that Sesame Street’s prime audience, preschoolers, is paying much attention to the debate on Capitol Hill, but some of their parents and grandparents are.

Arthur and the executives

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Nuclear Power and Protest

Posted on March 16, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The continuing disaster in Japan hasn’t closed the nuclear debate in the United States, even as many national political figures, including President Barack Obama, have been trying to invigorate the nuclear power industry.

This is a social movement story.

In the United States, opposition to nuclear power grew in the the 1970s, expressed mostly through local campaigns directed against new nuclear power plants.  The vital core of these campaigns was the Union of Concerned Scientists, which started in 1969 as a group of MIT faculty and students opposed to the war in Vietnam.

Activists who had cut their teeth in the antiwar movement burrowed into local politics, organizing antinuclear campaigns across the country.  Their issues were the same ones we point to 40 years later; they worried about the safety and cost of nuclear plants, about spoiling the environment even if nothing went wrong, and about disposing of nuclear waste.  They also worried about the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, warning about the proliferation of nuclear weaponry.

Activists engaged in large and small demonstrations and civil disobedience actions, most memorably at the site of a planned reactor in Seabrook, New Hampshire (Clamshell Alliance) and San Luis Obispo, California (Abalone Alliance), and an operating plant at Rocky Flats, Colorado, which made weapons material.

A larger movement grew to coordinate these efforts and make claims nationally.  Activists planned to conduct a large demonstration in Washington, DC in May of 1979, and the reactor accident at Three Mile Island boosted the turnout, the urgency of their efforts, and the attention they got.  In the fall, Musicians United for Safe Energy [MUSE] (including Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Springsteen) held a series of “No Nukes” concerts in New York City to raise money (and visibility) for the movement, producing a record album (on vinyl!) and a movie in the process.  The same year, Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas starred in The China Syndrome, a thriller about a corporate cover-up of a nuclear accident, a movie that circumstances made perhaps more popular than its artistic merit might have warranted.

While activists didn’t exactly win–some, but not all, of the plants they protested were ultimately built–they pushed the federal government to work harder to ensure reactor safety, with more formalized approval processes and safety regulation.  All of this drove up the costs of building new plants–as did the protests.  It was harder and harder to make the new numbers work, even with large federal subsidies.

No new nuclear plant has been licensed in the United States since the reactor accident at Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania.

Older, likely less safe, plants continue to operate across the country.  [The San Onofre plant (left), not far from here, sits next to a popular surf spot.  Waiting for waves, surfers sometimes joke about warm currents.]  The United States generates about 20 percent of its energy with nuclear plants–less than Japan, and much less than France.

This isn’t the outcome that anyone wanted.  The industry had far more ambitious plans for nuclear power in the United States, while activists wanted to shut down the more dangerous plants already operating.  Stalemate isn’t the same as satisfaction.

As the nuclear power stand-off took hold, many activists and organizations shifted their efforts to campaigns against nuclear weapons (President Ronald Reagan helped with this shift).

Some people, increasingly concerned with climate change, supported a shift to new (ostensibly safer) nuclear plants–which don’t generate greenhouse gases.  This includes President Obama–but not Al Gore, who reiterates the concerns raised by scruffy activists outside plant gates 35 years earlier (full disclosure: sometimes, including me).

John Hall, the lead singer and songwriter of Orleans, who had organized MUSE and the No Nuke concerts, and written the (insipid) antinuclear anthem, Power (clip), got into politics.  Elected to Congress from upstate New York in 2006, he was one of the Democratic casualties in 2010.

David Weigel reports that supporters of nuclear power in industry and government haven’t backed off that support in the wake of the unfolding accidents in Japan, but they acknowledge that their efforts will be even more difficult in the future.

After all, no one thinks that the Japanese would be less attentive to the dangers of nuclear power, less careful in construction, and less prepared to handle accidents than Americans (see Anne Applebaum‘s discussion.).  (Compare the response to the accidents in Japan, where stockpiles of iodine were available for immediate distribution, to the American response to Hurricane Katrina which, horrifyingly, was a smaller disaster.)

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On Wisconsin: After Defeat, Activists Pick New Arenas

Posted on March 12, 2011 by David S. Meyer

When a door closes, start trying the windows.  A defeat in Wisconsin has spurred a new wave of activism, and advocates have turned their attention beyond the state senate.

In the United States, when activists lose a battle in one place, they look for other arenas in which to carry on their struggle.

Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president, has offered thanks to vigorously anti-union Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker.  (I believe that Trumka is also the only person on Glenn Beck’s list of the nine greatest dangers to the Constitution who is not Jewish!)  As reported in Politico:

“We probably should have invited him here today to receive the Mobilizer of the Year Award,” Trumka said Thursday morning while speaking to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. “Wisconsin is the beginning — it’s pushing the start button” for pro-labor activism.

Of course, it’s Trumka’s job to exude optimism and outrage, but the Wisconsin campaign has given organized labor the kind of focal point and opportunity for effective activism and outreach that unions have had a hard time finding in the past half-century.

Today, Governor Walker’s opponents have mobilized the largest demonstration yet protesting his (at the moment, successful) effort to dramatically limit collective bargaining–and his policies in general.

As you recall (see here, here, here, and here, e.g.) the Democrats in the Senate had extended and expanded the debate on collective bargaining by leaving the state, denying the Republicans the quorum they needed for a budget bill.  Even as negotiations with the governor continued, the Republicans in the Senate pulled the labor provisions out of the budget bill and voted on them separately, sending the new, narrower bill to the state assembly.

Once the Senate bill was over, activists shifted their attention to the state assembly, and through vigorous demonstrations in the Capitol building, delayed assembly passage for a few hours.  When the bill was signed, activists continued to mobilize, drawing funds and attention across the nation.  They’ve continued to demonstrate (inside and outside the capitol), filed legal challenges to the new law, and fully engaged in recall campaigns for virtually every elected official eligible for recall.  (In Wisconsin, an elected official can only be recalled after a year in office.)

There’s all kinds of other stuff around the periphery.  [I was most amused by a facebook campaign to find and destroy Scott Walker’s horcruxes (need I note that this is a Harry Potter reference?):

We’ll need all the help we can get to find and destroy ALL SIX of the Governor’s horcruxes before formal recall procedures can be initiated on January 3, 2012.

Especially important will be gathering any information we can on his most valued possessions, and on places from his past that may hold a certain glamor for him, (ex: American University in D.C. where he …first met Ronald Reagan in 1985.) Also needed will be any sites from his past where he may have committed acts of unspeakable cruelty. We can infer that he’s used the Imperius Curse at least twice; he won both his Assembly and his County Exec seat in “special elections,” the first unopposed, the second after his predecessor “resigned.”

Please share any useful leads you might have. Remember not to use HIS name as it might be jinxed. (We prefer to call him “He who shall not be named……Governor”)]

Republicans have also started circulating petitions to recall the senators who left the state.  Thus far, it looks like they’re not doing as well as the Democrats in stoking activism or raising money.  David Weigel, at Slate, cites a fund raising letter from a Tea Party Express group, which suggests desperation:

Now, we must raise the money to fight back.  We must do much better than what we’ve done so far if we are going to be able to compete with the liberals and the $1.5+ million we’ve raised so far. I know so many of you have contributed already – but I need to ask you to please contribute one more time.

If the liberals can raise $1.5 million in one-weel then we must counter by raising as much money as we can to fight back.  Please make the most generous contribution you can to our campaign to Support Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican members of the State Senate.

Meanwhile, the “Fab 14” senators were given a hero’s welcome when the returned to Madison during today’s demonstration.  Madison police estimated the turnout as up to 100,000 people–more than Vietnam era demonstrations.

The Madison mobilization continued to display local passions, plus tractors, people in cow suits, and national activists and celebrities.  USA Today reports:

It drew high-profile public figures like actors Tony Shalhoub, a Green Bay native whose sister is a teacher, and Susan Sarandon, as well as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the longtime social justice activist. It drew tens of thousands of public employees and even farmers who created a “tractorcade” of farm equipment that circled the Capitol in the morning. And at its climax, it drew most of the state Senate Democrats who fled the state Feb. 17 in an unsuccessful attempt to block Walker’s bill.

Across the nation, liberal and Democratic groups are trying to tap into the moment and extend it, raising awareness, activism, and money.  They’re channeling their efforts into the recall campaigns, but hoping that the energy spreads far beyond those channels (e.g.)

Expect to see sympathy demonstrations, with labor unions at the core of the organizing, and expect to see conservative groups trying to generate some kind of grassroots response.

In the beginning, all the world was Madison…

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Investigating Religions: Congress, Muslims, and Terror

Posted on March 10, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Rep. Peter King, on alert

I’m deeply troubled by the hearings in the House of Representatives that opened today, “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.”  Initiated by Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, it’s hard to ignore the not quite implicit racism inherent.

It’s not that groups or individuals willing to use violence to advance their political goals aren’t a relevant concern–for Congress or for the rest of us–but this effort seems misspecified (targeted at the Muslim community in the United States, almost all of whom, according to Rep. King, do not support terror.)

From the start, even Rep. King’s commitment to stopping terror is undermined by his own past, as a supporter of the Irish Republican Army, as the New York Times reports:

We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” Mr. King told a pro-I.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.”

King’s past suggests that he is more concerned with causes than tactics, which makes the hearings seem targeted much more at American Muslims more than at terror.

Even more than that, focusing on the broad and diverse communities of American Muslims is an extraordinarily inefficient way of going after terrorists.  Neither the House of Representatives nor the state of Kansas held hearings on radicalism within Christianity when the professed Christian Scott Roeder murdered Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions, in Tiller’s church.  Of course, most Christians aren’t murderers.  But those few lunatics who murder doctors often claim Christianity.

If the idea of investigating Christianity in response seems ridiculous, why is Islam different?

And as Americans, we have a long history in which ethnic, racial, and religious groups have been scapegoated and demonized.  I would have thought that we would learn from our past, but people learn odd lessons:

In supporting King’s efforts, Ed Koch, former Congressman and Mayor of New York, compared the hearings to the investigations (and internment) of Japanese Americans during World War II:

Congressman King is now seeking to protect America and the Muslim American community.  How?  By holding hearings on whether or not the American Muslim community is becoming radicalized and giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies.

Remember, we are at war with Islamic terrorists who, according to the U.S. government, have Al-Qaeda cells at work in 62 countries.  Islamic terrorists have made it clear that they want to kill Americans – men, women, and children.  If the hearings establish that the American Muslim community, like the Japanese American community during World War II, is devoted and loyal to the U.S., wouldn’t that be of enormous assistance in protecting members of the American Muslim community from the charges that have been made against them?

Eventually, the United States apologized for investigating  and interning Japanese Americans during World War II, as we’ve discussed.  Fred Korematsu, who unsuccessfully challenged internment, saw the parallels between the wartime frenzy that put Japanese Americans in concentration camps and the post-9/11 stigmatization of American Muslims.

Protest in Times Square

Five hundred people protested against the  King hearings in Times Square, and there were other assemblies across the country.  From  Arab News.com:

Christians, Jews and Muslims gathered together in the rain to brand the hearings a witch-hunt, waved signs and chant: “Shame, Shame, Pete King!”

“Today I am a Muslim, too,” said Rabbi March Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is a co-founder of Islamic community center mosque near Ground Zero, also addressed the crowd.

We really don’t have to keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

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Irvine 11 update

Posted on March 10, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Nothing’s happened, but there’s plenty of news.  Coverage continues this morning on NPR.

Recall (post here): The Irvine 11 are students who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech here at UCI.  After facing discipline on campus, they now face criminal charges from the Orange County DA.  This ill-considered prosecution has helped bring national attention to the students and their cause, vindicating what seemed like a poor protest strategy by the students.

 

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The Hidden Camera: Technology, Testimony, and Truth

Posted on March 9, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Conservative hidden camera insurgent, James O’Keefe, has notched a victory on his own checkered activist scorecard, taking down the CEO of National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller, who resigned under pressure this morning.

Pretending to be a potential donors (funneling money from the Muslim Brotherhood), O’Keefe‘s associates lunched with Ron Schiller, a vice president of development (read: fundraising) at NPR who had already announced his impending departure from public radio.  O’Keefe They said offensive things at lunch, as did Schiller, and O’Keefe got it all on video.*  Smelling a big donation, Schiller (who had nothing to do with programming) worked to win the confidence of the faux donor.  I’d guess this is at least close to standard practice for people who have the job of cultivating large donors.  (See Jack Shafer at Slate.)

James O'Keefe in pimp outfit

O’Keefe has used this approach to go after what he views as liberal orthodoxy for years now, usually targeting lower-level staff, who are more accessible and perhaps more prone to error than corporate vice presidents.  He makes outrageous claims (e.g., Lucky Charms cereal offends Irish Americans, and should be banned from the school’s dining hall), and sometimes generates sympathetic (and horrific) responses.  Along with sometime ally, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, he’s gone after Planned Parenthood.  Dressed as a 1970s vision of a pimp, he helped take down ACORN.  Dressed as a telephone repairman, he attempted to tap Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones, and was sentenced to small fine and three years of probation.

Seeking stupidity and hypocrisy is terribly easy.  You can shoot hundreds of hours of tape, and leave everything other than that on the cutting room floor, broadcasting the most offensive moments.  And conservatives have no monopoly on the tactic, or on using subterfuge to get opponents to behave foolishly.  Just recently, Ian Murphy, of The Beast, posed as billionaire David Koch in a prank phone call to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  Walker was sufficiently solicitous of the faux conservative donor to provide ample material for a damaging tape (transcript here).

Even easier, interview activists at a demonstration on camera, and edit down to the foolish, misinformed, or sarcastic.

But, activists have always worked to document and expose the evils of their opponents.  In the very long campaign for abolition, the narratives of former slaves were a powerful asset for people who wanted to end slavery.  Their experience belied whatever claims supporters of slavery made about their beneficence.  Sojourner Truth’s testimony made it harder for people to ignore slavery.

For more than a hundred years, at least, journalists and writers have lived lives on the edge to document injustice.  George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London) and Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) are among the better writers who went undercover to live–and write about–the difficulties of those on the bottom of our social ladder.

Fiction may be even more powerful in spreading ideas and insurgency.  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (about slavery) and Upton Sinclair’s expose of meat-packing in Chicago, The Jungle, reached far larger audiences than any actual story.  The tortured prose of libertarian novelist, Ayn Rand, continues to attract readers–presumably on the appeal of her ideas.  Conservative activists have just recently produced a film of the first half of her novel, Atlas Shrugged.

The technological development of small recorders and cameras has made the expose more accessible.  It’s been a favorite tactic of environmentalists and animal rights activists, documenting whaling, animal experimentation, or slaughterhouses (Sinclair’s subject), and producing images far more accessible to a contemporary broad audience than even a well-written novel.  The web transmits the images quickly and indiscriminately.  (PETA.tv is a good place to see a samples.)

The prevalence of cheap video cameras–on almost every cell phone–means that it’s no longer paranoid to think that you might be on camera, and to worry that a moment’s comment might be broadcast globally and stored forever on the web.  I’m not sure this will help make the world more just–or more pleasant.

And, as audiences–and citizens–we’re left with the task of judging the integrity of the videographer, and whether the practice on camera is exceptional or business-as-usual–and which is worse.

* O’Keefe himself was not present at the lunch.  Corrected March 10, 2011.

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