Searching, this last month, for books that might help me through the impending Kananaskis G8 Summit -- an even more remote venue for a major sporting meet, if you can believe it, than Asia was for this year's World Cup -- I found The Global Activist's Manual: Local Ways to Change the World (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 324 pages, $26.50), with an introduction by (yawn) Naomi Klein. Edited by "Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond (United for a Fair Economy)," it has numerous contributors -- among them activist icons Starhawk, Elizabeth Martinez, Kai Lumumba Barrow and Andrew Boyd.
Yet it is a book, I confess, that left me feeling rather hurt.
Enough that Naomi Klein, who is to global activism these days as Don Tapscott is to the Web -- tired, unrevelatory, institutionalized, and on unimaginative editors' first-call list -- was called upon to write an intro again.
No, what hurts is this. Having worked in Kananaskis, Alta., for a few summers back in the mid-'80s, constructing what is now the golf course there, I consider myself a fount of critical local knowledge. If this were Crete, in 1939, MI5 -- without today's technology -- would have certainly been in touch. But today, even as our government is building army encampments and issuing orders to shoot to kill if necessary, neither Starhawk, theatrical hit man Phil T. Rich -- of the "Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)" -- nor any number of the post-Seattle CBO stars in the Direct Action Network (DAN) firmament have deigned to get in touch.
I could have told the DAN, no doubt already moving in on Kananaskis, about Johnny Chrome, another alumnus of the golf course crew, who has cycled all over the roads and trails of Banff and Kananaskis, and whose years of teaching local kids to race would have made him sympathetic to the movement. Or about Rob Tooke, who founded Rudeboys, Banff's most successful and pioneering snowboard store, and how he used to start pressing on the horn of his '68 Rambler two or three miles up Highway 40 (the government's main avenue of approach) before arriving at the Kananaskis work site in the morning -- and that this is probably not a good way to arrive at the G8 camp unheralded.
I would have told them about Terry Wall, an Elmer Gantry-like figure and the man responsible for 100 Times Better, a musical celebrating the centenary of Canmore, Alta., a former mining town, back in 1983. Terry, well before most of these anarchist ingenues were out of diapers, was an accomplished grassroots activist who somehow managed to get elected to Canmore's town council a couple of times and counts members of the local Stoney band among his friends. Had Starhawk only called me, who knows, I might have leaned on Terry to get the DAN a vital laissez-passer through the Stoney reservation.
And I would have told them about Randy Eastwood, who led the pissed and renegade Kananaskis construction crew, single-file, across Canmore at dawn one July morning to where the company van would wait for us, on what we used to call Gasoline Alley, playing his saxophone all the way. That happened after we'd drunk all night, having put on 100 Times Better, to the pleasure of the town, the night before. The salient detail of this story, note, is that if you have the people's goodwill, only a minimal amount of stealth is actually necessary.
But no call came. Not even an e-mail circular. All of which leads me to conclude that the current hullabaloo about post-Zapatista Internet organizing between disparate anarchist groups is, in fact, overestimated. That, or the Kananaskis G8 is destined to be a flop, largely unattended except by our aforesaid army hauling anti-tank missiles, by park wardens drugging and displacing local grizzly bears, and various other government orderlies indulging in the very Canadian tradition of post-factum overkill.
Still, The Global Activist's Manual is not an unrewarding read, and I will hang on to it despite this nagging wallflower feeling. As with most guides to grassroots political movements, however, a lot of the pieces included in it -- mostly accounts of small industrial protests, written up by local group leaders -- are earnest and disheartening; six protestors outside a mill in Tennessee hardly threatens to rock the world, and yet ... and yet Seattle was revivifying, if only in showing that there was some opposition to systems of governance that the collapse of Enron, of the American Catholic Church and of the Liberal Party here in Canada (led by a thug who increasingly resembles Lee J. Cobb's mobster Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront) prove are in need of more than a little tinkering. Who needs these anachronistic G8 congresses, really?
And remember, it's not only the "activists" who would like to see the end of G8 meetings. As Canadian economist and international trade specialist Sylvia Ostry pointed out in the editorial pages of this paper recently, surely the best thing that could come out of the Kananaskis suitfest is the decision of its members not to meet again on such a ridiculous, ineffectual scale.
So, a modicum of support for the G8 protestors, even if this particular manual is, by and large, depressing. Some of the most interesting articles in it -- "Where was the color in Seattle?" by Martinez and "Harnessing Direct Action for Social Change," by Cameron Levin -- show just how tenuous is the alliance (and make one wonder if the absence of "color" at Seattle is also what made the protest acceptable to the media -- and the nation).
Andrew Boyd's "Billionaires Crash the Extreme Costume Ball" extolls the use of street theatre as an effective protest tool (it recalls, if the reader is in a generous mood, an equivalent role of theatre in the pre-1989 Eastern Bloc) and would have pleased my mate Terry Wall -- even if its players' college provenance lends legitimacy to Martinez's view that the activism movement is remarkably one-toned.
Starhawk's "How We Really Shut Down the WTO" is the most chilling and triumphant piece, a charter for action, but the better part of the book is a guide to the uneasy business of maintaining fractious coalitions.
The sotto voce message is that what happens with nearly any spontaneous "people's" movement is that, after a time, it crumbles. DAN, Soviet Socialist Union or Threepenny Opera gang -- without the refinements of the thing we call "democracy," human failings come out on top. We feud, we fall apart. The centre does not hold. Without proper procedure, a movement is doomed to fracture and achieve very little -- which is, if you think about it, what the G8 protestors have settled for: damage, overturned barriers, a bit of press attention, etc. What are the aims these days beyond disruption?
I despair for the DAN and note in passing that the greatest upturning of government policy in my own locality -- of the Ontario government's planned privatization of Hydro One (the pros or cons of the decision are not the issue here) and the gross salaries of its board -- was achieved through the courts and the threat of punishment at the ballot box. No masks, no tear gas, no barricades.
Is global activism a growing movement? I'm not so sure -- though at Kananaskis we'll get some kind of signal. But the consolation, for the visiting protestors anyway, is this: The eastern slopes of the Rockies are so extraordinary and compelling a landscape, such a remarkable playground, that a significant number of the Germans and Austrians we interned there during the Second World War stayed. They liked the activities. Next week we'll not see much protest, I'd wager, but who knows? We might end up with a lot more snowboarding stores.
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