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| Re: Inside the political machine by Mischief Shai-hulud 03/17/2005, 10:02pm PST | ||||
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FABIO wrote: So Fabio gave me a rough draft of this story he wrote for a creative writing class called "Futile System." Whenever I mention politics on Caltrops something amusing always develops, so here's the excerpt I'm going to comment on: futile system draft wrote: Okay, there is no way a couple of guys this knowingly sarcastic would ever be manning a booth for a cause they know nothing about.* The second either of them even suggests they're accomplishing nothing, the two would look at each other, say "fuck this," and head out to the bars, leaving all the materials behind. *The one exception is if they're doing it to impress a hot wet-dream activist chick in an undersized "Feed the World" T-shirt. It's no secret that we'll consciously pick our hottest volunteers for drawing in new recruits. But that has less to do with a futile system and more to do with guys doing pathetic things to try to get in a girl's pants. If that's your angle, you could just as easily have these guys handing out fliers for an Indigo girls concert or picking her up some tampons. If they're doing this because the administration put them up to it... what kind of moron school do they go to where the administration would actively set up an info booth for an issue that was over years ago? And if this was a "PR stunt" where's the press? And what the hell did this school do that would require them to set up a PR stunt showcasing leftist student activism? Is their football team called "the Dumbshit University Nigger-Baiters?" In real life, these guys would either be total "Peter Pan" activists convinced that they, with their fliers in hand, were going to change the world, and so starry-eyed that it'd never occur to them to do the slightest research into the issue. Or they'd be pragmatists running a campaign that would actually work and know exactly what they're doing, but be cynic because their campaign needs the help of a large number of people but the vast majority of students, even the ones that say they really really care, won't get off their ass and do anything. If you're writing about Peter Pan activists, aka. "If we win the Lambada dance competition, we'll have 5 minutes of screen time we can use to tell America to save the rainforests and solve the whole problem right then and there!" then you don't need my input. It's the same old "bunch of humorless dumbasses who take themselves way too seriously work very hard on something that has no hope of ever succeeding" plot. It's not only stale and old, it's dangerous. If the movie "PCU" had merely been a crappy animal house rip-off no lasting harm would have been done, but this is the flick that launched David Spade's movie career! Can your soul handle a stain of "the aryan antichrist of weak-ass sarcasm" proportions? Plus that plot wouldn't have much to do with any futile system. Peter Pans are a dime a dozen. At best they accomplish nothing. At worst they're the rouge dumbass with a brick and a plan to trigger the proletariat revolution who manages to turn your entire months-of-coalition-building-press-wooing-background-researching-statement-preparing media event into a round of pundits clucking their tongues and shaking their heads at the brutality of these crazy hippies trying to relive the 60s by smashing starbucks windows. Note that activist members of the christian right who earn under $200,000 a year eerily mirror the leftist peter pans in almost every way. So let's put that scene together as if they were a pair of legitimate activists. Let's say that that political prisoner guy in Burundy really still is in captivity. These guys are working with activists in 10 other colleges to get this guy freed by having their colleges, which have millions invested in a major corporation that does business in that country, threaten to pull their investments if the corporations keep doing business in that repressive regime (pull strings to get the prisoner released) like what was successfully done to fight Apartheid in S. Africa. The Chancellor and the regents are understandably leery of pulling millions in stock out of a profitable company like that so they say they'll seriously consider it only if the group can prove that at least 50% of the student population supports that move. Unfortunately, it was a freezing cold night when their group has their recruitment kickoff so their volunteer base is way below what they wanted. The main character tried pooling resources with the fair trade group on campus. The fair trade group leaders loved the idea and thought that while they're at it the college should also go after three other companies it was invested in for their practices in other countries. When the main character cautioned them to concentrate on one thing at a time because this was going to be a stretch for the regents as it was, the fair trade group got angry and accused him of being an elitist and a sellout and started their own identical campaign focusing on their own countries. Short on help, the main character was pulling double shifts to keep up with their signature targets. To make things worse, the company they were targetting got wind of the campaign and were taking action on campus. Their PR department picked a handful of business students and young republicans to do a "paid internship" with a possible future job by starting their own student group to give voice to the "other side" of the issue. (They'd call it "Students for a Sensible Burundy" or something like that) The business students crapped their pants in excitement at the opportunity and began covering campus with expensively produced materials talking about how the company was helping to modernize the repressive dictatorship and build schools and ease it into a more democratic state, writing articles in the student papers about how the political prisoner was a crazy communist with terrorist ties while making fun of the main character's silly hippy group, and setting up speaking events with high-profile speakers. Last week the main character's group had set up a huge demonstration with a couple hundred attendees to draw atention to the issue and managed to get some media coverage. At the same time, the Sensible Burundy guys had their own demonstration with about 20 people. When the report came on the news, both sides were given equal time and no mention was made of how the main character's demonstration dwarfed the other in size. Shortly after that, he took part in the weekly conference call between the schools where it ws reported that most of the schools were behind in their signature quotas but his was the furthest behind. The main organizer, like most left-wing organizers, laid the guilt trip on thick, reminding the main character of the Burundy death squads and the massacres of civilians and the widespread famine and how meeting these signature quotas are YOUR responsibility and only YOU can make a better future for the Burundy victims. The time the main character's putting into meeting the signatures is cutting into his school work and his grades are slipping. He just broke up with his girlfriend for the same reason. He's run into tons of people who are, like, so supportive and would definitely sign, but very very few of them were willing to put in and hour or two to help actually win the campaign. Now he's sitting at the booth, a full color Sensible Burundy poster across the hall mocking him, and student after student passing them by while he stares at the petition clipboard in front of him and the pathetically low number of signatures. A white kid in B-boy clothes comes up and says, "Dude, do you really think a bunch of signatures are gonna change anything over there? Do you think that Filipe Butros Amandi is relieved that a bunch of college kids way over here are getting signatures for him while he's stuck in jail?" And the main character responds, "You can sign it yourself and find out." The b-boy walks off laughing. Then the main character says to his friend, "that guy from the mean streets sure is going to be pissed when they jack up state tuition on him again because he was too busy keepin' it real to vote." Then he buries is face in his hands, looks at the nearly-empty signature sheet through his fingers and sighs, "How the hell am I gonna pull this off in time and not kill myself?" That, my dear Fabio, is a taste of what real college organizing and the real futile system is really like. |
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