Oregon Humanities Spring 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Field Work: Boots to the Pavement, Poems to the Parapet

Political scientist, poet, and one-time professional soccer player Jules Boykoff on the suppression of dissent in America and the need for artists on the front lines.

It's a gray morning, the color of gunmetal, the color of pavement, the color of approaching storms. But it isn't raining--which is good, since Jules Boykoff is arriving at the coffeehouse by bike.

Lean, mid-thirties, hair with a mind of its own--you might peg him as the former pro soccer player. Or the poet whose latest collection is called Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge. Would you cast him as the respected academic who is one of the country's leading thinkers on how government and the mass media meld to suppress dissent? Or as the researcher whose work on how the long-held notions of "balanced" journalism can backfire to create bias was cited by Nobel Prize winner Al Gore in the book and film An Inconvenient Truth? Probably not, unless you broadened or shifted or otherwise reshaped your perspective. Which, in fact, is exactly what Boykoff would like everyone to do.

An assistant professor of politics and government at Pacific University, Boykoff is the author of Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007), a meticulously researched look at the rise of today's public-relations-drenched culture and the Orwellian savvy with which our current government moves to preempt protest and dissidence.

Boykoff believes that political dissent isn't simply disagreement with government policies or actions. "To qualify as actual dissent," he says, "there must be some form of action tied to that disagreement. In one way or another, boots must be put to pavement."

Where once Plan A was to grind those boots into the pavement (Chicago, 1968, anyone?), today that is a last resort.

"There's a much more preemptive dimension to the way government suppresses dissent today," explains Boykoff. "Which, of course, dovetails with the notion of 'preemptive' wars. Once, the state would allow something to flower into dissent, then crush it with batons or bullets. Now, there's a different zeitgeist." As Boykoff points out, the Bush administration wrote the book on these new tactics--literally. "The Presidential Advance Manual," he says, "is a detailed handbook on how to prevent and/or squelch dissent and demonstrations at administration events."

Boykoff describes the rise of public relations sophistication and how it has served government from the outset:

"Spin was really given birth during World War I," he says. "Today we are drenched in PR. It's absolutely inescapable. It's much more difficult to be an informed citizen now--you have to somehow slice through all that spin without becoming enveloped in cynicism! It's not easy."

Boykoff has identified twelve ways that government and mass media converge to suppress dissent. A prime example on the government side is surveillance, which has a long history, justified and otherwise, and a sort of dark lord/poster boy in J. Edgar Hoover.

"The rise of new technologies," Boykoff argues, "and new laws have made surveillance an even more important mode of suppression. Warrant-less wiretapping, Section 213 of the Patriot Act--the so-called 'sneak and peak' provision that allows the FBI to enter your home secretly--these are just the most publicized examples.

Knowingly or unknowingly, media joins with government to suppress dissent in what Boykoff has dubbed "bilevel demonization."

"You have an external enemy," he explains, "and you have a domestic dissident group, which the government then links to the external enemy based on ideology or ethnicity or simply a label. The Earth Liberation Front is a good example. The government calls them a 'terrorist' group, but are they in reality? The ELF has never injured anyone. The media gets involved in the process when they transmit the connections drawn by the government at face value. I don't mean to say that there is some wide conspiracy in place, often it's just the structure of journalism at work."

For Boykoff, traditional objective journalism isn't always a good thing. He and his brother Max, a research fellow at Oxford University, published a hypothesis they call "balance as bias" in relation to mass media coverage of global warming. This was the work that caught Al Gore's eye. Simply stated, so-called balanced reporting actually misleads readers when the opinions of one or two scientists who don't believe in man-made climate change are given equal coverage with the opinions of the thousands of scientists who do.

So how do we resist this overt and covert suppression of the dissent that Boykoff sees as "an absolutely crucial cog in the machine of democracy"? Boykoff is buoyed by a belief that, indeed, the pen (and the brush and even the guitar) is mightier than the sword.

"What we really need now," he says, "are courageous, engaged artists who are taking up this moment as a call to duty. The antidote is art and artists who can step up and provide a serious dose of necessary spunk to the process of political dissent. That's how you turn spin on its head: with creativity. I mean, who does the PR industry recruit? All these creative people who would probably love to do something more with their lives than make money for corporations or help government pull off all sorts of dodgy shenanigans. But they are handcuffed by student loans or can't give up the lifestyle."

And Boykoff has a parting shot for those in the humanities who believe politics and art don't mix. "There are historical junctures during which it becomes vitally important to dispense with the notion of 'art of art's sake' alone. I don't support didactic political art that tells people they're stupid. What interests me is art that illuminates the political complexities of the real world. Art that embraces politics, but in ways that reverberate outward through the viewer or reader of the work. I appreciate political artwork that demands a thoughtful, active audience and knows such an audience is possible. Without dissent there is no democracy, and the humanities are vital in fomenting effective protest for our future."

--Todd Schwartz

Todd Schwartz is a Portland-based writer who is more likely to put flip-flops to the pavement than boots.

Published in the Spring 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities