"What are you doing sitting on your ass. Your very future is threatened and all you want to do is party and bullshit." I have scolded myself with such thoughts during this political season. "The most important election in a generation" is testing our "resolve." If you are over 25 it begs you to prove that you are truly an adult. In a serious time, adults respond with full attention, long deliberation and decisive action. Right?
There is no doubt that this is as serious a time. You no the litany: jails in place of schools; unjust wars are waged for profit; poverty - who did not go anywhere- is back in our faces after being ecplipesd by the irrational exuberance of the 90's; the civil liberties gods - that demanded the tribute of the lives and limbs of a generation- are again hungry. Money is being taken right out of worker's pockets in the form of tax cuts by a coterie of corporate sponsored politicians who rather lace school lunches with benzine and prozac than give up their box seats at the Texas Ranger's game; gay people are being witch hunted; women are being put back in their place; aids is now sponsered by Phizer et al; section 8 is gone today; social security gone tomorrow; fundamentalists of all stripes have hijacked religious discourse for power, profit, and self-delusion proclaiming that all this violence is being perpetrated at the behest of God who-if you ask your average American evangelical- looks like Ronald Reagan.
So maybe partying isn't so bad after all. Relative to the cynical objectives of the starch-collared marauders who we call our governors, the aims of the partygoer are noble: joy, shared experience, and novelty. With a mixture of music and camaraderie, parties dilute pretension and fear - the rocket fuel for war and terror. The party challenges the very notion of self-hood by submitting its participants to communal forces of dance and laughter. Security is not a contrivance of the party, but a direct effect of the communion. Party preservation-the urge to sustain the vibe-replaces self-preservation.
Parties are among our most subversive political tools. A party requires the presence of many who share a peaceful, even joyful, consciousness. As an act of peace, parties are the means and the end, the sign and signified, the thing and its expression. A party is proof positive of the very human possibilities that conservatives must deny in order to maintain their twisted Darwinian ideologies of winner take all. Partygoers eschew schedules in exchange for spontaneity. They forego individual accolades in exchange for group identity. But, if its a good party, they retain their ability to opt out whenever they feel compelled. It is this sense of chosen-ness, of the un-prescribed desire to participate that makes a great party.
Ironically, partys are perhaps the greatest obstacle to the viability of progressive politics in the United States. The dominance of party politics in America makes corporate patronage a requirement for political leadership. The needs of corporations are therefore disproportionately figured into the decisions of American political leaders. I think it is time for the word party to be used more liberally in relation to politics. The word, party, used to mean a social gathering could come to challenge the established use of the word party in the political sense. A political party would therefore be spontaneous and organic. Unlike a political machine, this sort of party must be fundamentally rooted in the needs and desires of its constituents. Let the parties begin. Let there be new parties every week to absorb our changing alliances. Let joy be our chosen form of protest.
check out this party we're thrownin'
// posted by brandon at
04:05 PM
