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There's a very interesting interview with Adolph Reed on the latest Matt Taibi podcast for Rolling Stone. Reed reflects in that interview that he saw the "video of 1968" playing in the eyes of the demonstrators in Seattle back in 1999.
This struck a chord with me, in fact I'd had that thought on many occasions over the last 2 decades since I first became politically active. So much of what we as a "left" did were attempts at imitating what we imagined the movements of the past to be.
It's like we were trying to find a winning formula A+C/G *F=Successful anti-war movement. I remember in the anti war movement days everyone kept calling for more and bigger demos. The references to the Vietnam era were made constantly. We were all trying to recreate it.
But it blinded us. It did so because we were trying to magic into existence a myth of the past. Even if we were accurate in our memory of that past event the context had changed so much that we were always doomed to fail.
It extends to everything. Our political imagination is so stunted by defeat, so polluted by hyper-mediating of past and present that we always seek to recreate images. We fail to see how stripped of all it's context even an accurate recreation is a failure.
It's the line for Shelleys "Ozymandias" over and over again - "Nothing remains beside that colossal wreck" - We keep trying to rebuild the past because we've had it drummed into our heads that we are at the end of history and there is no alternative in our future.
