The mischievous ones
By David Brooks
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
NEW YORK – The mischievous ones are harassing the powerful, which provokes a delicious laughter, a feeling that a rebellious heart still beats here, something like a collective recognition that a consciousness still exists and that sometimes it generates solidarity.
It may be a comedian, a singer, or a philosopher. It may be a famous person or an anonymous individual, it may even be a journalist who breaks away from the daily official story with some devilry, that is, a moment or a way to misbehave in the face of so much evil.
The torrent of news about the elections – what candidate said what, who’s winning according to such-and-such poll, what are his vulnerabilities, who can “create jobs,” who is truly devoted to education, health, the environment, who would be more macho in the international arena, who’s threatening war where, in other words, the national conversation authorized by the higher powers – threatens to drown everything.
But in the middle of all this suddenly appear some mischievous people who simply do not play by the rules. Some use mockery, others use music, others give voice to those who nobody in higher circles listens to, or talk about things the higher circles prefer to avoid. They are not marginal people. Among them are some of the most recognized, most distinguished figures in the country.
This week, TIME Magazine published its annual list of the 100 most influential figures in the world. What’s remarkable is not that the list includes the obvious people – the President, politicians and business figures – but that it includes the mischievous ones.
Most surprising of all is Stephen Colbert, the comedian who appears as an ultraconservative commentator in his TV program The Colbert Report. Colbert’s shtick is to mock, with tremendous intelligence, the daily political-social dynamics that appear in such a serious and arrogant manner in this country.
Also on the list is Anonymous, the collective of hacker-activists (composed not only of U.S. Americans) that has repeatedly faced, on the cybernetic battlefield, some of the world’s most powerful entities, demanding, from behind its iconic collective mask, democracy, transparency and accounting. “Expect us; we’re everywhere,” they warn their adversaries in power.
And there’s the undocumented students (one of them, Dulce Matuz, from Sonora, Mexico, who heads the Arizona Coalition for the DREAM Act, is on TIME’s list) who have propelled a brave movement by showing their faces and identity (risking deportation) as they demand their legalization and, with it, respect, dignity and the right to study.
Many of those who are not on the list also distinguish themselves by confronting, provoking or mocking the power. Of course, one of them is Bruce Springsteen, currently touring the U.S. to promote his new disc, in which he rips the bankers, saying that those responsible for the economic crisis had “committed a basic assault on the heart of what was the American Dream.” In one of his songs, he urges his listeners to “hold tight to your anger and don’t fall to your fear.”
Others who walk to that beat are Tom Morello, with his T-shirts featuring the IWW, the Wobblies, who have revived the great anarchist-unionist movement of the 20th Century, and plays a guitar that’s labeled “Arm the Homeless.” Patti Smith, the novelist-poet-singer-composer, who spans generations of fury and counterculture, says that “because nights were made for lovers” she calls for rebellion against the conventions that dull our lives. Anti-business rogues like The Yes Men, who drive executives and politicians mad when they appear, disguised like them, or when they provoke public relations crises in organizations like the Chamber of Commerce.
And there’s the people of Occupy Wall Street – youngsters, unruly musicians, students, union members, veterans of the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, veterans of antiwar and civil rights struggles, religious folks and more – who have transformed the national debate in a few months.
There are “spoken word” poets, a branch of the hip-hop movement, born among the poor. There are rebel philosophers in the same universities that shaped the powerful, such as Cornel West (a former professor at Harvard, now in Princeton) who, with the renowned TV-public radio interview host Tavis Smiley, crisscrosses the country in an intellectual caravan through poor areas, denouncing economic injustice and its consequences.
West points out that, in the richest country in the world, one of every two Americans is in poverty or on the brink of it and warns that if that doesn’t become the center of the national debate, American democracy will be destroyed. “Today’s topic is oligarchy. Poverty is the new slavery. The oligarchs are the new kings. They are the new bosses of this structure of domination,” West recently explained to journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.
Goodman is part of a broad spectrum of independent journalists with national influence that includes well-known veterans Bill Moyers of national public TV and Seymour Hersh. They and others repeatedly dare to break away from the official story (not just sometimes but all the time), defending the honor of their profession and observing the first commandment issued to every journalist by the legendary I. F. Stone: “All governments lie.”
This doesn’t mean that the country is at the brink of a revolution or a radical change. But the fact that all of these figures, individually and collectively, are not only present but also – far from being alienated – create an echo among millions of people in their country and the world, generating uneasiness and sometimes alarm and hysteria among the richest and most powerful, provokes satisfaction and sometimes even hope.
Each day, these mischievous ones somehow rescue this country.
