The Activism Games: From Young Adult Book Fans to Wizards of Change
21st March 2012
From the ‘Do Something Even If It’s Wrong’ chronicles: Midnight basketball for the Children of the Crust.
One of the perennial problems of modern revolutionary movements is ‘What do you do if you win?’ Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all faced this problem and answered it in different ways: Hitler by external war, Lenin and Stalin by internal purge, and Mao by cultural suicide. I think one can safely say that the these were all, shall we say, less than successful.
The modern Crust likes to encourage ‘activism’ amongst its juvenile tools (including, of course, its own offspring) — witness the ‘anti-fascist’ movement in Europe, whose chief characteristic is that they are actually the chief tool of the ideology that they claim to be fighting. There are two reasons for this, so far as I can tell: It gives Restive Youth something to do rather than effectually opposing those who actually run the circus, and it creates a handy tool to use against those who refuse to Get With The Program, such as the Tea Party movement in America and the Anti-Islamist movement in Europe.
The continuing problem, of course, is that ‘activists’ are active, and they might chance upon some cause that does not comport with the New World Order. So they must have straw men to fight, lest they turn and render their handlers. Hence projects such as these.
This week, Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” hits the big screen. As the latest wildly popular young adult (Y.A.) novel becomes a film franchise, it’s not just box office dollars that will be captured, but potentially nascent citizens. At least that’s the goal of the social campaign called “Hunger Is Not a Game” which aims to connect fans to the global food justice movement.
This is a perfect example of the increasingly fashionable trend that might best be described as a ‘theme circle-jerk’. It resembles nothing so much as what the authors of the Illuminatus trilogy called a ‘Bavarian fire drill’ — at the end of the exercise, everyone is back in their cars, having changed nothing but nevertheless having worked off some steam, imbued with a vague but satisfactory feeling of accomplishment.
The ‘global food justice movement’ is almost a poster child for the sort of thing with which the Crust occupies its more ADD denizens. What, exactly, is ‘food justice’? And in what respect is it ‘global’? This is one of those inchoate concepts that Voices of the Crust love to drop en passant in the sure and certain knowledge that those whose lives are a constant struggle with Fear Of Missing Out will nod sagely and say, ‘Why, yes, of course, the global food justice movement’, having no clue as to what it means but unwilling to acknowledge that they aren’t up to speed with the In Crowd.
It is, of course, more redistributionist nonsense — the fact that there are hungry people in the world and well-fed people in the world OF COURSE means that the well-fed have somehow done the hungry people a mischief, which it is the goal of the activists to shame them into correcting, preferably by means of giving the activisst money for them to distribute (with a healthy cut for themselves, naturally, for being so well-meaning). Nothing significant ever comes of it, of course — a wad of taxpayer-supplied cash to play with, a few meals augmented here and there, a notch on multiple resumés, but no real mark in the sands of time.
Food prices in recent years have hit record highs, leading to riots worldwide. Oxfam’s pledge calls for simple reforms: create policies that encourage crops for food, not fuel, reform food aid procedures and support small farmers.
This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. The reason food prices are high is because governments provide price supports, precisely to ‘support small farmers’ but chiefly benefiting Huge Corporate Farmers; of these ‘simple reforms’ that Oxfam would do: (a) ‘encourage crops for food, not fuel’ is directly contrary to official government policies based on the clamor of their fellow ‘activists’ in the environmental movement, and now set in stone for benefit of the typical special interests that grow up around any foolish government money-spending program; (b) ‘reform food aid procedure’ would have to mean getting the government (and NGOs like Oxfam) out of it, and you know that’s not going to happen; and (c) ‘support small farmers’ is a strategy guaranteed to keep prices high, since such farmers can’t use the economies of scale that actually bring prices down. So, as you see, it’s all hot air.
It’s worth paying attention to this campaign, not just because “The Hunger Games” film is projected to make $90 million at this weekend’s box office, but because Imagine Better is an example of how social change organizations are looking to tap into the extraordinary market power of Y.A. fiction — now the world’s fastest growing literary genre.
How to keep young people active but ineffectual? Key their themed circle-jerk to a current fad. You didn’t think that Lady Gaga got where she is today based on actual talent, did you? And it’s brilliant. Having ensured that two entire generations of young people will have no useful skills by pushing them into college and luring them into such wanker majors as art history, gender studies, and queer theory, the Crust capitalizes on the sort of ‘literature’ that is most popular with the arrested-adolescent set by keying their ineffectual ‘activism’ exercises to it.
Perhaps the most effective practitioner of fan-fueled social change is Andrew Slack, the 32-year-old founder of The Harry Potter Alliance and the force behind Imagine Better. Since Slack, who started out as a comedian, founded the Harry Potter Alliance, he has motivated Potterphiles to send five cargo planes with $123,000 worth of relief supplies to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, donate more than 88,000 books across the world, raise awareness about net neutrality and genocide and make forays into politics — taking on Maine’s 2009 ballot initiative that sought to repeal same sex marriage.
The ‘most effective practitioner’ is named Slack (surely this is a joke?), 32 years old but head of the Harry Potter Alliance (bet he still lives in his parents’ basement), and is ‘most effective’ … how? Sending food handouts to Haiti (an amount that Congress spends in about ten minutes on ethanol subsidies) rather than, you know, helping them grow their own food; donating a lot of books (and doesn’t that fill the stomach?); ‘raising awareness’ about net neutrality (seriously? ‘net neutrality’?) and genocide (not trying to prevent it, mind you, but just ‘raising awareness’ — for the Crust, ‘raising awareness’ is almost as good as actually doing something); and ‘forays into politics’ (in support of a typical Crustian political initiative — yeah, there’s hope and change for you). Really, you can’t make this shit up.
The rest is more of the same. The problem is that you can’t parody this stuff; they write a better parody than you can, and present it as news.