Hi Alice, I grew up in San Diego and used to catch the Bags and other L.A. bands once in awhile when I was a kid (I was also a neighbor of Michelle Habell-Pallan's back when we were both students at San Diego State). Anyway, I recently stumbled onto your blog and have been reading with interest your observations on what it meant to be a violence girl since, for me, sharpening my fingernails into claws, throwing chairs, breaking glass, and punching out guys who so righteously deserved it were sort of defining moments in my development. Such fantastic and enriching experiences don't seem to translate well to a lot of my students at _______ College though and about six months ago a girl asked me, sincerely, why anybody would hate hippies. I had to stop for a moment and think about why we did hate hippies so much. Although part of it was undoubtedly a kind of generational backlash, part of it was also this instinctual understanding that their message of nonviolence was often just an apology for various kinds of monopolies on greater, and usually well-institutionalized, systems of violence. Let me try to explain. Recently, I've noticed a number of annoying authoritarian behaviors from these kinds of earnest former hippie types who always bothered me back in the day and continue to bother me even now; let's use the orange-vested "peace marshalls" at recent demonstrations as one example. The job of a peace marshall, as I see it, is to work with the police to make sure that protesters remain as passive and as ineffectual as possible so that the sponsoring groups can win the approval of the news media, local and federal politicians, and any other authority figures likely to lump them in with perceived undesirables--vegans, anarchists, and Zapatista sympathizers, for example--people whose very presence, apparently, seems to justify the anticipation and deployment of mace, rubber bullets, plastic handcuffs, bullhorns, helicopters, tasers, nightsticks, helmets, bullet proof vests, shields, squad cars, etc. I think what a lot of peace and love types seem to have forgotten is that even nonviolent protesters like Martin Luther King didn't go where they were loved, they went where they were hated. They went where there were dogs and water hoses and people wearing white hoods who wanted to hang them from trees. I remember how dangerous it was to just walk around not looking like Farrah Fawcett or Stevie Nicks, but also how thrilling it was, too, to think that if you didn't fit some desirable stereotype, that even a cop might be too scared to approach you. There was a great unpredictability in this. You didn't go get permission to have a demonstration, you just spilled out into the streets. You didn't hold a sign, you scrawled your message on a wall or carved it on your arm. Best of all, nobody had a cohesive plan. If someone messed with you or your friends, you just fought them right there. Or you talked your way out of it. Or you lost, but you did so with a sense of style, or humor, or both if it was possible. I remember one kid, the only punk in his high school, who got punched in the face by a football player just for looking different. He told the guy, "Thank you. Thank you very much" and then wobbled around a corner and passed out on a patch of grass. It was important for me to know that fighting back was O.K. because it made it O.K. not to fight back too, and a choice, my choice. In "How Nonviolence Protects the State" (South End Press, 2007) Peter Genderloos makes a pretty convincing argument that not only is the cult of pacifism delusional but it is ineffective. On some deep level we knew that hippies were full of shit, and that even efficient nonviolence requires a confrontation with a violent opponent before the tactic can even be recognized, let alone taken seriously. Kind of a scary concept, but one that, as I said, seemed to be intuitive on our parts. Just some things I've been thinking about. Anyway, love your blog. Love the Bags forever. Tamara _______ Grown-Up (!) Punk |
