Wednesday, Mar. 17, 2004 - 11:02 p.m.

TV Land

I have not been keeping my readers updated. One thing I’ve postponed mentioning is that now I appear on a weekly public-access TV show which I’ll call Anarcho-Primitivism Today. It’s been on for a number of years, produced by shifting groups of volunteers. It started as a show about tree-sitting and other Earth First! kind of stuff, and morphed into a show from an anarchist perspective, particularly green anarchism, which is a medley of primitivism, anti-civilization, and anti-technology perspectives, and which is one faction of the post-Left trend in anarchism. Green anarchism is (for the moment) the wacko fringe of the anarchist milieu, which itself is a fringe of a fringe, but it has hegemony among anarchists in Eugene. It conflicts with my philosophy in several ways, but still comes closer than any other scene in town.

I first saw Anarcho-Primitivism Today after I moved to Eugene 2 years ago, and I thought it was pretty bad. It was just angry, depressed people bitching about how everything sucks, and how we’ve got to tear it all down. I started volunteering on the show tentatively, but was quickly pleased that the quality of the program had much improved since last I viewed it. Nowadays it’s a fairly serious news-and-commentary oriented show (Like the MacNeil-Lehrer Report?) with some occasional investigative reporting, or an original music video.

I was also following the example set by Ilonina, though I appear fully clad. No naked jello wrestling, nor anything like it, has been on the show since I’ve been involved. Last week we showed some footage I had not seen or heard of before: a small anarchist anti-war march from a year ago in Eugene of about 15 people that culminated in a confrontation at a Marines Reserve base in town, in which anarchists took down the US flag off the military’s flagpole and burned it in the street. Then, for good measure, they burned a black anarchist flag too, demonstrating some splendidly recursive anti-hypocrisy. I have seldom felt more inspired then when I saw that footage.

Now, even though I don’t watch TV, and I don’t own a TV, I’m on TV. I try to find areas where my ideas overlap with the scope and tone of the show. The areas of overlap are large: a critique of the State, a critique of capitalism, a critique of authority/obedience in all its manifestations, and a critique of liberals and the Left. In my on-air appearances so far, I’ve reiterated my anti-socialism rant, elaborating on gangs as a description of governments, and Stockholm Syndrome as a description of citizenship, and I decried birth registration as a mechanism for centralized authority to control a populace.

I am warming to some green anarchist ideas. While I’m not ready to reject technology, I think it would be fruitful to question every aspect of our material and cultural lives. Right now, perhaps every manufactured item is covered in blood. Industrialism as we know it is inextricably bound up with environmental destruction (raw material extraction and effluents, and shipping using petroleum) and degradation of the lives of workers (dispossessing people of their traditional lifeways through temptation or force, then regimenting them into productive units deprived of their full humanity) and consumers (manufacturing demand by drenching the culture with advertising). I still cling to a hope that we could retain the comforts, protections, and enhancements that technology has brought us without perpetuating that wretched context. But to change that context would require nothing short of a revolution. Green anarchism holds up primitive peoples as an ideal, and perhaps a goal, but offers startlingly little in the way of practical means to get from here to there. I think there are more profound ways (such as Nonviolent Communication and Buddhist practice) to alter the culture than the green anarchists’ nihilistic advocacy of riots and targeted property destruction. Right now, I guess my ideal society would be some kind of Ewok village with some ecologically sustainable computers, if such a thing is possible. I don’t want to see knowledge abandoned, just a shift to using holistic quality of life as the standard by which we make decisions.

Green anarchists look like hypocrites because they use all kinds of technology, such as cable television, to spread their message. I had to suppress laughter when local anarcho-badboy Johnny Z showed me how to operate the television camera, or when he gave me a ride to the studio and we stopped at a gas station and I watched him refuel. But I had to remind myself that anarcho-primitivists are not content to live as primitives themselves; they seek the collapse of all industrial society, and have decided to use whatever technologies are most expedient to get their ideas to the masses, because they’re going to need a lot of help in that endeavor.

I’ve heard that the police and the Secret Service monitor the show, which lends an air of danger, and a feeling of significance to the whole affair.

Leaving after the show last week in a car with three other members of the collective, a pig pulled us over for no reason as soon as we turned out of the parking lot. I was scared, thinking that this would momentarily turn into a Mississippi Burning-style political execution for the four of us. I was also content, for I’d much rather go out this way, dying for my beliefs, than from some stupid accident, or wasting away from cancer brought on by industrial pollution. The pig asked the driver what we were doing, and the driver responded truthfully that we were just coming out of the TV studio. Upon hearing that, the pig was satisfied, and let us go on our way. He said that he did not know there was a TV studio back there behind the high school, and had pulled us over because he thought it was suspicious for a car to be leaving the school parking lot late at night. Which means he did not know who we were, nor what kind of TV show we make. Whew! It was just another case of too many cops and not enough crime, so they take to harassing whoever looks suspicious in order to give themselves something to do.

Stay tuned…

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