The Sticking Place Theatre and Film productions

In anguish and anger, an increasing number of Americans, especially among the young, are becoming convinced that the presumed ideological based of American society – democracy – is a myth hiding a far more sordid and complex reality.

It is not possible to expose an entire generation of new, fresh, fervent and as yet uncorrupted minds to a succession of lies and disasters such as Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Santa Domingo, the civil rights legislation’s fiasco, the galloping death of our cities, the crisis in the universities, and un-resolved racial question, the unctuous hypocrisy of our leaders – and not simultaneously create in them a crisis of confidence.

What is new and ominous in the present situation is that the very concept of democracy itself has been compromised by its cynical manipulation and perversion.

All social systems, however laudable in theory, begin to serve diametrically opposed purposes as soon as their practices diverge from their professed intentions. At such a point, to continue mouthing slogans of ideologies no longer operative begins to serve a profoundly reactionary function.

Specifically, in a system with built-in inequalities, the invocation of democratic slogans against the oppressed merely serves to protect the status quo; the equality of the rich and poor consists, as Anatole France remarked a long time ago, in their equal right to sleep on park benches.

In 1969, in America, to tell Blacks or radical students to redress their grievances by the ballot box or Robert's Rules of Order is an act of political hypocrisy and profound conservatism. This is because the ‘game’ of American democracy is in itself rigged.

Democracy presupposes an informed electorate, with open access to uncensored information media, and their right to select and vote for representative of their choice. In America today, however, newspapers, television, radio and cinema are controlled by the few, dependent on money and power available only to the establishment, with access to them severely limited or non-existent for the rest of the population.

The selection of political representatives is controlled by political machines, in turn created and dominated by factions within the establishment. Decision-making and effective control of local, state or federal governments, as well as of schools, universities, foundations and cultural institutions, is likewise in the hands of the power structure.

Under the circumstances, in America it is the establishment which – to protect its privileges – parades as champion of the democratic mythos, while it is the radical, desirous of making democracy meaningful for the first time, who is forced into seemingly anti-democratic acts. This is the ironical outcome of the perversion of the democratic ideal in this country.

The liberal philistines and self-satisfied bourgeois flutter their wings in utter dismay every time White students occupy a building or a Black ones parade with (unloaded) rifles. Sitting in secure control of all levers of power and information, they do not wish to see them threatened and therefore oppose these haphazard forays by their as yet sparse opponents. This is why the ‘hot’ defense of what should be their inherent rights by militant Blacks (riots, self-defense units, student rebellions) is denounced as violence; while the cold institutionalized violence practiced by Whites against the Blacks (age-old discrimination, deprivation and injustice) is, at best, viewed as an imperfection of the democratic system, sooner or later to be corrected.

Consider a recent television symposium on the SDS and Black student rebellions, in which both radicals and conservatives, Sidney Hook and others, participated. It quickly became apparent that the most effective panel member was a New Jersey professor who, in an intellectually rigorous way, attacked the radicals for denying him his democratic rights and violating the democratic process as well. You have every right to protest and petition, said the good professor, but none to prevent me from doing what I want to do, ie. teach. What would you say if I – merely because I disagree with you – disrupted your classes? Is this what you do, in a democracy, when you cannot get your views accepted by a majority? Disrupt the schools of get guns? You are not playing the game of democracy fairly.

The good professor would be entirely right if the game of democracy were played in a vacuum, an intellectual exercise between equals, with the more convincing side winning, and constant readjustments of elites and objectives possible. The reality, however, is quite different: the professor speaks from a position of power; the American university is very much part of the establishment; the students and Blacks lack power vis-à-vis this establishment; basic inequalities are built into the system; the Blacks suffer from a double disenfranchisement; and what is most important, the possibility of democratic, peaceful change from within, has proven to be utopian, given the self-satisfied rigidity of the existing school system. (The university reforms of the last two years are the direct result not of democratic persuasion but of social force; this lesson has not been lost on students, both Black and White.)

These built-in features so completely pervert the democratic process that it is profoundly reactionary to invoke its rules in this case, as do the professor and others. The true defenders of democracy (or of a democracy that does not yet exist) are ironically placed in the position of attacking the system by force and bearing the burden of being called ‘fascists’ by aging old Leftists such as Howe and Rustin. Just as Julius Lester profoundly commented that many American Jews now mistakenly consider the Blacks as the Nazis of America while in actuality they are its ‘Jews,’ so must we say that it is neither Rudd nor Rap Brown who are the fascists of America, but rather the bland, ‘principle-less’ administrators and trustees who invoke ‘democracy’ against the young rebels.

It is in this sense that the entire mythology of democracy in America – shot through to the core with cant, hypocrisy, lies and privilege – has become a hindrance to social progress. On its deathbed, bourgeois democracy, never a perfect virgin, is being repeatedly and cruelly raped by genial totalitarians parading as anti-totalitarians. Paradoxically, the path toward real democracy – a mixture of socialist and anarcho-syndicalist elements, and participatory, free, pro-life oriented, decentralized, ‘sensuous’ (Marcuse) in style – leads through a rejection of the falsehoods of prevailing pseudo-democracy.

At present, the country is full of object lessons of the rejection or manipulation of the democratic process in the name of democracy. To the extent that these are large and significant, they are discussed at least in left-of-center magazines and the radical underground press. Less conspicuous, but even more symptomatic, and testifying to the all-pervasive corruption of the system at the lowest level, are the object lessons that surround us daily to such an extent as to become practically invisible and accepted. It is in these ‘small’ issues, however, that the real nature of the system, and the manner by which it controls us, are most manifest.

In New York, the disastrous 1968 teacher’s strike against public education and community control – a short-sighted, racialist ploy by powerful, desperate interests centered in the white middle-class and urban Jewish establishment – has helped polarize Whites and Blacks for years to come and introduced ominous tensions among parents and teachers, teachers and children, and parents who previously seemed on the same side of the barricades (or fences). Radicals were revealed as timid liberals, Old Leftists and strident Neo-Conservatives, Liberal Integrationists as Jews-Ueber-Alles, and Democrats as Proto-Fascists. Perversely, we must be grateful to Albert Shanker, a most dangerous politician, for stripping away masks and posing central issues.

The strike has left a permanent legacy of dissension within all institutions and groupings touched by it. Within the Parent-Teacher organizations at New York’s public schools, the dominant groups – an alliance of the United Federation of Teachers and White middle-class parents – are for the first time confronted by new power groupings, specifically the more committed the radicalized parents who opposed the strike and in some cases helped open the school during its course. These groups, usually organized in ‘Concerned Parents’ factions, now contest the previously unchallenged majority leadership of the UFT-Parent alliance. In so doing, they invariably are confronted by manipulations and perversions of the democratic process indicative of the extent to which the very concept has been emptied of meaning: to explore their nature – given the crucial significance of the issue of public education and community control – is of utmost importance to radicals.

A few weeks ago, the present PTA leadership of PS 41, the Greenwich Village public school, was confronted by a series of proposals by the dissident ‘Concerned Parents.’ The issues were intricate and required detailed analysis; what concerns us here, however, is not their substance or merit but the methodology of non-democracy by which they were contained.

Position papers relating to the issues were ‘mailed’ to parents in curiously haphazard fashion; the issues were to be discussed and voted on at a special PTA meeting. A few days before, parents were suddenly advised that both the meeting and the voting would begin simultaneously.

This intriguing new kind of instantaneous democracy predictably led to a surrealist situation. While many members voted and left immediately afterwards, others futilely tried to start the meeting. A ‘Concerned Parent’ wanted to know how one could simultaneously discuss and vote on an issue. What followed was an exercise in proto-totalitarianism parading as democracy. A youngish mother from the majority delivered a cold, intense little talk on how ‘undemocratic’ it would be to tell her when to vote or to force her to be present at a meeting and listen to arguments before her voting on them; who had the right to ask her how many newspapers she had read or meetings attended prior to voting for Nixon or Humphrey?

In the guise of defending democracy, this young woman betrayed her ignorance of its essence. To decide a given issue, Robert's Rules of Order, the scaffold of democratic procedures, provides procedures for the proper introduction of a motion, then its discussion and, finally, a vote. Discussion is the single most important ingredient in this procedure, the heart of the democratic process, during which minds are changed and made up; its course and nature is carefully protected. Not so, says the lady, let us vote first and discuss later; or let us vote first and not discuss at all. ‘Who wanted to sit through all that talk?’ is not a favorite phrase of the non-democrats, used copiously not only at parent-teacher meetings, or of certain political organizations, but also reminiscent of Nazi and Stalinist organizational methods in the Thirties. Totalitarians have always displayed ‘impatience’ with the democratic process.

To give each person a vote is only one component of the democratic process. Equally essential is the presence of an informed electorate. A vote without knowledge may be worse than no vote at all. No one should compel a citizen to come to discussions; but where they do take place, and he does not attend them and votes nevertheless, he impairs, in terms of personal morality and social result, the game of democracy.

The overhead to be paid for participatory (real) democracy is protracted, at times chaotic discussion, which slowly, confusedly, inevitably begins to crystallize possible solutions. Tidiness of discussion stands in inverse ratio to its efficacy as a tool of democracy. Anyone who had occasion to participate in the endless discussions of the French student rebels and the New American left realizes that in their very un-orderedness and anarchic chaos lies one of the best guarantees against totalitarian manipulation.

This concept of discussion and intellectual interplay is, of course, endemic not just to parents, but to the very fabric of American society today. Ideas and issues have been subsumed as marketable and controlled commodities into the workings of society. A most dangerous instrument of this transformation is the mass media – which sandwich the few discussions of social issues between soap operas, commercials and innocuous entertainments, and determine their duration not by the inherent needs of the issue under debate but by the exigencies of broadcasting schedules and available space, controlled in both instances by the overriding requirements of sponsors and advertisers. This tendency is further reinforced by the use of TV interviewers totally ignorant of the issues they are to discuss (such as Mike Wallace’s recent scandalous ‘interview’ with Cohn-Bendit). Neither newspapers nor TV even bother to record speeches and debates in Congress and the tendency for the political machines to select candidates from the viewpoint of looks and TV popularity rather than intellectual sagacity has been widely commented upon.

The total frequency of commercials and advertising by far exceeds that of the intellectual debates, and the utilization of police, teargas, bayonets and buckshot to ‘arbitrate’ essentially intellectual challenges posed by political demonstrations serves as an effective index of the society’s real attitude toward such dissent. Can one then really be surprised at the cavalier dismissal of discussion and debate by a group of parents – or, for that matter, by any other social grouping?

The chairing of a meeting by a representative or leader of one of the parties to a dispute is another favorite anti-democratic device, leading to the most luxuriant and tendentious rulings masked as democratic. When another parent at the same meeting asked the chair to explain who and how it had been decided that the voting could take place concurrently with the discussion, the PTA President, who chaired the meeting, announced, a bit flustered, that this had been a decision of the Executive Committee. If so, let us discuss if this was a correct decision, she was asked. No, that would be out of order, she replied, since the Executive Decision had already voted on it – a perfect example of circular reasoning.

A few moments later, a lady from the audience announced that although herself a member of the Executive Committee, she had never heard of such a vote being taken. The PTA President thereupon attempted to move to another topic but, when pressed, vaguely explained that there were ‘elected’ and ‘appointed’ members of the Executive Committee and that only the ‘elected’ ones had voted on the issue. This ‘explanation’ added fuel to the dispute, since it points to the existence of two classes of membership. Either the ‘appointed’ members were, in fact, second-class citizens or the full Executive Committee had not voted on the proposal. Further clarification was sought from the chair; but now the PTA President, firmly in its control, stood her ground, pale and tense, and, despite ever more insistent demands, simply refused to reply.

The refusal to provide pertinent information, the refusal to reply to points made in a discussion, is in itself a perversion of democracy, as is the passive acceptance of such acts on the part of those present. Democracy is a game that can be played only if all will play. Lack of information leads to an uninformed electorate, a danger to the democratic process.

The brief position papers outlined various viewpoints, prepared before the meeting, were made available to parents in the most desultory fashion and under the effective control of the PTA leadership, one of the parties to the dispute. They were either mailed or handed to the children (aged 6-11) to bring home. The predictable result was that many parents lacked one or more of the documents sorely needed for background information to the issues under dispute.

This is an especially weighty issue since the PTA mailing list is in the hands of its present leadership. This gives control of access to one party, an untenable limitation and denial of the democratic process. As usual, this occurs in the guise of democracy: “We must protect the parents from unauthorized use of these lists.” The Majority addresses the electorate at any time, it slants the news and announcements in any way it sees fit; the Minority, on the other hand, either cannot approach the electorate on an equal basis or must commit an ‘illegal’ act to obtain the parents’ lists which should rightfully be theirs. (In some schools as they had physical access to the files at the time, the Minority obtained the lists during the teachers’ strike, and were promptly denounced as anti-democrats for having done so.)

It is significant that in a recent decision involving the mine workers union, the courts declared that a minority group within the membership had the constitutional right of equal access to membership lists. This decision indicates both that such violations of democratic procedures, far from being limited to PTA groups, occur throughout society and also the (limited) possibility of recourse still episodically available in America.

The PS 41 situation represents and earlier stage in a totalitarian degeneration of the PTAs that has reached its culmination in certain other schools such as the Bronx High School of Science. There the PTA is in the hands of a proto-totalitarian clique whose antics must literally be seen to be believed. There is absolutely no way for a minority to express its views or affect action. Speakers from the minority are not recognized, declared ‘out of order,’ shouted down or denounced. The meetings are completely controlled and carefully manipulated as to time, scheduling, content. Controversial issues are not taken up or intentionally incorporated into agendas so tight as to make any discussion impossible. The chair is regularly held by the PTA’s President, a crass totalitarian, who at a recent climatic confrontation between Majority and Minority declared that “although favoring one side,” he was going to chair the meeting, and “since I know all the facts, I shall immediately correct and misstatements from the floor.” His first official act was to ‘grant’ the Minority one speaker and his own side several.

‘By decision of the President’ (!), balloting on a recent key issue, hotly discussed by Majority and Minority, was by numbered, written and open ballot (invalid without the voter’s name!), a device that effectively prevent many parents, fearful of their child’s position in the school, from expressing their true feeling.

The PTA bulletins, mailed to parents, in their outrageous portrayal of the treacherous, nefarious, criminal schemes of the subversive Minority groups, read like an updated version of the anti-Semitic Nazi sheet Der Stuermer: ‘It is characteristic of the leaders of the Minority that continually tried to cause disruption and turmoil this past year that no matter how often and overwhelmingly they are rejected by the vast majority of the parents, they will continue, like a cancer, to try to find a place to establish roots and grow, eating away at your Association and your school… Constructive voices, ideas, questions and dissents will always be in order at the Bronx H. S. of Science. Destructive power plays must always be put down.’

It is, of course, the Majority that determine at any given moment what is ‘constructive’ or ‘destructive’ (and therefore to be ‘put down,’ a truly ominous phrase).

But the most appalling aspect of the Bronx situation are the parents themselves. It is as if years of television, packaged foods, evening papers heavy on ads and light on news, life-less plastics and the psychic impoverishment of the contemporary urban scene, had finally taken their toll. There is nothing more sinister than the petty-bourgeois on the rampage. His style and values constantly tempt us to ridicule, but his crude, intemperate, intolerant actions reveal him as frightening counterpart of the Little Man of the German Weimar republic, prospective infantryman of future fascism.

These parents, largely hard-working, lower middle-class Jews, having succeeded in getting their children into this prestigious school, now only had one thought: to get them through to college. Anything else along the way is an unnecessary and disturbing diversion and must be swept aside, including bothersome student revolts, Black Power, decentralization, pot, sex, underground student newspapers. They are quite content to leave all this to the ‘specialists’ and merely serve as their rubberstamp (or battering ram) against those rootless cosmopolitans whose kids would be better off cutting their hair.

As a result, these parents not only do not complain about the abrogation or perversion of the democratic process vis-à-vis people whose only offence is their different viewpoint – they welcome it and have no difficulty accepting inventive, steamroller voting, character assassinations in place of discourse and discussion.

The favored device of containment utilizes apparently democratic procedures to insure the deft manipulation of majority rule when deemed contrary to the needs of the existing power-structure.

During the ’69 teachers strike, a large group of the more political students and teachers at Bronx High School of Science forced an opening of the school and instituted a ‘free’ school with an experimental curriculum, jointly developed by teachers and students. (The marvelous experience of unexpected freedom, the sudden enthusiasm of previously bored students, the growth in personal responsibility and social awareness that occurred in both teachers and students are matters that await future social historians and indicate that Lane, Dewey and Neill are less irrelevant today than our learned educational theorists will admit.)

Out of this utopian experience emerged a series of carefully drawn proposals to the school ‘to make education more relevant.’ These included such ‘radical’ items as the right to place material on school bulletin boards without prior approval, to eat lunch out of school, to enter through the front door, to use textbooks in the library, to do away with the internal pass system (every student must at all times carry a pass with name and hourly study schedule and requires a special pass to go to the bathroom), the elimination of attendance records beyond those imposed by the Regents, and a demand for a Student-Teacher Advisory Council. The very nature of these demands testify that the students in our public schools (and Bronx High is one of the best) are being ideologically prepared and molded for life in a totalitarian society.

Afraid of possible trouble, the energetic and politically clever principal Dr. Taffel decided not to accept these demands, but ‘for the sake of democracy’ rather submit them to a student referendum (simultaneously announcing, however, that he would not feel bound by its results).

Apparently he misjudged the temper of the student body: each of the twenty demands was approved in the referendum, many with almost eight of ten students voting for them.

The initial ‘democratic ploy’ thus had failed. No longer able to attack the proposals as ‘pie-in-the-sky demands of a few radicals,’ as he had done in the New York Times, Taffel, instead of finally implementing the democratically approved proposals, fell back to a new position by announcing the creation of an Advisory Teacher-Student-Parent Committee ‘to discuss the proposals’ feasibility,’ thereby in effect countermanding the referendum, a beautiful education in democratic procedure by the principal himself. He also unilaterally announced that the Committee was to consist of five teachers, five students and five parents. Since Taffel knew that the parents were to be chosen by the conservative parent-UFT coalition leadership of the PTA, it was clear that the students would in all crucial cases by outvoted. So much for democracy.

The committee, after much delay (so that the revolutionary fervor of the students could cool off), finally recommended that a number of the minor proposals be accepted by the school. These (opening the front door, availability of textbooks in the library, a student lounge) were accepted by Dr. Taffel. The two major demands approved even by this already ‘stacked’ committee – the right to eat lunch outside school and a modification of the pass system – were vetoed by him.

The use of these so-called democratic procedures thus simply results in a subversion of majority will and its ‘containment’ by acceptance of a few minor and rejection and of the major demands. Taffel can well pride himself on having ‘maneuvered’ the students into relative impotence; but, as always in history, he fails to realize his heavy contribution to a deeper understanding of the limitations and perversions of democracy on the part of the students which can only lead to their further radicalization. In this negative sense, he indeed served as educator. But it is precisely by such short-sighted maneuvers that the University rebels of tomorrow are born. Defeat of a cause considered righteous, by administrative machinations, only leads to cynicism and hostility on the part of the victims.

An identical but more dangerous example of ‘containment’ – the macroscopic counterpart of the Bronx High School referendum – took place at the same time in New York on a far larger and more explosive issue: the scuttling of the justified demands of the Blacks for community control and decentralization of the New York public school system. Here, too, an untenable situation initially led to widespread demands for change. These caused an illegal, racist strike by the predominantly White teachers determined to nip in the bud what is ultimately inevitable. Continued, larger demonstrations favoring decentralization and community control led to administrative maneuvering and the semblance of a democratic debate at the local school board level on a city-wide basis. It was this latter development which warmed the cackles of many a liberal’s heart. Here, in the free give-and-take of public hearings (resulting in legislative action), we were to see examples of ‘participatory’ (through SDS-less) democracy at its best.

The public hearings did take place and different viewpoints did get aired, and since they had been preceded by discussion in each local PTA group, a genuine feeling of participation in a legislative process at the grassroot level began to develop. And then the issue moved to the New York State Legislature for action on the various recommendations that had emanated from the hearings.

What followed was an unspeakable perversion of democracy at the legislative level which even the staid New York Times denounced in editorials as sell-outs. As in bad novels, the powerful Teachers Union and their allies in the city and state councils succeeded in stale-mating and destroying every single proposal. Deals were made behind closed doors; the UFT, initially unable to water down a proposed compromise to their full satisfaction, suddenly threw its support to a reactionary bill proposed by the ultra-right-wing Republican Senator Marchi. Finally, when the situation became untenable and totally deadlocked, the morally corrupt legislature, beholden to their respective political machines, created, overnight and in shameful secrecy, a totally new and totally unspeakable ‘compromise’ that effectively destroyed the very concept of neighborhood control and decentralization and eliminated the experimental school districts (the only hopes for the future), thereby insuring a day of reckoning between the races. Once more the Blacks were fucked; and if ever a future confrontation in New York between them and the Whites also pits them against Jews, the shameful failure of New York’s Jewry to live up to its professed historical role as vanguard of social progress, will be a primary cause. Indeed, the Jews stood revealed as not ‘the chosen people.’ When they find their positions of power threatened, they are an anxious as any other race of class to blindly cling to their prerogatives, until the forward movement of history relegates them to be swept aside as others before them.

But the underlying infractions of democracy touched upon here, however painful, are but a pale reflection of the situation in society at large. It is, in fact, this larger perversion which causes and reinforces the petty totalitarianism of the ridiculous people who run the PTAs as their own pathetic little preserves.

This pernicious, daily, societal perversion of the democratic ideal proceeds, of course, in the name of democracy and is not at all limited to one kind of social organization such as the PTA. This disastrous fact is that such incidents and procedures can be duplicated at will in almost any social grouping, be it labor union, political party, fraternal organization or community association.

As such, they reflect the rot that festers in America today, the decline of a class civilization. We have all unlearned or never were taught what democracy really is, and the decay has spread so far that even the pretended democratic structures and facades can no longer be properly maintained.

And so, in every succeeding generation, the system inevitably clarifies its true nature to yet another group, and teaches, in action, the difference between sham and real democracy in which, for the first time, the sensibility of man can be developed toward human ends. It is in this sense that the daily perversions of the system must be analysed by the true subversives among us and must, in a paradoxical way, even be welcomed for the necessary education that provide along the road toward a somewhat more human society. In the meantime, let them shriek at the undemocratic spectacle of forty students occupying a building. We shall instead remember one napalmed child killed in the name of democracy and shall not permit war criminals who commit genocide in the name of our (yes!) America to lecture us on the finer points of democratic behavior.

© Amos Vogel, July 1969
All rights reserved by the original copyright holders