Life During Peacetime (conclusion)

In 1979 I lived in San Francisco, where I had been editor of a movement newsletter for the past two years. When the inevitable splits happened, and my comrades and I finally lost our battle against the secret police takeover, I moved to New York, cut my hair (only because I was tired of long hair, I insisted), and retired from Indian politics.   

In North America that year, Nelson Mandela was a household name only in the houses of intelligence analysts, South African exiles, and perhaps a few thousand committed leftists. I was not particularly knowledgeable about South Africa, so I probably didn't know this name until later. Equally obscure was this: in the left ghettos of New York and San Francisco and maybe Ann Arbor and Detroit, you would occasionally hear one comrade gossiping that another comrade was always trying to be "politically correct." This was never a good thing. Being politically correct meant being holier than thou, a goody two-shoes, a crashing bore and stone cold drag. And it was never, ever, applied to anyone but another leftist. It would have been nonsensical to refer to President Carter's stated belief in social justice and diversity as an attempt to being "politically correct." Only true believers were eligible to be trashed for their political correctness; liberals need not apply.   

When I left New York at the end of the 1980s, Nelson Mandela was as famous as Michael Jackson. If there had been an election that year for King of Earth, Mandela would have defeated Gorbachov by a wide margin.   

Mysteriously, that bit of nostalgic leftist patois had also achieved stardom, and I would read in the Washington Post fantastic articles on how some Republican Chairman was being sniped at by opponents for being "politically correct." It was a trait available to anyone, and I even found myself using it in this new wave interpretation.   

I would say this is as good a date as any to chart the dawn of the Age of Whatever. For me, that is. Everyone is entitled to their own Year Zero when words and history ceased to have any apparent meaning, and when irony became obsolete. To call someone politically correct today, as I understand it, is to ridicule their insincere attempts to oppose racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, and imperialism. Among others. I always hated these laundry lists, and I'll say this much for my rather dreary gang of bourgeois radicals: even though we were wrong about almost everything, at least we never believed that naming a thing made it better. We stupidly argued about the particulars of hierarchy of oppression, but at least we agreed there was such a thing. Now, of course, all oppressions are equally oppressive, and as such all right-thinking people should oppose them all equally. Even the white men who run Texaco, which is a MULTINATIONAL OIL COMPANY in TEXAS (Hellloooo!!!), arouse shock and indignation when tapes reveal their use of unflattering terms for black people. The executives are terribly sorry and embarrassed. They don't know what came over them, really. They are presumed, like everyone else today, to of course be opposed to racism and colonialism and all the rest. When they are busted, it is a sensational news story that runs for months.   

To cope with such nonsense, the masses have developed a rather sophisticated coded response that has become the catchphrase of the last decade of the millennium: whatever.   

Terrible diseases sometimes require terrible remedies. And the whatever vaccine is blunt and indiscriminate, and for those who want to rescue words from meaningless this cure is as bad as the sickness.   

I left New York in 1991 to write, and I ended up writing a book about the Indian movement. During the 1980s, a popular mythology had been created about those years that drove me crazy. It was all peace and love and suffering elders and the four directions, and none of the stolen rental cars and shoplifting expeditions and attempted treasons that I remembered so fondly. Even the most basic facts were up for grabs, or not important. I would always end up, half-drunk in some West Village bar, saying things like "confusing the shoot-out with the FBI in 1975 with Wounded Knee two years earlier, events that had nothing in common, since one involved thousands of people and a popular movement, and the other a few dozen who were mostly strangers on the reservation is like thinking that it was Malcolm X who gave the I Have a Dream Speech!"   

You know what they were thinking to themselves. 1973, 1975, Malcolm, Martin: whatever. (Anyway, I did write the book, with a friend who did finish school, and it's really really good, both sad and funny and not nearly as depressing as you would think. It even has a big scene with Merv Griffin. It's in paperback this summer. Buy it!)   

Twenty years later I find, for the most part, the language and methods of the North American left exhausted and useless, rusting away in abandoned fields like obsolete farm implements. Their ability to challenge power and defy authority has all but disappeared. It's the price of being wrong too many times, and of failing to find an answer to the insidious courtesy of multiculturalism and the brave new world of political correctness.   

In such a dim and confusing environment, the very idea of a show whose stated purpose is to engage art in the continuing fight against colonialism is either a very bold move or a very silly one. And when that show self-consciously employs a Mohawk Indian, a Jamaican, a Chilean expatriate, a Palestinian, and a Comanche "cultural critic," a reasonable person might fear precisely the kind of self-congratulatory exercise that has turned profound words like colonialism into cartoons.   

Instead, through work that is political yet never didactic, accessible yet challenging, the artists in Across Borders offer a vision of a new kind of political engagement; of this decade, fresh and bitter and funny and intelligent, and not for one minute cynical.   

In the cool spring Toronto night, after everyone leaves, the installations pass the time by telling cruel jokes on themselves. Did you hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, the minister and the fall of the Paris Commune? They whisper tales of crazy and lost nights during the Spanish Civil War, the ridiculous strategic blunders and pathetic fashion sense of those losers who fought Pinochet, of doomed slave rebellions in Haiti and South Carolina. High as kites on cheap wine, they party till dawn, collapsing in giggles after a very bad rendition of "We Are The World," and in this at least, you can tell straight-away: they are absolutely not kidding.