Grassroots democracy comes by our own hands
“Hegemonic Love Potion,” by Jules Boykoff. Factory School, Queens, NY, 2009 103 pages.
By Jay Thiemeyer
Contributing writer
At a recent reading, Jules Boykoff, anarchist scholar and activist with Agit-Prop Collective, opened with:
the economic cue cards were a’ flippin’
the livid civilizers were a’ slippin’
there were no jobs left, so
there were all these jobs, so
he called it ‘gringostroika’
a process of primitive accumulation?
ah, the NAFTA rapture of yesteryear
conditions revisited
upon the people...
-- from “Gringostroika”
His recitation reminded me of “Howl” and that famous gathering of the soon-to-be Beats where Kerouac jumped among the seated, pouring wine, drinking himself under their tables. But the crowd listening in Powells On Hawthorne were all very young and student-like and drinking coffee shortly before. Testimony to Boykoff’s trick: he is both mad poet (“mad as Hell”) and professor. He knows whereof he speaks when he rails on about NAFTA’s reduction of all but the rich.
Globalization is a major theme in his work. As it must be. His studies “Landscape of Dissent” and “Beyond Bullets”deal with the impact of globalization on our freedoms. To express, to move about, to disagree, to create. All proscribed by the corporations’ demands on us (and presence in us). To be or not to be; allowed our own lives. Corporations are saying: we got no right to be ... anything more than compliant consumers.
“Decisions are not always conscious choices,” he writes in his poem “Attention,Attention: This Is A Customer Announcement.”
Turn on your computer and go online and you’ll find out why someone named Ashlee is thin. And to what point she’s thin. Without dissent. Without discussion. Ashlee’s thin. We are all on the same page. With Ashlee. Life at the register browsing the “news” in the grocery line, only now it’s online. Poetry counters the corporate skull-numbing.
Who controls the space we live in is a fundamental question in his scholarship and his art. This is from “The Wrecking Ball Theory Of Love & War.”
the provision
of space
to meet
demand
it demand it
only then
will it come
A simple poem with basic appeal because whether we’re talking about space or water and food or healthcare or democracy, in Obama’s inherited casualty, the USA today, we won’t get it if we don’t demand it. You say you want universal access, single-payer health insurance? The private insurance corporations want to make you squeal and give up blood before you get any care. And they got more money than you. And they have louder voices, squeakier wheels on their payrolls, especially in these hard times. And they have the lobbyists writing legislation to hand to your congressmen.
So you’ve got to get up and demand what is yours. Or you won’t get it! And our space, our commons, our country, will have disappeared before our eyes. We’re not owed a thing. And as to the precise meaning of “Hegemonic Love Potion,” my take is that the hegemonic empire is screwing us and the potion is our growing insensitivity to it. Love your enemy. We’ve resigned ourselves: Nothing to be done -- just like Vladimir and Estragon in “Waiting For Godot.” The two homeless derelicts waiting for an accidental reprieve.
Pretty soon, like those two stage creations, we’ll be standing on our own individualized postage stamp, sucking our separate alienated thumbs in unison. Write poetry about that and find a publisher. Who’ll be left to read it?
“I want to be good neighbors,” Boykoff writes, “but it’s hard to do when you’re losing money.” Greenspan couldn’t have simpered better. And “I saw the best minds of my generation get stoned on PR.” Ginsberg redivivus?
There are some memorable, quotable lines as stand-alone poems here, as well as memorable quotes from, for example, the transcript of Alberto Gonzalez’ non-testimony before the Senate Judiciary several years ago. Talk about death by a thousand cuts. But we must never forget what Bush’s people got away with. Boykoff won’t let us forget.
This book is a poetical aside to the author’s excellent books on suppression of dissent in United States. As such the poetry is “fly” and diverting, not as serious but in the same grave spirit. His message is constant: if we want grassroots democracy, we’ve got to do it ourselves, every day. The poems or annotations recorded here serve to capture the absurdity and mean-ness of our times. His arrangement of Gonzalez’ epic disrespect for the Senate is itself worth the read. Maybe looking at his sliminess, they were afraid of what they saw of themselves.
Posted by Joanne Zuhl