Creative Maladjustment v. Pipe Bomb Fantasies

Our friend Stuart’s third novel is out, and it’s great. In fact, you should all go buy it, right now. The Army of the Republic is set in a near-future Seattle (our house makes a cameo appearance!) in which the U.S. government has become a corrupt Regime with rigged elections, and a group of hacker/tree-sitter types has hooked up with some right-wing militia guys to bring it down. My favorite review so far: “Read it quick, while it’s still fiction.”

Stuart's reading at Elliott Bay this week also forced me to confront my pipe bomb fantasies, which really needed to be dealt with before they progressed any further. As part of his presentation, Stuart shared some of his research about the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and the 1970s revolutionary movement in Argentina, both of which served as reference points for his story. “I started out trying to answer some basic questions,” he told us. “What makes ordinary people -- students, accountants -- take up arms against the state? Where do such people get the wills and the skills to actually fight their own government?” The WTO stuff was largely familiar to us here in Seattle, but the stories from Argentina were new to me: dramatic tales of courage and commitment, but mostly with grim, bloody endings. Stuart’s book has plenty of bloodshed and grimness, too, but also a kind of wild hope. (You really should read it.)

All of this made me think of a little book I read a couple of years ago called Negroes with Guns, written by Robert F. Williams. Williams was a civil rights activist who took up arms in the 1950s, and became an inspiration for the Black Panthers a decade later. I should be clear that Williams was advocating self-defense, not revolution. But a common thread somehow connects Williams’s Negroes with Guns, Stuart’s Army of the Republic, my recent frustrations with the School District’s Facilities Department, and my hopes for Creative Maladjustment. I just hope I can follow it all the way to the end, because I’m a little afraid of where I might end up if I get stuck half-way through.

So, Negroes with Guns. Robert F. Williams grew up in Monroe, North Carolina, a small conservative town with a large Ku Klux Klan actively supported by the local government, and an African American population that had, like most Black people in the South at the time, learned to survive under continual harassment and the constant threat of violence. When he returned home from the Marine Corps in 1955, Williams was determined to revive the Monroe chapter of the NAACP, which, according to him, had all but died out. The new group’s early gains provoked a backlash: the Klan began to hold enormous rallies (7,500 people in a town of 11,000). “After their rallies,” says Williams, “they would drive through our community in motorcades and they would honk their horns and fire pistols from the car windows. On one occasion, they caught a colored woman on an isolated street corner and made her dance at pistol point.”

After a futile effort to get local law enforcement to protect the African American community from this onslaught (two Monroe police cars actually joined the Klan motorcade on at least one occasion), and after being refused help by State and Federal officials, Williams decided that Black people in Monroe needed to be able to defend themselves. He started a chapter of the National Rifle Association, which quickly grew to 60 well-armed members.

One day, during a tense campaign to integrate the local swimming pool, Williams was giving some picketers a ride back into town along a narrow road. He had been attacked before on this road: a few days earlier, his car had been rammed from behind and pushed zigzagging, at 75 miles per hour, past the police station, where a group of patrolmen laughed, waved, and turned their backs. This time a car peeled out of a driveway in front of him to block his path. He swerved, but still hit the car, and they both wound up in the ditch. Williams and his companions sat in their car as the other driver approached with a baseball bat, saying “Nigger, what did you hit me for?” A crowd had gathered, and they began chanting “Kill the niggers! Burn the niggers!” Williams describes what happened next:

When this fellow started to draw back his baseball bat, I put an Army .45 up in the window of the car and pointed it right into his face and I didn’t say a word. He looked at the pistol and he didn’t say anything. He started backing away from the car. Somebody in the crowd fired a pistol and the people again started to scream hysterically, “Kill the niggers!” … The mob started to throw stones… So I opened the door of the car and I put one foot on the ground and stood up in the door holding an Italian carbine.

I know it’s not very Quakerful of me, and I know that two wrongs don't make a right, and that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, and that only love can drive out hate. And I know that what happens next is bound to be awful… But if we could just put all that aside for one second, freeze the frame right here, and savor for a moment the thrill that must have gone through Robert Williams as he watched his would-be assailant backing away from the car with his baseball bat drooping at his side. After a lifetime of putting up with bigotry, harassment, threats of violence, and outright violence; after trying repeatedly to enlist the help of the authorities and finding the authorities seamlessly integrated into the system of racist brutality; after determining, as he put it, that “there was no such thing as a 14th amendment to the United States Constitution in Monroe, N.C.” -- he was finally the one calling the shots. “Enough. This time it’s going my way, pal.”

You can only freeze the frame for so long, of course. What happened next was this: the Monroe police demanded that Williams surrender his weapon, which he refused to do. A City Councilman arrived and called in the state police, who escorted Williams and his companions safely away from the angry mob. That day, Williams triumphantly pointed out, his show of force effectively prevented bloodshed "in a situation where normally (in the South) a lot of Negro blood would have flowed."

But it didn't stop there. The incident was used to justify further violence by the government and by racist mobs later on. White anger and fear spilled over into non-violent protests in Monroe – the Freedom Riders suffered terrible beatings there later that summer. Newspapers printed distorted versions of events, and Williams had no way to set the record straight. He lost the support of the NAACP and other more moderate civil rights activists. Any tentative interest the Federal government might have had in helping him out vanished completely. Williams had, like the Monteneros in Argentina, like the rebels in The Army of the Republic, unleashed a series of events that he couldn’t control. In the end he had to flee for his life. (He ended up exiled in Cuba, along with many of the Argentine guerrillas; I wonder if they got to meet each other?)

Well, okay. So maybe I won’t be ordering that pipe bomb kit from the internet after all. But I keep coming back to that adrenaline-filled, hair-raising moment, when Robert Williams emerged from his car with an Italian carbine and stopped a stone-throwing mob in its tracks. Why? I think it's because I want to feel that powerful. I want the power to impose my own values, ideas, dreams, and plans upon a world that frankly needs a little ass-kicking:

Enough. This time it's going mymy way. Back away slowly, lady, and leave those pastels on that fifth grader's desk. I want this chain link fence gone by sundown, or else. Another committee to study education funding, instead of fixing it? Not on my watch. You want to drill in the ANWR, you'll have to get past meme first. How's that universal health care coming along? I don't have all day, people.

I hope I've made it clear that I see the problems inherent in this approach (like, do we really want anyone with strong feelings and a loaded gun to be able to determine our educational policy?). The question is: How can someone like me get the power to make things happen... without having to blow things up?

Here's another question: What, if anything, does this kind of power have to do with Creative Maladjustment? I'll admit I'm still mulling that one over. I know there's power in numbers: massive nonviolent demonstrations famously brought down governments in Czechoslovakia and the Philippines. And there are more conventional routes to power too, like getting a job where you actually have some. (School Board, anyone?)

Creative maladjustment isn't about political protests or running for office, though. It's more of an individual stance, an internal attitude that allows a person to claim some power, whatever form it might take. Sometimes the courage to make that leap is mighty hard to muster, though. Lately it seems like a lot of people (including me) are looking for a little magic to propel them across the gap, to convince them that their values, ideas, dreams, and plans actually matter. Maybe creative maladjustment is just recognizing that the first person I have to convince is myself.