The recent announcement that Bob Avakian, Chairman of the
Revolutionary Communist Party (USA), creator of the New Synthesis ™, and the
only dude with the chops to save our species from collapsing into barbarism and
lead it into the bright communist future would be making his first publicly
announced appearance in the US in over 30 years has occasioned some comment.
After decades of exile, rumors of sightings, and long, long
recorded speeches purportedly delivered in secret conclaves, it was hardly
surprising that there would be skepticism and humorous commentary by that small
section of the left that remembers him or has followed his career.
Then, though, his acolytes in the RCP advanced a bridge too far.
Earlier this month, an anonymous article on their website promoting his
upcoming talk at Riverside Church in Manhattan compared the chance to attend
with a hypothetical opportunity to see Jimi Hendrix play live in his prime. (Read it
here.) As TV Guide used to say: Hilarity ensues.
So brutal (and funny) has been the mockery that the online
edition of RCP organ Revolution now contains a little slogan box proclaiming
Damn, can't these folks get anything right?
The culture of snark strikes me as a positive and transformative
development in the youth culture of the 21st century. The last
couple decades of the 20th century were dominated by cheap irony.
Everything was equal because everything was worthless. You could do any stupid
thing you wanted and simultaneously embrace it and proclaim your superiority to
it. Wear a backwards gimme cap with a confederate flag on it and blast Public
Enemy out of a boom box. Cheer, ironically, at ultra-patriotic films while
stuff blew up. Or people. If you were around and paying attention then, you know what I
mean. Irony's slogan is a world-weary "Whatever" with a knowing
smirk.
Snark may share an evolutionary ancestry with pure irony,
but the two occupy very different branches on the tree of worldviews. Its
apostles in our era are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It is not a declaration
of the equivalence of everything, because it has a place to stand—a standpoint,
if you prefer. The snark stance carries with it the idea that things don't have
to be as they are, and, further, that there are forces responsible for them
being as they are or getting worse. Those forces should be mocked, be exposed
and be opposed. They are the target of snark.
I'm not saying it's revolutionary. It's not. Hell, it's not like I've thought through this little exercise in cultural typology in any deep or
systematic way. It may be entirely wrong-headed. But until argued out of it,
this is where I stand.
And if that means being snarky about "the Jimi Hendrix of the Revolution," so be
it. At least I'm not wearing the
peculiar little pin of Avakian the RCP made--the tiny featureless, text-less one which bears the image known as The Blob--trying to make some kind of contentless ironic statement.
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