A Word from Richard Risemberg for September, 2001

The Real Revolutionaries

One of my closest friends is a lifelong outsider and rebel: a teenage runaway who grew up in punk culture in Orange County, who inhabits coffeehouses and midnight lounges and concert halls and little diners lost in the far edges of 2 a.m. A girl who goes to sleep an hour before dawn and breakfasts at noon, a photographer who'll shoot for free if a poor but honest band has an edgy sound·once an habituŽ of thrift shops with bright orange hair, and now still a bright comet who shoots across our lives in mysterious loops, a beautiful and illuminating and disquieting force, as rebels should always be, still fiercely, fearfully independent as she approaches forty·she has been calling me lately to talk over a great worry in her heart: for she is buying a new car. Or rather a new-to-her used car, as her beloved Datsun 280Z is finally becoming terminally fragile and, it must be said, a bit unpresentable for someone who must regularly meet with clients in the LA media businesses. So she's buying a Volvo, fairly late-model, a reliable, elegant car that's still expensive and stylish enough to pass for "hip" in our city's little corner of human culture. And she's worried: does it mean that she's "selling out"? Does it mean that she's pandering to people whose values she despises? Should she just fix up the Datsun, which, as a cult object for many people in car-crazy LA, is permanently hip? What she wants to know is: Does this mean that she has she lost the revolutionary spirit?

Of course not, I told her. Because if you drive, you are already part of the system, not part of the revolution. You feed on the system and it feeds on you, and all suffer. You already have a car. You already support the corporate structures, the tax subsidies, the pollution, the waste of space, and the fracturing of society that cars either require or inevitably bring about. If you're going to drive, you may as well drive a newer car that doesn't leak in the rain and that causes slightly less damage to the earth than the old one. Because you joined the oppressors long ago.

I've spent about fifteen years in the photo retail business, so I meet, obviously, hundreds of hip LA photographers. They come across my path wearing tattoos and chains; wearing black leather and thirty earrings, or nose rings, or lip plugs, or spiked hair, or hair dyed magenta, or no hair at all; wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and razor-mangled jeans: wearing all the emblems of rebellion. And they all drive in, pouring Arab oil that's been marked up by Exxon or Shell into an endless concatenation of tin boxes built for them by such famous rebels as Ford, Chevy, Toyota, by tycoons and salarymen whose only value is a symbol of a dollar in a ledger book; in they drive over the thousands of acres of asphalt we have paid to pour over the earth, soaring over dilapidated neighborhoods on massive freeway bridges, turning their Samsung or Blaupunkt car stereos up to ten to celebrate rebellion with music sold to them on mass-produced CDs assembled by the minions of some nameless accountants in the MCA·to quote Tom Petty's fine song, "Into the Great Wide Open," they are "rebels without a clue·." Whatever drives them, what they drive speaks louder than what they wear.

And don't think I maul only my own: right-wing rebels are just as innocently hypocritical, with their Jeeps and gas cans and their off-the-shelf survival gear. One good friend of mine has devoted an astounding proportion of his income to a massive SUV equipped with three or four different types of radiocommunication gear, GSP, first aid kits, shovels and axes, emergency food and water, spare parts for the truck itself, special compartments for his AK-47 and his pistols, and so much more other stuff that this vehicle, which is literally the size of the bedroom in my little apartment, can carry only two actual humans in it·. He is ready for anything: earthquake, invasion, dictatorial coup, riots, civil war, hell, even nuclear war ·anything, except for running out of gas. Should anything happen, he'll be a fierce and free-running rebel till the tank runs dry--when he'll turn into a feeble little fellow with sore feet, waiting for the rest of them for someone to tell him where to go for his bottle of water. He can't escape the system in a car, because a car depends on the system. He's a nice guy and an intelligent fellow, but in this regard he is a fool. And a pernicious one: for he chooses to take advantage of the system while he can, though he claims to despise it, in hopes that he'll escape it when it falters: but the car, the ultimate consumer item in our culture, is the system, and you cannot escape the system once you've closed that door from the inside.

You can escape the system only by changing it for the better. You cannot change it for the better while you accept one of its most pervasive and damaging components, the personal automobile..that false symbol of freedom, which tells you that you can go anywhere you want as long as you follow the road where it leads you--and can find parking there. And the more you drive, the weaker you become, and the more dependent on the car; and the more you drive, the lonelier you become, and the more dependent on the degerminated culture the system offers you through your car stereo.

People now, as always, I suppose, rebel far more effectively against symbols and emblems than against the realities of "the System." But if you really want to oppose the System, if you really want to rebel in a meaningful way, to change the world for the better, you could do far worse than to start by giving up your car, by getting about on foot, or on a bicycle, or on buses or trains shared with your community, rather than to perpetuate the selfishness, the waste, the alienation and fragmentation inherent in car culture, which not incidentally enriches the corporate mobsters who most impoverish our souls and our planet while they sell you tin cages and subsidized oil. Walking to the store, bicycling to the movies, or waiting for a bus or a trolley next to a janitor, a cook, and a guy in a wheelchair might not seem the hippest, baddest thing you could do·but it will start to change the world for the better. Driving just wears it, and us, all out.

Soon we will find out
Who is the real revolutionary·.

Richard Risemberg

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