Let
the dead bury the dead, and mourn them. Our kind will be the first to blaze a trail into a
new life.” Those lines by Karl Marx flitted across my mind as I read the latest
— and apparently last — issue of (sub)TEX, a radical newspaper
sporadically published by a collective of the same name. Born in 1994 from the
ashes of a failed campaign by progressive students against the University of
Texas’ fresh outrage — the transformation of the Texas Union into another
outpost of corporate culture so that it now resembles an enclosed strip mall —
(sub)TEX shows why Marx’s words, now 153 years old, carry unbearable
poignancy today. He wasn’t suggesting that history is irrelevant, of course, or
even that it could be escaped. I think he meant that the past offers glimpses
of real freedom, marking as zombies those who treat it as a sealed document
promising more of the same. However misguided Marx’s formulas for social
justice, his optimism was epic and his language incandescent.
Turning the pages of (sub)TEX, you find evidence on almost every page
that paths into a new life, never more urgently needed, are in bad repair or no
longer visible. The signs of a demoralized resistance are there in the stories
themselves — which tell how the power of money is having its way with people
all over the world — and in the language used to tell them, which is dead.
They cannot be faulted for lack of ambition. There’s more substance, or at
least more substantive issues raised, in the 40 pages of Issue 10 of
(sub)TEX than in a dozen numbers of almost any other publication you’d
care to name, and I urge everyone who reads this column to pick up a copy,
available free all over Central Austin. Probably because they knew the cost of
printing would pre-clude any future issues (on paper anyway; the website
(http://www.utexas.edu/students/subtex/.web) will be updated from time to time)
the people responsible for (sub)TEX aimed for the big picture this time
out. The issue tours points of fracture all over the world, beginning with UT
and its metamorphosis into a corporate tool, and covering a wide spectrum.
There are stories on the Triangle development off 45th Street, the Austin
bicycle helmet ordinance, the corruption of ACC’s educational mission, human
rights in Indonesia, Israel’s behavior in Lebanon, the U.S. military in
Okinawa, book banning in Round Rock, Shell Oil in Nigeria, the CIA’s
sponsorship of thugs in Guatemala, the transformation of the Internet, the
realities of immigration, and Chiapas.
Most of the articles aim for a clear accounting of the facts without sinking
into the mire of leftist jargon and clich�. Some succeed more than
others. Narratives of impossibly difficult struggles against concentrations of
power have a way of disappearing into their own context — the familiar problem
of preaching to the choir. Leaving aside the occasional lapses into total
gibberish and na�ve rhetoric, a bigger problem is the legacy of passive
academic prose, which has a way of sneaking into even the toughest pieces, and
some of the articles here, such as “`War on Drugs’ Money Supports Criminal
Activities,” are admirably hard-nosed.
What is lacking in the language of these stories is the kind of fire and
passion that might persuade an ordinary person that fighting the triumph of the
grand neoliberal project — shopping malls and insecure jobs in the First
World, a sweatshop on every corner in the Third — is not a gesture of
futility, but a way of instilling everyday life with a sense of decency.
Americans live in an ethereal fantasy universe to an extent undreamed of even
20 short years ago, and piercing the sheen of unreality requires hard, fierce,
active language.
A beautiful and wrenching example of how this can be done is found in the
December issue of Harper’s, in an article by Charles Bowden called
“While You Were Sleeping: In Juarez, Mexico, photographers expose the violent
realities of free trade.” Bowden describes a version of Mexico that is
unrecognizable alongside the bland coverage prevalent in the North American
media, confronts a social reality others prefer to sidestep. And no wonder: The
Juarez on view in Bowden’s prose and the images of the street photographers he
befriended is a charnel house, a place where teenage girls walking to their
$35-a-week maquiladora jobs in the pre-dawn darkness are routinely
kidnapped, raped and killed, where the unthinkable occurs every day:
“Like all the shooters in Juarez, [street photographer] Julian [Cardona]
is keenly aware of the seasons. In November and December, there is a bumper
crop of drug murders as the merchandise moves north and accounts are settled.
Then around Christmas and New Year’s people hang themselves. The first few
months of the new year bring fires and gas explosions as the poor try to stay
warm. Spring means battles between neighborhoods (or colonias) over
ground for building shacks as well as outbreaks of disease in a city largely
lacking sewage treatment. Summer brings water problems to a head (Juarez will
run completely out of water within five years unless something is done), more
disease, and batches of murders by the street gangs. The cool days of fall open
a new season of battles between colonias, and then, with the holidays,
the photographers return to the drug killings and the Christmas suicides.
“…What is happening in the city is often dismissed by simply saying that
many cities are violent, that gangs occur in the United States as well, that
strife and dislocation are just the normal growing pains of a society
industrializing, and so forth. All of these statements make a lot of sense, and
all of them are lies. The photographers of Juarez know they are lies and
believe body and soul that their work will state the truth. They say their
cameras are more deadly than AK-47s.”
Think about that as you go about your Christmas shopping; there are hundreds
of maquiladoras in Juarez manufacturing thousands of products for First
World markets.
Now, Bowden is a remarkable journalist with decades of experience behind him,
working for a magazine that pays in the dollar-a-word range. So comparing his
work to that of campus-area activists working on a shoestring is in no way
fair. It is, however, unavoidable. That kind of language, vivid, eloquent, and
transcending the norms of political analysis, is the only kind that will make
people see sense about the evil that is being done in the name of the global
market. Radicals who embrace this way of telling stories actually stand a
chance of piercing the fog all around us.
This article appears in December 6 • 1996 and December 6 • 1996 (Cover).