On Oct. 16, 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002” I had signed up to attend a very large antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 26. My knee was injured, and I was hobbling around. Also, I had about $200 in my bank account. I knew that the protest would fail, as the die was cast for war.
I went, anyway, feeling an intuitive conviction that I needed to attend.
As I recall, all Republicans had skipped town. Certainly, no Republicans came out to speak to us. I think there was one or two Democrats. The rest either skipped town, or just didn’t bother showing their faces.
I think it was on the bus ride home I started thinking about the strategic usefulness of large demonstrations. Certainly, large demonstrations had helped end the Vietnam War. However, there was a finality to the move towards war, in 2002, that, I assumed, would defy repeated, large, demonstrations – even if they were to occur. The Federal government had basically ignored us, as much as possible, and then just proceeded with their war preparations and propaganda.
I don’t want to look up the history, but the fairly robust antiwar movement that was still exstant, at the time, seem to die a silent death with the coming of President Obama. There would be no more large, antiwar demonstrations, in the forseeable future.
In my case, I had taken a bus from Princeton, NJ. We could conveniently come and go, on the same day. Other Americans obviously would have to sacrifice much more. California residents readily come to mind. As moral as protesting the wars of choice may be, it can also be a huge burden. A burden so large that it necessarily constrains how often such large protests could be attempted.
I’m not sure, but I think the seed of the idea for my preferred means of doing political messaging, in the Voter’s Revenge scheme, dates back to these considerations. I also personally have a great distaste for any sort of ingratiating supplication. I’ve worked many years as a waiter, and my jobs wasn’t to wait for customers to even ask for what they needed, but to try and anticipate their needs and wants. Why should we beg Congress Critters to do anything? Don’t they work for their constituents? (Well, probably not. See represent.us. But I am describing my emotional input to my strategic conclusions.)
Regardless of how, exactly, I came to view Shotgun Messaging as the preferred way to do political messaging, it is definitely going to be pushed in the opinionated tool that Voter’s Revenge is. This was the case in the retired version, and will have additional arguments for it in the reimagined version, which didn’t apply in 2002.
In 2002, I already knew that the traditional media was very corrupt, and served the Military Industrial Complex. I used to listen in Democracy Now and Gary Null quite a bit, in that time frame, and knew that the military had agents embedded in the major TV news organizations. Noam Chomsky had been a frequent enough guest on Null’s show, and analysis of media bias was one of his specialties. I’d also discovered Michael Parenti, somehow, and he also was a revealer of media biases.
The first sign that censoring and biasing of internet dissident media sources would now fortify ‘traditional’ media manipulation, that I can remember, was an article that I read concerning the deprecation of Google search results for antiwar websites. As my rather faulty memory thinks it recalls, the most suppressed website was the World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org. Looking it over, it is still running the kinds of articles that will get you suppressed and/or cancelled, today. wsws is a marxist website, just as surely as chroniclesmagazine.org is a paleo-conservative website. It was in chroniclesmagazine.org that the best anti-war essay I ever read, by it’s brilliant foreign affairs editor, Srdja Trifkovic, was published. It was called “Iraq and the Necons’ Pseudo-Reality”. Alas, I cannot find it online, anymore.
Left or right, the censors ultimately spare nobody.
Since President Trump’s appearance on the stage, manipulation of both traditional media, and alternative, internet-based media, went next level. Probably the most serious example of this manipulation was the backdoor access that Federal employees had to Facebook, which was used to expedite censorship and suppression. This was revealed in documents obtained by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, a candidate for US Senate who ran against Elizabeth Warren, who was apparently defrauded by obviously cooked vote tallies. The documents came to light during his subsequent lawsuit.
What I am calling “Shotgun Messaging” is obviously much the opposite of a large demonstration. These are ‘demonstrations’, of a sort, that are 1) ubiquitous 2) frequent and 3) targeted at citizens (as opposed to politicians).
ubiquitous
We live in a systemically corrupt country (the arguments for which I’ve not developed for Voter’s Revenge, which is clearly focussed on elected officials, though I’ve expanded the theoretical scope to target members of the unelected regulatory apparatus.) There are severe problems at the Federal, State and local levels. These problems will never get fixed with current levels of civic engagement. So, just like one could expect to see “Uncle Sam Needs You” posters all over America during World War 1, if there’s a ‘war’ for America’s survival as a democratic republic, the reminder of this should be everywhere.
One of the first posts I ever made, online, concerned the near total absence of politically themed billboards. If you think in ideal terms of what one would expect of a country where the US government spends 36% of US GDP, and federal taxes average 19% of income, you might hope for maybe 20% of billboards to concern federal government issues, if the citizens’s input was desired and relevant. Instead, there is, and was, almost nothing that might rile up citizens, for or against any issue. (Although libertarians and some conservatives would object, paying for these billboard ads could be accomplished through some sort of mandatory subscription plan, similar to the way the BBC is funded. Citizens would choose which sort of political messages their subscription fees went to.)
Absent ubiquitous reminders, it’s much easier for citizens to live out their lives as mere consumers. The modern word “idiot” started out it’s linguistic life in Ancient Greece, as “idiotēs”, which was a “private citizen or someone who wasn’t actively involved in public affairs or politics”. A nation full of “idiotēs” essentially FORFEITS it’s opportunity to keep their nation from degenerating into a manipulated hellhole.
frequent
Advertising works partly because it’s repeated. From memory, I thought that 30 exposures was the “magic number”. Just checking with gemini, it mentions the “rule of 7”.
Whether 7 or 30, I’m quite sure that Coke and McDonald’s will keep advertising more than 30 times per generation. The weighty issues being decided for us, against the public interest, should receive no less repetition.
targeted at citizens (via face-to-face interactions)
As mentioned previously, part of this is purely emotional, on my part. However, there’s more objective reasons for not overly wasting time trying to “just get Congressman X to understand”, as opposed to just growing the electoral threats implicit in wrangler posses, and explicit in voteslinger posses.
Firstly, size matters, and Pam Popper’s results indirectly underscores this. Said Pam, who I quote on the home page of Voters Revenge:
Look, last time you won your election by a couple of thousand votes. We have almost 20,000 voters in your district, and if you don’t vote to impeach {?}, we’re going to take you out this November, and I brought a list of our registered voters so you can see that I’m serious.
20,000 is much more than 2,000. Your governor and Congress Critters all understand this sort of math. You don’t need to waste time trying to make them understand something that they already understand, very well.
What you understand, I’m sure, is that if your Congress Critter won their last election by 20,000 votes, and your list of voters is only 2,000, you’re not going to strike fear into their perfidious heart.
As I wrote elsewhere,
From my point of view, one of the MAJOR purposes, if not THE major purpose, of ubiquitous, frequent demonstrations is Recruitment. On a similar level of importance is educating the public. The LEAST important reason for shotgun type demonstrations is to immediately influence a public figure. When the activists grow their numbers sufficiently, and FOCUS their efforts on removing bad public officials from office (especially during primaries), THEN we will see real world changes, indicating that their activism had paid off in the longer run.
You basically have zero opportunities to “Recruit, recruit, recruit” into your posses while you’re interacting with a Congress Critter and/or his staff, and he likely isn’t going to be truly concerned about your issue unless you carry a big enough stick, anyway.
So, don’t waste your time focusing your activism towards your ultimate target. A Pareto ratio of 80%/20% is probably invalid here. Rather, I would suggest something like 1% public facing activism will yield results equal to the 99% of activism facing the posse target (or their staff).
Therefore, spend 99% of your time recruiting into your posse, and educating the public, and only 1% of your time leaving messages in your Congress critters’ voicemail, which he will likely never listen to, anyway, until you deliver your political message with a big enough stick.
N.B.: By “messaging”, I’m mostly thinking about pamphlets and hand-held signs. However, there’s other means: 1 or 2 question push polls come to mind; also, in heavily (foot) trafficked areas, you could do skits and even stand-up comedians.