Always leave a trail

Other important qualities in the urban guerrilla are the following: to be a good walker, to be able to stand up against fatigue, hunger, rain or heat. To know how to hide, and how to be vigilant. To conquer the art of dissembling. Never to fear danger. To behave the same by day as by night. Not to act impetuously. To have unlimited patience. To remain calm and cool in the worst of conditions and situations. Never to leave a track or trail. Not to get discouraged. – Carlos Marighella

So much for the sixties.

Never to leave a track or a trail – to be the mystery man, Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, the hero of a Dylan ballad – was the politically charged thing at one time. Go with the Weather. Go with the RAF. Go down the rabbit hole.

Times and strategies and fantasies change. LI has, for those of you who’ve read some of these here posts, an obsession with trails and tracks. Instead of the guerilla’s disappearing footsteps, our model is Little Red Riding Hood’s path of needles – the whorish path, the path on which the going forward and the going backward are radically different experiences. As a political act, however, LI thinks it is important to leave a track or trail, rather than the opposite. To be so open and so trackable that there can be no doubt about it – for political magic, today, should take place where there are no shifting shadows and no disappearing Clint Eastwood figures – in spite of the fact that the motto of this site - that the U.S. should have a big picnic, elect a midget mayor, and be painted red - does come from High Plains Drifter.

So I’ve been thinking about Withdrawal. As a show. As a power point program. Much like Al Gore’s Global Warming show.

I’ve been trying to finish this rather big editing job. At the end of the job is a big reward – at least, by LI’s standards (I had a conversation with my editor at the Austin Statesman, who gingerly asked me if I had any plans for the future, in which I told him that I might have money for the next two months when this is through. And he calmly told me that normal people, uh, would think that not knowing if they will have any money two months from now an indicator that THEY WERE FUCKING LOSING IT.) With the bit of free time I might have, I’m thinking that I might put up a notice at the U.T. campus, looking for people to put together some such presentation and film it. The traditional forms of protest are dead. The demonstration has become a ritual for ersatz politics – go out, march, be ignored. So it goes. At the moment, that forum just doesn’t work, at least in the Anglosphere. But there are other forums. This is a make your own tv era. I am appalled at the emptiness at the center of the Iraq war ‘debate’ – withdrawal. There seems to be a complete lack of any sense of what it means, how to do it, how to do it completely, etc., etc. “Withdrawal” as a power point show would fill in the blanks. It wouldn’t be hard to do – or rather, it wouldn’t be hard to research. The material is superabundant. LI wouldn’t, of course, be the speaker – the project wouldn’t work without someone who could do that job well, an actor or – better – an actress (I’d dearly like to lower the testosterone on this issue) so I’ve been thinking of U.T.’s theater department or radio and film.

This may be a passing fancy. I don’t know.