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Learning anarchy: radical books for kids
By Egg Syntax and Radym
We’re certain that most anarchists can remember at least one book
that first introduced them to anti-authoritarianism, political engagement,
gender-role-bending, or other topics of lasting importance. But such
books are hard to find amid the morass of boring, mainstream kid-lit
that reinforces the same capitalist and authoritarian values which are
fed to adults (can you say “Disney”?). Here, then, we present
a highly subjective and idiosyncratic guide to some of the best work
out there. Undoubtedly, we’ve left off your favorite author; we’re
sorry, and we meant to check with you before we wrote this, but there
are thousands of great children’s books out there, and our guide
could easily have taken up the whole of this issue if we’d let
it. Our selection is ordered, loosely, by age of target reader.
Willis, Jeanne. I want to be a Cowgirl. Illustrated by
Tony Ross. Henry Hold and Company, 2001. Leave the city. Throw down
that tea set. Fight back against the education system. Dump your penthouse
upbringing. Forget cooking and cleaning and become a cowgirl. What’s
so wrong with that?
Cronin, Doreen. Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. Illustrated
by Betsy Lewin. Simon and Schuster, 2000. With factory farms and worsening
conditions for farm animals world-wide, it’s only a matter of time
before the animals start fighting back. Actually, the wait is over.
In Cronin’s genius children’s book Click, Clack, Moo,
the animals fight back against the oppressive farmer by going on strike.
Gosney, Joy. Naughty Parents. Millbrook Press, 1999. While
I don’t know if the author meant the book to be explicitly political,
it’s anarchist in the way it portrays two parents as free souls.
In Naughty Parents, a young girl must keep a sharp eye on her parents
as they make their way through puddles, down slides, and more.
McMullan, Kate. I Stink! Illustrated by Jim McMullan.
Joanna Cotler Books, 2002. Well, if you haven’t told your little
one lately about how important garbage trucks and the people who pick
up your garbage are, then you better pick up this book. From dirty diapers
to rotten radishes, your local garbage workers are doing the under-appreciated
(and stinky) job that very few people want from dusk ‘til dawn.
Sheldon Epstein, Vivian. The ABCs of What a Girl Can Be.
VSE Publisher, 1980. If you knew the ABCs of what a girl can be, you’d
have just a small idea of the possibilities! This is a very cute book,
with retro drawings and the wildest ideas of what a person can be when
they grow up (P is for Parachutist). This is a great book to show your
children what they’re not learning in school -– that girls
kick ass!
Yarbrough, Camille. Cornrows. Illustrated by Carole Byard.
Coward-McCann, Inc., 1979. This Coretta Scott King Award winner tells
the story of hair in Africa and for African-Americans during slavery
and to the present day through the stories of Mama and Great-grammaw.
Together, they teach Sister and Brother (aka MeToo) about the power
of pride and cornrows... from Robeson to Malcolm, from Richard Wright
to Langston Hughes, from Mary Bethune to Aretha.
hooks, bell. Happy to be Nappy. Illustrated by Chris Raschka.
Hyperion Books for Children, 1999. This is hooks’ first children’s
book, and it makes the reader shiver with excitement. Children will
love this book not only for its words, but for Raschka’s beautiful
illustrations.
Baylor, Byrd. The Table Where Rich People Sit. Illustrated
by Perter Parnall. Scribner’s Sons, 1994. Like all of the beautifully-illustrated
collaborations between Baylor and Parnall, this story teaches the value
of the natural world. Unlike others, though, this one is explicit about
the relative value of money and freedom, suggesting that money “shouldn’t
even be on a list of our kind of riches.”
Silverstein, Shel. Lafcadio the Lion. HarperCollins, 1963.
Lafcadio is a lion raised as a human. He learns to be a sharpshooter
and eventually goes on a hunting expedition and encounters his lion
kin. Forced to choose between the lions and the hunters, he puts down
his gun and walks away to forge his own path.
Lindgren, Astrid. Pippi Longstocking. Viking Penguin,
1950. This indispensable inspiration for young anti-authoritarians features
Pippi, age nine, who lives without adults and does whatever she likes
because “in the whole wide world there was not a single police
officer as strong as she.”
Dahl, Roald. Danny, the Champion of the World. Knopf,
1975. A charming, less-well-known work by Dahl about a boy who lives
with his father in a gypsy caravan and learns to poach pheasants. Includes
a lucid, class-based defense of poaching.
Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. HarperTrophy, 2003. While Gaiman’s
charmingly scary children’s book is not explicity political, his
protagonist’s survival depends on her unwillingness to trust self-proclaimed
authority figures and her trust in her own intuition and agenda.
Pinkwater, D. Manus. Lizard Music. Yearling, 1976.
In quintessential Pinkwater style, Lizard Music skewers cultural sacred
cows left and right. The protagonist finds himself embroiled in marvelous
adventures by rejecting all received truth in order to think for himself.
Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Kids on Strike! Houghton Mifflin,
1999. A history of labor conditions and labor resistance a century ago.
Both an excellent introduction to labor issues and movement and a paean
to the possibility of political engagement by young people. Includes
wonderful photos as well.
Tolan, Stephanie S. Welcome to the Ark. Morrow Junior
Books, 1996. The first in a trilogy following four kids who are involuntarily
committed to a youth “rehabilitation” center because of their
inability to fit into or accept society. This book poignantly portrays,
among many other things, the abuse of power in the mental health system,
the importance of communication with the land and the devaluing of kids
in our society.
Allende, Isabel. City of the Beasts. HarperCollins, 2002.
A wonderfully written book for adolescents that denounces the rapacity
of those who want to destroy the Amazon rain forest by exploiting its
riches for profit, killing any of the Native population that interferes
with their plans. Very funny at times, the book never preaches and the
reader learns about the Native peoples and the problems they’re
confronted with through the eyes of a 15 year old boy who unwillingly
accompanies his eccentric photographer grandmother on a magazine expedition.
Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Lowry
House, 1991. Very possibly the most radical book on this list, this
fiery guide encourages kids to really think for themselves, drop out
of school, and start making their own decisions once and for all.
Some material we omitted includes: Dr. Seuss (our hero!), Lewis Carroll
(our other hero!), James Loewen’s The Truth About Columbus, and
the now tragically out-of-print Suzuki Bean and Radical Red.
Source: The Fifth Estate
"As ye sow, so shall ye reap"
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on
the Consequences of US Imperial Arrogance and Criminality
by Ward Churchill
AK Press
Review by Faith Attaguile
On the matter of 9/11, Ward Churchill takes no prisoners. “As
ye sow, so shall ye reap” is the message urgently advanced in On
the Justice of Roosting Chicken’s first section, “The Ghosts
of 9-1-1.” The rest of the book effectively jams the same message
into the reader’s consciousness, although in a very different way.
In the end, he fully exposes – in all its “imperial arrogance
and criminality” – the thieving, murderous hulk lurking behind
225 years of American “law-abiding” pretensions. No one is
absolved from responsibility for ending these crimes.
In the next section, “That Most Peace-Loving of Nations,”
Churchill offers a year-by-year chronology of military violence and
borders from 1776 to 2003. Even though Churchill describes it as an
abridged list – “the barest tip of the American militarist
iceberg” – it remains one of the most comprehensive narratives
I’ve encountered. As a backdrop, Churchill quotes one Major General
Smedley Butler:
“I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of
our country’s most agile military force – the Marine Corps…
And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle
man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for bankers. In short, I
was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially
Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti
and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect money
in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics
for the benefit of Wall Street… In China in 1927 I helped see to
it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I
feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do
was operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.”
Any remaining illusions the reader may have about the legality of US
activities will not survive the book’s third and final section,
“A Government of Laws?” A chilling 172-page “chronology
of criminal comportment” documents the true underpinning of US
legalistic pretensions between 1945 and 2003 and exposes the lethal,
mind-numbing efficiency with which the US has repeatedly violated international
law in the past, and continues to do so in the present. Churchill writes:
“If, as US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has observed, the world continues
to be an exceedingly ‘rough neighborhood,’ it is mainly because
he and his ilk have insisted – indeed guaranteed – for their
own purposes that it be so. And this, notwithstanding the insufferably
smug delusions afflicting the great and mostly mindless mass of ‘law-abiding
Americans,’ is the signature characteristic of the variety of criminal
enterprise commonly referred to as an ‘outlaw’ or ‘rogue’
state.”
He is uncompromising in his criticism of the seemingly unstoppable propensity
of Americans across the political spectrum to dodge responsibility for
the “hideous human costs” attending US actions around the
world by claiming “innocence” or ignorance of the facts. Asserting
that most Americans engage in “willful and deliberate ignoration,”
Churchill writes that he “feels obliged to try and deny them of
the option of such pretense.” In that respect, the book is a triumph.
Churchill asks which of us, left horrified in the wake of 9/11, stopped
to consider how many US citizens would have had to die in order to achieve
parity with the Iraqis dead from US-imposed sanctions after the first
Gulf War. For those who haven’t (and that’s most of us), the
figure, assuming a 15-to-1 US-to-Iraq population ratio – is 7.5
mission children and 22.5 million adults. This is mind-boggling in its
implications. As Churchill notes, we’d run out of people long before
we ran out of “compensatory obligation” if we were “forced
to compensate proportionally and in lives for the damage… wrought
upon other peoples over the past two centuries.”
“The Ghosts of 9-1-1” was originally published in a short
form soon after 9/11, and caused quite a stir amongst some US leftists.
Intent on seeing themselves and their loved ones as “innocents”
in the wake of the attack, they flinched at Churchill’s description
of the majority of those who died as “little Eichmanns.” But
Churchill’s description of “little Eichmanns” as a “cadre
of faceless bureaucrats and technical experts who had willingly (and
profitably) harnessed themselves to the task of making the United State’s
genocidal world order hum with maximal efficiency” is certainly
an apt parallel. Eichmann was a mere mid-level officer in the SS, by
all accounts a good husband and devoted father, apparently quite mild-mannered,
and never accused of having personally murdered anyone at all. His crime
was to have sat at several steps removed from the holocaustal blood
and gore, behind a desk, in the sterility of an office building, organizing
the logistics — train and “cargo” schedules, mainly —
without which the “industrial killing” aspect of the Nazi
Judeocide could not have occurred. His most striking characteristic,
if it may be called that, was his sheer “unexceptionality.”
Although it is easy to see why many of us might wish to define ourselves
as out of this category, the fact remains that in the eyes of the world,
today’s Good Americans are ultimately just as responsible for the
state terror perpetrated in their name as were yesterday’s Good
Germans. To those who counter Churchill’s argument with “we’re
doing all we can,” he replies simply that it doesn’t matter
if the crimes don’t end. If they don’t, and the US continues
pushing the rest of the world around, don’t be surprised to find
that the ones who finally push back aren’t “nice guys.”
He continues, “whoever they might otherwise have been or become,
the sheer and unrelenting brutality of the circumstances compelling
their response is all but guaranteed to have twisted and deformed their
outlooks in some truly hideous ways.”
Churchill is right. Until we take responsibility for terrorism perpetrated
in our name, and until we end it, we can’t stop the terror returned.
Indeed, the people who live in “the seething, bleeding psychic
wastelands spawned by the unspeakable arrogance of US imperial pretension”
will continue to feel the need to push back to the extent that people
of the US -– all of us -– continue to wallow in delusions
of innocence and exceptionalism. Standing as, in Churchill’s term,
“moral witnesses” to these crimes is not enough.
To some, Churchill is a “howling, shocking nuisance.” But
we desperately need people like him to shake us to our roots.
Source: LiP Magazine
Billionaires for Bush
By Rebecca Fox
On a breezy Saturday night in late May, New York’s youngest
Billionaires were six-week-old twins dubbed “Cash” and “Carry.”
They were proudly toted around by their mother and father, both in
evening gowns, while other Billionaires, bedecked in their own ballroom
finery, cooed over the infants in elevator lines on the three floors
of Chelsea’s City Stage.
The occasion for the duo’s arrival — about 15 years ahead
of schedule — was the Billionaires’ Ball: a Spring Bling
K’Ching Thing, a night-long party put on by the street theater-cum-protest
group Billionaires for Bush. “Founded during the 2000 Presidential
election, Billionaires for Bush (B4B) was designed to be a strategic,
grassroots media campaign that spreads like a virus” to denounce
the negative effects of wealth on politics, according to the Billionaires’
online DIY guide to becoming a Billionaire, available at their web
site (www.billionairesforbush.com).
Newly mobilized, strategically planned, and garnering more media attention
than many of their more official and better-funded counterparts on
the (anti-)campaign trail, “Billionaires for Bush is a do-it-yourself
street theater and media campaign,” according to Pam Perd, the
group’s National Director for Public Relations (who provided
only her Billionaire identity, “for separation reasons”).
Perd’s effort at separation seems to be in name alone, as she
typically devotes 40 hours per week to the Billionaires on top of
working full-time.
The creation of a Billionaire identity is but a preliminary step in
casting oneself as a Billionaire. Billionaires for Bush’s Web
site lists snarky names for acolytes to assume, and encourages them
to emerge from “behind closed limo doors” to engage in an
intensely media-savvy combination of protest, street theater, organization,
and activism. Role-playing generalities may pepper the web site, but
the DIY guide to becoming a Billionaire is 45 pages long and provides
instructions for everything from developing a Billionaire personality
(encouraging newbies to create “Your Persona & Portfolio”)
to planning one’s own Billionaire actions (including the inside-out
approach of “Counter-Demonstrating at Anti-Bush Events”).
The Billionaires bank upon the creativity of their membership to embrace
their story-within-a-story approach to ousting Bush, inverting typical
models of protest and demonstration by subversively appearing to support
that which they wish to alter. Billionaire street actions are typically
peaceable ones in which it’s not uncommon for actual Bush supporters,
confused about the Billionaires’ real intentions, to append themselves
to the group in a show of mistaken solidarity. According to Perd,
the Billionaires’ collective straight face and singularity of
focus is what keeps it so effective in “using a heaping spoonful
of humor, savvy political messaging, grassroots participation, and
the Internet to flush out the truth about how the Bush administration’s
economic policies have been a disaster for most Americans.”
May’s Billionaires Ball raised money for the group’s summer
“Swing State Limo Tour” and its upcoming actions, currently
in the planning stage, in conjunction with the Republican National
Convention’s arrival in New York City at the end of August.
Back in January, at B4B’s inaugural event — which was to
kick off the presidential election year of actions, fundraising, and
demonstrations — B4B had only two chapters and a Ball with 450
attendees; May’s event boasted approximately 1,100 guests while
50 new chapters have sprung up nationwide, according to Emily Wynns
(a.k.a. “Lucinda Regulations”), Deputy Director of Public
Relations.
Given the rapidly devolving situation in Iraq, when every passing
day seems to provide anti-Bush activists with a new reason to rally
to unseat him, and in an increasingly charged election season, the
Billionaires’ success in building membership and popularity stems
from the fact that “people are looking for change,” according
to Perd. “People are very unhappy with the administration at
this time and they’re looking for a way to lend their hand to
changing that.” As Perd sees it, the Billionaires provide a droll,
creative roadmap to effecting such change. “Billionaires for
Bush works because of our tight messaging and savvy delivery,”
she said. “We know our facts, and we are witty. Plus, it’s
fun to be a Billionaire!”
At the spring fundraiser, Billionaires of all ages appeared to agree.
Throughout the night, party-goers in tuxedos, opera gloves, and evening
gowns streamed into City Stage to watch Billionaire performers convey
the group’s message through singalongs, brief speeches defending
the rich, and skits in which mock corporation heads and moneyed old-boy
networks fought to protect their sizeable political interests.
One of its major successes is that, unlike many other protest groups,
the Billionaires have been able to attract participants of all ages
and backgrounds with their grandeur. Though Cash and Carry were the
youngest Billionaires at the Ball, others ranged in age from seven
to seventy. Ariel Willner, aged seven, was wearing a white wedding
dress, and answering to “Mary Rich.” According to her mother,
Toby Willner, a petite dark-haired woman only slightly less bedecked
than her offspring in nuptial attire, their involvement in the Billionaires
arose from their participation in the Radical Cheerleaders (defined
on its Web site as “activism with pom-poms and middle fingers
extended”). “I’m divorced, so when Bush got elected,
I would bring Ariel with me to the Radical Cheerleaders practice because
I didn’t have a babysitter. She wound up learning the cheers
better than me,” said Willner.
Dark-haired Ariel streamed layers of tulle as she shyly circled her
mother, who said “I think it’s really rubbed off on [Ariel].
At school they had the students draw pictures of the flag and she
wound up drawing two — one was an American flag and the other
was a peace flag. It was a golden mothering moment for me,” Willner
said with a laugh.
Of her own political involvement, Willner said, “I’ve been
doing activist stuff my whole life. Back when I started, you did it
because it was the right thing to do, not because it was fun. I think
Billionaires for Bush is a great concept — it’s really fun,”
she said, gesturing to the throngs of people in their finery. “A
lot of people who have progressive sentiments don’t end up getting
involved, because they think this is drudgery. If it’s more fun,
like this, people want to get involved.”
Source: Clamor Magazine
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