Give Peach a Chance

by Red Emma

9/11 changed everything, except of course it didn’t. We continue to dwell fitfully in The Society of the Spectacle, even more so now on Anniversary V of what will be no doubt the next XXX Year’s War, the Hapsburgs vs. the McCoys, the shirts vs. the skins, the Islamo-fascists vs. the Elmo-fascists, everybody fighting in that land of ironic self-defeat identified by the Situationists, discussed in my most recent posting. For those behind on your reading, here are some key concepts from May of 1968.

The Spectacle: The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought the degradation of being into having. The total occupation of social life by the spectacle leads to having becoming appearing.

We live in a society where, faced with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around…No more coats and no more home…The spectator feels at home nowhere because The Spectacle is everywhere.

Meanwhile, in resistance to the spectacular and in favor of the authentic, I baked a terrific peach cobbler over the weekend, with fresh organic peaches purchased at the Friday morning farmer’s market in the Sears parking lot at Laguna Hills Mall. It’s possible to buy all-organic there by visiting just two of the three dozen stalls: Smith Farms and the organic peach, plum, nectarine and grape fellows, one of whom promised me that trying his white peach would “change my life.” It did, however subtly.


I’ve never really liked the sappy, fatalistic, weepy sing-a-long by the otherwise brilliant and deeply radical John Lennon. I understand the psychology of “(All We Are Saying is) Give Peace a Chance,” but it kind of gives me the creeps because I think there’s a lot more to say, that “we” are saying much more and, indeed, saying it articulately, or at least in the familiar left-wing critical gasbaggery you expect from Red Emma, Situationists and cobblerists. (So maybe John was onto something.)

Yet Yoko and John’s skill at crafting exactly the most imaginative subversion of The Spectacle still resonates in the famous Bed-In, a perfect Situationist critique where art meets activism and, however briefly, supersedes and transforms both into everyday life.

Which is to recommend the new film “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” especially relevant in that Six Degrees of Alienation way, which we admire here at Dissent because the film appears based on the tireless research and analysis of Our Favorite Historian, Professor Jon Wiener of UCI. Wiener, who also hosts one of the very best radio shows ever (The Four O'Clock Report, Wednesdays at 4 pm on KPFK 90.7 FM), once appeared at IVC during the Frogue Recall, offering a compelling analysis of the assault on academic standards, administrative noodling, rightwing suspicion of critical thinking, historical revisionism, all in the context of our own Holocaust-denying conspiracy kook, the former Boy Scout with the Crazy Eyes who grew up to become a trustee.

Watch a clip from the film at US v JL clip. I enjoyed the part where Al Capp, once of Dogpatch comic strip fame, but turned pathetic masher and pro-war buffoon, does his bitchy best to take on John and Yoko in their bed in Montreal. At one point, Johns responds to Big Abner’s gay-baiting or homophobia or whatever it is with something like, “If Churchill and Hitler had gone to bed, a lot of people would be alive today.”

This cheered me on the occasion of Monday’s awful anniversary, as did two terrific analyses of the overly-available nutty conspiracy-(un)thinking which abounds in popular commercial media and, alas, on the airwaves of our singularly left-leaning community-radio station.

First, I heard the David Barsamian interview with Noam Chomsky, an excerpt of which was palliatively applied to the open and bleeding head wounds of the 9-11 conspiracy crowd seeming otherwise to dominate the station that day. To her credit, Sonali K. offered a few minutes of this rational analysis from the Noamster.

Then I read Alexander Cockburn’s comprehensive application of logic, history, and reason to the Conspiracy Industry at Counterpunch.

The U.S. government’s efforts to deport John and Yoko? Conspiracy. The assault on Shared Governance? Conspiracy. The attack on the Twin Towers? Conspiracy (but not by Bush and Cheney). The surrendering of their own political interests by a majority of the American people to a scion of corporate power? Spectacle.

Finally, I recommend “The Joy of Cooking” for instructions on how to create the most wonderful late-summer dessert. --RE