Press Action ::: Utah Phillips: My Body Is My Ballot

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Utah Phillips: My Body Is My Ballot

Amy Goodman played an interview with Utah Phillips on her Democracy Now! radio show this morning in memory of the folk musician and activist who died on May 23. Goodman interviewed Phillips in January 2004 at the beginning of the primary season to that year’s presidential election.

Near the end of the interview, Goodman asked Phillips whether he planned to vote in the 2004 presidential election and whether he was endorsing any candidate. In response, Phillips told the beautiful story of his friend, fellow anarchist Ammon Hennacy, who “never went to the polls.” But Phillips explained that “you couldn’t tell him you hadn’t voted. He did vote. Ammon’s body was his ballot. And he cast it in behalf of the poor around him every day of his life. And he paid a terrible price for that.”

Phillips continued: “You couldn’t tell him you hadn’t voted. You said, ‘Yes, I did vote. I just didn’t assign responsibility to other people to do things. I accept responsibility and saw to it that something got done.’ It’s a different way of looking at voting, isn’t it? And you can do that all the time. You could have your life in this way. I lived my life. My body is my ballot. It’s a lesson I learned from Ammon.”

At that point in the interview, I thought to myself, “What an inspirational message!”—especially in a time when we need more action and less talk.

But then the sucker punch came just moments later in the interview when Phillips, the anarchist, did a complete 180 in his political thinking. After explaining how he had made a promise to Hennacy in the late 1960s that he would never engage in “systemic politics” ever again, Phillips was now telling Goodman that anarchists, communists, progressives, animal rights activists, feminists should support the Democrats in that year’s presidential election in order to oust the “corporate fascists” from the White House. Talk about playing mind games with the listener.

Because the Democratic Party was “the only organized force on the planet” that could remove the Republicans from power in 2004, it was in our best interest to create a “united front,” similar to what occurred in the 1930s among communists and leftists who decided to support Roosevelt.

But what beliefs do anarchists, left libertarians and anybody who seeks to sustain life on Earth have in common with the Democratic Party? The Democrats embrace capitalism and its never-ending destruction of our land and our hopes for a livable future. The Democrats embrace the continued expansion of a police state whose goal is to extinguish all notions of freedom. The Democrats embrace making our war machine even mightier and our foreign interventions more efficient and deadlier. The Democrats embrace continuing the strangulation of some nations and using our huge nuclear arsenal to threaten others with annihilation.

Removing the Republicans from power in Washington, without also removing the Democrats and all other protectors of business as usual, will have little effect on the terrible mess we face by remaining on our current path. As Derrick Jensen writes in his book Endgame, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, capitalists and communists—the civilized—will have the option to take the right step to make things better. But they will not choose this option.

They will “instead kill everything and everyone who stands in the way of their perceived entitlement, who stands in the way of their increased centralization of power, who stands in the way of production, of the conversion of the living to the dead. At every step of the way the civilized will have the option of converting weaponry to livingry … And the civilized will not choose it. The civilized will choose murder and ecocide, the latter of which ultimately means suicide, over relinquishing the quest for control.”

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