Harvard Square, MASSACHUSETTS, 13 September 2008--
A demonstration broke out in Harvard Square today, maybe reaching 25 people at some point milling about with 2 or 3 ringleaders with mime-style masks opposing "destructive cults." Someone had the temerity to rent out a former bookstore at street level at 30 Brattle St. and display an exhibit on psychiatric drugs for children and the huge recent growth in their use in the united $tates. MIM recommends the exhibit running till the 24th.

The demonstration against the exhibit is pro-capitalist--for the profits of drug manufacturers who tell the public they have something that improves kids' behavior. Every few minutes a driver would pass by and oblige the demonstrators by honking against supposedly destructive cults. The Church of Scientology of Tom Cruise fame is behind the exhibit.

The ritalin phenomenon and similar fads are uncontestable; yet, the mood of the moment is that the critics are cultists. The sad truth is that the Church of Scientology's Dianetics movement is probably the largest independent-thinking source of discontent of any kind in the area. Yet the discontent it peddles is so mild it does not deserve any anti-system credentials. The Church of Scientology is behind a huge psychological counselling movement attempting to replace exploitive psychiatric practices.

Right at a central newsstand in Harvard Square a t-shirt hangs for sale: "Harvard Square: People's Republic, est. 1968." It's a joke that student radicals took over and established the equivalent of Mao's China in Cambridge. Yet things are far from 1968 in 2008. Today Cambridge is just a bastion of the Democratic Party.

There are three other causes besides the anti-psychiatry movement making their appearance in Harvard Square lately. Two are domestic. Lyndon LaRouche still hands out his magazines through his cronies. Then there is the activity of Bob Avakian's "Revolution Books." There is a ring of truth to today's demonstration. It seems the only people with opinions that might even be worth investigating as having some grist for discontent are organizations led by old white men. L. Ron Hubbard is dead, so the Church of Scientology has demonstrated some staying power.

Anyone with a strong opinion not conforming to the happiness of the moment is now deemed cult material. Upon further investigation, both LaRouche and Avakian are backbone material in the Democratic Party. That is the ultimate irony, that even "dangerous" cults lead back to the Democratic Party.

This brings us to the Wall Street Journal's editorial by Lee Siegel September 13 titled "The Triumph of Culture over Politics."(1) Siegel is correct that Republicans are better at culture wars than Democrats are. What he leaves out is how Democrats pave the road to culture wars.

MIM happened to be there when "Revolution Books" obtained its Harvard Square lease. MIM was also there when Joseph Kennedy intervened with a board to kick MIM out of office space it paid for fair and square in the 1990s. There is in-bounds and out-of-bounds, and MIM was out-of-bounds for the Democrats.

"Revolution Books" is allowed to put up posters cribbing from MIM on defending the achievements of China. They deserve the credit for recognizing finally that MIM knew what it was talking about and was making headway among youth. So Avakianites copied MIM spiel. As long as the spiel leads back to saying that 51% have to be organized to "drive out the Bush regime," the Democrats know where their bread is buttered.

Thus in Harvard Square there is now mostly various expressions of corporate content. In the past week, five banks have set up tables to entice new student customers. There were not tables out to recruit new members of anti-imperialist or anti-militarist organizations.

Today in Harvard Square's center I found two long tables connected together to attract attention. I approached hoping it would be for leaflets to oppose the war on Afghanistan. Despite seeing the mainstreaming of Amerikkkan opinion into cultural non-politics, I still have that sort of vivid imagination.

I chided myself as I got closer, because the tables were obviously too heavy to be anything not set up by hired help. There was no way I should have imagined even a handful of volunteers with the drive and energy to carry such heavy tables.

Activists were unlikely to have put on such a large show. And so it was WBCN, FM radio 104.1, one of the larger rock stations feeling an urgent need to recruit on the street.

I turned to two smaller operations by artists nearby, but the art was of the contented quality that could have been on sale in a suburban glassware chain.

I went down to Club Passim and "Veggie Planet." Surely the vegetarians would have some posters for weekly anti-war organizations. Perhaps there is an upcoming talk on Iraq. There was instead a poster for an artist who "possesses the voice of an angel" --no discontent there or in scores of other posters up in Harvard Square. Club Passim recently featured musicians of diverse but apolitical folk bent.

Walking around Harvard Square, one may run into contented vocal performances by large groups of students. The music provides a means of expression and more importantly, a coordinated social belonging, but there is never any message. Subversive is now ever so slightly mocking rock music from an ever-so slight gay angle. That's as far as it goes.

One can encounter people in costume from sword-fighting days. Today, there was another mime clown about. Not to worry, he was not a Charlie Chaplain-style clown with a Marxist message. He was a giant walking billboard for the corporation F.Y.E. Cambridge fines MIM for putting up posters in order to make the streets safe for FYE ads. Too bad MIM can't afford to compete in that category, but then again, that's how Cambridge planned it. Cambridge knew who can afford to do what. Cambridge's Republican brethren in the South long ago learned to fuck up the order of the First Amendment--protection for for-profit pizza and Chinese food delivery, arrest for communist paper distributors. Cambridge has now managed to do the same via other means.

The previous demonstration in Harvard Square was against China and for Tibet. Apparently with nothing to protest in the united $tates, the intellectual and youth center known as Boston has to import discontent, again in line with the interests of finance capital. Anti-China demonstrations are now the most frequent demonstrations in Harvard Square.

The average age in Boston is an artificial 25, guaranteed by the turnover in students every year, which assures that the population cannot get too old or removed from collegiate concerns. If discontent is not rocking in Boston, there is not much hope it exists anywhere in the united $tates.

One can walk down to the bar "People's Republic," but there are no posters, no invitations to organization and no discontent, just large crowds of beer-swillers. Yet these same Democrats will turn around and wonder why Republicans win on culture instead of issues.

The boldest poster up in Harvard Square is up where a cop might have seen it put up. It's a commercial poster offering a contest to win $30,000 for graduate school. I appreciated the energy that went into putting that up, but the cause I found lacking.

MIM has seen the same thing happening in Madison, Wisconsin. Where the "Madison Insurgent" used to appear, there is now a career female publication in the bins. Likewise in Cambridge, there is no longer "MIM Notes," but there are two or three competing tabloids about bars. The fad now is for groups of friends to take their pictures in bars and get them into these tabloids.

The free anti-China publication is the limit of politics now. Others are into their individual spiritual pursuits, their psychiatry and raising money for the Democratic Party.

Out of hundreds of culturally self-satisfied posters up, the one in second place behind "Revolution Books" in the "worthy of investigation" category advertised learning the dead language Babylonian as a means "to do something about the war in Iraq." In third and fourth place we would have to refer to posters about "democracy" and "human rights," the blandest and most non-controversial words and ideas in use.

Conversely we can look into what is moving. In neighboring Somerville in Davis Square, where we might expect to find a "stop sign" we find a "hate free zone" sign opposing domestic violence. The idea fits the general trend that lifestyle police can fix everything within capitalism.

It is the college-educated themselves who are responsible for cultural anti-politics created via political correctness. The original psychiatrist behind the anti-psychiatry movement Thomas Szasz was just a libertarian. Yet he had the dangerous goal of opposing a profession's self-interests that took advantage of an irrationally individualist culture. For this reason, though his own goals were individualist, he shined too much light on Amerikkkan individuality and his followers today are called "cultists." We applaud the Church of Scientology and others for laying bare a systematic analysis of a profession's self-interests. We Maoists do the same thing, because the truth is not the same thing as what builds a for-profit profession. The nothing-to-lose proletariat is that group of people with a self-interest in the truth.

Notes:
1. http://www.wsj.com/article/SB122125912790430149.html?mod=hpp_us_leisure
2. See also www.cchr.org for more Church of Scientology information.
See MIM Theory 2&3 for the MIM article "Abolish Psychology!"