Author: activistangler

I had missed daybreak but it was still early morning when I pulled into the beach parking lot next to a large SUV with Rhode Island plates.  Four guys, all in their late 20s or early 30s, were unloading their gear. It was impressive gear: top-of-the-line St Croix rods and Van Staal reels. They were outfitted in bib waders and surf boots with fancy tackle bags slung over their shoulders. A shiny steel device hanging from one of their belts reminded me of a prosthetic robot arm from one of the science fiction TV shows I used to watch as a kid. (I later found out that it’s used for gripping a fish’s lip and weighing it at the same time which, I have to admit, is pretty cool.) We did what anglers do when meeting one another: wishing each other luck and soliciting advice on where best to fish — which I gave freely, if not entirely completely. They clunked their way across the lot and to the beach in all their gear as I got my rods out of the jeep, slung the old Strand Bookstore bag I use to carry my surf plugs over my shoulder, slipped on my rotting canvas sneakers, and followed them. The fish weren’t biting that morning, and after an hour or so I saw them leave. They didn’t seem disappointed at all, and I began to think that maybe fishing for them was more about the road trip and the gear and not so much about catching the fish. 

I was in Washington Square Park a few months ago sharing a coffee and a catch-up with a scholar whose work on social movements and radical theory I’d known and respected for a number of years. They asked me the required question that scholars ask one another when we meet up: “What are you working on now?” I knew better than to tell them I’d been working a lot on my fishing lately, so I described my current book project assessing the impact of artistic activism. “That’s good,” they said, “because you’ve been coasting since your last book.” For the past dozen years, I had been busy working on scores of campaigns with thousands of activists around the world while raising a family and holding down a full-time teaching gig. Coasting? I was exhausted! I was also angry that someone who I thought shared my commitment to radical social change could somehow overlook the work I had been doing to bring about change for more than a decade. Then it hit me. Radical social change for this person wasn’t activism and organizing, it was primarily a set of academic ideas and lifestyle practices. And in this way I had failed: I hadn’t published an “important” book in more than a decade and I was living a middle-class life with a job, wife, two kids, and a dog (a Labrador Retriever to make it that much worse). For all our ostensible shared revolutionary desires we didn’t really share much at all. Since that day they’ve texted me a couple of times to see if I want to get coffee and catch up. I reply that I’m too busy.

Sometimes you have to fish when it’s windy, and when the wind is up it’s best to cast with it rather than against it. Obviously.  But sometimes you don’t have a choice, like with surfcasting for instance, where if the wind is blowing in from the water you either cast into the wind or you go home. Casting into the wind, however, isn’t impossible, you just need to use heavier lures and reconcile yourself to the fact that you will not be able to cast as far and will spend a fair amount of your fishing time picking wind knots out of your line. But there’s another way to deal with the wind. While you can’t change the force and direction of the wind, you can change your positioning. If you are fishing a stream, simply hop to the other side, or fish upstream as opposed to downstream. It may take a bit more time to get downwind when fishing on a pond or lake, but it’s often doable with a nice walk through the woods. Situated where I am on Cape Cod at its narrowest point, if the wind is blowing the wrong way on the ocean side I can take a short jaunt to the bay where it’s blowing the right way, or vice versa. When I can find a way to work with the wind, fishing is a lot easier: my line snarls less and I can cast much further, and this means catching more fish.

As an activist the wind is often against you: the other side often has more power, money, resources, and an entrenched tradition that we do not. It’s still possible to win victories, but it’s always a struggle. It’s better to find a way to work with the wind. Favianna Rodriquez, an experienced artistic activist who believes the way to change society is through shifting the culture, once explained to me that why she’s such an avid news reader, social media follower, and popular culture fan is because this allows her gauge which way the wind is blowing and tailor and time her interventions accordingly.  It’s in this vein the radical playwright Bertolt Brecht opined,

I believe that an artist, even if he sits in strictest seclusion in the traditional garret working for future generations, is unlikely to produce anything without some wind in his sails. And this wind has to be the wind prevailing in his own period, and not some future wind. There is nothing to say that this wind must be used for travel in any particular direction  (once one has a wind one can naturally sail against it; the only impossibility is to sail with no wind at all or with tomorrow’s wind).

Brecht’s advice was meant for artists, but it works for activists as well. Activism is always easier with wind in your sails. Understanding which way the wind is blowing and working with it doesn’t mean letting it take you wherever it will, it means maneuvering your activism so you can use it to your advantage.

As far as I can tell, nearly the entire ecosystem of Central Park’s lakes lives on bread. The ducks, mallards, geese, and swans eat it. The red-eared slider, painted and box turtles \eat it.  And, arriving at my interests, the sunfish, catfish, and carp eat it (only the largemouth bass seem immune). They don’t eat just any bread. They do not crave my all-rye sourdough Danish Rugbrød with its whole pumpkin, sunflower, and flaxseed that I am — justifiably, in my opinion– famous amongst my neighbors for baking. No, the birds, reptiles, and fish of Central Park’s waterways prefer white bread, the softer the better, with over-processed, additive-enriched, Wonderbread being their favorite. This strange food dependency began, of course, with humans who, despite the many signs forbidding it, throw bread out onto the water to attract the pretty birds paddling on top. Leftovers then go to the cute turtles floating along the surface, and any uneaten scraps sink down under the water to the unseen fish. (There may be beasties further down the food chain that also consume white bread, but this is as far as my knowledge descends.) Processed white bread can not be good for these beasts, it certainly isn’t good for humans, and I feel a twinge of guilt that I am contributing to this destructive mono-diet. I’ve tried fishing with other baits and lures, but if it’s carp, catfish, or sunnies I’m after I always resort to whitebread. An unintended consequence of this fish diet is that it’s changed my own. I usually have a loaf of what our kids call “carp bread” around the kitchen, and I am regularly pressed into service by them into making toasted cheese sandwiches, with Wonderbread and processed American cheese, for lunch on Sundays. I know they are not good for us, but damn, they are good.

Activists often have a problem with purity. Rather, purity is a problem for many activists. Reacting against the myriad modes of oppression in the world we are trying to change, we create an ideal of the individual we would like to see and be, and then expect it of everyone else around us. We tell others to eat the way we do (go vegan!), dress the way we do (no heels), and talk the way we do (the ever-changing lexicon of political correctness). I’m sympathetic to this politics of purity. Identifying oppression, and creating alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and doing is an essential part of a rebellious identity formation. I’ve actually done this rejection and recreation twice, first as a punk rocker, the second time around as an activist. In each instance, I tried my best to purify myself of the sins of society and was born again. My purity set me apart from other people, except the other elect who shared my views. This would not be a problem if I was interested in founding a monastery or content to live in a bohemian ghetto, but as an activist trying to change the world, I found I was largely cut off from the people in the world I was trying to change. The great Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs once said that “You cannot change any society… unless you see yourself as belonging to it.” I needed to let go of a bit of my purity in order to belong to an impure society, and I rediscovered a lot to like — even as I worked to change it. When my friend, the activist and writer Maz Ali, heard I was creating a blog on fishing and activism he wrote to me, congratulating me on this bold strategic move, 

to use affinities (even just hobbies) as inroads for deeper human engagement…to enter readers’ minds — including the most unlikely readers — to find messaging themes that just might win them over, because we can’t go as far as we need to with just the choir.

Maz, as always, is brilliantly perceptive. Is that what this blog is? A strategy of engagement to reach Fox-watching anglers and convert them to my cause.  Or is it the pure expression of my re-found love for fishing and its connections to my long-beloved activism? I really couldn’t tell you; for an experienced activist the lines are never that clear.

As much as I like to think of myself as a modern, enlightened man, I am still loath to ask for directions from strangers,  but I’ve learned that to catch fish you need to ask for advice all the time. If I’m new to an area the first thing I do is go to the local tackle store, and ask whoever is there a whole bunch of questions: What’s biting? Where are they biting? What are they biting on? They always have good answers, though the style of delivery can vary quite a bit depending on the locale. In my favorite, and only remaining, tackle shop in Manhattan there’s a fast-talking, loquacious kid who has talks to me for hours about the merits of home-made bread balls vs store-bought boilies to catch carp in Central Park (bread balls win). Out on the Cape, the advice is delivered in New England monosyllabic pulses that go something like this: Are the fish biting? Yup. Where? Off the beaches. What beach? Race Point. What are they biting? Depends. Depends on what?  And so on, but with perseverance and a bit of patience I always find out what I need to know to catch fish.  Other anglers can sometimes be good sources of intel, but anglers are also notorious liars: exaggerating their own fishing prowess and jealously guarding their favorite fishing spot. Likewise, tackle shop employees are in the business of selling you gear, so I always consider what is being said and who is saying it and take advice with a grain of salt. But if you want to catch fish local knowledge is invaluable.

As activists, we are in the business of reaching people. To reach people you have to know people, not as an abstraction: The People! (or some equally conceptual subset, like The Workers, Women, Immigrants, People of Color, et al.) but as real people, living in real places with real lives, and having real thoughts and feelings. To know these things you need local knowledge. The importance of this was brought home to me on a small island off the coast of Dakar in Senegal. I was there as part of a training workshop in partnership with West African trainers, working with a group of artists, activists, and investigative journalists interested in combating corruption. None of us were from the island, yet we were planning on doing a training action at the end of the week-long session. Keyti, one of the trainers (and co-creator of the Senegalese rap news show Journal Rappé) quickly identified this problem and came up with an exercise. That afternoon, the workshop participants were instructed to wander the island and do research. The French and Wolof speakers were to interview locals to talk to them about how corruption impacts their personal lives, while the English speakers watched where people congregated and what they did there. After a few hours, we reconvened and shared what we had learned, and from this knowledge, we identified local targets of corruption: officials who receive kickbacks for allowing locals to act as guides to visiting tourists, and a place for the action: a prominent sculpture across from the ferry landing where the tourists come ashore. With this local knowledge, we were able to stage an affective intervention that spoke to local concerns in a  meaningful location populated by locals.

Our family dog Simon, a normally calm and sweet Labrador Retriever, is the world’s worst fishing companion. I found this out one day when I thought it would be fun to take him with me as I fished for schoolies off the local bay beach jetty. In my mind’s eye, Simon would sit there serenely, looking up at me adoringly with his deep brown eyes, and perhaps let out an excited but mild yip in admiration when I hauled in a fish. A scene that Norman Rockwell might paint for the cover of Field & Stream. Instead, Simon barked, loudly and incessantly, from the moment we arrived on the jetty. As I tried to cast, he jumped up on me, lunging at the barbed lure on the end of my line. Watching the lure hit the water, he scrambled down the rocky embankment in an effort to retrieve it.  Then he barked some more. After 30 minutes of this I gave up, ended my fishing, and brought our dog home. It’s not just my fishing that gets him riled up. The minute he sees someone on the beach with a pole he takes off like a shot and runs up to them, barking and lunging, as I sprint after him, grab him by the color and slip on his leash, calling out apologies over my shoulder as I haul him away. I am disappointed that Simon is not the fishing friend I dreamed of, but there’s plenty of ways that we still find companionship: we go on long walks in the woods and on the beach (with a wary eye open for anglers), we hang out on the deck and keep guard over the chickens, we snuggle together on the couch in front of the fireplace when it’s cold. There’s a whole lot we can do together, we just can’t go fishing.

Politics, specifically progressive activist politics, makes up a large part of my life. Not only as an activity, but in terms of identity: it’s who I am, through and through. There’s nothing I like more than hanging out with my friends, drinking a few beers, assessing the current state of the world, complaining about how crazy the Republicans have become and how lame the Democrats have always been, talking strategy and tactics, and imagining what we would do if we ran things. These friends are also my comrades. Although they are quite diverse in terms of where they live and what they do, their ethnicity and sexuality, they all share my political views and my activist practice. I also have friends and acquaintances who do not. A lot of them are friends from High School who I’ve remained close to. Some are neighbors, others are regulars from the dog-run or a fishing spot, one is a barber I’ve been going to see for the past 20 years. With these friends, I don’t talk politics, especially not now in these highly partisan times. I call them out if they say something racist or sexist, or repeat some stupid “fact” they’ve pulled off a conspiracy site, but most of the time I steer the conversation to things we do share: a backyard fence, memories, kids and dogs, the weather, and whether the fish are biting. Perhaps this avoidance is cowardice on my part, but it allows me to enjoy these folks as friends. It seems like a paradox, but having friends who I can not talk to about my progressive activism also makes me a better progressive activist. Activism is not about hanging out with people who already agree with you, it’s about understanding and reaching out to those who don’t.

I usually get to my favorite fishing jetty early, when I am one of only a few people there. But as the day gets brighter and the tides get closer to their ideal high water point, the jetty begins to fill up. First is a group of older men, speaking quietly amongst themselves in a language I don’t understand. Then come the fishing-bros with expensive gear who look at my yard-sale rod and reel with curiosity and contempt. A mother and her two children show up. She stares at her phone, bored and inattentive, while her daughter and son randomly plop their bait into the water. Finally, a group of teenagers shows up, talking loudly over a radio they’ve brought, and spending equal amounts of time horsing around and casting out. Even with social distancing it gets crowded, and I make way for the newcomers, but not without reservations and a bit of resistance.  None of them fish the way that I do: they are too loud, too taciturn, too serious, or not serious enough. They don’t fish with the right lures. (Everyone knows that you fish with five-inch Savage Gear Sand Eels in either silver or pearl to catch Schoolies on this jetty). But that’s not the worst of it.  With the wrong lures, the wrong gear, the wrong technique, and the wrong attitudes they sometimes catch more fish than me.

Men, particularly white straight men, take up a lot of space. Nowhere is this more evident than a political meeting where some white dude will stand up and proceed to explain, with assurance and authority and volume, exactly what the situation is (no matter the situation) and precisely what is the only possible course of action (the one they suggest). If you were to ask them why they do this, they would, first, explain that it is critically important that things be done correctly if the revolution is to succeed and that they were merely sharing this crucial insight, experience, rigor, etc. Second, they would not notice they had done anything wrong at all.  One of the dubious privileges of being white, male, middle-class, straight and from the USA is the belief that your way of doing things is the best way to do things, not necessarily because it is born of many years of study and experience, testing and evaluation, but because it is the only way of doing things. This is white male universalism.  Most activists I work with today are younger, queerer, darker, poorer, less male and are from outside North America. They have different ways of doing things: different ideas, different styles, different approaches. My first instinct is often to stand up and man-splain how it is and how it should be done. But I’ve learned (or rather, been taught) to sit down and listen, in activist speak, “step up by stepping back.” Sometimes other people’s ideas turn out to be wrong, but most of the time they are simply different, born of that person’s particular experience and position in the world — just as mine are. This doesn’t mean that my ideas are simply “male, pale, and stale” and should be summarily dismissed, just that they aren’t the only ideas that matter, and may not be the ones that matter most.  As more and more activists, the greater public, and even the power elite look less like me, these “different” ideas are more in touch with the mainstream than mine might be. After forty-odd years of being an activist, of being someone who teaches activists (and others) with assurance and authority, I am being replaced. And, in my own opinion,  that’s a good idea.

As the sun rises over the beach and the sky glows purple, red then orange and finally turns to blue, I remind myself for the umpteenth time how fortunate I am.  Not fortunate as some sort of idyllic abstraction, but “fortunate” as the result of the structural privileges of my race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography. Fishing is not a particularly privileged activity. It is dominated by men, it’s true, but it is not a rich man’s sport — though fly fishing can certainly lean that way.  Nor is it particularly white. My fellow anglers on the Christopher Street Pier are almost exclusively Asian, those casting their lines into Central Park’s Harlem Meer with me are usually Black and Latino, and any trip to an urban pier or a country brook (or East Asia) will soon dispel any stereotypes. Yet my own love for fishing is largely dependent on the fact that I have a good salary, a flexible schedule, and own a house in Cape Cod while renting an apartment in New York City. My fishing is untroubled by a need to work double shifts at the Stop and Shop to make ends meet or worry about getting hassled by the police or assaulted by a thug as I pull up to an empty beach parking lot while it’s still dark. Hell, I wouldn’t be fishing at all if European colonizers hadn’t forced the Nauset peoples off the Cape, and the Lenape out of Manhattan. Recognizing my privilege doesn’t keep me from enjoying fishing, but there is no escaping it: I am a White Man Fishing on the Cape.

In my twenties,  I traveled to war-torn Nicaragua to build houses to support their recent revolution. Although we were all pretty good carpenters in our group, it soon became clear why we had been invited by the Sandinista government: yes, to build houses for the poor Campesinos who had been living in substandard conditions under the former regime, but also to put our US bodies in an active combat zone so the US-funded Contra guerillas would be more reluctant to attack. After a month, with no attacks and several houses built, we were getting ready to leave when one of the local Sandinista officials said to us, “Thank you for building these houses in our country, but now you must go back to your country and get the US to stop funding this war. This is your real work for the revolution.” This was what we were asked to do with our privilege. As a privileged activist today, at a time when this privilege is increasingly being identified and called out by others, I ask myself constantly what I should do with my privilege. I can continue on in the great white way of refusing to acknowledge that my experiences are particular and privileged, then get increasingly alienated from social movements as my ways of thinking and doing become increasingly irrelevant and ignored. Or I might conclude that my activism is so tainted by my privilege that the only right thing to do is stop being an activist, and retreat into a guilt-ridden, yet morally righteous, solipsistic inactivity. (Guilt, perversely privileges the privileged.) But then I think back to that Sandinista who was suggesting another path, his words less diplomatically translated into something like this: “Listen up, Yankee! You’ve experienced a little of our reality, take that understanding with you, but now use your privilege to stop your government from killing us.” My privilege does not make me a better activist. In many ways, it makes me a worse one in that I am too often blind to other’s experiences. But my privilege does give me power in the world. My responsibility is to recognize this, yes, but then use that power in the service of those without it to make a world where privilege no longer exists.

Why is catching a fish so thrilling? I think about this a lot — usually in those non-thrilling moments when I am not catching any fish. I’ve come to the conclusion that fishing is like gambling: you never quite know when you are going to get a bite. You fish and fish and fish and nothing, and then wham: you get a bite and the adrenaline starts pumping. It’s like hitting the jackpot.  But fishing isn’t so much like slot machine gambling, where some mechanical ratchet or digital algorithm determines your payout (although the bad odds are similar), rather fishing is more like poker where skill and practice increase your luck. Yet while fishing can be thrilling at times, at other times, most of the time, it can be excruciatingly boring. The same repetitive motions, staring across the water, not knowing if there’s anything under that opaque surface that might be remotely interested in what you are offering. But it is exactly the long stretches of boredom — the runs of bad luck — that make the moment when a fish hits your lure, your rod doubles, and your reel drag screams as the hooked fish makes its run, so damn thrilling. 

“Whose streets? Our Streets!” I absolutely loathe the unoriginality of this common protest chant, but it taps the rush you get when you are in the middle of what would normally be a car-jammed boulevard and everywhere you look you see people protesting for the same cause. It’s those moments when you can viscerally feel the potential power of the people. Yes, activism is thrilling, and for some folks, that’s all it is. These activists get addicted to the thrill and spend their time hopping from one hotspot to another, this protest to that protest, in search of a high. Then there are the activists who continually raise the stakes in search of thrills, staging more and more confrontational tactics in order to provoke more extreme responses from authorities and boost media notoriety. Most common, however, are those activists who quit activism when the thrill is gone.  What all these folks don’t seem to realize, or recognize, is that it’s the long stretches of patient planning and organizing  — the boring meetings, the tedious communications, the uncomfortable fundraising — which allow for the thrilling moments of activism.

When the striped bass are running, my local jetty is lined with anglers. We are respectful of one another and try to give each other room so our lines don’t cross, yet it is still obvious when someone has caught a fish, and just as obvious — to me, at least — when I have not. In this situation, it’s hard for me not to feel jealous, competitive, and then a bit resentful of these weekenders catching all these fish at my local spot. Who are they, my mind complains to me, to be catching all my fish and leaving me with none?  All of this is ridiculous. While in the grand scheme, there is a finite number of fish in the sea and the fishing stocks are being depleted, the culprits are climate change and capitalism in the form of huge fishing industry trawlers scooping up fish in international water, not a few weekend anglers. On the jetty, some people catch more and some less, but this is just a matter of having the right lure, a certain amount of skill, and luck.  As people start reeling in stripers, and I’m still waiting for a hit, I just remind myself that fishing is not a competition. When the schoolies are running there’s enough fish for everyone and all of us end up catching something. 

As an activist, it’s hard not to get jealous of others’ successes. I know I’m not supposed to — Solidarity Forever! — but still, it happens: while my downtown community activist group is struggling to rack up a single win, a group in the Bronx makes the papers by saving their community garden; when my non-profit is rejected for its umpteenth grant, we hear of the Ford Foundation making a three-year commitment to supporting a friend’s organization. Why are they succeeding and we are not? And then I step back and take a long view.  Over the long arc of my activist life, I have had successes as well as failures  — as have my friend’s organization, and likely that group in the Bronx as well. But more importantly, if I step back even further I can start to see their successes as mine too.  Our tactics might differ: I work with creative forms of activism, others use legal or electoral means, and our objectives may vary: lately, I’ve been working on anti-corruption campaigns while admiring (okay, a bit jealous) of my friend’s work on the environment, but in the big picture we are all working toward the same goals: a more just and sustainable world.  “Diversity of Tactics” has become the norm at most large-scale, multi-group protests these days. At its worst, this means marching peacefully with thousands while watching a small group of black-clad protestors smash a Starbucks window and set fire to an upside-down American flag knowing which image will make the nightly news, but at its best diversity of tactics is s a recognition that there are many approaches to activism and that no one way is the best. In fact, it’s the diversity of many approaches that is the best approach,

Almost all of the fish I catch I release back into the water. There are all sorts of reasons I do this. Freshwater bass stink up the kitchen when you cook them and taste like mud, the saltwater striped bass I catch never seem to fit into the 28-35 inch “keeper” window allowed in Massachusetts, and by law, all fish caught in New York City parks have to be released and, to be honest, I would not relish eating a fish whose main diet consists of white bread and plastic garbage. To make the fish easier to release I replace treble hooks with single ones and then clip the barbs on all my hooks so I can slide the fish off the hook and into the water quickly. I remove the middle hook on large, three hook lures. (Since predator fish strike at the head or the tail of a baitfish, the only function of the middle hook on a lure is to rip open the fish’s cheek or stab your thumb as you try and remove it.)  And I use a silicon mesh net so the freshwater fish with delicate skin are better protected. Reducing the number of hooks and clipping the barbs means sometimes losing a fish I would have otherwise caught, but that’s part of the game for me. Every once in a while I keep and eat a fish, mainly the tasty lake trout I catch in early spring before the water heats up and drives them into the shallows and the bluefish whose oily meat is just perfect for smoking. But pan-fried trout and home-smoked bluefish are special treats, and most of the fish I eat comes from the store. The commercial fisherman of Cape Cod who supply my store-bought fish, the older Chinese men on the pier next to me who fish the Hudson River for dinner, the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama, and Warm Springs peoples who have to fight to keep their tribal fishing rights on the Columbia River where my parents retired. They all keep what they catch.

In our workshop, we have an opening exercise where we ask people to introduce themselves by telling the group how they got involved in activism. The point of the exercise is for people to get to know each other, but also to reveal — through example– that traditional activist outreach efforts: flyers, door knocking, petitions, and public meetings are not how they themselves got involved. Their stories, as different as they are, share several traits: they are experiential, they are emotional, and they are personal. In brief: they are affective experiences, and the very sorts of experiences we hope to generate through creative activism. By way of example, I usually begin with myself: I grew up in an activist family with a social justice minister for a father. But I was also an angry kid, upset by the inequities and vacuity of the world around me, and my father’s Christian brand of peace and love activism didn’t speak to me. Then, sometime around 1979, I heard my first punk rock song, God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols, and while I couldn’t understand the words they were singing I knew that they, too, were pissed off at the world and that I wasn’t alone, and through punk rock I found activism. Once we were doing this exercise with a group of sex worker activists in South Africa. When it came time for one of them to tell her story of activist awakening, she stood up and said: “I am poor, black, queer, a woman, and a sex worker. There has never been a moment when I was not an activist.” I realized then, and have realized many times since then, that activism for me is a choice, and for her, and many of the activists I work with, it was not. Activism is survival. I can always walk away from activism, with a bad conscience, perhaps, but no deleterious impact on my life (in fact, my career prospects would likely improve). She can not. This is why it is all the more important that I don’t.