Moving the Minds of the Movement's Masses

 (Originally published in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, as "Handbooks For, By and About Activists," 6 October, 2022.)       The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator by David Fenton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

      David Fenton and his wife, according to Wikipedia, “divide their time between New York and Berkeley.” It is a true measure of our clout in the thought leader world that neither of these cities needs to designate thOur states, let alone thOur countries. We are “mononymous,” like Aristotle or Cher.      

Fenton started “hanging out with the radical kids… marijuana and rock and roll…demonstrating against the (Vietnam) war” in his late 1960s “75 per cent Black and Puerto Rican” high school; “arousing my senses, sexuality, and creativity in new ways.” 

     He and his fellow students in the Bronx banished their “dress code” “by word of mouth” by all “showing up in blue jeans” one day; the first of many civil disobedience actions that made him more and more confident to question authority, preferably in large groups with a lot of like-minded others willing to take action. 

    He also “subscribed to…intellectual new left magazines,” joined photography club, and “we started the New York High School Free Press,” out of the Student Union and anti-draft coalition. The parent publisher, NY Free Press, and other underground and formal adult magazines began picking up his “photographs of riots and demonstrations around New York,” helping him to make “serious money from photography” for them and the Liberation News Service of the “hundreds of hippie, counter-cultural, antiwar underground newspapers” that had sprung up “across the country.”  (He's center on this Getty Images photo -- very young.)  

     He latched up with Abbie Hoffman and the Youth International Party Yippies (see Judy Gumbo, Yippie Girl, Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI), impressed with how “creatively the defendants” of the Chicago Seven and their previous protest “mythmaking,” especially on television and talk show news, proved that “image” about “yourself or your organization, is as important to communicating your message as what you actually do.” Read that sentence again, because it is the essence of HIS message. 

     Officer Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck viscerally encapsulated Black Lives Matter, and the broadly misunderstood slogan “Defund the Police” kicked a hole in it. (It should have been "Demilitarize the Police," and Fenton is talking to the wrong audience when he uses the metaphors of "fight" "war" and "generals" when talking about progressive "leaders.")

    An Ann Arbor commune, riots, rock stars and tear gas followed, including his work in The Berkeley Barb during a time of police, corporate and secret repression under Nixon and Reagan. The Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Koch Brothers/DT/Bannon/Giuliani/ domination years have followed, and he worked against alar on apples, big oil, and with Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon to ban fracking in New York State. 

     I don’t agree with all his stories about people and events, details and conclusions; but what he’s learned on the way to International Climate Action and confronting “The Conservative Media’s Alternative Reality” as a photographer, organizer and "ad man" is stunning. (see https://www.davidfenton.com/ Amazing!)

     Just A FEW bits/bytes: “For decades, I have watched crazy dogmatism hurt the Left,” (SO TRUE!) 

“People learn from engaging characters and moral stories,” (people we can relate to and empathize with) 

“Public relations also affects the legal system and the courts” (from the grassroots up, not always “trickle down”) and 

“To change policy, you have to change public opinion.” (see the dogged determination of the Heritage Foundation and other Right-wing Think Tanks over the past 40+ years culminating in Trump and the Dobbs decision etc. Persistence and appropriate "packaging" (fear mongering) (infusions of Hope) to the right population in thOur own language WORKS.

     Find this book, study it and USE his PR principles in your next endeavor. 

Available at Eastwind and other independent bookstores in the Bay Area and elsewhere.

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