The March on Mission Bay

I’m not much of a go-getter and I’m more than a little narcissistic. With these shortcomings I could rarely find the news when I was a reporter years ago, and I frequently end up on the margins as a gallerist now. But even a broken clock is accurate twice a day, and last Friday morning the hands aligned perfectly for the Offbrand.

The time was inching toward 10 a.m., and I should have been on my way to the gallery. Instead I continued watching ESPN on the exercycle at my gym in Mission Bay with the late-morning crowd of oldsters, muscle boys and pregnant ladies. The glare that pours in from the north-facing windows, which look out on a wide stone pathway, normally forces me to keep my head down. But an unlikely procession had toddled into view, so I squinted into the light, finding before me the charges of a local day care, accompanied by their smiling chaperones, trudging double file, and toting mini-placards with portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Slack-jawed, I gaped at this pre-school political pageant. Most everyone around me was smiling through the exertion of their workout. Who could blame them? You’d have to be heartless not to swoon at the overwhelming cuteness of the treacly tableau—tiny mincing steps, bewildered pink faces and ridiculous toddler outfits, offset by the adult troop alignment and the hilarious sign-carrying. It’s hard not to chuckle at kids playing dress up and acting like adults. But this kind of amusement curdles quickly. Try watching Bugsy Malone. Almost immediately I found myself cringing in nauseated fascination at the spectacle of toddlers conscripted by their daytime handlers to march unwittingly for the dead civil rights leader.

Already I can hear you muttering: Sarcastic bully beats up on well-meaning parents and teachers to further his own twisted need to criticize. I’ve heard that voice before; my mother peppered my childhood with the phrase, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” I didn’t listen then and I’m not listening now. Because while the suborning of toddlers to march in a demonstration for MLK is nowhere near as stupid as decorating them with Che Guevara t-shirts, it still smacks of pre-teen beauty pageants, the premature transformation of kids into consumers and the smug treatment of babies as articles of fashion.

 If kids are going to march it should be for things they care about: Sponge Bob and soccer and cupcakes and ice cream. I’m no Victorian who thinks childhood should take place in a snow globe of innocence and protection. When my wife goes out of town, junior and I camp out in front of HULU and catch up on Family Guy. He is only six, and we seem to get very different things out of the show, but we can always agree that the best episodes focus on Stewie. But I don’t make him pimp things he is not passionate about. I would have preferred, for instance, that he dress for Halloween as the young Frederick Nietzsche, but in the end I did the right thing and popped $45 for his G.I. Joe Snake Eyes Ninja costume. He wore to a Halloween parade peopled with boys wearing costumes just like it. That’s healthy, in spite of the superhero military facist thingeee going on.

Even more dispiriting than watching parents billboard their children is witnessing their satisfaction in creating a defanged protest march. Literally. Some of those kids didn’t even have their baby teeth. I have a little experience in this area. I participated in a protest march last summer at the Marin Headlands organized by the Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren. Instead of protest signs the marchers were given placards with reproductions of modernist paintings on them and led on a three-hour hike. It wasn’t the first time a protest march seemed more like a grandiose spectacle than a heartfelt political outcry, but it forced me to consider how political action has drifted away from authenticity and towards performance and representation. MLK’s protest marches had the power to destabilize the status quo. J. Edgar Hoover violated every statute in the constitution trying to disrupt them. The police and the National Guard used tear gas and attack dogs to control the crowds. These days all we need to keep our demonstrators in line is a dozen juice boxes and some cheddar cheese goldfish. Our protests now exist only to give us the illusion that we possess the agency to fundamentally change our system. And the system is thankful, for we might panic and revolt if we knew there was really no exit. 

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