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ALL DRESSED UP WITH NOWHERE TO GO
Stephen Duncombe:
I wasn’t involved in the War Chest Tours, ‘cause that was out in San Francisco.
In the 1980’s, I was still in college, so I was doing lots of anti-Apartheid stuff… But no, I was actually not a part of the punk rock protest stuff. Oddly enough, in New York there wasn’t any, and that’s what’s weird. Really, the punk-infused politics happened out west, and in Minnesota as well. But there really wasn’t much of it in New York –which is to the detriment of New York. (In the 1990’s there was.)
The Left was changing-over. It was a mix. On the one hand, there were sort of these leftovers from the 1960’s. Or the professionalized activists from the Sixties who had gone into nonprofit work in the 1970’s and the 1980’s, keeping the structures alive as best they could. But what I was excited by was this undercurrent of people who were interested in alternative culture –particularly punk rock. But they hadn’t found a political voice for it yet. They had in the West, but really not on the East Coast. And so you had these things like the War Resister’s League, which—God bless ‘em!—but they’re a pretty staid organization. But they were staffed by all these ex-punk rockers! So there was sort of this mismatch between the culture of us young organizers, and the organization itself.
NO BUSINESS AS USUAL
The CIA manual advising Nicaraguan guerrillas how to kidnap, assassinate, blackmail and dupe civilians is an appalling production, and its disclosure has produced a first-class storm... Mr. Reagan himself is desperately trying to flee responsibility for the document.(38)
- Washington Post, October 21, 1984
Mark Anderson:
We were influenced a lot by things that had happened on the West Coast, particularly in San Francisco during the ’84 Democratic Convention. There was this new style of protest that developed… And because punk rockers were visibly connected to this creative, disruptive, un-permitted street protest, it was easier to notice.
Folks in Nevada picked up on this… People in and around the band 7 Seconds had created the original Positive Force in Reno as an affinity group—a punk affinity group—to help give support and encouragement to each other during actions. It’s one thing to say: “OK, I’m going to do such-and-such,” but if you’re doing it by yourself, it’s awfully intimidating. It’s easier to volunteer at a homeless shelter or a meals program if there are several of you going together.
So that was the whole concept of Positive Force: let’s help each other to become not just talkers, but doers. It was exactly the right idea, at the right time.
At the same time, the reverberations of these protests were filtering across the country. Kevin Mattson, picked up on this style of protest, and helped organize a local chapter of No Business As Usual.
April 29, 1985 was chosen as “No Business As Usual Day,” a national day of protest, with simultaneous actions in a dozen U.S. cities. It was, in the words of Dick Lucas, “a bit of a disaster.”(39)
They won’t listen to reason / They won’t be bound by votes / The government must be stopped from launching World War III / No matter what it takes!
- Official slogan for No Business As Usual Day
Writing in the Chicago Reader, John Stevenson observed:
This [slogan] appealed to me, and apparently to a few hundred others who gathered in Chicago’s Loop for a day of street marches, ‘die-ins,’ chants, and guerilla theater. The police were aggressively present, and grabbed people up on the slightest pretexts, arresting about 40 by day’s end.(40)
Mark Anderson:
I will say that the No Business As Usual protest did not seem to be a striking success… In Washington D.C., we might have had 100 people in the protest, and about 100 police following us. It was not a big event.
Part of what it taught me was the huge gap between our ideals, and the reality of what we could do with such a small and alienated group. Because our aim in No Business As Usual was to “Stop World War III –no matter what it takes!” That’s what it said on our posters! (I didn’t make up that slogan.)
But you know, 100 scruffy kids and aging hippie socialists trotting around in the street… how is that stopping World War III?! You need a mass movement to stop World War III.
Nevertheless, No Business As Usual played a critical role in the formation of Positive Force D.C.
POSITIVE FORCE
In June 1985, just two months after No Business As Usual, D.C. punks held the first of many raucous Punk Percussion Protests outside of the South African Embassy. Though the embassy was surrounded by a 200-yard exclusion zone, the metal security fences couldn’t keep out the noise. For the white supremacists, it was a major headache.
Mark Anderson:
I got to know Kevin [Mattson] through some of those protests, and that’s what brought us together. No Business As Usual predated the punk percussion protests, but they are essentially parallel activities. When we heard about the Positive Force groups that had started in Reno and Las Vegas, we thought, “Well, why not a Positive Force in D.C.?” And even though we had slightly different concepts of what the group would be about, we joined together to create Positive Force in the summer of 1985.
We are the only Positive Force group that remains active now, 21 years after we started.
Though open to anyone, from the very beginning Positive Force has been strongly identified with members of the punk community. Writing in Maximumrocknroll #206, Felix Havoc recalls:
I was an active participant and later organizer in the No Business as Usual protests and the War Chest Tours of the early and mid 80's. These were organized by Positive Force D.C., until they were co-opted by the leftoid cult RCP.(41)
Today, most people know Felix Havoc primarily through his columns in Profane Existence and Maximumrocknroll. But prior to settling in Minneapolis, the future Havoc Records executive lived in Washington D.C., where he was still known by his birth name: Krishna Dorney. “He was one of the original members of Positive Force,” says Anderson. “Way back when he was 15.”
Though Anderson stresses that Positive Force “has never been an adjunct of bands on the Dischord record label,” this close relationship with the D.C. punk scene has proved very fruitful over time. Over the next 20 years, Positive Force D.C. would stage more than 300 benefit concerts, and raise over $200,000 for groups such as the Alexandria Tenants Association, the United Mine Workers, Damien AIDS Ministries, the War Resisters’ League, and Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (H.I.P.S.).
Jenny Toomey—a former member of Positive Force D.C., and currently the Executive Director and President of the Future of Music Coalition (a Washington think tank)—has seen things from both sides of the aisle, having testified repeatedly before the U.S. Senate.
Jenny Toomey:
The main goal of the group was to take activism to a more creative level, to get away from traditional leftist activism, and do more creative activism.
We also raised a whole lot of money. We learned basic organizing and activist skills that I still use to this day.
I think a lot of the people who came to Positive Force were idealistic, and had worked through traditional activist groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or PIRG [Public Interest Research Group]. And they had found that when they worked for these organizations, that they were just exploited as an extra pair of hands. It was ironic, ‘cause you’ve got these kids who have the most energy in the whole world, and their main contribution to the fight was licking envelopes or going door-to-door to beg change.
What Positive Force did was to allow these activists to have a greater voice in how their activism expressed itself.
Punk columnist Felix Havoc agrees:
[W]hen we were organizing protests we steered away from the boring "slogans, speakers, marching, slogans" repertoire and tried to inject humor and action into our events. We were very inspired by the “Stop the City” actions in London, which we read about in [Maximumrocknroll], Conflict and Subhumans lyrics. There was the mass "die in" at the corporate headquarters of Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster.
We would put laundry soap and dye in the fountains and then plug up the drains with coffee can lids so that colored soap suds would fill the park, making it hard for cops to chase us. There were costumes, banners and often missiles hurled at police, such as rotten fruit or dumpstered Twinkies. I remember one night, we set up a protest outside an arms show where foreign dignitaries in limos pulled up to sip cocktails and check out the latest in hi tech weapons and surveillance gear. We lobbed so much rotten fruit at those characters…!(42)
Jenny Toomey:
There was an Arms Bazaar, which is basically a black tie event and military Expo where members of the armed forces get to dress up and take their wives to a ball (and also go look at all the latest military technologies).
I think in that case, we made a huge papier maché missile, and basically created a disturbance so that these people who do this every single day had to actually think about what they were doing.
At its best, Positive Force was very democratic. Anyone who wanted to do anything could do it. If I wanted to have a two-day arts festival in Dupont Circle, I could do it. And if I wasn’t old yet enough to sign for the permits, one of the older folks would sign for them… When it worked well, it was a wonderful organization.
Mark Anderson:
From January of 1987 through October of 2000, Positive Force was based in a punk rock commune, a raggedy house (actually two relatively raggedy houses) out in Arlington, Virginia. We were gentrified out of both of those houses, and ultimately relocated back into the city –although we dissolved our communal household at that time. We’ve been based in various community institutions ever since then, and now we’re based in the house that I own with my wife.
GRAY HAIRS AND GREEN HAIRS UNITE
Though the punk percussion protests drew the most attention, Positive Force D.C. was increasingly moving away from the confrontational street tactics of No Business As Usual, becoming more of a direct action social service organization. In the process, they were also creating an unusual alliance between punk rockers and Senior Citizens.
Mark Anderson:
We have to break out of the subcultural ghetto… And one of the ways that we do it in Positive Force is literally by drawing punk rockers into delivering groceries to elderly folks, going to visit elderly folks, working at homeless shelters, and working at daycare centers in low income areas.
We also did a lot of volunteer work in soup kitchens and with the [Center for Creative Nonviolence] at their shelter. I grew up in pretty poor white trash culture, but for a 16-year-old kid, working at the homeless shelter and soup kitchen was a real eye opener for me… I remember cooking food and strapping it to the back of Jenny Toomey's scooter and taking it to the park to feed the homeless.(43)
- Felix Havoc, Maximumrocknroll
Mark Anderson:
I moved to Washington D.C. from Montana. I’m from a very rural part of the country. I grew up on a farm and a ranch, 15 miles from the nearest town or paved road. So when I moved to Washington D.C., and encountered the extraordinary gap between the rich and the poor… I wanted to try and do something that would help. So part of what came out of this, was a decision by myself to go and work in the inner city. And just by accident, I ended up connecting with a group that worked with senior citizens.
It was an outreach group. It took me out into the community to get to know seniors in their own homes… And so, we began to visit seniors as volunteers, to deliver groceries to them, and quite honestly, to become their friends.
At a certain point, I realized that what we were actually doing was what the progressive movement needs to do, which is we were stepping out of this rhetorical left wing politics, and actually connecting to the people who we said we wanted to be in solidarity with. How can you be in solidarity with somebody that you don’t even know? You’re in solidarity with a social stereotype or a label. You need to gain solidarity with people.
So that’s how that happened. And people think “Oh, isn’t that odd!” They think it’s cute—and maybe it is odd, maybe it is cute—I know it’s extraordinarily important. And I do believe that it’s something that punks in general, and the progressive movement, would do well to pursue more consistently and fully.
Kristin Thomson:
In 1989, I moved from Colorado, and within a week of moving to D.C., I went to a show with Fugazi, Jawbox, and Shudder To Think, who were playing at a church. It was a Positive Force show. And one of the first people that went up to speak on stage was Jenny [Toomey]. And I was like: “Wow! She seems really great!”
I stuck around after the show, and I talked to Mark Anderson. The next day they were going to go recycle cans and bottles in the parking lot during a Rolling Stones concert at RFK Stadium. So I went with them, and immediately realized that this was exactly what I was looking for. And it was the sort of the perfect connection between music, politics, punk rock-ness, and community organizations. Here were these bands that were generous, and they were playing these shows for people who loved their music, but also playing a benefit that would help the community. So I was immediately attracted to Positive Force. And I was involved within a week of going to D.C.
Mark Anderson:
The key thing is that you can’t stay within the comfortable punk rock nest that you’ve made. You’ve got to spread your wings. You’ve got to take it out into the world. Which means that you’re going to change the world by what you’re doing. But you’re also going to be changed by it. And that’s part of what you have to learn. You have to learn how to connect to other communities, how to speak the different languages—whether literally, or metaphorically—so that we can communicate and connect. Together we can be powerful. Because that’s how you stop World War III. That’s how you stop world hunger.
Which means that there’s a tension at the heart of punk politics. If punk is tied to some big revolutionary effort, but it’s also tied to this outsider-subterranean-bohemian ideal, then how do the two connect? Because the revolution doesn’t happen in the basement. Your personal revolution can. But objectively, we have to change the things out there.
I’m proud of what we did in No Business As Usual and the punk percussion protests. But it was also a learning experience. That’s where we were in 1985. And this is 2006. We have to keep growing and moving forward.
Sometimes we learn the most from the mistakes we make.
© 2006 by Erik Farseth
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