The Lone Flagman Phenomenon (of the PCFM)
Meet Hannah, the Free Palestine protester who filibustered our production!
What is the symbol of the Left in the 2020s?
Burnt out Bernie Sanders?
The Self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell?
Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson?
I think it’s The Lone Flagman.
We want to do something. Anything!
Whatever it takes to stop the misery! To stop the genocide beamed into our retinas on this daily algorithmic diet!
If you’re empathetic. If you’re aware. If you care, you will do something. Anything!
Yet we cannot communicate beyond our niches.
The niches of the PCFM (post class fractured mass) are what people are getting at with the we’re all in “echo chambers” and subject to “tribalism” discourse.1
Enter the Lone Flagman Phenomenon.
It’s something I started noticing on tour this year. I should have started taking photos of it, but the first few times I saw this I didn’t even think to because I was honestly stunned.
What kind of adult thinks walking around alone with a flag, or two, is a good idea?
Maybe I’m wrong, and the Lone Flagman will prove to be a canary in the coal mine, so to speak. But I think the Lone Flagman actually undermines whatever movement her flag represents. Whether it be Palestine or Israel, Pride or The Confederacy, you make the movement look even weaker than it is.
I started noticing lone protesters last year, both for and against Trump. This year I am now seeing lone flagmen.
The first time we saw one was in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. My wife and I were running some errands before leaving for the Billings, Montana event. Driving up Government Way, we saw a Lone Flagman. He/she/they was walking around with a a pride flag (the ugly newer one with the non-rainbow colors added).
The would-be activist was somewhere between 18 to 22 and looked chronically online, like the sun had not seen this body in few years—except maybe on its way to the local adult-centered lifestyle tabletop gaming storefront.
The part that really stood out was that this individual was, like a homeless schizophrenic I saw one time, having a loud conversation with no one in particular—alternating between shouting and talking. (Maybe the person had an earbud in and was on the phone. It’s possible. But I didn’t see an earbud.)
Self criticism: I do not want to act like I am superior to these people. Thankfully I went through my adolescence during a more or less non-political era. When I was 17, I spray painted my little junker Dodge Ram 50 with black and red spray paint. I literally flew a giant pirate flag off the back of my truck. I got pulled over a lot and harassed by cops for bogus reasons. Now that I’m older I will just say it, I was asking for it. The difference between me then, and these kids now, is that I at least knew what I was doing was not political.
Meeting A Lone Flagman (FlagWoman, to be precise)
I am not averse to meeting people.
For the last month and a half of TU Tour I’ve interviewed a ton of gas station workers and truckers, as well as other random people, from states all across the country while we are on tour.
As much as I like meeting people, I have never felt the impulse to meet a lone flagman. That is because I feel like intellectuals who want to theorize change need to stop centering or catering to young foaming-at-the-mouth fringes. That’s been the strategy since the sixties. Though it made sense once upon a time, it no longer does. For reasons to get into later.
Well, the lofty powers decided to make it happen anyway: I met a lone flagman just last week. I went with Nance and Will to the Capitol steps in Boise, Idaho, to do a PDR (public display of reading). We love to do these, Nance and I, and have been doing them since 2023 (example).
The poetic magic of the occasion was that we were reading about the burnout moment of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969—when the organization lost a third of its members to a dramatic walkout.2 That was the anti-imperialist moment, when students were divided on how to best sacrifice themselves for the Third World liberation struggles.
And up walked a lone echo from that era. Enter Hannah. It’s like we summoned her. I won’t say anything more, other than, I think she’s the best representation of the American Left. My heart goes out to her!
You can watch that here:
In this video, before and after meeting Hannah, we are reading from Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. If you want to skip to the part with her, of course do so, but also, I recommend listening to our reading. This video fits together at the levels of form and content in ways about which a grad student could easily write a dissertation. It’s profound!
If you’re curious about The Weather Underground, and our critiques of both it and the New Left, check out this reading of their manifesto we did last week with Benjamin Studebaker for a TU Agora mashup with Why Left:
Enjoy!
In this video from last year, Ann and I give lectures about two of the big structural-material developments from the 20th century that led to the production of the PCFM. Should be of interest for anyone who cares about theory, change, or reality in the 21st Century.
Then, just a couple of days ago in Chicago, I presented my position on the Old and New Left and why the PCFM is a serious problem for both at the Platypus Convention. You can watch that, with god awful audio (workers in loud warehouses or factories will definitely not be able to hear it, which is sadly the case for 98% of their content) here, or wait around til I publish a better version later!
Since the time that I wrote this up a few days ago I learned that the person who led the huge walkout from the SDS, Bernadine Dohrn, was there for the panel I was on at the Platypus Affiliated Society convention. I was critiquing the Old and New Left and she was right there in the front row seat. That was crazy, but I wouldn’t have known who she was without doing the reading we did up on the Capitol steps. Thankfully, because we did that, when Bill Ayers told me her name, I knew, and turned to her and said, “I was just reading about you last week. You are the one who led the walkout from the SDS!” She smiled and nodded. Here is a related post and pictures about that:
While I can accept the Lone Flagman as the avatar of 2020s politics, unfortunately the Left can only be represented by that one single flag, that of Palestine.