Media Watch:
The Rag in the Modern World
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:960955
Olde Ragsters revive in a Digital Age
BY KEVIN BRASS
FEBRUARY 12, 2010
For most of us, the underground press movement of the Sixties exists
as little more than myth and legend, tall tales of radical
journalists throwing bombs at the establishment in the form of wild,
drug-induced articles and freaky cartoons. For a brief period, art,
culture, and politics converged in cheaply produced newspapers, which
were often amateurish, repeatedly offensive, and passionately
devoured by anyone under 30 who thought Tricky Dick Nixon was a sweaty weasel.
In Austin, The Rag was a firebrand little troublemaker that grew out
of the University of Texas in 1966 and then spent 11 years spraying
lighter fluid on local culture. A seminal influence in the national
underground press movement, it served as Austin's primary link to the
Students for a Democratic Society, SDS' offspring the Weathermen,
naked hippies, Jerry Rubin, and a generation of hygiene-ambivalent
kids trying to change the world in their own dippy way.
Flash forward three decades, and The Rag is back. Instead of selling
for 20 cents on the Drag, The Rag now exists as a blog and a radio
show on KOOP-FM, part of an effort to revive some of the
rabble-rousing counterculture spirit of the Sixties. "There are a lot
of similarities in the two eras," said Thorne Dreyer, the editor of
the Rag Blog, who dropped out of UT in the Sixties to fight the fight
and work on the original Rag.
Opening the Perspectives
With Dreyer as "funnel," the Rag Blog (www.theragblog.blogspot.com)
keeps up a steady stream of essays and articles covering everything
from the travails of the American Civil Liberties Union to the
passing of historian and social activist Howard Zinn. Headlines
trumpet, "Is America Already a Failed State?" and "Health Care and
Campaign Finance: The Corporate Stranglehold" "Brought to you,"
the site proclaims, "by the miracle of functioning anarchy." Regular
contributors include Dick Reavis, Jim Retherford, Alan Pogue, Roger
Baker, Harvey Wasserman, Gregg Barrios, Paul Buhle, and a host of
other writers and artists with lengthy pedigrees in progressive media.
They're working in a media landscape light-years removed from the
offset printing presses of their youth. While the original Rag would
be lucky to sell 15,000 copies on Austin street corners, the
3-year-old Rag Blog attracts 45,000 unique visitors a month, drawing
comments from Russia, Japan, and all parts of the globe. On any given
day, a Rag post might pingpong through the digital atmosphere,
creating the type of traffic the kids of the Sixties couldn't
imagine, not even with the right psychedelics.
To oversee the new Rag, a core group of old Ragsters formed a
nonprofit organization, the New Journalism Project, which hopes to
reach across generations and cultivate young journalists. "We're
looking to keep expanding the variety of perspectives, including some
that might be hard to find if you rely on the mainstream media," said
Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte, an associate professor at UT who serves as
president of the nonprofit's board. "The Digital Age provides
opportunities to create a product that mirrors the goals of the Sixties."
There are, as Dreyer notes, similarities in the eras. Much as in the
Sixties, the Rag is re-emerging at a time of extreme political
polarization, when progressives are increasingly disillusioned and
isolated. Media is as ubiquitous as water these days, yet many
lefties feel as though they have no voice, despite the growth of
Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, and other liberal outlets. The
rantings of Olbermann and Matthews seem no more relevant or
interesting to the movement than the babblings of Hannity and Beck.
"Keith Olbermann doesn't represent my political perspective," said UT
journalism professor Robert Jensen, a prolific author and Rag
contributor who describes himself as "anti-capitalistic" and
"anti-empire." "There's no political party that represents us and no
media outlet that represents us."
If the progressive movement seemed marginalized in the Sixties,
that's even truer today. Terms like "socialist" and "liberal" have
become meaningless slurs in the political dialogue. Any connection to
the radicalism of the past is political dynamite, evidenced by the
way Barack Obama was demonized for his past association with
professor and social activist Bill Ayers (whose articles have
appeared on the Rag Blog) for things Ayers allegedly said or did decades ago.
If anything, it's harder than ever for the radical press, the true
lefties, to influence the dialogue. As the Sixties raged, The Rag
could whip up a crowd to protest the tyranny of library cards. Today
the Rag Blog can engage readers in Uzbekistan, but it's tough to
create a ripple in the media ocean, unless they're taking on the
frenzy du jour, screaming about the use of the word "retard" or
debating whether the president is a socialist, fascist, or just a
really sneaky Kenyan Nazi.
It's a Zen koan of the YouTube era: When everyone has a megaphone,
it's impossible to be heard.
"There's just too much noise," Dreyer said. "You have to find ways to
make a real connection." The original Rag was founded on the idea of
unabashedly marrying activism and journalism, a concept that seems
almost quaint now. Everybody preaches to the choir these days.
Big Plans
With a straight face, it could be argued that it's the tea party
movement that's staking out the anti-establishment, counterculture
media turf these days. The tea baggers may believe that Obama is the
spawn of the devil, God is personally writing scripts for Fox News,
and Sarah Palin is intellectually stimulating, but they're the ones
taking to the streets and changing the dialogue, not progressives.
It's Bizarro World for progressives. Instead of helping the
progressive movement, the democratization of media has led to little
progress, in terms of breaking the media power structure. The
original Rag "may not have had the circulation, but it had a personal
impact," said Alice Embree, one of the original Rag crew who now sits
on the board of the nonprofit. "We're losing that sense of community
people used to have, and I don't know if digital media makes up for that."
For Dreyer, 64, a self-described "old doofus," editing the Rag Blog
has been an education in the new media. On several occasions,
right-wing sites have picked up Rag articles and twisted them for
their own purposes, he says. And in contrast to the communal,
all-for-one sharing days of the Sixties, not all liberal writers and
illustrators have been happy about finding their work used without
compensation on the Rag's site. ("We send them a link," Dreyer said.
"If anybody doesn't want us to run it, we'll take it down.")
Plans call for the Rag to shed its limited blog format and expand
into a full website. The New Journalism Project is also trying to
raise grant money and generate funds for new programs. The focus is
on bringing new voices into the project, especially young journalists.
While the old Rag was known for its free-flowing prose, ignoring
conventions of grammar and taste, Dreyer wants the new Rag to traffic
above the fray. "I'm more concerned about offending people," he said.
"The shock aspect of the underground press is not what I'm going to
be into doing."
As a result, in another ironic twist, it's the old hippies who come
off as reasoned and informed, at least compared to the
slogan-chanting right. Many Rag articles seem downright homey when
placed alongside the rantings of radio circus acts like Alex Jones
and Michael Savage. "I want to reach more people," Dreyer said. "And
I want to reach them in a calmer way. I want to have a real
discourse." If that sounds like a very un-Rag-like statement, Dreyer
says the new Rag is "informed" by the underground press movement, but
it is, in fact, a new era.
"There is a different sense of how to communicate," Dreyer said.
"We're not crazy rebels now. We're something more sophisticated."
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