The First Arrests

Josiah called about a week and a half after the open house, shaken up. They said they’d just gotten out of jail, that they’d been picked up on the way out of the open house along with a few others. I asked for what but they were evasive, which is their right. The cops can always make something up, and anyway, if they were doing anything after all, there would be little benefit in telling me, for them or for me. Josiah asked if I’d been invited to the open house, that it was peculiar who exactly had been invited. Kendra Badger is a bit of a celebrity after all, wouldn’t any open house get a lot of publicity? No, I lied as I looked over to the flyer she had pulled out of Greg’s bag when she knocked on my door. It was the first of many times I’d lie for Kendra, to myself and to others.

Josiah continued: There had, indeed, been another open house, just a few days later, which got the normal press attention and the throngs of residents looking for free finger food and a chance for a selfie with the councilmember the country was talking about. There were arrests there too, apparently, two guys the police said were stalkers. Kendra had a lot of them over the next three years. I was never one, though at one point last year while leaving one of our rendezvous I was stopped by a couple of secret service agents. I didn’t know, she didn’t tell me, that the then former president was in town to meet with her. The cops thought I looked suspicious so close to where the former president would be when no one was supposed to know about it. I’m sure that was the night he convinced her to run for mayor, it made me bitter to know that that slime bag had slithered his suggestion into Kendra’s head. I had had different plans. But I’m getting ahead of myself, that’s still two years from where we are in the story. The former president is president again of course, but like they say, all politics is local.

So anyway, Josiah kept going on about the two open houses. It made sense. The arrests after the first open house meant no protests at the bigger one. Kendra wasn’t a badger, she was a snake. Josiah stressed the importance of organizing again. Our city had its share of uprisings in the summer of 2020, and there were lots of promises to spend more money on youth programs, but Kendra Badger’s win and popularity showed we had a lot of work left to do. The trouble with mass movements, of course, is that they attract the masses. That’s unnecessarily bitter—maybe Kendra is getting inside me more than I sometimes consider, even though I try always to be aware of the dynamic, and that as much as I can influence her she influences me too. What I mean to say is the trouble with popular movements in a capitalist society is that their popularity leads to their commodification, and the emergence of hangers on. People get worked up over an issue but quickly move on to something else. A popular movement and a mass movement are not the same thing.

Josiah pointed out that I hadn’t been at a protest action since that summer, attending meetings only sporadically and not even really appearing at social events anymore. I had been writing a lot. The summer of the uprisings led me to the conclusion that America was the only place global communism could sprout from, but that the way communism was first discovered, by Marx, in the old world, prevented it from taking root properly here on the soil most suited for it. Marxists succeeded in implementing communism, if not the executing and maintain it, where it was tailored to the historical situation. It’s an oversimplification, but Leninism was Marxism for Russia, with the vanguard party that was needed to seize power from the Tsars and express the will of the working class. Maoism was Marxism for China, with its focus on the peasant class as congruous to the working class. And so forth, and so on. Yet here, in America, we insisted, in so much as we have had any kind of real Marxist project at all, on using one of these localizations as if it would work here also, instead of formulating Marxist theory that would actually work here. I found myself deep in reading and writing about these topics, and had become disillusioned with the tenor of our local meetings, which always seemed to focus more on organizational politics and personal drama more than anything outward facing. I admit that sounds condescending, but if there were the passion in our political work we claim there is, we should have something to show for it other than our own cliques.

In any case, Josiah was right. Kendra Badger represented a new kind of threat, and she had targeted us rather directly. I promised I’d be at the next meeting, though they hadn’t yet had one scheduled. Josiah had explained that at least three comrades were still in jail a week later, we guess on older charges. I decided I ought to go to talk to Badger, to confront her about the ruse of the open house. And I wanted to see her, face to face again, to understand the passion she ignited within me. I was set to go right after getting off the phone with Josiah, once the idea of going to see her had settled in my head. It never occurred to me to look at the flyer she had pulled out of Greg’s bag, but I glanced at it as I grabbed my keys to leave the house. The date was last Saturday, the second open house, not the one Josiah and the others had been invited to.