Although Dery's remarks are entertaining and on level not wrong, I think it is important to place them in a larger context--the context of current conservative hegemony. Whose interests does trashing NODD day serve? Certainly not liberal, left, of anti-Bush interests. Certaintly not even free speech or libertarian interests. Instead, it fits in with current right wing attacks on anything left of lock-step neoconservativism. NODD was symbolic politics--that's all. And, it doesn't occur in a vacuum but linked and connected to all sorts of other efforts--it isn't all or nothing like this is the only thing one ever does or will do.

At the level of tactics, renunciation and self-sacrifice sometimes works. Roosevelt made sacrificing for the one a sign of patriotic support. The far right offers renewable virginity and censorship to its enthusiastic adherents. In the 20th century, consumer movements have boycotted meat, orange juice, and grapes in order to challenge pricing structures. So, mass support can be garned in lots of different ways--it doesn't have to promise enjoyment. (There's a cool reason why this works--people like a sense of shared suffering or suffering for a cause; it tends to cathect them more than the self interest of pleasure, proving to them that they are Really part of something...)

Mark Dery asked me to post his response, which follows:

>>Not quite sure where to start with this little farrago.

By Jodi's logic, the Left can never police its own ranks, for fear of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. "Whose interests does trashing NOMDD Day serve"? To be sure, it may gladden the hearts of the flying monkeys of the vast right-wing conspiracy. And it may well quicken the pulses of snarky assistant editors at Reason and The New Republic (although their last issue weighed in at a Karen Carpenter-esque *38* pages, so I wouldn't worry about *their* faithful legions storming the oval office, anytime soon). But a Left that cringes at the thought of self-criticism, for fear that any criticism is sweet music to its enemies, is a Left doomed to succumb to its own craven refusal to confront what ails it from within. It's feckless and, worse, intellectually flabby. It's no Left I want to be part of. Finally: If intellectual lockstep is what characterizes the right, isn't a willingness to break party ranks and utter uncomfortable truths the very essence of liberal thought? Delicious irony, then, that Jodi seems to be calling for a moratorium on self-criticism, which necessarily implies a phalanx of right-thinking party faithful, all marching in the same direction. Not a pretty image.

As for analogizing NOMDD Day with Roosevelt's call for self-sacrifice, the analogy fails, at least for me. Roosevelt rallied the troops, on the home front, by calling for judicious use of materials needed for the war effort in which many Americans' sons and husbands were fighting. The causal relationship was direct, the practical effect demonstrable, the emotional impact profound. In NOMDD Day's case, the relationship between a well-meaning, if woefully naive refusal to consume (a boycott that makes no distinction between fair-trade, greenie retailers who step lightly on the environment and treat their workers well and big-box retailers who practice scorched-earth capitalism at its worst) and the social change it dreams of creating (including, weirdly, inspiring "religious leaders" to Do the Right Thing) is oblique at best and wholly unprovable. Yes, the grape boycott, which I lived through in the heart of Cesar Chavez's cultural battlefield of Southern California, was empowering and, seemingly, effective. And it couldn't have been more unlike NOMDD Day. The relationship between the boycott and the farmworkers' goals was clear, unlike the murky sympathetic magic of NOMDD, whose cultural juju is supposed to bring about a plate-tectonic shift in American policy in some undefined way. The Chavez boycott appealed powerfully to many Americans' sense of fair play. My family was staunchly blue-collar; my stepdad, an AFL-CIO officer, jeered at Norman Lear-style feminism, sneered at collegiate Marxism, yet emphatically supported the grape boycott because it struck a responsive chord in what was once called, in the age of Marcuse and Mao jackets, his "class consciousness." NOMDD, by contrast, potentially pits middle-class liberals against nickel-and-dimed wage slaves; calls for an unfocused, indiscriminate, unsustainable boycott of all consumption; and by definition demands that those most committed to social justice and political change *secede* from the cultural arena. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy that fairly trumpets the powerlessness of bien-pensant liberals.

Regarding the virtues of "symbolic politics," well, a half-hearted golfer's clap for Umberto Eco's "semiological guerrilla warfare." But symbolic politics is too often a retreat from the Desert of the Real. NOMDD Day rhetoric reminds me of a passage in Robert Hughes’s American Visions, where he quotes a bunch of Conceptual artists writing in their house organ, Art-Language, in 1970. “It is an astonishing but inescapable conclusion that we have reached, namely, that the seemingly erudite, scholastic, neutral, logical, austere, even incestuous, movement of conceptual art is, in fact, a naked bid for power at the very highest level---the wresting from the groups at present at the top of the social structure, of control over the symbols of society.” To which Hughes, ever the pugnacious populist, retorts: “Fat chance.” (Yeah, yeah, Hughes is a neocon, and therefore demon’s seed, but the Devil has all the best lines and in this case the best argument.)

On other hand, if we’re going to make grand symbolic gestures of refusal, as the Situationists did, we need to buy a big, fat clue about how to do that. (Although it bears pointing out that the Situationists ended up routed, every boho’s favorite lost cause.) The right is cleaning our clock in the war of symbols, right about now. Tearing a page from their handbook on tactics might help us gain some ground. Staying home, all pouty and pillow-biting, and refusing to come out and play sure as hell isn’t going to secure the beach head, in the culture wars.

Jon, thanks for letting me know about Mark's response. Because my response is so long, I posted it on my blog and put in a trackback.