“That’s what’s so great about this new kind of activism: it’s convenient. Just like masturbation. It’s better than sex, because it’s on your own time.”

— Stephen Colbert

Picture the American political beast. I am thinking of a huge obese lizard with all kinds of spines and slime coming out of him. Like Jabba the Hutt with horns and teeth. Ooh! Ooh! Remember “Pizza the Hut” from Spaceballs? Just wondering. My point is, this guy — or gal! — doesn’t like to move. For the average American politician, the costs of violating the status quo are prohibitively high. Often, it takes a Taser to the belly to, ahem, encourage action.

So it is that 70-odd-percent of Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and this great slimeball of a political beast remains inert, unwilling and unable to take any serious action that changes national policy to something most Americans are willing to swallow. One big reason might be that while so many people could be organized to demonstrate against Ahmadine-whatever and to support the Jena Six, so few take to the streets to protest the war in Iraq.

A couple of weeks ago, The Sun ran an editorial called “The New Age of Activism.” We tried to construct a “new wave of activism” out of a softcore engagement limited to volunteerism, “petitions, and online discussion boards.” The editorial did have some good points. But it ignored, I think, the benefits of direct action, as well as the real need for systemic change. Colbert’s ironic inference was right: you’re never going to really effect change if you only “protest from the polite distance of your home computers, [making] ‘The Man’ wish he’d never visited your site.”

Demonstrations need to be on message. Nothing screams “don’t take me seriously” like kaftan-wearing pro-Palestine nuts and 9-11 truthers running around at your out-of-Iraq protest. But when they avoid becoming what we called “sensationalized 1960s tear-gas rallies,” demonstrations can work: Changing the cruel calculus of congressional complacency by making an issue impossible to ignore.

Fortunately or not, politicians’ actions can be explained as a tallying-up of competing incentives. Our beast’s main concern is survival with the least possible expense of energy. For politicians, action only comes when the opportunity cost of ignoring an issue is more than the opportunity cost of taking it on. At its best, confrontational politics changes the equation, pushing politicians concerned about blowback over the threshold of inaction. Which is why at its best, confrontational politics works as part of a broader strategy that includes internet activism, grassroots talk-to-your-neighbors operations, lobbying, media and electoral politics. Activism alone isn’t enough. The Internet alone isn’t enough either.

The reason the Jena protests were successful — if not at immediately freeing Mychal Bell than at least at creating national awareness of the broken justice system — is because the Internet was able to mobilize a combination of street protests, lobbying and action by elected officials. Passive online activism like joining a Facebook group and then forgetting about the issue doesn’t work. Internet activism on its own is like Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron (See: Sleeper, 1973) — you can press a button that makes you feel good, but nobody’s really getting laid.

And America needs to get laid, and needs it bad. The situation is so dire that while local change on an incident-by-incident basis is cute, systemic change is brutally necessary. The system — from Jena to Jalalabad — is sick.

While the war racks up trillions of dollars in the national debt, nearly nine million children go without health insurance, broken schools stay broken and the least among us — from Katrina victims to the targets of predatory lending schemes — have been abandoned by the government and lost their homes.

The government takes every available opportunity to invoke fear. There are secret prisons where political prisoners are tortured. Ordinary citizens are spied upon. Paramilitary groups, unanswerable to the public account, carry out missions in an unpopular war. To wit, where soldiers would be court martialed, Blackwater hired guns — mercenaries, “security contractors,” Big Media calls them — as if they were going to mow your lawn — are “employees” to be fired.

Unfazed by a war and a politics that seems to have little tangible effect beyond a few extra dollars at the gas pump, we go on with our lives — for example, treating September 11, the date that changed the history of our world and our generation — as if it were any given Tuesday: Breakfast. Class. Career Fair. Lunch. Libe. Yes, we must survive — we have obligations, from succeeding as students to keeping up with our social lives to finding out a way to get a job and pay back massive student loans.

But the beast gets fatter, and the possibility for change gets slimmer. How bad will things get before someone gets up and gives him a shove?

David Wittenberg ’09 is a Senior Editor at The Sun. He can be contacted at dwittenberg@cornellsun.com. The Scoop appears alternate Thursdays.