The young voices I have begun to hear at this site brought to mind "Slacker Uprising," a film by Michael Moore released as a free download in September 2008 and now also available on DVD. When I watch one of Moore’s films, I keep my hand on my gun. He is very effective and honed in his craft, so I approach his work with a hyper-critical stance. I keep up with policy debates enough to have a confident grasp of the difference between reality and entertainment. Political players, be they elected officials or artists, have achieved their success by some combination of skill, energy, and moxie, and are all therefore worthy of at least equal amounts of attention and skepticism.

As a filmmaker, Michael Moore uses a lot of what I recognize as factual, but the operative word here is “uses” because even if his facts are straight he is still using those facts to construct a larger narrative line, creating meaning out of building blocks of information. The employment of selective facts to shape something interpretive is, of course, one definition of “propaganda.” As definitions go, I find it much more reliable than the popular notion that propaganda = lies. I worry about it because I also know that facts do not always add up to truth. I respect Michael Moore’s passion, talent and influence. I pay to see his films. But I never let my guard down.

I was especially prepared to resist "Slacker Uprising" because I find the term “slacker” incomplete at best and offensive at worst. Since the word is almost always used to dismiss someone, usually a young person, I have never liked the term. Beyond that, and more important, I resist the label because I have taught college students for almost twenty years, and it simply has not been my experience that our country has a slacker problem.

Have I encountered students in my college classrooms that were unfocused and floundering? Sure.

Have I recognized lethargy and sloppy thinking at times that I suspected was directly related to the business end of a bong? Of course.

Did it cause me to worry about my country? Never.

Because in those same classrooms, for every dilettante with a bad reading of Nietzsche there were five students who had read the entire assignment on John Dewey and drew from it that democracy was for participants, not spectators.

Yet while I was annoyed at the film’s title, I also understood that it might be a head fake, Moore’s way of setting his audience up to be surprised by power and patriotism where popular stereotypes assume disengagement and ignorance. And that story was one I was ready to see told because the story of young people who work hard and love their country was a story I had witnessed for years. It’s also a story that Sarah Burris, among others, has told well on this site since her very first post. Sarah’s coverage of young people in political life is the best anti-depressant available.

"Slacker Uprising" is a documentary feature about a tour Michael Moore organized in the fall of 2004, hitting sixty-two cities in about twenty battleground states. The objective of the tour was to energize the eligible voters who generally fail to show up on election day, even in presidential races like 2000, where you had to be in a coma to not understand that the election was going to be razor thin. 2004 was shaping up exactly the same, with state of the art software micro-targeting “swing” neighborhoods and “tipping point” precincts. People who don’t vote are indeed civic slackers, but I bristled at the tour’s focus on college campuses to find them. On the other hand, given the reality that 18-29s vote overwhelmingly Democratic – when they vote – I could appreciate a strategy that sought to maximize turnout in a reliable demographic. If Karl Rove can troll evangelical churches to find his voters, why can’t Michael Moore hit college campuses?

On the tour, Moore enlisted guests from across the entertainment spectrum to generate interest and excitement: Viggo Mortensen, Steve Earle, REM, Roseanne Barr, and Tom Morello were among the performers who showed up on various stages to encourage audience members to register, vote, and volunteer. Eddie Vedder’s soulful acoustic cover of Cat Stevens’ “Don’t Be Shy” comes early in the film, and it’s a performance that should be automatically included in every progressive ipod.

This is a Michael Moore film, so expect his trademark techniques. There are villains of the ignoramus variety cast as the voices of conservatism; trust me, these supporters of President Bush and the Iraq war are not a think tank. There are sleaze merchants who try to use their money and power to keep Moore from speaking on college campuses, and as the usual suspects, they hit their marks on cue and efficiently make Moore’s point about our civil liberties being only as sturdy as our integrity. The media covers the tour as a story about Moore and his film "Fahrenheit 9-11" rather than civic engagement, and thus, worthy of a Darwin Award, the mainstream matrix stupidly electrocutes itself with its own lightening rod. As in all his movies, Moore finds ordinary individuals willing to tell their stories with such authentic force that the emotional impact is devastating. The power of Moore’s method is to let people speak in their own voices, just as Edward R. Murrow let Joseph McCarthy expose himself as a bully. Filmmaking is also film editing, a kind of sewing project, and "Slacker Uprising" is a quilt of a movie, with patches of tragic and comic moments arranged and connected to spread a compelling narrative. What can I say? The film is provocative and moving, but you should never forget that you are in the hands of an arch-manipulator.

Two things struck me as I watched "Slacker Uprising." First, even as I knew how the election of 2004 turned out, it was clear that the objectives of the tour had been met. More young people voted in that election than had ever turned out since eighteen year olds gained the vote, and they were the only demographic that John Kerry won. Moore was fishing in the right hole. Beyond that, I realized that this film had less to do with the election of 2004 than it had to do with 2008. The crowds who turned out for Moore’s rallies were huge, averaging 16,000 by the end of the tour, according to the "Slacker Uprising" website. There were people with clipboards all over the place, depositing names and email addresses directly into DNC databanks. Given the passions involved, it is safe to assume that such voters were going to be up for a fight four years later. Those who got involved (and barely lost) in 2004 for a charismatically challenged nominee like Kerry were ripe for an inspirational new voice like Obama. It was never about the hope he provided or the change he promised. It was about people who were tired of hoping and ready to change things themselves, which is the best definition of citizenship I know.

That’s when I started thinking about my former students who had voted for the first time in 2004. I marveled at how many of them had graduated and immediately entered some form of public service. Claire, who is now Chief of Staff for the minority leader of the Virginia legislature. Eric, working in public policy in New York. Megan, who worked for AmeriCorps and is now in Seattle, shaping her journal entries into a book about the experience. These are just three examples, and all of them are about 25.

With so much to feel cynical over, and most of them with student loan debt to somehow retire, the young Americans I see and admire have taken their degrees and their blackberries and run to the battle. They don’t seem all that interested in figuring out Puff the Magic Dragon or throwing themselves on the gears of the machine or going to jail for even a moral reason. They know how bad things are, and it doesn’t get them down. There may not be enough jobs, but there is plenty of work to do, and young Americans are inventing ways to do that work.

I am forty-five. I often feel queasy with sadness and guilt for the young people in this country. People my age made a lot of fast money, spent billions on elections but still can’t provide universal access to health care. We bought elixirs from a medicine wagon economy, gave Al Gore an Oscar for his power point presentation but never got serious about global warming, and couldn’t manage to do anything but play out the clock on two wars and an eight year Krystallnacht of constitutional vandalism.

When I was in college, rain was already poison and sex could already kill you, but it did not get us into the game. We allowed our political life to become a fever dream of abortion wars and a talking head version of vaudeville called cable television. There were food fights about tax cuts and the size of government while government ballooned and we got less for every dollar we sent to Washington. Elected officials from both parties hid costs and bragged about economic growth, but there were enough bills lying around to see that they weren’t even making the minimum payment, just raising the credit line. Still, we let a politics of name-calling flourish because it was all about winning elections even if there was no chance to govern.

At one point in "Slacker Uprising," Joan Baez (inevitably) performs at a rally. I like Joan. She has spent a lifetime paying the price, and she is still showing up, still singing. In the movie she speaks of the slacker generation as having “no Dylan” yet suggesting that Michael Moore fills that “voice of a generation” role for them. Maybe. Moore is by far the more committed political activist. Bob Dylan gained an audience by fusing beat poetry and folk music during unsettled times, and that went a long way for thoughtful young people at the time. He is also an artist who resisted political crowds, refusing to serve as a drum major in anybody’s parade. I don’t think this is a slacker generation, and I don’t think they need someone to stand in as their voice. Like Joan, I can’t help but think of Dylan right now, but “Blowin’ in the Wind” is not what comes to mind. I’m thinking about how hard the rain is about to start falling.

"Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’,
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’,
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’,
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall."

Now the clouds are overhead, the drops are getting too fast for the wipers, and the bullshit about blue skies won’t work anymore. The storm is here.

Oddly enough, I am less worried now than I was several years ago. Maybe it’s because I understand something about this so-called slacker generation. I have read their assignments and written their letters of recommendation. I know the quality of their minds and what they care about. I know what they are capable of and I know that they are digging in all over this country. I have read their posts on this site. I am no longer their teacher. We are simply fellow citizens, and I can’t think of any generation I’d rather go through this storm with.