A Brief History of Eat the State!

(Humor us; we'll only do this once!)

Eat the State! is five years old this week, but the idea first took form seven years ago, in Sept. 1994. I was seriously ill, awaiting a hoped- for double organ transplant, and on leave from an activist job. I doodled around with an idea for a weekly political newsletter that would have the kind of valuable information often found in activist groups' publications, but be more topical, livelier, local, more community-based, and more widely distributed. We wanted it to be free, non-sectarian, and accessible to people who didn't live and breathe politics (that's why we started, and have stayed, in print rather than on the web as our primary focus). And have a catchy name: Eat the State! The mockup's lead story was on Clinton's threats that week to invade Haiti to displace the thugs the U.S. had helped install three years previously.

It looked great, but I was sick and had no way to afford to print and distribute it. And so the idea sat for two years, while I got and began recovering from the transplants (Dec. 1994), did occasional mockups, and talked the idea up.

The name "Eat the State!" was part of the very first mock-up, and stuck, partly (to answer one of the questions we get most often) because it seemed like more of a systemic, less individualized target than "Eat the Rich!," and partly because it was a catchy, in-your-face phrase with an ambiguous meaning and plenty of room for related puns and graphics. The intent, however, was never to focus solely on government institutions as our idea of "the state"-- "Eat the Corporate State!" just didn't have the same flow to it.

The breakthroughs came in the form of two very generous offers of in-kind donations from local activists. Lance Scott, who published the invaluable Community Catalyst from 1991-93, offered his professional layout services at a deep, ongoing discount. (It continues to this day--Lance has only missed two issues in ETS!'s history, fewer than any other person, and is an invaluable core collective member.) And John Reese, who leased a photocopier for (at the time) his engineering consulting business, offered to not only let ETS! photocopy its issues at cost, but to pay for half of the actual costs himself and did a lot of work.

On Tuesday, Sept. 10, 1996, 500 or so photocopied 4-page issues of Eat the State! (photocopied double-sided on 11" x 17" recycled paper, hand-folded by John and I) were distributed free around Seattle. The commentaries flowed as one article, all written by me, on U.S. bombing of Iraq, allegations of the CIA's funnelling of crack into poor black neighborhoods, and protests against Seattle visits by "Billybob Clintondole." And, of course, the "Why Eat the State!?" tract and the first appearance of our famous mission statement (both below) and an editorial box statement that is essentially unchanged today.

The following Saturday, Sept. 14, was my first 30-minute Saturday morning interview segment on KCMU's "Mind Over Matters," hosted by Mike McCormick. He and I have been on the air, at the same time, almost every week since. A week later, issue #2 came out. An early fan, Ben Attias of Northridge, Calif., designed a web site for us and started coding and posting each issue.

And ETS! was off and running.

There have been a number of other notable events along the way. The response to ETS! was immediate and phenomenal. Soon we were up to 1,000 copies weekly, and in six months, we went to eight pages from four. (The weekly photocopy/fold/collate work parties were alternately tedious and a blast!) Also by then, we started incorporating other writers--for the first six months, I wrote all of the copy. And by June, one of ETS!'s newer volunteers, someone none of us knew named Maria Tomchick, had agreed to help edit. She's been a phenomenal presence ever since.

In late March 1997, on the strength of ETS!, I started writing a weekly political column for The Stranger, which has subsequently led to the Seattle Weekly and, more recently, regular gigs with (briefly) Mother Jones, and (currently) Working Assets, In These Times, and Alternet--phenomenal venues for activist-based political opinion, all made possible by ETS!.

These expansions were made possible, in part, by a very generous large donation early on; printing that many pages and copies wasn't sustainable without more income, though, and so in June 1998 we went to eight pages of newsprint--a bigger format, slightly more expensive, but also one that made local advertising possible. That helped, but eventually, finances and the desire to get some of our weekends back caused us to "temporarily" pull back to every other week publication in summer 1999. That was two years ago, and we're still hoping to get back to weekly. So far, the money just hasn't been there--none of us are exactly rich, and we all have day jobs.

Still, we've put out almost exactly 200 issues in five years, and we're now rolling along with more visibility and more readers than ever--five to ten thousand (depending on whose pass-along figures you believe) for each print edition, and 150,000-200,000 requests a month, from all over the world, for aweb site we've done almost nothing to promote. ETS! has been and remains a financially tenuous outfit--no staff, no office, horrible cash flow. But most of us who help out (nearly 30 distributors, at least 50 on the overall volunteer list) have stories of being accosted by people who love ETS!, who are grateful we're here, who think what we're doing is important and essential. It would be great, of course, if ETS! could turn those good vibes into cash to print more papers. But it helps, a lot, to know that plenty of people like what we do; that, more than anything, gives us faith that despite the lack of obvious resources, we'll find a way to keep going for a long time. You can blame Lance, John, and I, or you can blame the 150+ (and counting) volunteers who've helped along the way (see box). Thanks to all of you for making ETS! possible!!! (And put your money in the donation bucket on your left on the way out of the congregation hall...)

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This little essay was written for an early ETS! mockup in 1995--and ran in the first and fourth issues of the newsletter.

WHY Eat the State!?

Welcome to this, an initial issue of what we intend to be a weekly, four-page forum for--like the masthead says--anti-authoritarian political opinion, research, news and humor. While Seattle already has lots of forest-eating print publications, including some very good political ones, it doesn't have one that is explicitly anti-statist (by which we mean both governments and corporations, which these days are essentially the same); explicitly activist; or published frequently enough to respond to breaking events, decode the news and publicize activist initiatives. That's what we wanna do. We also think being clearly biased in our approach is not only more honest than so-called "objective" corporate media, but lots more fun to read. Short, frequently published broadsheets, interpreting the news of the day in a way the newspaper barons would not, were a staple of the radical U.S. labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They served to link isolated communities and provide a voice and soapbox for the voiceless. The "Democracy Wall" writings of China's student movement in 1989 filled a similar function. On a more modest scale, that's what we hope to do, too: avoid rhetoric, make the issues of the day relevant to our daily lives, get the word out, inspire, have fun, and encourage each other to think for ourselves and look beyond what self-interested corporations and governments hand to us.

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

Missions were used by the Spanish to colonize Mexican California in the 18th century. Their establishment was instrumental in the genocide of California's native peoples.

We oppose them.

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