We must be very careful in making statements in the google age.  Before our time knowledge had to be handwritten or somehow handled by humans.  Books could be burned, canons could be controlled, voices and actual facts could be sealed into truth or completely blocked from view.

In the early days the idea of revolution was no doubt literal.  People started making wheels and noticing cycles and noticing how things turned, some things quickly, some things slowly.  So they named a movement “revolution.”  This we could imagine is probably true.

At some point some people started calling another thing a revolution.  If we think about this genesis of an application of metaphor to the world of happenings, we can see the awkwardness of the metaphor.  Not all change is cyclical, yet the earliest namers of the human condition we now know as revolution (as in the French Revolution or the Cuban Revolution) had to be thinking that their actions were not a permanent change but a rotation of some social phenomenon.  Out with the old king in with the new.  In the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky advocated for a permanent revolution, one that kept blazing and spreading and rolling.  Perhaps subconsciously he was subscribing to the physics of the metaphor more than some of his fellow revolutionists.  After all, he WAS a very smart dude.

And hindsight is 20/20 in history, or… we can all afford to be smarter in rethinking it than anyone involved was in thinking it.

If you look at it objectively the application of the metaphor of the verb-filled noun “revolution” to a social phenomenon was a poor choice.  It was naive and self-absorbed in its concoction.  Revolutions are changes and you can’t go home after they happen.  Early wordsmiths would have been better off finding a river metaphor.  Something like, “We are going to start a River and take those motherfucking imperialist pigs down!”

There seems to me, and I am a wordsmith, a possible opening for the word Revolution to be, as it were, reborn into a notion that would be productive to both present and future generations.  Circularity is the essence of much of life’s richest and most sustainable grist.  The old concept of revolution took too much from the application of the word after the naming, the new concept would do well reaching into the possibilities of the original metaphor.  Turn, baby, turn!

Hula hoops as agitprop for this new movement of redefinition makes it all fun and lighthearted.  It means we can talk to the most right wing fascist tv watching idiot in Amerikkka and connect on some level of civility, even as we throw vibes of old school revolution, a la Trotsky, subconsciously into the heads of the oppressorman.

Thats all the time i have today, stay tuned for the pedagogy of hoops part 4, keeping track of the human body that you inhabit.