Mickey Z.: My Personal Trainer and Yours (Susie Day)

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Dec. 31, 2008 (Monthly Review) -- "Edupunk," one of 2008's official buzzwords, means someone who is self-educated, "without concern for schools, corporations, or governments." I shall now describe Mickey Z as a hyper-stone-uber-megalo "edupunk." Mickey, née Michael Zezima, is a 48-year-old working-class writer, martial artist, vegan, public speaker, and environmental activist who lives in The People's Republic of Astoria, Queens. He's just published his 6th book, No Innocent Bystanders, so we sat down to discuss it:

MZ: No Innocent Bystanders is the culmination of years of articles, essays and blog-posts I wrote while my mom was very ill. She passed away earlier this year. I began to feel that if I put some of these together, they might become a book.

People who run websites have said to me, "I'm not going to post this or that article because you're blaming the victim." But I tend to see the victims as the people under the bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to Americans paying for those bombs but choosing to ignore how their tax dollars are spent -- not excluding myself.

As our situation becomes more drastic, I find my writing becoming less forgiving, hence the title. A lot of people say, "Well, people just don't know," but there comes a point where you have to ask, "When are we going to try to make a difference?"

SD: "No Innocent Bystanders," makes me think of the Holocaust.

MZ: Actually, people who lived in Germany in 1936 had far more of an excuse to say, "I didn't know what was going on" than today, with the Internet and cable TV. In this day and age, one click on your mouse, and you can see the direct cost of our actions, our inactions, our silence. You wonder what it's going to take before people begin to step up.

SD: But how do you step up? That's the huge question.

MZ: Act as if the planet is in critical condition. Think to yourself: with 200,000 acres of rainforest gone; 100 animal and plant species gone; 13 million tons of toxic chemicals released every day -- what are we going to say in twenty years? That it was more important to watch American Idol?

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