Grateful after Midnight

In the Kandowski home it's just past midnight and meatballs simmer in a pan of sauce where my lovely lady fans the exquisite aroma of good delectable eats everywhere. I'm grateful for the food this New Year's morning, the privilege of sharing it with a person whom I'm privileged to love and whom I'm doubly privileged loves me back. I'm grateful that my parents are alive and well, that my brother and sister-in-law eagerly await the birth of their first child, that my friends navigate the world smartly and humanely, that my cats have Dutch-boy haircuts and snore in their fuzzy sleeps. I'm grateful that Kafka wrote books in his lifetime which many of us have the fortune of reading, that Proust had his Madeline, that coffee served black does something to the drama in the color of morning, that the electric bass exists, that the guitar is by nature democratic, that conscience sometimes sticks. I'm grateful that one of my best friends tunes pianos instead of firing flash grenades, that another runs youth programs out of an arts library in Methville, Indiana, that I know a guy in Istanbul with crazy hair and fine aesthetic tastes, and another guy from whom songs pour like water from a faucet which, even when turned off, still drips. I'm grateful that I can still hold a 48 hour conversation with the horse thief who just returned from the Far East, that I have a new friend in an art teacher who finds beauty worthy of attention, another new friend in a chemistry teacher who knows his politics and can spin a wisely informed yarn, and still another new friend whom it feels I've known many years and writes stories like Mark Twain and skips stones like a toddler. I'm grateful my lady's dad treats me as he would a son, and my lady's brother is bedecked in neat tattoos. I'm grateful my dad paints portraits of his mind and my mother hangs them on the walls of their house. I'm grateful I don't suffer migraines and that I've the opportunity to fight the good fight in the classroom. I'm grateful the novel isn't dead, that Christopher Hitchens' untimely death gave rise to lovely eulogies, that Radiohead continues to experiment with sound, that Corporate America still sucks and I wasn't wrong on that one. I'm grateful to recognize how grateful I am to be alive and well, to be getting older, to have some hard-earned wrinkles that aren't pillow marks, to be inspired at the start of another year … grateful to have work that needs be done.

We Will Not Forget: Some Items Worth Remembering as We Look Ahead to the New Year

The end of the year is generally accepted as a moment during which we're allowed time to reflect on the previous twelve months. It's during this final week of the year that news outlets look back farther in time than a few days, and what we as viewers are given is a second serving of headlines devoid of analysis and popular faces devoid of soul. In the subtle smirks of our television anchors we see a kind of existential incredulity negated only by the promise of the chance to do it all over again. And at the conclusion of the week, when we've paid our fleeting respects to Tahrir Square, Casey Anthony, Iraq, DSK, Lebron James, Joplin, Missouri, the Federal Budget, Wisconsin, the OWS, etc., we usher in the New Year blitzed under the influence of forgetful springs of alcohol and look with glowing eyes ahead at the changes we've promised each other and ourselves. 

Sadly for the sane, we're in midst of election season, and one thing the progressively-minded must remember going into November '12 is President Obama's onerous track record during his tenure in office. With the New Year upon us, it's far too easy to opt for the forward look instead of the one that looks back. But remember, this lazy inclination was among Obama's first daggers to the heart of his base, when in the spirit of moving forward he refused to sanction an investigation into or prosecution of the previous administration's criminal use of torture.

The need to remember the real Obama is great, since you can bet your ass that Mr. Change We Can Believe In won't be pulling any punches to the sentimental side of the progressive heart in his campaign for reelection.

The following is excerpted from an article by Glen Greenwald. Titled "Progressives and the Ron Paul Fallacies," it might serve well as an antidote to the joyously positive, inebriated New Year's mind.

The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than
ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these facts — like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay — negate that desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they don’t exist. And there’s a corresponding hostility toward those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.

Selling Out

It's settling in like a deep chill in my bones. Perhaps it has something to do with getting slightly too excited, a little more hopeful that warm weather was here than I should have been. I stripped my coat and danced a jig in my shirt. I dragged my waltz-stepping feet through the fallen leaves on the sidewalks. But now I'm cold and it's a problem. You see, these last couple weeks Roscoe's begun to despair.

The two party system is an abject failure. The financial system that supports it crawls with maggots and head lice and crabs. Based on their decision-making our corporate leaders appear in the final stages of the same syph that felled Nietzsche. However, instead of weeping for a whipped horse, they do the whipping, and in this moribund phase of their decayed intellectual lives their tenacity and depravity grows stronger.

But Roscoe doesn't despair for his shameful country. Having come of age in the era of 9/11 (I'd turned 21 two weeks before), Roscoe's used to that.

Enter Occupy Wall Street.

There have been many iconic moments so far in the movement. At the forefront we see the occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge, the young women corralled and pepper-sprayed by police in lower Manhattan, Scott Olsen's bloodied, petrified face as he's carried to help in the arms of fellow protesters asking his name, police jabbing Berkeley students in the stomachs with their batons and pulling them out of line by the hair, the 84 year-old woman sprayed in Seattle, the Oakland PD's lacerating another vet's spleen, students sprayed like roaches on the campus of UC Davis, ad nauseam.

Additionally, there's the interview between freelance writer Jesse LaGreca and a Fox News reporter from the early weeks of the movement. LaGreca's eloquence in articulating the corporate media's shortcomings and the political and economic disenfranchisement of the majority of Americans over the last thirty years was useful in that it disproved certain stereotypes of the occupiers promulgated by the media as unthinking dope-fiend disciples of Obama. LaGreca's interview, unaired on Fox, went viral on the web, earning him props from celebrity figures like Jon Stewart, as well as guest spots on network programs like ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour,  RT TV, and, most recently, MSNBC's The Ed Show. While LeGreca's critiques of the nation's political and media landscapes are accurate, his sudden celebrity is the very thing individual occupiers must resist, lest the movement as a whole gets co-opted by the likes of the Democratic Party and networks like MSNBC, which the party relies upon for loyal partisan banter and shilling.

The Ed Show appearance was particularly odious. Pardon the cliché, but under Ed's brutish puppeteering, LaGreca played the faithful and soulless marionette. In his by-now trademark Union cap (a politically-minded fashionista at LeGreca's blog on the Daily Kos actually praised the cap, stating that he or she loves it), Ed played clips of Republican talking points that LeGreca then went to work on. Finally, under the pulls and twists of Ed's fat sausage fingers, he was led to praise how effective Obama's stimulus has been in getting Americans back to work. The manner in which MSNBC used LaGreca, who was more than happy, it must be said, to oblige, bodes poorly for the future of the movement if it is to avoid co-option by the very forces responsible for the social, financial and political problems it protests. The unyielding, unconditional support of the Democratic Party by corporate megastars like Ed, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell need to be challenged by people from the movement, not flattered. They are the media-equivalent of the false, lesser-of-two-evils political choice that progressively minded people have felt obliged out of fear to make for a very long time at the voting booth.  

There's a reason Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks ditched that network.

If anybody's been reading this blog, you'll see that Roscoe's recently shifted his pronoun use when discussing OWS from "We" to "Them." This shift has a lot to do with Roscoe's despair.  

Preferring Not To

Reading through Saul Bellow's letters this morning, I came across one he wrote to Lionel Trilling in 1953, one of the era's foremost literary critics whom Bellow credits for some of the success of his famed Augie March.

Bellow cites a passage from Emerson's lecture (1842), "The Transcendentalist." What struck me is how clearly it speaks to a persistent attitude in our time, epitomized in the very marrow of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.

'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'

'We have none.'

'What will you do, then?' cries the world.

'We will wait.'

'How long?'

'Until the Universe rises up and calls us to work.'

'But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.'

'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_, (as you call it,) but I will not move until I have the highest command. If no call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence. Your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. I know that which shall come will cheer me. If I cannot work, at least I need not lie. All that is clearly due to-day is not to lie. In other places, other men have encountered sharp trials, and have behaved themselves well. The martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung alive on meat-hooks. Cannot we screw our courage to patience and truth, and without complaint, or even with good-humor, await our turn of action in the Infinite Counsels?'

Like the stoical and at times pained solitary Transcendentalist in Emerson's lecture, the OWS movement refuses to participate in a morally and democratically bankrupt political system. By refusing to translate its message into the popularly coherent corporatist language of two-party politics, the corporate media and the corporately benumbed society of its peers, it refuses to play the game according to the rules. It refuses to play the game at all. There are no touchdowns and glory for the protesters; the game was not designed for them, merely the menial duties of managing the upkeep of the field.

Henry Miller recognized "the game" long before he made splits with NYC, repositioning himself in the scummy, aesthetically mad and artistically alive Parisian Bohemia of the first half of the last century. His daily participation in the life of inequitable labor and economic servitude moved on his soul like gangrene a bloodless limb. He said enough, fini, and he left. He would play no more.

Just before Miller's arrival the Dadaists made a full frontal assault on classical definitions of great art. Their contention: If one mark of high civilization is the artwork it produces, than it would be dishonest to produce art that appears highly civilized. The inexplicable obscenity of WWI transformed all of Europe into something of less moral vision than "R. Mutt's" (i.e. Duchamp's) widely lambasted "Fountain." Like Miller, the Dadaists said, you guessed it, FUCK YOU.

Miller and the ideas that informed Dadaism are simply two examples of "just saying no," though it doesn't end there. The Beats displayed in their lifestyle and output something of this nature, too. Of course, we trace it also to Emerson's time, the era of Melville's Bartleby "preferring not to" engage in the bureaucratic, soul-killing swill of his office job.  Thoreau, whose notions on the efficacy and political imperative of civil disobedience informed 20^th century giants like A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr, is also a part of this tradition. Of course, in that he wasn't a pacifist, Thoreau goes a step further than the non-violent civil-disobedience of King and Gandhi, as evidenced by his support of the uprising at Harper's Ferry led by the abolitionist John Brown in 1859.  

Returning to Emerson, how his words and ideas resonate today, providing, for those interested or with the privilege of education to look, a grounded historical lineage: "Your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me … If I cannot work, at least I need not lie."  Isn't that what OWS is all about, speaking truth to power in the as-of-yet uncorrupted language of revolt? Like the ghost armies of the restless dead summoned by Aragorn to combat his enemies in The Lord of the Rings, the OWS would be wise to summon their own armies of the past in order to secure the legitimacy of the present and the high enlistment needed in the armies of the future.  

Again from "The Transcendentalist:" "If you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say. I will not molest myself for you. I do not wish to be profaned."

You're 99%? Me Too!

The OWS movement's resiliency has been on numerous occasions tested over the last eight weeks. Between commercial and municipal propaganda, disproportionate police crackdowns, heavy weather, and voluminous arrests, the OWS is not going away. In spite of the largely dismissive nature of the media's initial coverage, and its continual framing of the OWS as a middle finger in the face of traditional American values, the movement's staying-power legitimates its very existence. What once was seen by many as an effigy symbolic of misunderstood angst and misdirected energy is rapidly earning recognition as an organism that lives and breathes, with blood that runs red and voices that speak. Its stalwart presence has attracted the attention of those who otherwise avoid the rabble-rousing fray.

With staying power comes recognition, and with recognition comes parasites. The Democratic Party and the SEIU, who recently endorsed Obama for 2012, come specifically to mind.  I saw an ad the other day which featured Mary Kay Henry, the national president of the Service Employees International Union. She states:

We know what's really important. We know that after a decade of tax breaks for the rich and out-of-control gambling on Wall Street, things have gotten much harder for working Americans. We know that if these problems aren't taken care of now, the next generation will have it even worse.

We know that we need to create good jobs here at home so that workers can support their families, young people can get a good start in life, and everyone can have a shot at the American dream.

We know that health care, elder care and other vital services must be available for all our families.

We know there needs to be a pathway to citizenship for every immigrant worker.

We know that something has to be done.

President Obama is looking to turn things around, but he needs support from all of us to be heard over his wealthy opponents, people who seem to believe that the only thing wrong with the economy is that they have to share it.

Like Glen Greenwald, whose piece on the endorsement is worth reading, I was disgusted, as well as concerned. On healthcare, Obama folded early on the single-payer system that on the campaign trail he vowed to pursue. Taking it off the table before the negotiations began, Obama opened the door to a mandate that ensures perpetual profit for the healthcare industry. On immigration, Obama's pursuit of undocumented immigrants has led to more deportations and ruptured families than his predecessor, George W., could ever have dreamed of. On jobs, while the President's recent unpassable bill is worthy of note, he appointed Jeffrey Emmelt as his go-to jobs advisor, a man who's made a bundle privately and for the company that he chairs, General Electric, outsourcing more than half of his domestic labor force overseas. And let's not forget Geitner, Summers, Rubin et al., primary players in the practice of disaster capitalism, scum who at the moment it would aggravate me too much to discuss. Moving onward, Obama's Win The Future is nothing more than a heinous WHAT THE FUCK to Americans uneasy with what it would take to transform the nation into a more cordial setting for big business, all the while using China as both a model for success and our main economic antagonist, a country whose human rights record is about as upright as Mother Mary's virginity is pure. And Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the triumvirate of programs that for a long while underpinned the moral platform on which the Democratic Party claimed to speak? Remember, it was just last July when the President beat the Republicans to placing them squarely on the chopping block of brutal austerity. I won't go into the wars, the assassinations, the surveillance, the tax breaks for the rich (of which Obama is the present owner), the imperial outreach to the East Pacific, the I-don't-give-a-fuck refusal to comply with the War Powers Act during the Libya fiasco, Gitmo, straddling the fence on Egypt, continued arms sales to Bahrain, etc. An entire catalogue of high crimes and misdemeanors that should make Obama as unelectable among progressives in the coming race as Vienna Sausage is inedible at dinnertime.

The impulse to suck the blood of a popular phenomenon is instinct among our political and corporate elite. It's what transformed Justin Beiber from a prepubescent know-nothing into a mega-celebrity at the vanguard of the pop-cultural know.  It's what made movies out of Jackass. What won a war out of post-9/11 melancholy and rage.  And yes, despicably and sadly, it may just win Brand Obama another four years. But at what cost to the OWS does the SEIU posture its sentimental connection?  

Critics are already more than happy to point out that the OWS is less grassroots than Astroturf. Folks of Bloomberg and Guiliani ilk and their Murdochean friends suggest that unions, who, needless to say, have had a troubled three decades in the American body politic and imagination, are underwriting the activists' actions with loads of cash that make all the occupying possible. To those suspicious of the movement's purposes, it’s a tenable theory, and when the SEIU starts bussing folks down to D.C. in the name of the OWS to push for financial reforms, will they be so far off? Tea Partiers who might have begun to recognize something familiar to them in their progressive counterparts- namely, dissatisfaction over the shakedown of their dreams - won't again have the chance to identify and act on their shared experiences. Worse yet, the OWS will come to be seen as a hired, populistic gun whose barrel is aimed and trigger pulled by the Democratic Party. After all, this was the Tea Party's story: a big fucking gun loaded and greased by Mr. and Mr. Koch.

Channeling OWS energy into the morass of partisan politics is a surefire way to kill what hope any of us have for meaningful change in this country's direction. I sincerely doubt that the occupiers themselves would ever stoop so low as join ranks with somebody with as much blood on his cash-grabbing hands as Obama and his corrupt, commercial party. That said, the reality of the OWS's political leanings is unable to keep up with the pace of public perception, and the endorsement of Obama by a major union who's co-opted the jargon of the OWS is the most efficient way of forming that perception into a reality. Obama needs to be seen as representing the 99% if he wants to be reelected; on the other hand, the survival of the 99% requires the very opposite.

As Greenwald writes: "if you believe that the wealthiest class anti-democratically controls political institutions (an indisputably true premise), then it makes little sense to expect specific new bills or even individual candidates inserted into that system to bring about much change."

Emotional Carelessness: What the People's Response to Cain, Paterno and Keystone XL Have in Common

A friend of mine recently asked me if Joe Paterno suffers in the waste of moral decay. My initial response was that what Paterno actually suffered was a momentary lapse of reason. Then the day went on, I read a little more, and discovered that Paterno's lapse lasted nearly a decade. Lapses of any sort, by definition, are just that: an ephemeral rupture in the ordinary functions of the machine. Paterno's failure to pursue the Sandusky affair beyond the realm of campus police and university administration is less of a rupture than an open wound into which will rot, for better or worse, what good the man achieved in more than a half-century of work for the Nittany Lions.

Rather than decry the outrageous and wholly predictable cover-up by Penn State University, whose cost on the lives of young people associated with Sandusky is not yet known, students rallied to oppose the university's decision to bluntly end Paterno's career. Although understandable, their response was largely a result of reflexive emotion, and for that reason, misled. While it's absurd to believe that students involved in the impassioned and at-times violent defense of their beloved Joepa would condone Sandusky's alleged offenses, equally absurd is their inability to recognize and act upon the implications offered by the bigger picture: namely, that Penn State University values its image over legal accountability and ethical responsibility. Of course, Penn State's not the only university guilty of covering up or disregarding crimes that potentially tarnish its reputation, but the magnitude of its scandal offers us a unique glimpse into how far universities nationwide will go to protect their image and guard no matter the cost the inflow of cash. On the other hand, the student response at PSU exemplifies how morally topsy-turvy we can become when lacking the critical literacy necessary to distinguish emotion from reason. 

Chris Hedges, former NY Times war correspondent and truthdig.com columnist, argues that one consequence of late-capitalism and consumer culture is how reliably we confuse our emotions for knowledge. This confusion is in my view an equalizer of sorts, reducing the manner in which we elect a president to the level of buying a pair of sneakers. "They look nice, I'll buy them;" "He looks nice, I'll elect him." Paterno's fans mistook their support for Joepa as a legitimate pursuit of justice. Likewise, in light of the sexual harassment allegations leveled against him, Herman Cain's supporters, presumably speaking in the name of justice, condemned the accusers as cheap opportunists enraptured by the glitter of fame and the monetary dividends that follow political scandal.

The last two week's haven't been as tasty to the Pizzaman as his pies are to his customers. Fortunately for him, his base's minds have been collectively warped by years of bloated reportage on their sue-happy, earn-a-quick-buck compatriots. Between hot-coffee spills at McDonald's (see last year's documentary on the issue, titled Hot Coffee), Anita Hill, and a decade long push for "Tort Reform" that falsely correlates the rising costs of healthcare with medical malpractice suits, Cain's supporters doggedly refuse to see yet another corporation 'injured' and 'great man' toppled by the unfounded claims of self-described victims. Instead of pausing to reflect on the merits the accusers bring to Cain's alleged sexual harassment, they neither pause nor reflect, dismissing in full the probability that Cain's yet another wealthy and powerful good-ole-boy piece of pig-headed-penis-minded-misogynist shit.

For many months, and under the leadership and expertise of environmental giants like Bill McKibben and NOAA climate scientist Jim Hanson, environmental activists have fought the Obama Administration/ State Department's approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada's project to install a 1,702 mile oil sands pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast. The project presents a major threat to our environment. By its very nature, the mining and processing of tar sands is filthy business. McKibben has described it as a "carbon bomb," with Hansen chiming in the potential to push a human-friendly planet over the edge of livable cordiality and etiquette. The stakes for human beings couldn't be higher, and therefore activist groups kicked their campaign to defeat the project into high gear last August when they began marching on Washington D.C.

Their efforts did not go unnoticed. Last week, State Department officials announced that they will delay their decision on the 7 billion dollar pipeline until after the upcoming presidential election, a decision that has environmentalists claiming victory.  Articles have begun appearing on progressive websites with titles such as "Activist Leaders Explain How They Beat the Keystone XL Pipeline" (http://www.truth-out.org/activist-leaders-explain-how-they-beat-keystone-xl-pipeline/1321118935). It appears that environmentalists are just plain giddy. Their hope in the possibility of change inspired by the spirit of the commons has been partially restored. The delay, coupled with Bank of America's cancelation of its plan to charge a monthly debit card fee, seem on the surface indications of the power of protest to affect change.

In a sense, both Occupy Wall Street and the environmental activists have very real cause for celebration, if only because the two decisions suggest that the people, in these cases anyway, were heard. But if History is any measure of things to come, Bank of America will find new ways of making up for the potential losses it sustained by rescinding its debit card fee, and the corporations behind the Keystone XL pipeline most certainly will not go gently into that good night. By deferring its decision on the pipeline until after the elections, Obama can reclaim parts of his original base that made his first campaign so vibrantly effective. And you'd be wise to remember Obama's strained past when it comes to living up to the hopes he instills in his base.

So my question is what is there to get so excited about? If Obama goes down to Romney, the project will move forward. If Obama wins, it will be a victory predicated in large part on the contributions of the very corporations that have massive financial interest in the pipeline and will rightfully expect a return on their investment in the incumbent. In other words, what we have here is a clear case on the administration's part of bait and switch, and I can't for the life of me figure out how certain environmental activists are falling for it. Unless, that is, we chalk their cries of victory up to pure, reckless emotion.

It's a natural response to be moved by the gut, but giving into the grumblings is a recipe for dysentery. Just remember the post-9/11 years.

An "Open Letter" Worth Some Consideration

An Open Letter to the Citizens of Oakland from the Oakland Police Officers’ Association

http://www.opoa.org/uncategorized/an-open-letter-to-the-citizens-of-oakland-from-the-oakland-police-officers%E2%80%99-association/

Police Brutality as Expression of Shame

A few weeks ago, police responded to OWS protests in Boston by turning their batons on a Veterans for Peace brigade standing between them and the protestors to their rear (http://intercontinentalcry.org/newswire/occupy-boston-police-attack-beat-veterans-for-peace-members/). In NYC, after Officer Anthony Bologna had already stirred the movement's momentum by showing the world one of many cruel ways in which cops get their kicks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRN_2AmJS-k), police turned a tense situation into a dangerous one by engaging a densely packed Times Square crowd on horseback (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kXQ5RMDtBI&feature=related). And then there's Oakland, whose police department unleashed its arsenal on demonstrators, nearly killing Scott Olson in the fierce continuation of its quaint tradition of violence and lawlessness. Olson's a 24 year old marine veteran who served two tours in Iraq before coming home to get shot in the head by those whose job it is to serve and protect him (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/28-4).

While the modes of expression are various, from the power-drunk, fratboyesque, hyper-masculine "I'm just gonna kick this asshole's face in cuz I can," to the bigotry-fueled "I'm gonna kick this asshole's face in cuz he's black," the type of noxious, all-too-common police conduct I'd like to focus on here centers on the handling of political dissent. I believe it's important to try to understand the situation that ground-level officers find themselves in when they are ordered to directly confront crowds comprised of individuals who look like them, talk like them, and who, as they do, struggle to make their lives work out as painlessly as possible.

One explanation for the manner in which police have dealt with OWS protestors the nation-round has to do with provocation. The logic goes as follows: the police behave badly, the protestors respond badly, and the media covers the latter, turning away from joining the movement's ranks those whose personal circumstances have led them to assess it sympathetically and supportively.

For Ralph Nader, provocation is ostensibly at the heart of the recent conduct of police departments. According to him, the "moral authority" of the OWS movement rises in direct proportion to each new example of police aggression that goes unanswered by the protestors. To maintain the moral high-ground, the movement must commit itself to non-violent civil-disobedience lest it become discredited; the movement's sustainability and success depends on it.  He writes: "Each new protest gives the protesters new insights. The protestors are learning how to challenge controlling processes. They are assembling and using their little libraries on site. They are learning the techniques of open, non-violent civil disobedience and building personal stamina. They are learning not to be provoked and thereby win the moral authority struggle which encourages more and more people to join their ranks" (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/27-7). Nader's emphasis on the essential need for the protesters to not merely act non-violently, but to appear visually non-violent, is on point if the movement is to grow. Think the Black Panthers, whose shotguns were at once their salvation and their undoing.

Conversely, others aver that police violence resulted from the protesters own provocations. The Washington Post last week led the charge with its absurd coverage of the Oakland debacle. Absurd indeed! C'etait absurdite par excellance: Above an article entitled "Protesters Wearing out their Welcome Nationwide," is a picture of a cop gently comforting a helpless cat; the caption beneath the photo read: "A police officer in Oakland, Calif., pets a cat that was left behind by Wall Street protesters who were evicted from the grounds of City Hall" (http://wonkette.com/455265/washington-post-illustrates-oakland-police-brutality-with-cop-petting-kitten). From this perspective, the police serve bravely and with highest honor to protect lives and properties from the motley madcap fringe threatening the functionality of American democracy. Doing the work that protects cities from fiery ruination is dangerous stuff according to proponents of this view, and the cops themselves have become victims of brash radicalism. So much that, as our friends at Fox News reported, the NYPD is considering suing protesters accused of harming police officers- this in addition to the felony awaiting the unfortunates charged with this type of assault (http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/the-five/index.html#/v/1247306262001/police-threaten-to-sue-occupy-protesters/?playlist_id=1040983441001).

So one question that everybody's talking about is whose provoking whom?

What if they were both provoking each other? What if the very presence of the cops represent to the protesters the very problem with our system, one that pits ordinary people against one another while the extraordinary watch from on high? What if the very presence of the protesters signal to your average cop that he's chosen the wrong profession, or at the least, chosen to obey the wrong orders, and thus chosen the wrong side?

Jonathon Kozol, teacher and educational activist, wrote somewhere (at least I think it was him) that when students express themselves coarsely in school, they reveal how limited their means of communication are. If an angry student hurls a chair at his instructor, Kozol argues that the child is articulating his emotions according to the limits set by his narrow capacity to express them through language. Had the child been able to simply state precisely how he felt, the chair would have been necessary only to sit in.

I think Kozol's point can serve as a useful analogy in the context of OWS and the violence the police level against it. The movement is in a large sense amorphous. Absent traditional leaders, it's also absent a catalogue of demands (I write about demands specifically in my previous post) and a timeline for action. When it will end is as difficult to determine as what it will achieve. These absences are what make it compelling to many, and they also point out the realization that got the OWS movement started in the first place: that the traditional modes of affecting change in this country are no longer effective. Like the child who desperately needs an education in speaking so he can abandon the chair, the OWS understands that words alone can no longer articulate their grievances, concerns, and aspirations to those in power most in need of hearing them. They have had to learn to speak in a different way. And thus they occupy. They occupy as a constant presence, a haunting, a fixture of light on the wall of America. Because it is non-violent, it cannot be mistaken for a chair.

(For more perspective on this, see Zizek's article "Occupy First. Demands Come Later:" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/occupy-protesters-bill-clinton)

The cops, on the other hand, don't have the liberty of finding novel ways of communicating with those who it's fallen upon them to manage. They must stand guard, listen and watch, corral, make arrests, swing batons and spray pepper juice, drag innocent people through the streets, the whole while facing down people with whom they share much in common at the command of others who are economically and politically apart.

On Friday's broadcast of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Brian Willson, a Vietnam vet and activist who lost his legs protesting munitions shipments to Nicaragua in 1987. In a lotus position, he occupied the track as it approached him, however, seeing him there blocking the tracks, the trains conductors decided to accelerate, running him down, nearly killing him, and irrevocably changing his life.

AMY GOODMAN: Brian Willson, do you regret what happened on September 1st, 1987?

S. BRIAN WILLSON: Well, I regret that I lost my legs, but I don’t regret that I was there. I did what I said I was going to do. The Navy crew, themselves Vietnam veterans, the three civilian employees of the Navy, were following orders. And I no longer follow orders. Following orders, I discovered, is not what I’m about. (my emphasis)

Willson argues that following orders establishes a false hierarchy of values and power which is ultimately dehumanizing. Personally, Willson stopped following orders after he'd seen firsthand the innumerable bodies of men, women and children that lay dead on the ground after an American air strike in Vietnam. It was a moment that he describes as an epiphany, after which he awoke from a long sleep in the nightscapes of social and political indoctrination.

The OWS protesters were raised exposed to the same sociocultural and political pressures as the police, yet, like Willson, they seem to have awoken. Though job duty and security keep them on the frontline of the protests, what precludes the cops from such, and can we really assume that they haven't begun to wake up already? This last part sounds ridiculous in light of the brutality we've seen, but it's not so simple to figure out.

If we say that the cops are just following orders, it takes agency away from them as individuals who willingly carry them out. Yet by holding them as individuals directly responsible, we might neglect to consider how conflicted these people might be. As Stanley Milgram discovered a long time ago, true obedience to authority is not determined solely by the threat of reprisal for disobedience:

There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority. That is, although the subject performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning.
            It is this ideological abrogation that constitutes the principal cognitive basis of obedience. If, after all, the world or the situation is as the authority defines it, a certain set of actions follows logically.
            The relationship between authority and subject, therefore, cannot be viewed as one in which a coercive figure forces action from an unwilling subordinate. Because the subject accepts authority’s definition of the situation, action follows willingly ...
            Dissent may occur without rupturing hierarchical bonds and thus belongs to an order of experience that is qualitatively discontinuous with disobedience. Many dissenting individuals who are capable of expressing disagreement with authority still respect authority’s right to overrule their expressed opinion. While disagreeing, they are not prepared to act on this conviction ...
            Disobedience is the ultimate means whereby strain is brought to an end. It is not an act which comes easily.
            It implies not merely the refusal to carry out a particular command ... but a reformulation of the relationship between the subject and authority.
                                                            -Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority.
                                                            (New York: Harper and Row) 1974, p. 145 - 62

When we consider Milgram's research in the context of the cops, who the protesters ask daily to join them, we may begin to understand that the cops have not reached the point where they can effectively reformulate their relationship to the authority they represent and obey. I say not yet, because, like the rest of us, the decline of material prosperity in this country has affected them, too. Like ours, their wages the last three decades have not kept pace with inflation; they, too, must find ways to deal with rising college tuition costs; they, too, must pay for the entitlements devoted financially to the rich; they, too, must pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign aid to dictatorships, and the patent criminality of the financial sector; they, too, send their children to public schools whose funding has been slashed and whose existence is threatened; they, too, must work longer hours with fewer resources to get the job done.

All this leads me to wonder if recent police violence in the context of the OWS paradoxically signals deep undercurrents of support for the movement. As I argued in a previous post ("The Anachronism's in the Nation"), what I called the symbolic bond to nation, and here I'll add authority itself, weakens when material conditions decline. When these conditions reach a low enough point, then the "reformulation" that Milgram discusses, to say a paradigm shift of mind, can take place. Since the cops share our shitty affairs, I assume that questions are being asked in the hearts and minds of police officers everywhere. And when questions are asked and the answers are revolting, what are the police officers left with but a job that is the physical arm of the authoritative state that has worsened the conditions of their lives? Worse yet, as this physical arm, they are charged with containing and beating back a movement that has asked the same questions and generated the same revolting answers about how the "system" fuctions.

To return to the child and the chair, how are the cops to articulate the conflict of their emotions when the only language they can speak is violence? I'm not suggesting that all cops overtly sympathize with the movement, and it's out of sympathy that they pumped some kind of slug into Scott Olsen's skull. I'm saying that they're between a rock and a hard place, defenders of a system that works only for those at the controls. What shame these officers must feel. It's not for long that working class cops can police working class people before the tension between job-security and doing the right thing causes something to snap. Perhaps this snapping is an articulation through violence of their own personal shame. Because shame speaks violently, the cops act violently, and disgusting violence in cops is in the job description.

However difficult and perhaps repugnant a task, we must try to empathize with the position the cops are in, and continue to model for them, even at the fist of their brutality, non-violent ways for reformulating mentally and physically the way we understand and resist the dominant structure of power in this country and world.

She said, "We see it's a soup, but what's in it?"

After the last bell sounded at work I was asked by a colleague what I'd be up to this weekend. "Music, reading, a little writing; maybe try to head downstate, Occupy Wall Street, ya know?"

            Occupy Wall Street's a non-issue at the school where I'm employed. There's this tremendous movement underway now a month, expressing the collective angst of millions. Yet many of the staff, and I suspect the majority of students, are unaware of what's going on.  The knowledge is there, of course, that something's happening; what, however, is more difficult for most to pin down.

            When the topic emerges from the occasionally tawdry morass of quotidian school issues, it's prefixed and suffixed with the flummox of why? Inquiring minds want to know about their goals. "I support the protests," said one colleague, "but they need to state some goals." Another quipped: "They're a joke. Nobody's taking them seriously. Without demands, what are you to make of 'em?"

            These folks are out of touch with history. Providing their stock example - the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s- they told me about how that movement had recognizable leaders with coherent demands. Somehow, through an admixture of how the era is discussed in the grand narrative of our school textbooks and media and entertainment industries, they have managed to isolate the struggle for black rights from those other struggles for the rights of women, workers, the poor, and human rights in general. Although the civil rights movement was a nexus of unrest and collectivization, it was just that, a nexus, out of which energy poured into other sectors of social and political life in the United States.

            The Wall Street Occupation is not an end in itself. However I'd like to suggest that from a certain perspective it is one for itself. The occupation, nearly into its sixth week, has been thus far a success that even critics are remiss to deny. Denials can't logically follow discussion, and there's plenty of it, even if at times it seems largely cheap, naïve and dismissive. Whether goals are articulated or not, the expression of collective will on display does one thing remarkably well and with crystalline clarity: it bears witness.

            Regardless of which one of the myriad issues you pick to spoon-sample from the pot, their systemic associations are blended so well together even Gordon Ramsey couldn't curse his way into distinguishing the carrot from the celery. Wall Street's the broth into which the ingredients are stirred and from which the stomach-turning aroma pollutes the air.

            If you happen to suck up a chunk of Citizens United floating in there, somewhere, balefully in Wall Street ooze, you notice quickly how the attack on public education dollars, state pension funds and social services enhance that particular flavor; or how about when you happen to chance on a soggified tendril that resembles by appearance only the disaster that is healthcare in this country? As soon as you let its flavors settle down for palatial recognition you suddenly realize you're eating the brains of a child and her sister eviscerated under the ballast of a remote controlled predator drone; how about that drone, doesn't it also taste like stagnant wages for those who have managed to retain or find employment, Tort 'reform,' or mercenary armies like Blackwater/Xe making a bundle on the public dime and thirstily sucking the marrow from the bones of the women and children they murder and rape? And those wages, they sure taste and smell a lot like the decline of organized labor, which tastes and smells a lot like the diminution of women's rights and the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, net neutrality, immigration 'reform,' the emasculation of the "job-killing" EPA, the farce of Copenhagen a couple years back and every G8 and G20 the bastards throw for themselves.

            The problem with choosing goals lies in how difficult it is to separate one issue from the next. What we are really hearing when folks demand demands and goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement is a request, either conscious or unconscious or uninformed, to pare the strength of our grievances down to manageable, conquerable size. Isn't the request for centralized demands a way of saying, "All right, we hear you. Now get the fuck off the street!"

            What in the past has dogged large scale protest efforts has been the inability or the lack of enough vision to unite singular struggles into a comprehensively unified one - He wants toe-may-toes, but I want toe-mah-toes.  In the early years of the movements against the Iraq War I was in Washington D.C. and New York with what at times seemed to be hundreds of thousands of others, standing together, marching together, cursing and crying and banging on our drums together. I recall hearing one critique that made some sense: we tended to be there for different reasons, under different front groups and coalitions, each with our particular issue that coalesced roughly around the catastrophic, illegal war. People came together, yes, however they used their own approaches to try to make their voices heard. Those approaches were in some sense determined by the issue that was of most immediate concern, and from one perspective they helped to create and maintain the factions that prevented the movement from realizing its potential.

            By demanding that the OWS movement draft and pronounce a list of goals is another way of asking them to choose certain issues over others, which risks the likely outcome of fracturing the movement. Who do we need to please, anyway, by listing our demands in the name of bringing comfort to the confused and ammunition to the threatened and unsettled? Why expedite the process? What's the hurry? We've been in this mess a long time, and it will take time to properly address it. Thankfully, as T.S. Eliot put it:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;	30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

If critics and skeptics want to figure out what's going on, they ought best get going on their studies.  

            They can begin with A People's History of the United States.

Boeing does Martin Luther King

            On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his "Beyond Vietnam" speech. Following the event, Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the security detail he had placed on King removed. One year later to the day, King was murdered.

            Unlike King's widely anthologized "I Have a Dream" speech, "Beyond Vietnam" is less known. Its unpopularity has to do in part with how difficult a job it is for editors sympathetic to the American experiment to cherry-pick inspirationally salient, Hallmark passages that can be read emptied of political potency and neutered of social virulence. The thematic arch of the speech also contributes to its unfortunate obscurity.  

            On 4/4/67, King's project for civil rights aggressively expanded, and in a sense began to fulfill its logical trajectory. It moves with great courage beyond the specific grievances of the African American community in the United States, bringing together the grievances of peoples of different colors, nationalities, and ethnicities under the banner of class in a capitalistic, profit-driven world. "We [SCLC] were convinced," he tells us, "that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear" (King). Here, by implication, his message begins to coalesce around the idea of freeing and saving the soul of the world by loosening the global dispossessed "completely from the shackles they still wear," from the poor in the ghettos of American cities to the peasant farmers of Southeast Asia.  

            King took heat not merely from certain members of the political elite who were once sympathetic to his cause, but from segments of the African American community itself. He says:

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to   speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they    ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. (King)

Obviously, King thought big, and believed genuinely in the largesse afforded by big ideas. The unification of communities with ostensibly singular, disparate grievances that the Occupy Wall Street movement is attempting to do today King began nearly fifty years ago. His project was primarily one of bearing witness and education. By bearing witness to one injustice, what is learned leads the student to the next, and then the next. It was only a matter of time before King became a voice for all communities victimized by racial prejudice, class marginalization, political disfranchisement and ruthless, naked imperialism.
            And now, as President Obama announced, King has returned to the national consciousness in the form of a massive, Stonehengesque memorial unveiled yesterday in Washington. But who is the figure we are memorializing? A look at a list of those who sponsored the dedication and construction of the memorial might help clarify, or perhaps muddle matters:

The General Motors Foundation and Chevrolet will serve as Dedication Chair and Dedication Co-Chair is The Tommy Hilfiger Corporate Foundation. Dedication Vice      Chairs include Aetna, Boeing, BP, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, GE, MacFarlane Partners, McDonald’s, Salamander Hotels, Travelers, Wal-Mart Stores, and Zoilëmax Foundation. (DedicatetheDream.org)

This unsavory and motley ensemble of corporate sleaze is underway reinventing King by co-opting his historical figure and interpreting his "message."
            "We honor Dr. King as a courageous and visionary leader," Jim McNerney, Boeing chairman, president and CEO, said. "He knew that when all people have the freedom to dream big dreams, to be included and respected even during disagreement, to learn, to contribute and to achieve, we strengthen our nation for generations to come" (DedicatetheDream.org).  The tremendous irony involved here is dumbfounding. The Boeing Mr. McNerney represents is the same multinational defense corporation responsible for continuing to supply nations with weapons systems that produce the misery and suffering that it was King's purpose to mitigate and end. And Wal-Mart? How exactly do they exemplify King's message? By being anti-union, anti-woman, anti-healthcare, anti-living wage? By selling agricultural products in such abundance and for such low costs that they've effectively killed any kind of local competition? And McDonalds? Give me a break.
            And yet these are the companies that control the manner in which the memory of King will be passed down to future generations. He will be King, the rugged individualist, King, the man who advocated freedom for the exact purpose of getting ahead at someone else's expense in the name of sowing your oats in the virgin forests of the world;  King the market deregulator, King the occupier of foreign countries, King the moral compass behind national excursions in torture.
            Does anybody recognize the great irony in Boeing being allowed anywhere near the memorial project while they profit by the billions in corporate tax breaks and two unwinnable wars; Boeing, the company that makes its bread on the most grossly violent types of conflict resolution? Or the war-profiteer GE, whose CEO Jeffrey Immelt now councils Obama on job creation after having outsourced something like 60 percent of his labor force overseas? How does King's message of nonviolent action and social justice resonate when those companies and the very nation affiliated with his memory habitually act in direct opposition to the man's most cherished values and highest aspirations?
            On that day in 1967 at Riverside Church, King discussed the question of how to motivate people to peacefully resolve their conflicts when the leaders of their nation know only the catastrophic language of blood and death:  

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I   knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the    ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.  (King)

The United States corporate government continues to be the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today", which is why it makes perfect, perverse sense that in the months leading up to yesterday's memorial dedication the plutocrats successfully hijacked their fiercest critic.

For the entire "Beyond Vietnam" speech, copy and paste the link below:

            http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

To checkout two in a series of Boeing commercials honoring MLK, links below:

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4zGwnipVYI

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izSIC7XZ32s

And how about Chevrolet's rendition:

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XovR_pgiLsw

The Anachronism's in the Nation

                 If I learned anything from Wisconsin 2011, it's that the whole notion of "nation" is old hat, to a degree kitschy and cliché, and dare I say anachronistic? Yet it's compelling.

                This final "yet compelling" part is most troublesome. And yet signs indicate that this "yet compelling" is becoming less so. Those who continue peddling the old language of the national we have either already surpassed the ordinary needs that sustainable nations at one time helped satisfy or are buried alive beneath the needs that they're financially unable to meet. It's no coincidence that the Tea Party base is primarily aging working class whites while the eye at the top of the pyramid is nearly classless in its infinite security, political omnipotence, and financial well being- think David and Charles Koch.

                The idea that the extent to which we associate ourselves with a nation is fizzling out would have seemed outrageous at any one point in the ten years since 9/11. That miserable event sounded the jeremiad, the familiar call to arms and nation and god that many feel comfortable referring to in the spiritual language of awakenings. The dogged ethos of American Exceptionalism was, in the presence of a ubiquitous, vague and indefinable enemy, reborn, and with it the token demagoguery of our politicos and the quintessential and entirely predictable mad acquiescence of the people to their demands. I recall viscerally the utter nausea of seeing so many bumper stickers and flags enshrouding the countless indecencies and crimes America committed throughout the decade. I recall the helplessness so many of us experienced daily, so raw in its vulgarity and injustice that getting out of bed itself became a singular act of humiliation. Or the moments we thought we might move the machine, make a dent in its façade, only to end our efforts happy to have made new friends but without a trace of influencing anything.

                You wouldn't have heard the fizzling even as recently as 2010, when the Tea Party stole the mid-term show. It was another bend in the nightmare from which any progressively minded, reasonable person has been for a longtime unable to awaken from. For my part I anticipated nothing of what happened in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio, or what's occurring right now on Wall Street, throughout the nation, and throughout the world. To my mind, we reached the breaking point a long time ago, but the corporate/political/sociocultural system reliably continued to strengthen itself.  In times of crisis, this strengthening generally seems to be the case. We fall back on what Benedict Anderson referred to as our symbolic connection to our imagined communities.  Today, in 2011, there's credibility in the idea that even those symbolic connections are on the outs.

                The symbolic value of an idea gets drained of meaning if a long time has elapsed without a statue bleeding the passion of the Christ or the Devil's face appearing in a plume of smoke. One's faith gets shaken. The symbolic value of America, then, bolstered by our collective memories of historic events, functions well only insofar as it has a counterpart in the material world. The burgeoning middle-class of the latter half of the twentieth century was the material counterpart to the faith people had in the notion of the nation as special, anointed, exceptional. Middle class life revitalized the faith that in turn energized the ethic by which people worked, striving for their slice of the pie.

                It's also interesting to note how transformative those years were for the nation: civil rights, women's rights, labor rights, the pill, etc. And it was during those years that within a decade a president and a presidential contender were assassinated, MLK was murdered, and Vietnam tore a hole in the confidence of the ancien regime. How did the nation, at that time, remain a nation? Where was the source of the strength that bound people together in some of the most perilous moments the country's ever experienced? I'd like to suggest that what insulated the nation against permanent destruction was a financially stable middle class, one capable of enduring eminent catastrophe and, most importantly, one able to evolve with the upheavals into a new stage of life. From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that today public safety nets are endangered, Planned Parenthood is on the verge of absolute defunding, civil liberties are curtailed, healthcare is an exclusive privilege, pensions are being raided, public education's at risk of privatization, immigrants are on the firing line, and environmental protections have no teeth. It makes sense because nations can't endure strife without the material strength to process it. While we're living now in a time of tremendous strife, what material strength we had is gone.

                The theft of that material strength through shady financial practices and deregulation and concerted legislation has caused a rupture between the symbolic idea of the nation and the material prosperity it provides. Minus the jobs, the idea of the nation as a massive collective in which we play a part is less appetizing, and in the end, less believable. This is one reason why OWS is striking a legitimate chord that people can actually hear. Even the flag-waving Tea-Partiers are pissed and legitimately aggrieved, even though they continue to misguide their fire. They wave their flags, eat their hot dogs and sing the "Star Spangled Banner," but perhaps they do so more out of helpless anger than national pride.

                What I'm really trying to get at is something my generation picked up on a long time ago: Nations are for Suckers. Those who control the United States know nothing of national borders. They operate in a globalized netherworld of immaterial monetary transactions, and it’s in bed with the financial markets that their allegiances lie. For the rich, nations died a long time ago. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the worse things became the closer we were drawn into the folds of penury and patriotism. The absurdity of the 2010 midterm and the 2012 presidential campaigns exemplifies how arbitrary America as a nation in the old sense of the word has become. A nation for those who vote to put people in power who are accountable only to the nationless.

                 My generation seems to me one that shed the stripes of the nation a long time ago. We've traveled, made connections across the world, paid for and reserved entire mortgages worth of higher education. We've deconstructed piety, picked the meat from the bones of war, internalized the drawbacks of the patriarchal model of authority, said hello and goodbye to the promise of middleclass life, squared off with the internal contradictions of capitalism, interrogated the assumptions of womanhood/manhood, the construction of gender, the games of sexuality, the identity referred to as the self, the I … I have an inkling that our generation's first words were je est un autre.

                With otherness as an identity, we've created an "other" kind of movement. It is strange, discombobulated, and just. It is the proper response to an old system that has currency only for those who still haven't learned better, who have yet to sever their symbolic bond to the country that has abandoned its material responsibility to them.