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.

Is the Corporate Media Relevant?

                 The Occupy Wall Street protests arrive at the tail end of a year in which we've witnessed a groundswell of direct democratic action across the globe.  The corporate media strains to capture its energy and its meaning. For most of us the media's effort registers both as flimsy and mocking: flimsy to the extent that the tepid coverage is not commensurate with the magnitude of the action; mocking in that its flimsiness is a result of what little seriousness the media devotes to considering the protests and its actors. In response to their effort, or what appears their lack thereof, many of us accuse the corporate media of an intentional, tactical "blackout" of the ongoing events in lower Manhattan and around the rest of the country. It would be a difficult argument indeed to suggest that a blackout has not, is not, occurring. My contention is that this "blackout" is in fact something else, a symptom of the corporate media's disconnect to the working American's world, and therefore a glaring indication that the corporate media in particular and the corporate world in general are as irrelevant to the common person as s/he is to corporate culture and plutocratic, oligarchic governance.

                As we've all seen and read, one item that justifies the media's lukewarm response to the largest sociopolitical event since the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq is what they refer to as the movement's lack of a coherent message and the absence of central demands. Of course, we know that such expectations were not placed on the Tea Party during their summer of Town Hall discontent a couple of years back. Was it because the Tea Party was itself a united movement with a coherent message and a catalogue of central and secondary demands, or did the social, class, and racial complexion of the Tea Party render assumptions about their purpose a significantly easier task?  

                Embedded in the name and location of the OWS is a clue as to the political makeup of the Wall Street protestors. The verb "Occupy" and its corollary noun "Occupation" are terms that progressives hold dear to our political discourse. The connotations are replete with historical examples, at the forefront of which are the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. By employing this term in the very phrase that has come to identify the burgeoning movement, the question of purpose becomes easier for those unfamiliar with it to understand. This movement vociferously opposes occupations that threaten the sanctity of segments of human life and their national and cultural autonomy. On another level, the movement opposes the occupation of our financial system by plutocratic/oligarchic behemoths who play according to their own rules at the expense of the majority's economic and political, and mental and physical health. So why, then, in light of the very terminology in the title itself, is it so difficult for the corporate media to find purpose in the movement? Is it straight obstinacy, a tactical propagandist decision, or an inability on their part to begin to understand the movement's past and present grievances and its future aspirations?  

                For the media to pick up on the connotations embedded in the title Occupy Wall Street would require a few preset conditions, but I'll focus on what I consider to be the most important one: in order to see how loaded with meaning the term "Occupy" is, in order to infer from it meaning as to the OWS movement's purposes and demands, would require of them the intellectual space needed to even imagine the occupation of Palestine, for example, as an occupation at all. The corporate media, as well as the majority of our political class in the United States, takes for granted Israel's right to occupy all the lands it labels its own. They recognize no injustice, whether ethically or in terms of international law, that may come of Israel's past and present relentless and brutal expansion of settlements. The Palestinian Question for our media and politicians begins and ends with how to mitigate Palestinian backlash to Israel's countless violations of its human rights. It's a question that begins and ends with Hamas.

                Likewise, the corporate media takes for granted Wall Street's role in operating our economy as it sees fit and with absolute impunity. Whether or not its practices are always savory, its "right" to run amuck like a wild pig through endless fields of shit is beyond its scope to question. To question bad practices is to question the capitalist economic system itself, and to question capitalism is tantamount to casting doubt and turning one's back on the fundamental tenets of representative government and the American "way of life." By extension, market regulations are synonymous with direct interrogations of the merits of capitalism.

                While the media recognizes some roots of the public's outrage with Wall Street, it cannot fathom the movement's genuine belief that it can do something about it, at the very least put their bodies on the line to physically express displeasure. The media's general incomprehension disconcerts them. They cannot frame the OWS too cynically without risking coming across to the American public as Wall Street apologists. At the same time, providing the coverage the OWS deserves endangers their own prominence in the hierarchy of American information production and distribution. Because the media is as inextricably fettered to the expansive core of our collective grief as the titans of finance at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, and they know it. Loyd Blankfein does "God's work" only insofar as somebody convinces us that he does.

                Conversely, covering the Tea Party was a boon for the corporate media. The entertainment value alone, which aggravated the us versus them post-9/11 narrative in the arch of American political and social life yielded remarkable network ratings and further fortified the new standard for partisan-driven network news channels; and the fact that the Tea Party has been demonstrably underwritten by corporate cash safeguarded those responsible for the corruption of our politics, the demolition of our economy, and the misinformation of our media from their fantastically ignorant though genuinely disaffected members. Furthermore, the Tea Party was from the very beginning a force that ran counter to social and political progress, reifying in the public imagination the steady presence of the white, patriarchal, anti-intellectual, religiously minded and culturally intolerant pre-Vietnam status quo.

                We are at an impasse with our media (and our political class) in its ability to articulate and understand the events and experiences in our country and the conditions by which they take place. The OWS doesn't speak the corporate media's language, and where it can it subverts its recognizable signs (think The Occupied Wall Street Journal). The OWS (so far, anyway) doesn't value the top-down vertical structure of leadership that the media traditionally looks for as a prerequisite germane to any legitimate movement. Whereas the Tea Party's another term for aging white conservatives beleaguered by the 21^st century, the OWS is a cross-section of America that doesn't sport the same jerseys. The OWS doesn't promote American values as much as universal values that apply to everyone, men, women, children, homo and hetero and transsexuals, blacks and whites and yellows and reds, the poor and the working poor and the diminishing middle class, the conscientious rich, the privileged and underprivileged, etc. etc. As long as we are on the streets, such an impasse will matter less and less, because we will no longer have to rely on whether the media characterizes us in a favorable light … because we have the voices and the technology to amplify our voices … because we can tell our own story and through direct action characterize to the entire world ourselves.

                The corporate media is quickly becoming irrelevant.

Conceptual Lights Blinking

… only they weren’t lights she saw, just concepts, concepts so luminous she didn’t need to flip some impersonal switch in the dark impersonal hallway to find the shortest, safest route to her own party.