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/