Police Violence Continues Unabated

Today a former friend, now resident in San Francisco, linked on Facebook to a Chronicle article headed "Bricks, pipes, thrown from occupied SF building." He commented: "Arrest every single person found in this building. Every. Single. One." One of his friends chimed in: "Yes...all of them. ALL OF THEM! That we're [sic] in the building illegally.. Repeat..illegally."

Of course, the rule of law is very important in Our America, which is why all lawbreakers are prosecuted, even if they are rich and powerful and white.  But I remain skeptical of the article, which was clearly written in haste and needed copy-editing.  First, I'd like to know how the reporter's single reference to one brick thrown by a squatter, who was arrested, became the plural "bricks" in the headline and elsewhere in the article. Second, I recall how many articles about Occupy have reported violence by protesters that within a day or two turned out to have been initiated by the police or agents provocateurs or just right-wing journalists out on a lark.

This time around, there's hardly any pretense in the corporate media.  An AP dispatch in my local newspaper today was headed "Stinging gas, swinging batons send May Day protesters fleeing."  Though the story reported some incidents of "mayhem" (i.e., some "small downtown windows" smashed) by "black-clad" anarchists, mostly it was matter-of-fact that the violence was one-sided and initiated by the police.  For example:

In Oakland, the scene of several violent clashes between activists and police in recent months, the situation threatened to boil over again when police fired tear gas, sending hundreds of demonstrators scrambling.

Officers also fired "flash-bang" grenades to disperse protesters converging on police as they tried to make arrests, police said.  Four people were taken into custody.

Maybe you don't think that firing tear gas is violence; what would you think if the protesters fired tear gas at the police?  Notice also those grenades fired "to disperse protesters converging on police as they tried to make arrests" -- that's to prevent eyewitnesses from getting close enough to document police abuse of people they've arrested.

Yesterday on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman talked to Marina Sitrin of CUNY and Amin Husain of Tidal magazine, both Occupy activists, and to the journalist Chris Hedges.  (I really need to reread Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and write a detailed critique of it, but its problems are summed up well by John Horgan, who wrote in his The End of War [McSweeney, 2012] that Hedges "eloquently describes war as a deadly addiction but seems to project his own fascination with armed conflict onto the rest of us.")  Hedges argued incoherently that he's not a pacifist, but "most revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, are nonviolent enterprises," and though he claimed not to be a member of Occupy, he spoke of it several times as "we."

I share Hedges's suspicion of violent tactics, as I've written here before, and still think that people who advocate violence should be presumed to be agents provocateurs until proven otherwise.  But it's absurd to claim that most revolutions are nonviolent, or even that the controlled use of violence will necessarily alienate "the mainstream."  Even very extensive property damage by college students celebrating a team victory or supporting a corrupt but venerable coach doesn't seem to bother many Americans, not even the police.  Union violence against cops and scabs didn't seem to alienate most American workers at the height of the labor movement, and state violence against dissenters doesn't seem to discredit the State either.  Student demonstrators in Asia, Latin America, and Europe have fought back against the police as a matter of routine, and Egyptian protesters in Cairo last year used more violence than the Occupy protesters have so far.  It's certainly legitimate for Hedges to criticize the movement, but he shouldn't lie in the process; it'll discredit him.

The other guests answered Hedges forthrightly, pointing out the legitimate use of masks and violence by protesters around the world.  To his credit, Hedges didn't get indignant or throw a tantrum when Maria Sitrin said:

It’s actually not useful at all, from the outside, to tell the movements what to do, especially with people who have access to publish in certain places. And there’s quite a few. Whether well-meaning—people, Zizek, telling us we must be serious revolutionaries and anti-capitalists and do this, that and the other. And, you know, with all respect, either engage in the discussion, because it is open—all of it is open, and we need to have these conversations, and we’d love to have more intellectuals who relate to the movements relating to us directly and having the discussions, not telling us what to do. That part is not useful. But we’re organizing despite all of it, and the movement is flourishing.

I still think that Hedges would do better to denounce aggressive, repressive, routine state violence rather than the small-scale violence of social movements.  There are good reasons against those movements using violence, not least that the State outguns them immeasurably and is far more heedless of human life and safety.  (Now that I've finished rereading it I can say that this idea is important in Marge Piercy's Dance the Eagle to Sleep.  It's not a recent concern.)  Anyone who attacks the Occupy Movement for allowing a few Black Bloc-ers to smash windows or "disrupt traffic" -- another high crime of yesterday's protests -- without condemning the much greater violence of the US government, the states and cities, is simply disingenuous.  By all means, try to win over the police and the army, but they are also human agents, responsible for their own choices, and "just following orders" is not an excuse.  Maybe it's been too long since World War II and the Nuremberg Trials, but "I was just following orders" used to be as much of a giveaway as "Some of my best friends are ...".  Now it turns up every time a US military or police atrocity gets attention.  That's got to be challenged.

At the same time, I'd like to know what the Black Blocs think they are achieving by smashing the windows of small businesses.  They have the same obligation to defend and justify their tactics as the rest of the movement does.  To me they just seem to be imitating college basketball fans, but I could well be wrong.

P.S.  FAIR's first report on May Day reporting.

Andrew Sullivan's Hippie Problem

Avedon linked today to this post (actually a couple months old) by Andrew Sullivan, which reminded me all over again why I hate him. That's a strong word, I know. I'd been mulling over writing a post on how easy it is for other people to hate Rick Santorum, but I can't work up a lot of bile over him. Yes, he's evil, but he's also a joke in the "mainstream"; hating him is like hating Fred Phelps -- easy, safe, conformist. Santorum couldn't even get re-elected to the Senate. Sullivan is also a right-wing Catholic, but he has more street cred in the corporate media. But I think I would hate him anyway, even if he were an obscure blogger with no traffic to speak of, just for his ongoing and unrepentant stupidity and dishonesty.

So here's Sullivan on his change of heart about the goddamned hippies of Occupy Wall Street:

A lot of us have to confess something about the Occupy Wall Street protests: we have a hippie problem. As a post-boomer, I’ve been trained to giggle at them my whole life. And anyone who has had to listen to an unsought diatribe about corporations in a line at Target, or has a friend who’s been trying to talk you into going to Burning Man for a decade, will know what I’m talking about. The crustier edges of the fringe can be as smug as they are alienating—from replacing applause in Zuccotti Park with silent finger-wiggling to the occasional, asinine assertion that the U.S. government is a greater evil than al Qaeda. I have to say I feel exactly the same ambivalence toward the Tea Partiers, with their strange 18th-century costumes, occasional racist diatribes, and gun-toting. Their cultural signifiers distract from their message—which is diffuse and vague enough to begin with. Before too long, I find myself inclined to move on, to zoom out.

I like the "a lot of us" in there -- what if Sullivan was one of us, just a slob like one of us? And "hippie problem" -- was that a conscious allusion to this notorious neocon polemic from 1963? Probably not, Sullivan is too ignorant of history for that. Ah, what a sign of his bold individualist stance, that he giggles at hippies because he was "trained to" do it all his life. He's such a bold freethinker. But didn't his parents ever tell him (however insincerely) that you shouldn't make fun of people's appearance? Even if they didn't, does it never occur to him that a guy who chooses to look like this:







shouldn't throw stones? (The shaved head to distract from the baldness; the bold bandido mustache -- everything that's risible about today's gay male culture.) And "as smug as they are alienating"? Physician, heal thyself. Sullivan's own smugness oozes from every word of this paragraph, as from his self-chosen photograph.

I suppose it must be very unpleasant to have to "listen to an unsought diatribe about corporations in a line at Target." (That's of a piece with his "If I hear one more gripe about single payer from someone in their fifties with a ponytail, I'll scream.") I do feel Andrew's pain. But those of us who live outside (or even, I should think, inside) the Beltway are more likely to hear unsought diatribes against hippies than against corporations in the line at Target, but unlike Sullivan I don't expect everyone in my vicinity to share my personal political convictions, or at least to refrain from saying anything that I disagree with in my hearing.

As for "the occasional, asinine assertion that the U.S. government is a greater evil than al Qaeda," well, asinine assertions turn up all over the place, and more than occasionally in Sullivan's writing.
Comparing evils is a treacherous enterprise, but there isn't any doubt that the U.S. government has killed far more innocent people than al Qaeda has, or that the U.S. government has on numerous occasions used jihadist terrorist groups (including many operatives who went on to form al Qaeda) for its own purposes. Whether that makes the U.S. government a greater evil is open to debate, but I think it means that the assertion Sullivan derides isn't necessarily asinine. It stands in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 assertion that the U.S. government was the greatest source of violence in the world, which was true then and I believe is true now. Sullivan has a record of indignant unthinking fury at anyone (except himself) who presumes to judge the morality of the U.S. government, of course. And as I've said before, I don't judge all gay people by Andrew Sullivan's frequent asinine assertions.

Sullivan goes on to say that he saw the light, maybe because of "seeing a more diverse crowd in D.C. than I expected, or absorbing online testimonies from 99 percenters, or reading yet another story about how corrupt the banking system has become (Citigroup was the latest to have me fuming)." Ah, that's Andrew for you: shooting off his mouth before he knew what he was talking about, even though the information had been there for a long time. (The corruption of the banking system, for example, didn't suddenly become knowable this fall.) But you see, it was the hippies' fault. If they hadn't set up their drum circles, Andrew would have taken them more seriously. Then, of course, he backtracks:

The revolts in the West require nothing of the courage displayed by Egyptians or Syrians or Tunisians standing up to tanks and bullets and torture.

True, true: U.S. state violence has been less extreme (for college educated white folks, that is) than Egyptian or Syrian or Bahraini state violence. But it still takes more than a little courage to face the state violence that had already occurred by the time Sullivan posted this piece on October 22: random and unprovoked pepper spraying, beatings with clubs and fists by cops who had been trained in that work. Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was nearly killed by Oakland police a few days after the post went up, and we've seen a lot more police assault since then. And before then, too: anyone who wasn't blinded by hippie-hatred and love of corporatism would have noticed that a pattern of state violence, intended to intimidate dissenters, has been in place in the U.S. for many years. Not just Seattle, the various "globalization" summits, and the national party conventions, but America's long and violent labor history testify to it. But Andrew couldn't see any of that. It was the hippies, you know.

Warning to OWS: If this guy has suddenly decided that he likes you, you may be doing something wrong. But don't worry about it too much; it was probably a lapse on his part, and it isn't your fault.

Who Cleans Up After the One Percent?

I meant to put up that corner banner before, but had trouble getting it to work. I tried again today, and it worked, so there it is. It would be easy to think that Occupy has passed its moment, with the police clearing out the occupations (though not everywhere, not yet), and the media are sure to tell us it's all over. That might account for the drop in donations to OWS recently. But it's not over. Occupy protests are happening in places you might consider unlikely. Did you notice that Occupy Oakland shut down Oakland Port again on Monday, with similar actions up and down the West Coast?

That's not what I mainly meant to write about, though. We had an interesting event in Bloomington last weekend that sheds light on a lot of the criticism one sees of the Occupy movement: IU won a basketball game against a number-one, and the fans went wild. "Slow-motion drinks flying through the air," says the report; how do you do that? But anyway, the key thing is that the police response, and public response, were very different than response to the local Occupy group, or to the movement nationally. Inside one of the popular bars:

"I don’t think I got to leave till 3 or 3:30 a.m.," [one worker] said. "I usually get off at 1 a.m. It was unreal. I’ve never seen Nick’s so dirty with beer on the floor. We were cooking food until the last minute when we had to shut down. Officially, we were closed, but on a night like last night, you couldn’t get all the people out."

Outside, the streets filled with people as the police watched. A car parked across the street from the bar was "trampled — its roof caved in, hood scuffed with shoe marks, windshield cracked. About an hour into the celebration, the crowd wanted to see it flipped." Which they tried to do, despite a couple of people who told them to stop. The car turned out to belong to a waitress in the bar, who was not pleased. However,

Bloomington Police Lt. Faron Lake was one of the officers who responded to Kirkwood following the win. It took the police some time to clear the area, Lake said, but there were no major problems while he was there. ...

Bloomington Police Sgt. Shane Rasche said there were no mass arrests as a result of the celebration.

"No major problems"? "No mass arrests", eh? Not even any arrests at all, it seems. Just as there were no arrests after Penn State students rioted in support of disgraced Coach Joe Paterno. The owner of the smashed car wrote a scathing letter to the local paper, which was published yesterday. One other letter appeared the same day, drawing unflattering contrasts between the treatment our student rioters received and the reactions of decent citizens to the Occupy camp.

For that matter, the police managed to arrest five IU students from a group who were protesting against the appearance of representatives of J.P. Morgan Chase at the School of Business.

At one point during the commotion, several protesters were allegedly pushed by a man in a gray suit. The man was later identified as IUPD Detective Greg McClure.

The assault was caught on video, of course, but to date McClure has not been arrested. The university has promised an investigation, of course.

(One of the things I, and I hope many other people, have learned from the late wave of protests is that the police cannot be believed about anything. Every time accusations of police violence have been leveled against them, they have come up with explanations that bear no relation to reality at all, which is proved by videos recorded by their targets. I don't suppose that this is anything new, either. It suggests that all police reports should be regarded as false until proven otherwise.)

By all accounts, last Saturday's riot was mild. I was living on the courthouse square in downtown Bloomington in 1976 when IU won the NCAA championship, and the rioters spread through most of downtown. They howled "Number One!", smashed windows, broke beer bottles on the pavement, and drove around honking their horns and ignoring stop signs for about three hours. I've been through two such victories since, which is not why I have no interest in sports -- that predates the 1976 riots by twenty years -- but it is why I always hope that IU or any team in the area will lose all its games.

This kind of behavior (which isn't limited to Bloomington, of course) doesn't lead to any general hostility to organized sport in America. But peaceful political protests are greeted by hostility, police violence, and dishonesty, as regular and automatic as breathing. That's a pretty stark disparity.

(By the way, I know that few of last Saturday's rioters come from the top 1% of the American distribution of wealth; even fewer of them have that much money of their own, as opposed to their parents. But as a matter of sympathy and solidarity, I suspect that many of them identify with the 1 percent. And we all know who cleans up after the messes the 1% make, be they literal or metaphorical; it's the rest of us.)

Giving the People What They Want

(photo by Steve Rhodes via)

Someone pointed me to this item about a survey which found that, contrary to the propaganda line about overtaxed, over-regulated small businesses, taxes and regulations are quite low on the list of small business owners' concerns. What's particularly intriguing is that the people who conducted the survey evidently expected to get results that fit their right-wing preconceptions. One shouldn't rely too much on one survey, of course, but happily ThinkProgress could point to other surveys which came to the same conclusion.

I hadn't heard this before, but I wasn't surprised. By now I'm used to the idea that government, business and media elites shouldn't be trusted.

Similarly, we are frequently told that most of the citizenry objects to dirty communists taking over the streets, going on strike, and otherwise disrupting the peaceful course of modern life. So I wasn't at all surprised to hear that a BBC poll found that a solid majority of Britons supported the public-sector workers' strike that began today. American support for the Occupy movement appears to be dropping right now, but that doesn't mean that most Americans support the Right's programs; public opinion presumably is unchanged from the status quo, which consistently wants social programs to continue, is less worried about the deficit than about jobs and mere petty survival, and is comfortable with imposing higher taxes on the rich. And this state of affairs persists even in the face of deliberate attempts to mislead the public.

(I've been wondering why I haven't been hearing more from my usual sources about the Egyptian parliamentary elections. Maybe it's because it's hard to squeeze the results into the usual boxes? Turnout, the head of the election commission reported, is high, but "he did not give figures." The US-supported military claims the high turnout vindicates them, though some voters "said they were voting simply to avoid a fine the military announced would be imposed on anyone who did not cast a ballot — 500 Egyptian pounds, or about $85, a significant amount in a country where 40 percent of the population makes less than $1 a day or just slightly more." Egyptian Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood are claiming "an early lead", which worries Israel, the beacon of democracy in the Middle East that got along so well with Mubarak's long dictatorship. Protesters continue to occupy Tahrir Square despite state violence that has killed dozens of people. But the segments of the blogosphere I watch have not had much to say about the elections yet.)

I'd been meaning to write about this stuff before, but then today I found two articles that gave me pause. One, by Ian Welsh, whose point of view and arguments I take seriously even when I don't agree with them, began as follows:

When Occupy started, there were polls that showed the public supported it. Later, polls showed that support had dropped and a majority no longer supported Occupy. In the first case progressives were pleased, in the second upset.

I didn’t care either time. Repeat after me:

Public opinion does not matter.

It is irrelevant. A large majority of the population wanted a public option added to the healthcare bill. A small majority wanted single payor. Calls against TARP were running 100:1 to 1200:1 against. There is no public option, there is no single payer, and TARP passed.

He went to point out the successful suppression of referenda on economic issues in Europe. "Our elites will do what they will do regardless of what public opinion is ... What matters isn’t what the public thinks, what matters is what the public does which has a tangible, real, cost to politicians or their masters."

True enough, as long as it's understood what "public opinion" means in this context. (There's also a begged question there: matters to whom?) As I've argued before, it's not possible that politicians in Washington, especially the Obama administration, don't know what the public wants; they just think they can ignore it. And yet they keep doing the polls, which seems odd. Elections, however empty a ritual, are required by law to take place, but opinion polls are not. Maybe our rulers keep hoping that someday they'll get the results they want.

Elections are interesting, though. On one hand, the ever-rising cost of running for office ensures a certain narrowing of the field of candidates. But on the other, the Tea Party managed to have a palpable impact on government at numerous levels in 2010. This happened partly because their corporate sponsors didn't realize until it was too late that their creation was going to blow up in their faces. I can't help wondering why some "progressive," even left candidates couldn't do the same thing. Despite the best efforts of the major parties to avoid unpleasant surprises, they keep happening. It's clear that Obama is doing his best to ignore pressure from his left (via), hence his silence so far on OWS.

I also stumbled on this post by Will Wilkinson, who appears to be a libertarian. I've read his blog a little, because IOZ has him on his blogroll, but I haven't been impressed. Today's essay, "The Occupy Movement's Enthusiasm and Contempt for Democracy," appeared under the rubric of "The Moral Sciences Club," which sounds like something out of a 1940s comic book for boys, and turns out to consist entirely of posts by Will Wilkinson. He begins by declaring that

now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns -- rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage -- Occupiers and their allies now ought to pull up stakes, give up their whimsically undemocratic semi-privatization of public spaces, and endeavor to reform public policy through the democratic institutions established to make the collective determination of binding public rules legitimate. Moving on to seek reform through established democratic channels would require giving up the insolent and frankly disrespectful presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them. It would require Occupiers to square up to the fact that their movement's implicit ideology is an ideology, and a minority ideology at that -- just one among our society's many rival moral and political worldviews. The intransigence of the Occupy movement suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism, and the corollary impossibility of consensus, which makes majoritarian democratic procedures necessary in the first place.

I'm sure that Wilkinson must know that many of the public spaces OWS and its spawn have been occupying were already fully privatized when they got there, so I presume that "semi-privatization" is meant to be provocative. It shows just how unseriously he's taking on the questions the movement has been addressing. I could sort of agree with his remark about the "presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them", though of course the Tea Party was even more sweeping and far more dishonest in its claims to represent all Americans. And I don't think Occupy's presumption is at all "disrespectful", let alone that it "suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism" -- very much the opposite. As for so many people, the Occupy movement functions for Wilkinson as a Rorschach blot, onto which he projects his own obsessions.

It's not for me to say (though based on this piece it's not for Wilkinson to say either) whether it's time for Occupy to move to new tactics and procedures, though numerous writers sympathetic to the movement have already been discussing such possibilities. But I think it would be premature for the movement to abandon street action in favor of "majoritarian democratic procedures." (I'm reminded of the commenter at alicublog who argued just before OWS took off that progressives unhappy with the state of our government should write letters to the Washington Post, a move guaranteed to put fear in the hearts of the Beltway elites.) Since the movement isn't interested in being subsidized by corporate donations like the Tea Party, and has a "healthy" distrust of the Democratic Party machine, I'd say it needs to build more of a base before it did such a thing. ("Healthy," by the way, is a word Wilkinson overuses in his piece; I speculate that it's to keep himself from screaming "dirty fucking hippies!" at OWS, but I could be wrong.)

So, where does this leave me? I think that our rulers do care about public opinion, if only because they need to know what to squash. We've seen that in elite responses to OWS, beginning with panic and proceeding to police violence. (I think that Welsh mistakes OWS' tactics toward the police, too. "Nothing," he writes, "is more pathetic than watching folks at Occupy who seem to genuinely believe the cops are on their side." I haven't gotten the impression that they believe any such thing: what I've heard indicates that they're trying to win them over, to remind them of their shared humanity, to remind them that the rich aren't on the cops' side either, to undermine the state's repressive arm. It won't be completely successful, but it might make a difference now and then. And since Welsh also advocates targeting the ruling elites directly, he knows perfectly well that the police are not the real enemy.)

For the movement, knowing public opinion can be useful too, even if it chooses not to be guided by it. But then, contrary to Wilkinson, the Occupy movement is the public. We're back again at the dictum that when the media talk about "special interests" they're referring to the overwhelming majority of people, and the "national interest" refers to a tiny elite minority. The "majoritarian democratic procedures" we have are currently structured to exclude the concerns of the majority of people; the question is is how, if it's possible at all, to make them more responsive. We didn't reach our current situation through the transparent working of those procedures, but through their subversion.

P.S. This episode of Making Contact offers an excellent discussion of the state of the movement. Listen or read the transcript. Andrew Levine has a very good analysis at Counterpunch, Democracy Now! did a story on the Egyptian elections, and the Daily Show (via) also noticed the curious lack of interest in them in American media.

Bold Independent Thinkers

Today there was another letter in the local paper asking rhetorically why the Occupy Wall Street protesters don't occupy Washington DC? I've seen this trope quite a bit in the past couple of weeks, by people who think they've really caught those hippies in their own hypocrisy. Another popular trope the letter-writer used was "stop whining and vote!" Why yes, we found out how well that worked in 2008! To his credit, the letter-writer didn't include the "take a bath, you dirty hippies!" trope, but maybe that was edited out for reasons of length.

Funny thing, though. There is already an Occupy DC. It's no more acceptable to clear-headed, public-spirited citizens than Occupy Wall Street or Occupy Oakland or any of the other sites, though FOX News is trying by reverse psychology to make it look bad. (I liked this piece at The Week, which called a 2 percent drop in support for OWS as "plummeting." True, the same poll showed a 9-point jump in opposition, but the story is obviously more complicated than the headline, though you wouldn't know it from the piece itself, which ignores the corporate media's ongoing antipathy to the movement.)

Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the "go occupy DC!" line is a talking point that these people were handed by someone else; but it does indicate that their hostility to OWS is motivated by something other than reason or fact.

Moving On

What I noticed most about Mayor Bloomberg's defense of his cleansing of Zuccotti Park was that he mentioned only freedom of speech. "The First Amendment protects speech," he said at his press conference. "It doesn’t protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space."

Let's look at the First Amendment for a moment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Occupy Wall Street is certainly about freedom of speech, of course, but even more it's about "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Every right has its limits, and it may well be that peaceable assembly doesn't include "the use of tents and sleeping bags," though I don't see why it shouldn't. But I can't help thinking that Bloomberg, "a cold ruthless billionaire who bought his way into the mayor’s office",* deliberately chose to sidestep that issue.

Oddly, most of the liberal commentators I've read since the Zuccotti Park raid let him get away with it. When Robert Reich lamented "the hijacking of the First Amendment," for example, he mainly seemed to be talking about the Citizens United decision. The only other person I've seen who noticed it was Todd Gitlin, whom I wouldn't choose as company in a matter like this. Rather to my relief, he rambled off in some unhelpful directions, with numerous errors of fact and disputable judgments.

I'll grant Gitlin this other good (if platitudinous) observation, though: "Movements wither when they don’t evolve, and they evolve when they learn intelligently how to avail themselves of opportunities and adapt to changes in the environment ..." It looks to me as though Occupy has been doing just that. Yesterday Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh interviewed Marina Sitrin, a "postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Globalization and Social Change at the City University of New York, author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. She is researching global mass movements from Spain to Egypt and has just come back from Greece." Sitrin's living proof that you can be a successful academic and still communicate outside the academy.

MARINA SITRIN: Yeah, I mean, these raids we’ve been seeing across the United States, and around the world, similarly, as the movements grow and grow in the plazas and the squares, the police come in and repress, and it doesn’t deter the movements. And, you know, similarly as in Greece, where I just was, I think the movements here will start to go more into neighborhoods, which we’ve already started to see happening. So, continuing to occupy a plaza or a park, that’s really significant and symbolic, but then, also, for example, in Athens, there are many, many neighborhood assemblies now dealing with local issues.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting you should say that, because last night at the general assembly, which was remarkable to see—I mean, well over a thousand people, and it went on for hours at Occupy Wall Street—one of the people in the stack—you know, they’re just sort of making announcements in the "stack," is what they call it—got up and said, "Occupy your block."

MARINA SITRIN: Exactly. I mean, that’s—exactly. And they’re actually finding, in Greece, for example, that by being more community-based, local-based, they can address specific needs more. So, for example, electricity is being taxed, so they’re working on making sure people don’t have their electricity cut off, preventing people from being evicted from their homes. So, similarly in Harlem, people have been working with Occupy Harlem in preventing people’s heat from getting cut off; in Occupy Bronx, it’s about preventing people from getting expelled from their homes—so, more and more kind of reterritorializing, but at the same time keeping a space where we can have our assemblies and exchange experiences from around the city. And I think, actually, it’s a much more radical, if not revolutionary, way of organizing, because when we just come to one plaza, we come to a plaza and have a gathering related to that space. When we’re in our neighborhoods and we come together and relate in that way, it’s more like alternative governance, which is I think what we’re seeing to a small extent in Greece now and in Spain, as well, similarly.

Bloomberg may have inadvertently helped Occupy Wall Street to move in this direction by clearing out the park.
This morning Goodman interviewed Dorli Rainey, the longtime activist who was pepper-sprayed in Seattle the other night. In the same segment she talked to Norm Stamper, who was Seattle's Chief of Police during the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations, now known as the Battle of Seattle, and to Chuck Wexler of the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum that coordinated the conference call with mayors and police officials around the country" which led up to the purging of the parks. This led to an interesting exchange. Stamper now repudiates the paramilitary response to peaceful protest that he used in the past:

... I do believe that since 1999 and the Battle in Seattle there have been many changes. My concern is, many of those changes have been for the worse. The officers, for example, in Oakland were dressed as my police officers were in Seattle, which is, in effect, for full—in full battle gear. We were using military tactics. I authorized the use of chemical agents on nonviolent offenders. I thought I had good justification at that time. I did not. The police officer in me was thinking about emergency vehicles, fire trucks, aid cars being able to get through a key intersection. The police chief in me should have said, "This is wrong," and vetoed that decision. I will regret that decision for the rest of my life. We took a military response to a situation that was fundamentally nonviolent, in which Americans were expressing their views and their values, and used tear gas on them. And that was just plain wrong.

Wexler, no doubt with an eye toward justifying this week's police tactics, disagreed with Stamper:

But, you know, in fairness, you know, you were faced, Norm, in a very difficult situation, and in fact, there really hadn’t been many demonstrations up 'til Seattle. I mean, prior to the Vietnam era, there was a big lag time. But what was—what does happen in some of these events is you can have 90 percent of the people are there peacefully, and you have this small contingent—and I think, Norm, what you had in Seattle is you had this group of anarchists that somehow was able to cause such disturbances that it forced a reaction, that perhaps was an overreaction, but I don't think the police were prepared for it. And today, you know, the police struggle between these two extremes, between people who go to exercise their First Amendment rights and then people who are there to cause, you know, damage and destruction.

Stamper wasn't having any.

Here’s my point: if the police and the community in a democratic society are really working hard—and it is hard work—to forge authentic partnerships rather than this unilateral, paramilitary response to these demonstrations, that the relationship itself serves as a shock absorber. Picture police officers helping to protect the demonstrators. Picture demonstrators saying, "We see people on the fringes, for example, who are essentially undemocratic in their tactics. And so, we need to work together to resolve that issue." These resolutions are clearly not easy. One of the things that complicates the picture enormously is when a woman like Ms. Rainey is pepper-sprayed. When innocent people who are there to protest what I consider to be very legitimate grievances against corporate America, against a government that has, in many respects, been bought off by corporations, the police have a responsibility to be neutral. It should be apparent that I’m not neutral, but I’m no longer a cop. And police officers on the streets really do need to be neutral referees, and they need the help of their civilian, if I may use that term, partners.

Goodman then brought in "retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer early Tuesday morning here in New York." Smith said,

I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested so we could follow them through the system and just observe what was going on. And as I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, "I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK." And he said, "Move on, lady." And he kept pushing—they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she said—and she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head. And I walk over, and I say, "Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that." And he said, "Lady, do you want to get arrested?" And I said, "Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer." He said, "You want to get arrested?" And he pushed me up against the wall.

This is the kind of thing that eventually strengthens a dissident movement, or at least weakens the position of people like Bloomberg: when people other than hippies and bums get shoved around by the police, they trust the government a bit less. Who knows, even the right-wing Daily Caller, beloved of RWA1, might have second thoughts now that two of their reporters were beaten by New York police officers.

I admit I'm not fully convinced by Stamper's claim that the police don't want to do these bad things, but I hope he's right, because as Michael Tracey wrote today at Salon, the New York Police Department has discredited itself by its conduct.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald has a good piece on the current state of the movement, which also recognizes that, far from needing advice on how best to "evolve" from the likes of Todd Gitlin, it has been changing all along and will go on changing.

Again using nothing more than reader donations, FDL designed and then purchased a full line of winter clothing for free distribution to the various Occupy sites around the nation: hats, sweaters, scarves, gloves, socks, blankets, jackets, thermal underwear, face masks, and more. Every penny FDL raises — 100% — goes exclusively toward the manufacture and free distribution of these products to Occupy protesters. They have thus far raised close to $90,000, and spent roughly $85,000 of it on the purchase of almost 7,000 items. They have also furnished heat generators, tents, and sleeping bags to numerous sites as well.

What makes this activism particularly impressive is that it is designed to build an ongoing and highly effective support network. Rather than indiscriminately dumping the clothing at various encampments, FDL has built a network of liasons and representatives to ensure that it goes to the places that need it most, and that it reaches those who will use it for its intended purpose: primarily, the “sleeper” protesters, largely impoverished, who form the backbone of the camps. Beyond that, FDL has expended great efforts to ensure that the goods it distributes are manufactured not in Chinese sweatshops but rather entirely by American unions — a difficult challenge in this age of disappearing American industry — which in turn ensures that the workers producing the products enjoy health insurance, living wages, and a decent standard of living: aims of the Occupy movement itself.

That last point underscores one of the most significant aspects of the Occupy movement: that it is not devoted to voicing grievances as much as it is finding a model to solve them.

The Occupy movement hasn't been only on the receiving end of such gifts: in Zuccotti Park, at least, the OWS library served as a lending library for the neighborhood, which makes its destruction by the NYPD and city sanitation workers the more of an offense. The occupiers' kitchens have also fed the homeless people that the police sent to them in hopes they'd be disruptive. I can't find now where someone associated with the movement was contemptuous of the police intention; it might have been in this Making Contact program I half-listened to this morning. And as the program points out, many veterans, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, are homeless, a reminder of how badly mainstream America supports its troops.

One last thing: when I first heard of rumors that the Department of Homeland Security was involved in this week's crackdown, I regarded the news that those rumors had been denied as confirmation that the rumors were true. That is usually the case, after all. Then today I saw that Homeland Security had denied the rumors again -- except, well, "Only in Portland." I expect more confirmations to leak out over time.
------------------------
* And even more: "a Wall Street billionaire who so brazenly purchased his political office, engineered the overturning of a term-limits referendum and then spent more than $100 million of his personal fortune to stay in power, and now resides well above the law."

Whose Ox Is Being Gored

The official backlash against Occupy Wall Street and its many offshoots is well under way. Last night the New York City Police went on a rampage against the people camped out in Zuccotti Park, ordered and defended by the corrupt billionaire mayor himself. It's a sign of the thuggishness of the assault that the police and "hundreds of sanitation workers" tossed protesters' belongings, including their tents, into dump trucks for removal, telling their owners that they would be able to pick them up after noon today at the Department of Sanitation's parking garage. Other workers told the protesters that their stuff was being taken to the dump, so I think the official claim can be regarded as an official lie. By morning OWS supporters had secured an injunction against the City, which Mayor Bloomberg dismissed out of hand. (Later in the day a different judge denied a request to allow the protesters to reoccupy the park, with a reminder that Zuccotti Park is private property -- which is a major reason why public space in New York City has been largely privatized: to prevent public assembly and protest.) Among those arrested (and assaulted by police) were a New York City Councilman and a New York Daily News reporter, which seems to have prompted the Daily News to reconsider its original cheerleading for the eviction. As similar, coordinated evictions occurred in other cities, there were some defections. Dan Siegel, Oakland mayor Quan's legal advisor, resigned, as did Deputy Mayor Sharon Cornu.

All this reminded me of liberal darling Elizabeth Warren's latest statement about Occupy Wall Street, which began: "Let’s be clear. Everybody has to follow the law. There’s no exception on that." (She said the same thing in her first statement about the movement a month ago, so her fans can't defend her now by saying she didn't have time to think her position through.) I didn't really expect her to say anything about government lawlessness and police violence, of course, but until she does she's established herself as a very familiar kind of spineless liberal, the kind who scolded the Civil Rights Movement for civil disobedience fifty years ago.

And indeed, her fans are evidently just that kind of liberal. I started looking through the comments on the Talking Points Memo article that reported her statement, and not only did most of the commenters exult over her toughness -- "In about 20 years we might be wanting to put her face on Mount Rushmore" one gushed -- they jumped on one commenter who criticized Warren's rejection of principled civil disobedience. One wrote (no permalinks, alas): "You don't put Wall St. in jail by civil disobedience. You put them there by getting elected and pushing the agenda. There are some personalities that glory in being macho, and then there are others who would rather get the job done." Another accused him of being "out of date", while another explained that "liberals generally have some decency and respect while at the same time protesting injustice." Another complained of his harshing their buzz: "Reading down the comments, I was fairly amazed by the uniformity of the praise for Elizabeth Warren ... then came upon your comment in such stark contrast, making you look more asinine than usual." Amazingly, this person was demanding more groupthink, not less.

So let's take a short trip down memory lane. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. responded to white moderate critics in the clergy:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion?...

Sound familiar? The criticisms King was answering have often been dusted off since then for reuse against succeeding movements for social justice. As I've pointed out before, the Black Nationalist line advanced by Malcolm X and his successors, that King "kept the Negro in check," is bogus. Rather, it was the Nation of Islam that kept the Negro in check, advocating quietism until a vague day in the future, while Elijah Muhammad became wealthy on his followers' contributions.

Nor did King have a rosy view of the power of voting and elections to effect change by themselves. I've quoted this passage before, but I might as well quote it again:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accommodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

Liberals today like to mock right-wingers who try to claim King as one of their own; but while white liberals in the 1950s and 1960s didn't hate King or the Civil Rights Movement as much as the Right did, most of them weren't really comfortable with them either. (The same applied to the movement against the war in Vietnam: most liberals disapproved of the war, but didn't want the US to withdraw in the foreseeable future, and they disapproved of nonviolent civil disobedience against it.)

I'm glad I don't live in Massachusetts, so I don't have to decide whether to vote for Elizabeth Warren. How much do you want to bet that once she's in office, she and her supporters will be trotting out the same defenses that Obama's supporters have made for him: Oh, it's only her first term, you have to be patient, she's just playing ten-dimensional chess with Wall Street until she's ready to reveal her true glory... That's assuming that the Democrats don't lose more seats in Congress in 2012; and remember, a Senator has much less power than a President. Warren is already being groomed as the new Messiah for (and by) Obama fans of little faith. But the important thing is, she's not Scott Brown and she's not a Republican! Her selective concern for the law is trivial compared to that.

It's the Only Thing

The child-rape scandal at Penn State continues to unfold, and I confess to some relief that for once, words that are often thrown around too freely, like "pedophile" or "rape" itself, are actually the right tools for the job. "Pedophile" has been been inflated to the point where it is used any time there's a notable age-difference between partners, even if the younger partner is thirty; but this time the victims are in fact prepubescent children, and they were forced, so "rape" is the correct word once again. Not that it matters, since a ten-year-old of either sex is not allowed to give consent to sexual penetration by a sixty-year-old male in any state of the Union; the overturning of sodomy laws in 2003 has no effect on that. It would be interesting to know how Jerry Sandusky worked around little details like this in what passed for his mind. He can hardly have been unaware of the law, or the moral issues; or even, "This is a lot of fun, but what if someone walked in and caught me?" Someone did, after all, but all that happened to Sandusky was that he lost his keys to the shower room and had to take the boys home to diddle them.

The Penn State coverup echoes the Roman Catholic Church's coverup of sexual abuse by clergy. Despite the high moral values claimed by religion and elite sports, neither institution could work up much concern over the sexual use of children and youth by adults who had official charge over them. Given the official hysteria about pedophilia in anti-gay campaigns, it's fascinating that, confronted with cases of actual pedophilia, coaching and religious hierarchies don't in practice consider it a big deal. (This might be a useful point to bring up when antigay bigots start frothing about pedophilia: why are they so worked up about a possibility that isn't even theoretically on the table -- If we pass a gay-rights law, day-care centers will have to hire known child molesters! -- but not very excited about institutions in their midst that have employed and protected known child molesters? Indeed, they continue to revere them, and defend them vehemently. More attention should be focused on this, and less on indignant screaming about whether homosexuality is a choice.)

It's a reminder that the word "rape" has only recently been dragged, kicking and screaming, to a new and specific meaning of the imposition of sexual acts (a messy category itself) by force on an unwilling partner. In practice and in theory, "rape" has included consensual acts where the "victim" was not allowed by law or custom to give consent: a white woman to a black or lower class male, a physically mature individual to an even slightly older one -- and in practice and social attitudes, the victim has often been blamed even more than the perpetrator: once penetrated, a woman is polluted, so she must have or get a husband, which justifies and covers the pollution, or she'll be branded a whore. ("Sodomy" is another tricky term: it often carries connotation of force, because no male of any age is permitted to consent to being abased in this way, so any "sodomy" is forced by definition.) "Rape," like many other sexual offenses, really means that a nominally clean person has been polluted, and her or his consent is irrelevant, which is probably why there's so much confusion about the issue.

Another confused area, of course, is mob violence, which is what got me started on this post. Penn State students rioted the other night in support of Coach Joe Paterno, who for the better part of a decade covered up the sexual abuse of children in his facilities even after it was reported to him. (A smaller group of students also gathered around Paterno's house to support him, crying "We love you, Joe!") This even jolted Jon Stewart; but maybe football is just inherently less important than basketball. FoxSports reported:

At around 12:20am local time Thursday, the university issued an official police dispersal order via Facebook, warning students to vacate downtown State College immediately. It came after several violent scenes in which protesters flipped over a media van and destroyed other property.

Well, there you go! I now see how valuable social media like Facebook really are.

About 2,000 people gathered at Old Main and moved to an area called Beaver Canyon, a street ringed by student apartments that were used in past riots to pelt police, myFOXphilly.com reported.

But while several arrests were made, the disorder was controlled amid a strong presence from state police as the crowds returned to Old Main.

(Bold type is mine.)

To add to the entertainment, the Phelps clan, aka Westboro Baptist Church, is planning to picket Penn State, to the indignation of some groups there. "[T]he radical group has caused the Penn State Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Ally Student Alliance to team up with the Penn State Atheist/Agnostic Association in a counter-protest."

Alyssia Motah, co-president of the LGBTQA Student Alliance, says that WBC's presence will be a chance to be heard.

"The fact that they're going to be here is an opportunity for us to react and we intend to do that," Motah said.

Maybe they should chip in for WBC's travel expenses, for giving them an "opportunity to react."

Compare this to the unprovoked police attacks on nonviolent protesters in New York, Boston, Oakland and elsewhere. If the Penn State rioters had been upset about something not related to college sports, I think we'd have seen pepper spray, tear gas, tazers, clubs, shields, and water cannons, and there'd have been a lot more than "several" arrests. None of these police sex toys have been mentioned in any report of the Penn State riots I've seen, and according to the FoxSports story, Penn State students have a history of 'pelting' police in past riots.

Amartya Sen wrote in The Argumentative Indian (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005), page 237, emphasis mine:

This inequality [of physical violence] has been traced by some commentators to the physical asymmetry of women and men, with men having greater immediate power in the gross bodily sense. Undoubtedly, this asymmetry does have a substantial role in the prevalence and survival of this terrible state of affairs, made worse by periods of particular vulnerability for women, such as pregnancy and early post-natal phases. But in addition to the physical aspects of this inequality, attitudinal factors cannot but be major influences. The possibility of physical violence can actually be used (to settle a dispute or gain an advantage) only when the permissibility of such behaviour is accepted, explicitly or by implication.

I think this goes a long way toward explaining the differing police responses to the Occupy movement and to the Penn State rioters. It's considered natural, if slightly tacky, for sports fans to riot after a loss, or a victory, or the dismissal of a popular coach; so the police treat them gently, even in the face of much greater and more overt provocation. Even political disruptions are okay, as long as they come from the Right. Remember the "unruly" Tea Party mobs, organized from above by right-wing organizations and media, at town hall meetings with Congresspeople in 2009? (The linked story mentions no arrests, let alone broken heads, resulting from the police intervention.) The Right's response to criticism was that the Left had done the same in our day -- which was true enough, but the Left got much harsher treatment for it, and continues to do so. As Sen suggests, that's not accidental. It won't be easy to change, either, but we should all be aware of the attitudes involved.

Word Salad with Oil, Vinegar, and May I Grind Your Pepper?

So, Friday night I began reading Richard Canning's second volume of interviews with gay (male) novelists, Hear Us Out (Columbia, 2003). I love reading interviews with writers, and these promised to be meaty and substantial.

Unfortunately Canning allows himself to chatter away in the introduction, and at one point he writes this (xi-xii):

Too many academics in our field have preferred to write voodoo prose, unaccountably egged on by an ever-dwindling number of colleagues to ever-more-intractable acres of prosaic purple. It’s heartbreaking to read literary prose of the quality, say, of E. M. Forster, and to witness how the worst sort of criticism can turn an honest, receptive, but untutored mind into a sort of “howling machine” of theory-born injunctions, objections, declamations, and obsessions. Enough! Enough, especially, of cries about what a certain author didn’t manage to do. Books are hard to write; harder still to publish! What did they achieve? I'm not ashamed of being unfashionably celebratory in the pages of Hear Us Out.

"Voodoo prose"? My dear. Piling on theoretical jargon isn't the only way to write badly. That first sentence doesn't make a lot of sense. "Prosaic" isn't the adjectival form of "prose": it means"factual, dull, unimaginative, everyday, ordinary" -- whatever "voodoo prose" might be, it wouldn't be that. I do believe Canning inverted the word order of "purple prose" (which isn't what he's objecting to) in hopes of making it less prosaic, but it doesn't work. It's not enough to purge your writing of academic buzzwords; you have to know what you're doing.

I've read a fair amount of academic critical writing over the past couple of decades, and while most of it is not very good, the trouble doesn't lie in jargon or "theory-born injunctions, objections, declamations, and obsessions." What bothers me is that the writers don't know what their jargon means -- many of them don't even know what it means to beg a question, and that's hardly cutting edge Derridean terminology -- and don't understand the theories they're trying to use. As I think I've complained before, when a critic displays a tin ear for English style, his or her authority as a critic sags, if it doesn't totally collapse. Personally, I think I'd enjoy reading some "voodoo prose," but unfortunately Canning doesn't name any names.

I also don't remember having read much academic criticism which was "full of cries about what a certain author didn't manage to do." If anything, the trouble is the reverse -- this or that author is celebrated, say, for having produced bold interventions which deconstruct the Western binary paradigms of gender (or whatever). I don't object to this sort of thing because the author never intended to do any such thing -- the author's intention isn't the final word, even when you know what it was -- but that the critic doesn't know what "deconstruct" means, and is still entangled in the coils of Western binaries. But that's okay, because as Canning suggests, the real purpose of such writing is to add publications to one's c.v., get tenure, and achieve security if not status in one's field. It's not, as is often claimed, to impress one's colleagues, because they don't read it: they're too busy working on their own c.v.'s. It's not intended for the general reader, and the only trouble with that is that, to judge from the occasional attempt I've witnessed, such critics forget how to communicate with the general reader. The "worst sort of criticism" lies elsewhere, though.

But, as Canning would say, Enough! Canning prepped himself well for the interviews, asked intelligent questions, and let his subjects have the limelight. The only real problem with the book is that I now want to read most of their writings, and I already have too many books piled up to read.

One interviewee really got my goat, though. I enjoyed Gary Indiana's journalism in the Village Voice many years ago, and read a couple of his novels when he turned to fiction: Horse Crazy and Gone Tomorrow. I didn't like them all that well, though I recognized that they were well done; I just didn't connect. And I seem to recall that somewhere along the line I parted company with him politically. Maybe it was something like this (Canning, p. 20):

What annoys me about the constant barrage of appeals made to “values” and “morals” is that I don’t see the morality of an overpopulated world, or the morality of taxing individuals like myself to pay for the education of other people’s children. I don’t know why people should be rewarded in any fashion for having too many children. If we have no birth control policy, I become a slave. I have to pay taxes to support other people’s kids – to send them to schools where they don’t learn anything.

The malignant stupidity of this paragraph boggles my mind. At the most basic level, public education isn't a "reward" for the parents: it's not a reward for anybody. In theory, at least, public education is for the benefit of the children. The idea is that kids shouldn't be deprived of an education because, through no fault of their own, they were born to indigent or simply lower-income parents. But even the loinfruit of rich parents -- George W. Bush comes readily to mind -- go to expensive private schools without learning anything.

Beyond that, Indiana should pay taxes for public schools because he himself benefited from public schools. I haven't been able to find much biographical information about him online, so I don't know that he didn't attend private schools through high school, but I do know that in his youth he moved west from New England and attended the University of California at Berkeley for a couple of years. Why should the taxpayers of California be enslaved so that a Yankee faggot could mooch off of them? I happily pay taxes to support public schools because I benefited from them. I also support public libraries, the training schools of socialism, because I continue to benefit from them. I'm not even going to dirty my hands on Indiana's whining about overpopulation and the lack of a "birth-control policy."

A few pages later, Canning remarks (25):

These things might make the aesthete in us recoil. The flowers for Diana outside Kensington palace were beautiful. But the letters! I’ve never read so much bad poetry.

GI: Daniel Harris wrote two brilliant essays – one on the Versace funeral; the other on the Princess Di affair. He took things people had posted on the Internet and analyzed them – the bad spelling, and so on. The sensation of being in a world of complete idiots is staggering.

I know just what you mean, Gary; I know just what you mean. (Daniel Harris wrote a stupid book, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, published in 1997. I reviewed it for the local gay newspaper, and I'll post the review when I get a chance.)

Just the day before, RWA1 linked on Facebook to this article on Occupy Wall Street by the pundit Thomas Sowell. Sowell is apparently a serious economist and social scientist, but this article is punditry, and even that is probably too generous. It's a "You kids get off my lawn!" rant, where the voices in Sowell's head substitute for the most cursory research. RWA1 called it "some home truths about 'occupations'", but I guess that amounts to the same thing.

In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance.

Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these "protesters," and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause -- whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education -- and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too.

But if these loud mouths' inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.

Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. It is common, for example, to hear in the media how some "protesters" were arrested. But anyone who reads this column regularly knows that I protest against all sorts of things -- and don't get arrested.

The difference is that I don't block traffic, join mobs sleeping overnight in parks or urinate in the street. If the media cannot distinguish between protesting and disturbing the peace, then their education may also have wasted a lot of taxpayers' money.

If Sowell's inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of his education, he should demand his money back from the institutions of higher learning that he attended (Harvard, Columbia, University of Chicago). On second thought, though, why should he? Incoherence and misrepresentation of fact obviously haven't hurt his career any. For example, from what I can tell, the Occupy camps aren't "trashing the streets"; they clean up after themselves. I know that the local camp does. Sowell (and others who've been repeating this talking point) is simply writing on autopilot, spewing "dirty hippies, dirty dirty hippies!"

For another, the "media" have not been "practically gushing" over OWS, unless it's bile they've been gushing. Even the supposedly "liberal" media have been overtly hostile to the movement, though their mood softened somewhat after some notable incidents of unprovoked police violence. Most of the time a false equivalence continues to be the norm in coverage, as in "protesters clashed with police" when police attacked the protesters. The numerous cases of police violence, revealingly, go unnoticed and unmentioned in Sowell's litany.

The fact that protesters have been arrested doesn't, unfortunately, mean that they were doing anything wrong, or even broke the law; it's not clear just what Sowell is griping about there. His stance of deliberate obtuseness goes beyond even the corporate media's "But why won't you tell us what your demands are?" "The difference is that I don't block traffic, join mobs sleeping overnight in parks or urinate in the street." That's probably not the only difference; part of it is certainly that Sowell picks only the safest targets to protest, and does so from his typewriter, not in the streets. Which is his right, but there is nothing disreputable about going to the streets either. And I doubt that he reacted the same way to the arrests of dissenters in the Soviet Union, say.  (I know RWA1 didn't.)

As for "members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education," this would be a lie if it weren't so amazingly clueless. Among other things, the movement complains that they went into major debt in order to get college educations that they were told would gain them good jobs; those jobs turned out not to be available. True, they could go to work for MacDonald's or Starbucks (except that neither chain has enough jobs to accommodate them all), but then why go to college in the first place? More important, college educations in the United States are already largely publicly subsidized, at state universities and community colleges; the trouble is that the public subsidy has been diminished steadily over the past forty or so years. Among the reasons for this was right-wing displeasure at the support that social justice movements found in the universities; one reason for moving subsidies from grants to student loans was to ensure that college graduates would be too busy trying to pay off their debts to make trouble for their elders and betters. The business community has always wanted public education to train docile, reliable workers, not educated citizens. (RWA1, unlike Sowell, is the product of a state university; I presume he had no objection to having his education subsidized by the taxpayer, only to anyone else having that privilege. While I am grateful to him for pointing me to the work of frothers like Sowell, I sometimes wonder if he reads the pieces he recommends.)

One thing I keep noticing in right-wing criticism of OWS is a subtext (not usually explicit) that there is no right of free public assembly. (They usually seem unaware that in New York City, public space has progressively been privatized: Zuccotti Park, for example, is now privately owned; The Reverend Billy Project recounts an attempt to keep the city from privatizing another NYC park that had traditionally been a haven for political assembly and speech.) Anyone, except fringe Republicans subsidized by right-wing money and covered by right-wing media, who gathers in public to criticize their government is a dirty mob, and probably not even American. (I get the impression that, despite their protests that they only object to "illegal" immigrants, the anti-immigrant movement considers all immigrants illegal.)

"Dirty" and "foreign" are the basic vocabulary of reaction, not based in real traits of the targets but in the psyche of the nativist. As I mentioned earlier, Sowell's contumely comes not from personal observation of the Occupiers, or even from a critical reading of media reports: it's recycled from anti-hippie hysteria of the Sixties, which in turn borrowed from much older anti-black and anti-Jewish propaganda. I was going to say that the Right (also, unfortunately, much of the Left) exhibits a fundamental hatred of humanity, but that's not quite it: it's more an attempt to split off outsiders, Others, as dirty animalistic subhumans, while huddling on an ever-dwindling and beleaguered island of True Humanity. The core symbolism of the zombie movie, come to think of it.

All the News That Fits

There are times when I vaguely regret not having cable or satellite for my TV, if only to be able to check on what the networks are not covering. The BBC news feed shows nothing -- oh, I take that back, this just appeared:

Thousands of anti-corporate greed demonstrators have closed one of America's busiest ports.

A spokesman for the Port of Oakland in California said maritime operations had effectively halted.

The shutdown capped a day in which hundreds of city workers, including teachers, joined the call for a strike.

The crowds also stopped traffic at a junction where a military veteran was seriously injured last week as protesters clashed with police.

I'd just done a Google search, and the first result was from the Guardian in Britain, whose live news feed agreed that the Port of Oakland had been shut down by the strike.

At National Public Radio's site I found this AP story, headlined "Oakland Protesters Halt Operations at Port" on the main page, but it only says that

On Wednesday morning, the port was operating as normal and most longshoremen had shown up for work, according to port and union officials.

I guess they couldn't update it all day. What a shame. (And now I'm listening to the midnight NPR news summary, which doesn't admit that the Port was closed by the strike either. That's a bit less excusable, and a lot more shameful. All Hail the Liberal Media, with their uncritical support of these anti-American rabble! ... Oh, now they're talking about Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Superbowl! Thanks to NPR for their up-to-the-minute coverage!)

CNN's soft-pedaling it.

Demonstrators in Oakland, California, appeared to carry out a successful strike of downtown businesses Wednesday, as most merchants and retailers shuttered their doors during a largely peaceful protest.

"Appeared", eh? All right. And this too:

Unlike prior protests in downtown Oakland, no uniformed police officers were visible during the demonstrations as of Wednesday afternoon. Oakland gained national attention during a recent clash between protesters and police, who fired tear gas upon the demonstrators after they allegedly threw objects at officers, police said.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan apologized for authorities' confrontations with demonstrators. The clashes led to the hospitalization of an Iraq war veteran.

That's not strictly a lie, but it's not honest either, as though "the hospitalization of an Iraq war veteran" had nothing to do with the "tear gas fired upon the demonstrators by police." If you didn't know -- if you hadn't already been informed by more honest news coverage -- you might think that poor veteran got so worked up by the sight of dirty hippies spitting on America that he had a conniption and needed treatment. C'mon, CNN, even Fox News did a better job, though they seem to have borrowed some quotations from other sources (like the AP) without attribution.

CNN also has an opinion piece by a reporter who says he's covered both Zuccoli Park and Tahrir Square, and the two are not alike, you guys, okay? -- even if some Egyptians have declared their support for Occupy Oakland.

Not one Occupy Wall Street protester is risking his or her life to publicly proclaim their demands. In New York, police resorted to pepper spray and clubbings; in Oakland, California, police sprayed tear gas and are seen in videos apparently throwing stun grenades. Protesters display serious wounds they say were inflicted by rubber bullets. But even that excessive force cannot compare to the threat demonstrators in the Middle East and North Africa faced for displaying their dissatisfaction.

Not a word about a man who suffered concussion and brain swelling from the impact of a tear gas cannister. He could have died, but he didn't. The writer's evasions are similar to those Mubarak's regime would have made about injured protesters in Tahrir Square. And these are just the opening salvos of state repression of free speech and assembly. But it's okay, it doesn't matter, they don't have to be exactly the same. Did anyone really think so?

Uniquely among the big American news organizations I've looked at so far tonight, MSNBC put the strike up front. They got the basic situation right, it seems, but had to remind us that

Black-dressed and masked marchers threw paint balls, ripped up a picket fence and broke windows at a Whole Foods market before about two dozen protesters forced them to stop. There was lots of shoving and punches thrown, the Oakland Tribune reported.

At least MSNBC drew a line between the troublemakers and the "protesters" who "forced them to stop." Again, I think the masked guys should be presumed to be police provocateurs until proven otherwise.

Democracy Now! did their daily broadcast in the morning, New York time, so they won't have a story up until tomorrow's broadcast. I'll be interested to see what the print media headlines look like too.

The strike is very impressive, a major early success for the movement. The relative lack of violence, due to the police standing back, is a reminder that the violence has been overwhelmingly police violence. I suspect many people in nice offices around the country, from the West Coast to the Beltway, are feeling nervous tonight.