“There’s nobody in this country who got rich on his own”
Today’s New York Times attributes this quote to Elizabeth Warren and it provides a nice starting point for this next Occupy post. Before we get to politics, a word about tactics.
I have strong personal feelings about public demonstrations – group expressions of emotion based on shared goals or values. The first demo I remember joining was the 1959 bomb-banning march I told you about yesterday, the one Pete Seeger and I disagreed about. I was at The March on Washington in August of 1963, I was in the Dan White demonstrations (the press calls them riots) that took place in the area of San Francisco between The Castro and City Hall, I was in the shrieking crowd of a million people in Santiago, Chile in December of 1989 when Patricio Aylwin was elected president following 18 years of Pinochet – and countless others, most of them just handfuls of Quakers with signs.
I’m not putting on my brag hat here, I want you to know that I have held a lifelong faith in the importance of public demonstrations and I’ve loved to be in them.
While people of all ages have been seen in the Occupy villages, these like most demonstrations are a kid’s crusade. It is not a small point that young people dominate OWS.
I remember early one morning going to meet someone in a church in downtown Seattle during the 1999 WTO demonstrations. The church was a sanctuary for some of the tens of thousands of kids who had come to demonstrate. The lobby, pews, choir loft and sanctuary aisles were entirely covered with sleeping young people; the air had a sharp smell from the chemical sprays the police were blasting into these kid’s faces, day after day.
Seeing the sleeping children I was overcome with a cross of parental endearment and political ecstasy. I wanted to cradle their sleeping scruffy bodies, and in fact I was interviewed after leaving the church and said that – I tried to find the film on the internet so you could see it, but I’m not a competent enough Googler – anyway it used to be out there.
The question I’m answering in these OWS posts is, what do I think of this movement, do I approve? My answer is aesthetic/romantic as well as political – we’ll get to politics next. First, I adore these kids, partly because they are using themselves as their political tools. There’s no mediation by blogs or ballots – they offer all they have: their bodies. They put themselves in harm’s way. They also (I assume) screw in tents, smoke dope, and argue through the night. They create an entirely wonderful experience for themselves, a sense of embodiment as a community on their terms.
The choice of these kids to leave relatively comfortable and way over-mediated lives to become their own implements of personal change – this in fact transforms them.
The Occupy movement also has its political aspects. It begins however with the personal renovation of thousands of people who will from now on act in different ways, because they have encountered their and other’s power in the most intimate and personal manner possible. And so are our children altered and therefore, so are the rest of us.
Looking at OWS as personal alteration discloses a huge gulf that I want to especially point out: the press sees the demonstrations as symbolic and that’s how they portray them to the rest of us – these events are about something. For the participants something else is going on. These demonstrations are something, they are experiences, actions – not representations or symbols or images.
On that basis, the Occupy movement has already been a substantial success. The lives of the participants have been altered and our country will be different as a result. All the analysis including mine is beside the point if we don’t notice the non-symbolic, primary if not primal nature of these actions for the people who have been participating.
Part two of answering the question is to hold these Occupy events up against some kind of standard of social change, to see if aside from being personally transformative they are politically relevant.
Back in the late 60’s I was helping out at a summer Quaker peace retreat up in the mountains of southern Pennsylvania. My boss sent me on a two hour drive to an little airport to pick up a Catholic priest who was a guest speaker. I spent the whole drive out congratulating myself for being such a dedicated cadre that I was willing to spend a total of 4 hours locked in a car with some musty fusty old church guy. Thus I spent four hours spellbound by Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who sat cross-legged next to me and described his trip to Hanoi, read me his poetry, and literally talked to me about his soul. By the time I dropped him back at the little prop plane, I would have followed him into flames, but also, through Dan I met his brother, the late Father Phil Berrigan, a charismatic Josephite priest who with Dan ended up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted for pouring blood on draft board files.
I’m raising the Berrigans because their two early and most famous public demonstrations involved four people and then nine people. These were not mass movements.
The Catonsville Nine grabbed onto the front edge of the peace movement in the United States like a puppy with a sock, and they shook that edge from side to side and then they pulled it way outwards from where it had been. Their deeply personal activities became highly transformational public actions. Phil and Dan and their tiny band of radical Catholic activists and seminarians changed the United States.
For reasons that we can talk about maybe another time, the media like to focus their examination of movements like OWS on how it will function in the mainstream of US politics. They think it’s helpful, not to mention rational, to analyze OWS in the same way they do John Boehner or Bank of America.
I think it’s more useful to see OWS as having multiple layers of significance manifesting differently over time. There are the aforementioned changes the participants create for themselves that will echo in our country for a generation. And there is the pointing of the media’s attention towards the roots and results of economic injustice in our country.
By the way I want to congratulate these kids for doing a better job than my generation did forty years ago when we got mired in ideological abstractions like imperialism and hegemony and Marxism in its seeming infinity of flavors. The modern Occupy movement prefers to focus on the behavior of people and the practices of institutions. I think these frames are a lot more practical for dealing with what plagues us, compared to the severely theoretical and abstract agendas of 1963.
So the Occupy movement changes its participants, redirects the press, and then does something the media call “moving the debate.” I’m not exactly sure what they mean – but for us, it can be quite Berrigan-like. Yesterday I talked about how the Nestle Boycott created activism on a scale to match the development of a new level of social problem: globalization. Similarly, given the domination of our political system and our means of communication by big financial companies, OWS is refusing to meet the bankers on the turf they own. Instead they’re making transformative actions on their own terms. The misapprehension of the movement by most of the media is not a problem, it’s a confirmation of the success of OWS, because the Occupiers are reframing the media not as the tools of the financial status quo that owns them, but as the estate of the people who are the “consumers” of that media. The inmates run the asylum.
There’s no better confirmation of this than to look at the supposed (and probable) godfather of the OWS movement, Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters and a popularizer of culture jamming. For many years Lasn has been perfecting the disruption of commercially-oriented memes and symbols by coopting the mechanisms that produce just what he’s jamming. He’s an advertising executive who figured out how to use advertising to disrupt advertising and the culture and values it represents and supports.
Culture jamming refuses to accept the power characteristic of institutions like our financial industry, by using that industry against itself. This is difficult for the media to understand, in part because they’re not permitted to understand it, and in part because they themselves have become the unwitting instruments of OWS. Subject has become object.
Just as the Nestle Boycott succeeded in part simply by coming into existence, Occupy Wall Street has already been a success in its transformation of the lives of its participants, its pulling of the national discussion in the direction of its choosing, and in its disruption of one of the principle tools of its target, the tool being the mass media and the target being the out-of-control institutions of national greed and perverse hyper-materialism.
There is no need to predict where OWS will end up. The seeming jumble of messy camps, evicted kids and strange tribal rituals will be the only determinant of what happens next – a prospect in our scripted age that is most likely a very frustrating feature of the movement for those in power, who have become quite accustomed to running the world.
So I congratulate OWS: their disruption, unpredictability, and apparent lack of coherent ideology and obvious leadership may redeem us all.
