Tuesday, August 07, 2012
What's going on II
As our friend and political analyst Storey Clayton noted in these pages last month, "[our] society is manufacturing anger and despair at an incredible rate."
The pervading sense of helplessness among American youth, having been jaded by four years of more of the same pre-packaged as "change," is as great as it has ever been.
The centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth are going faster in America than they ever have previously. American youth can feel that lack of control.
Perhaps a few visual aids...
More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...
That's nine companies controlling every brand shown in the diagram.
More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...
"The four most complex U.S. financial holding companies -- JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America -- each contain more than 2,000 subsidiaries, with two of those controlling more than 3,000 subsidiaries, according to a research paper published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Citigroup has 1,645. In 1991, just one firm exceeded 500 subsidiaries..."---source: Bloomberg News
The pervading sense of helplessness among American youth, having been jaded by four years of more of the same pre-packaged as "change," is as great as it has ever been.
The centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth are going faster in America than they ever have previously. American youth can feel that lack of control.
Perhaps a few visual aids...
More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...
That's nine companies controlling every brand shown in the diagram.
More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...
"The four most complex U.S. financial holding companies -- JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America -- each contain more than 2,000 subsidiaries, with two of those controlling more than 3,000 subsidiaries, according to a research paper published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Citigroup has 1,645. In 1991, just one firm exceeded 500 subsidiaries..."---source: Bloomberg News
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, George Carlin, Politics, public protest, thought, war
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Object Lesson
Resident New Bruinswick philosopher, Storey Clayton, last seen in this space writing about the Occupy Movement faces the harsh realities of his reaction to the Colorado movie theater shooting. In a piece that challenges, provokes and doesn't apologize, he makes you think about modern society.
It is long, but well worth it. All links in the body inserted by author.---Ed.
Read more of Storey Clayton's work here at the Blue Pyramid. Check out the insights of his famous cartoon Duck and Cover, here on the Clarion Content. See and take the Blue Pyramid's legendary Book Poll here.
**************************************************
Object Lesson
by:Storey Clayton
I have learned a lot about myself in the past week. This is good. Learning is fun!
One of the things I have learned, or relearned perhaps, is how little I am surprised by things. Most people like surprises. I kind of miss them, I guess. Which is not intended as a way of tempting the fates. But if anything, I think I'm surprised that there aren't more mass-shootings in America. About one a day is probably what I'd expect. Maybe we'll get there soon. This is not a desire or a hope. It would be nice to have no mass-shootings in a year. But there would have to be a lot of changes to make that happen.
No, not increased security measures.
I wrote at length about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon last October, how I saw it as a harbinger not of a revolutionary protest movement in our society, but as a reflection of how many people were left with nothing to do in our society. It would be nice if it were a revolutionary protest movement that was burgeoning in our society. Unfortunately, we have all seen too many revolutionary protest movements. We are watching several of them now! Look at Libya, Egypt, Syria. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A bunch of people get themselves killed and do some killing and you end up with a society that looks a lot like it did before. But the leaders are slightly different and maybe this race or religion or sect has the advantages to lord over the prior victors. There is much to deter a young revolutionary in society today.
To believe in revolution, you have to believe in the future. You have to believe that there is a future worth fighting for. We are getting little stark illustrations all over the place that this is a foolish perspective. There will be a future, surely, in the sense of days that follow this one. No matter how much caves in or how much I lose, that is inevitably clear. But the idea that the right people can be in control, nay, that there even are right people, seems unlikely. And the more people who were raised and brought up to believe in an American dream and a future that was better than their parents' and the mass accumulation of growth and so on and awaken to find the piles of debt and futurelessness waiting for them, the more people they are likely to go out and shoot.
I probably shouldn't put in print that I understand that frustration and powerlessness of mass-shooters. I am a pacifist, of course, and abhor violence of all kinds, and am in no way trying to justify or vindicate the actions of James Holmes or anyone like him. But I get the idea of the world being so backwards and upside-down that only an absurdist and horrific reaction seems fair or justified. I have felt this way in my life sometimes and am very grateful to my pacifism for keeping me from stockpiling weapons. I know that some of you are probably surprised (there it is again!) to see me writing this, but I think you are not necessarily checking in with yourself sufficiently if so. Look inward, my friend. Have you never felt that kind of anger and despair?
This society is manufacturing anger and despair at an incredible rate right now. We've been over why, this worship of the magical "Economy", and we've even been over how it manifests when people only turn the proverbial gun on themselves, most recently. As my friend and debater Kurt Falk often tells me, I should be the entertainment at children's birthday parties. His idea for fixing all this is in his most recent post, where he joins Kurt Vonnegut (in Palm Sunday, just finished today, certainly influencing the style of this post) in advocating that we have new rites of passage for American youth, bar mitzvahs or quinceañeras for a culture unmoored. It's a good idea. It used to be that graduating from high school was our culture's adulthood commemoration ceremony. But now there is no real adulthood to be reached. In the sense of independence, of self-sufficiency, of freedom to make informed decisions, our newly minted adults are as bankrupt as someone with six figures of student loan debt. And just like those folks, they can't file it and start over.
So they shoot people, don't they? I guess that's a little oversimplified, but that looks to be the size of it. Apparently Mr. Holmes is walking down the corridors pretending to be the Joker or some other masked movie villain (get it?), but I'm sure he was perfectly sane when he spent meticulous hours buying guns on the Internet or laying tripwires across his apartment. He did the math. He was good at it. He realized that he had no future, that the people of America who were being distracted to death had no future, and he tried to illustrate that. All the way down to the six-month-old and the six-year-old who were apparently watching one of the most violent franchises in movie history after midnight.
I am not trying to glorify this scumbag or turn him into some sort of dark anti-hero (I'll leave that to Hollywood). But I am trying to dissent from the media chorus singing about the senseless unpredictable shock of all this. It's perfectly predictable and it has a kind of logic. Michael Moore did much the same treatment of Columbine in his masterpiece movie Bowling for Columbine, which we should all probably go rewatch. Part of his thesis was that kids growing up in the shadow of defense contracting, preached to about how the country they're supposed to love solves all its problems through violence, will occasionally take this environment seriously. And respond in kind. People are all agog about what's wrong with Colorado when Michael Moore already told you. To be fair, Holmes did hail from San Diego, one of the biggest military cities in the country aside from those found in Colorado. When we have a society filled with people who play a little video game attached to real drones that blow up real people, how shocked can we be that disgruntled broke teens or twenty-somethings from the new Lost Generation walk into a movie and emulate the solutions found on-screen and in real life?
What no one seems to realize is that you need to do something with these people. I don't mean to sound pejorative when I say "these people" - many of them are my closest friends and confidants. I coach them, I talk with them, I worry about the very concept of a future around them. They need things to do. They have active minds and have been raised on poisonous dreams about growth and accumulation. They need to put their mind to something other than disappointment, despair, and the soulless thresher we call "The Economy".
Many would suggest a war. I have no doubt that's one plan being hatched in the corporations funding the Obama/Romney campaign. A nice big war to sweep everyone into the old employer of last resort. You wouldn't even need a draft, you'd just have it de facto. I'm sure a land invasion of Iran or North Korea would keep many hundred-thousands of a Lost Generation occupied and out of the way. The legend is that this is what saved America from the Depression, what saved the Baby Boomers from totally overwhelming the system in the sixties. There's little doubt that part of the lack of enthusiasm to really make jobs and work for the youth of our society has to do with making the incredibly unappealing military look a little more enticing.
I, of course, would never suggest a war, any more than I would advocate you going down to your local movie theater and shooting up six-year-olds. They are the same thing. Only in a war, more six-year-olds die. Usually more horribly, more painfully.
I would suggest make-work programs. We certainly have things that need fixing. Let's build a free wireless Internet network for the whole nation. Yes, even rural North Dakota and Alaska. That would require some people, wouldn't it? Give them room and board and a college-like camaraderie, a little spending cash (so they can - gulp - see a movie), maybe access to a shared fleet of cars on weekends. Let's build some high-speed rails so we can take all these dangerous overpriced gas-guzzling trucks off the road. Let's build some solar and wind plants. I know, I know, it would require a total resignation from the very concept of The Economy. It would mean government was actively putting corporations out of work, and some of their employees too, and treating the youth of America with dignity and respect and like they're people who can do things. Heaven forbid.
But what are your alternatives? These people are going to be on the dole one way or the other. There aren't jobs, there aren't opportunities, and everyone in The Economy is doing their damnedest to make sure there are fewer jobs and fewer opportunities to come. I guess you can repeal minimum wage and make everyone punch each other in the nose for a scrap of bread you throw from the tower at midnight, but these people are increasingly going to leverage their debt and take matters into their own hands. And they'd have to believe in a future to make a revolution. If all they believe in is despair, then you get Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech. You get little dark knights everywhere, believing they are extolling some kind of neo-nihilism with every bullet, not realizing governments cornered that market with wars centuries ago.
I envisioned this post a long time before there was a movie theater shooting, and it was going to be about another kind of object lesson, back to the theme of learning about myself. It was about the fact that I bought a new coffee maker I didn't need a few months ago and haven't had the heart to set it up and replace the old one.
The old one looks like this:
I won it at the Yale tournament in the spring of 2002. They gave out useful or fun objects like rice cookers and Gameboys and coffee makers with the budget they would have spent on shiny trophies. I actually initially took the rice cooker at Emily's behest, but quickly swapped it for a more practical (for me) coffee maker with Steph Tatham, who'd won some lower award. The thing has worked perfectly for a decade. It's a relic of an American era of making machines that lasted, even though it didn't come from that era at all. I've probably had six-thousand or so cups of coffee out of this thing. It still worked perfectly this morning.
My intent was to replace it with this model that I got at Target for like twenty bucks:
It shouldn't take much imagination to see why I picked this out. The color is like the font of this page, the color I would pick for nearly all objects out of a pantheon of a thousand hues. It has a timer so that it will brew the coffee for me and have it ready when I blearily awaken at six in the morning to go to a tournament or fulfill some other wakeful task of existence. It is in every way perfect. Whereas the old one is dingy, off-white, wearing the stains of thousands of brews, incredibly simple in its design. It doesn't even have digital numbers! In an era where you can't dry your hands in public without interfacing with a motion-sensor, holding on to this thing is as old-fashioned as not having a cell-phone (I'm coming up on two years with a cell-phone!).
And yet I can't seem to make the transition, to get rid of the old thing. It was free. It has served me so loyally for so long. It still works.
I am such a bad capitalist.
Or maybe, to borrow a phrase, I'm just committed to commitment.
Maybe we just need to take everyone in the Lost Generation and have them paint our coffee makers. Have them fan out in the neighborhoods, house by house, and ask what everyone would like updated or changed or painted or retooled so that life feels new and fresh again. So that it feels like there's a future that's not just austerity and decline. So that people can feel like a rich person without actually being decadent or aspiring to buy and sell people.
That kind of house-by-house work sure beats the hell out of what that phrase is being used for in Afghanistan right now.
It is long, but well worth it. All links in the body inserted by author.---Ed.
Read more of Storey Clayton's work here at the Blue Pyramid. Check out the insights of his famous cartoon Duck and Cover, here on the Clarion Content. See and take the Blue Pyramid's legendary Book Poll here.
**************************************************
Object Lesson
by:Storey Clayton
I have learned a lot about myself in the past week. This is good. Learning is fun!
One of the things I have learned, or relearned perhaps, is how little I am surprised by things. Most people like surprises. I kind of miss them, I guess. Which is not intended as a way of tempting the fates. But if anything, I think I'm surprised that there aren't more mass-shootings in America. About one a day is probably what I'd expect. Maybe we'll get there soon. This is not a desire or a hope. It would be nice to have no mass-shootings in a year. But there would have to be a lot of changes to make that happen.
No, not increased security measures.
I wrote at length about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon last October, how I saw it as a harbinger not of a revolutionary protest movement in our society, but as a reflection of how many people were left with nothing to do in our society. It would be nice if it were a revolutionary protest movement that was burgeoning in our society. Unfortunately, we have all seen too many revolutionary protest movements. We are watching several of them now! Look at Libya, Egypt, Syria. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A bunch of people get themselves killed and do some killing and you end up with a society that looks a lot like it did before. But the leaders are slightly different and maybe this race or religion or sect has the advantages to lord over the prior victors. There is much to deter a young revolutionary in society today.
To believe in revolution, you have to believe in the future. You have to believe that there is a future worth fighting for. We are getting little stark illustrations all over the place that this is a foolish perspective. There will be a future, surely, in the sense of days that follow this one. No matter how much caves in or how much I lose, that is inevitably clear. But the idea that the right people can be in control, nay, that there even are right people, seems unlikely. And the more people who were raised and brought up to believe in an American dream and a future that was better than their parents' and the mass accumulation of growth and so on and awaken to find the piles of debt and futurelessness waiting for them, the more people they are likely to go out and shoot.
I probably shouldn't put in print that I understand that frustration and powerlessness of mass-shooters. I am a pacifist, of course, and abhor violence of all kinds, and am in no way trying to justify or vindicate the actions of James Holmes or anyone like him. But I get the idea of the world being so backwards and upside-down that only an absurdist and horrific reaction seems fair or justified. I have felt this way in my life sometimes and am very grateful to my pacifism for keeping me from stockpiling weapons. I know that some of you are probably surprised (there it is again!) to see me writing this, but I think you are not necessarily checking in with yourself sufficiently if so. Look inward, my friend. Have you never felt that kind of anger and despair?
This society is manufacturing anger and despair at an incredible rate right now. We've been over why, this worship of the magical "Economy", and we've even been over how it manifests when people only turn the proverbial gun on themselves, most recently. As my friend and debater Kurt Falk often tells me, I should be the entertainment at children's birthday parties. His idea for fixing all this is in his most recent post, where he joins Kurt Vonnegut (in Palm Sunday, just finished today, certainly influencing the style of this post) in advocating that we have new rites of passage for American youth, bar mitzvahs or quinceañeras for a culture unmoored. It's a good idea. It used to be that graduating from high school was our culture's adulthood commemoration ceremony. But now there is no real adulthood to be reached. In the sense of independence, of self-sufficiency, of freedom to make informed decisions, our newly minted adults are as bankrupt as someone with six figures of student loan debt. And just like those folks, they can't file it and start over.
So they shoot people, don't they? I guess that's a little oversimplified, but that looks to be the size of it. Apparently Mr. Holmes is walking down the corridors pretending to be the Joker or some other masked movie villain (get it?), but I'm sure he was perfectly sane when he spent meticulous hours buying guns on the Internet or laying tripwires across his apartment. He did the math. He was good at it. He realized that he had no future, that the people of America who were being distracted to death had no future, and he tried to illustrate that. All the way down to the six-month-old and the six-year-old who were apparently watching one of the most violent franchises in movie history after midnight.
I am not trying to glorify this scumbag or turn him into some sort of dark anti-hero (I'll leave that to Hollywood). But I am trying to dissent from the media chorus singing about the senseless unpredictable shock of all this. It's perfectly predictable and it has a kind of logic. Michael Moore did much the same treatment of Columbine in his masterpiece movie Bowling for Columbine, which we should all probably go rewatch. Part of his thesis was that kids growing up in the shadow of defense contracting, preached to about how the country they're supposed to love solves all its problems through violence, will occasionally take this environment seriously. And respond in kind. People are all agog about what's wrong with Colorado when Michael Moore already told you. To be fair, Holmes did hail from San Diego, one of the biggest military cities in the country aside from those found in Colorado. When we have a society filled with people who play a little video game attached to real drones that blow up real people, how shocked can we be that disgruntled broke teens or twenty-somethings from the new Lost Generation walk into a movie and emulate the solutions found on-screen and in real life?
What no one seems to realize is that you need to do something with these people. I don't mean to sound pejorative when I say "these people" - many of them are my closest friends and confidants. I coach them, I talk with them, I worry about the very concept of a future around them. They need things to do. They have active minds and have been raised on poisonous dreams about growth and accumulation. They need to put their mind to something other than disappointment, despair, and the soulless thresher we call "The Economy".
Many would suggest a war. I have no doubt that's one plan being hatched in the corporations funding the Obama/Romney campaign. A nice big war to sweep everyone into the old employer of last resort. You wouldn't even need a draft, you'd just have it de facto. I'm sure a land invasion of Iran or North Korea would keep many hundred-thousands of a Lost Generation occupied and out of the way. The legend is that this is what saved America from the Depression, what saved the Baby Boomers from totally overwhelming the system in the sixties. There's little doubt that part of the lack of enthusiasm to really make jobs and work for the youth of our society has to do with making the incredibly unappealing military look a little more enticing.
I, of course, would never suggest a war, any more than I would advocate you going down to your local movie theater and shooting up six-year-olds. They are the same thing. Only in a war, more six-year-olds die. Usually more horribly, more painfully.
I would suggest make-work programs. We certainly have things that need fixing. Let's build a free wireless Internet network for the whole nation. Yes, even rural North Dakota and Alaska. That would require some people, wouldn't it? Give them room and board and a college-like camaraderie, a little spending cash (so they can - gulp - see a movie), maybe access to a shared fleet of cars on weekends. Let's build some high-speed rails so we can take all these dangerous overpriced gas-guzzling trucks off the road. Let's build some solar and wind plants. I know, I know, it would require a total resignation from the very concept of The Economy. It would mean government was actively putting corporations out of work, and some of their employees too, and treating the youth of America with dignity and respect and like they're people who can do things. Heaven forbid.
But what are your alternatives? These people are going to be on the dole one way or the other. There aren't jobs, there aren't opportunities, and everyone in The Economy is doing their damnedest to make sure there are fewer jobs and fewer opportunities to come. I guess you can repeal minimum wage and make everyone punch each other in the nose for a scrap of bread you throw from the tower at midnight, but these people are increasingly going to leverage their debt and take matters into their own hands. And they'd have to believe in a future to make a revolution. If all they believe in is despair, then you get Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech. You get little dark knights everywhere, believing they are extolling some kind of neo-nihilism with every bullet, not realizing governments cornered that market with wars centuries ago.
I envisioned this post a long time before there was a movie theater shooting, and it was going to be about another kind of object lesson, back to the theme of learning about myself. It was about the fact that I bought a new coffee maker I didn't need a few months ago and haven't had the heart to set it up and replace the old one.
The old one looks like this:
I won it at the Yale tournament in the spring of 2002. They gave out useful or fun objects like rice cookers and Gameboys and coffee makers with the budget they would have spent on shiny trophies. I actually initially took the rice cooker at Emily's behest, but quickly swapped it for a more practical (for me) coffee maker with Steph Tatham, who'd won some lower award. The thing has worked perfectly for a decade. It's a relic of an American era of making machines that lasted, even though it didn't come from that era at all. I've probably had six-thousand or so cups of coffee out of this thing. It still worked perfectly this morning.
My intent was to replace it with this model that I got at Target for like twenty bucks:
It shouldn't take much imagination to see why I picked this out. The color is like the font of this page, the color I would pick for nearly all objects out of a pantheon of a thousand hues. It has a timer so that it will brew the coffee for me and have it ready when I blearily awaken at six in the morning to go to a tournament or fulfill some other wakeful task of existence. It is in every way perfect. Whereas the old one is dingy, off-white, wearing the stains of thousands of brews, incredibly simple in its design. It doesn't even have digital numbers! In an era where you can't dry your hands in public without interfacing with a motion-sensor, holding on to this thing is as old-fashioned as not having a cell-phone (I'm coming up on two years with a cell-phone!).
And yet I can't seem to make the transition, to get rid of the old thing. It was free. It has served me so loyally for so long. It still works.
I am such a bad capitalist.
Or maybe, to borrow a phrase, I'm just committed to commitment.
Maybe we just need to take everyone in the Lost Generation and have them paint our coffee makers. Have them fan out in the neighborhoods, house by house, and ask what everyone would like updated or changed or painted or retooled so that life feels new and fresh again. So that it feels like there's a future that's not just austerity and decline. So that people can feel like a rich person without actually being decadent or aspiring to buy and sell people.
That kind of house-by-house work sure beats the hell out of what that phrase is being used for in Afghanistan right now.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Guest columns, Politics, public protest, thought
Monday, April 23, 2012
Fracking meeting
Since the Clarion Content broke the story that Mineral Deeds were being signed in Durham County granting national builders like D.R. Horton fracking rights, there has been much hue and cry.
The Assistant Attorney General of North Carolina, M. Lynne Weaver, wrote D.R. Horton asking them for further information about how they disclosed to potential homebuyers that they were reserving such rights. (See below.)
That they reserved the rights, and have been reserving them in certain property agreements as far back as 2010, is not in dispute.
What does that mean? What can you as a Durham resident and/or homeowner do?
One place to start getting answers to some of those questions is a public meeting tomorrow night. Durham County Agricultural Cooperative Extension Services and Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA have organized an informational session at the Durham Agricultural Extension Center, #721 Foster Street, at 7pm.
Some of the topics on the table include: Understanding the hydraulic fracking process, the potential impacts of drilling on crops, livestock, forest land, and water resources, how to understand oil and gas rights lease terminology, how to fairly negotiate a mineral rights lease and landowner protections,1 and adequate compensation for mineral resources.
We hear that the organizers of the No Frack PAC might be in attendance.
For more information contact: Jordan Treakle at Jordan@rafiusa.org or 919-444-1321
Notes
1Remember these agreements are fairly common in some of the Western and Rocky Mountain states.
2Letter from the Attorney General's office.
The Assistant Attorney General of North Carolina, M. Lynne Weaver, wrote D.R. Horton asking them for further information about how they disclosed to potential homebuyers that they were reserving such rights. (See below.)
That they reserved the rights, and have been reserving them in certain property agreements as far back as 2010, is not in dispute.
What does that mean? What can you as a Durham resident and/or homeowner do?
One place to start getting answers to some of those questions is a public meeting tomorrow night. Durham County Agricultural Cooperative Extension Services and Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA have organized an informational session at the Durham Agricultural Extension Center, #721 Foster Street, at 7pm.
Some of the topics on the table include: Understanding the hydraulic fracking process, the potential impacts of drilling on crops, livestock, forest land, and water resources, how to understand oil and gas rights lease terminology, how to fairly negotiate a mineral rights lease and landowner protections,1 and adequate compensation for mineral resources.
We hear that the organizers of the No Frack PAC might be in attendance.
For more information contact: Jordan Treakle at Jordan@rafiusa.org or 919-444-1321
Notes
1Remember these agreements are fairly common in some of the Western and Rocky Mountain states.
2Letter from the Attorney General's office.
Labels: Durham, ecology, energy policy, Politics, public protest
Saturday, February 25, 2012
The Record is not over yet
The Occupy movement has lost momentum in many places, but it is still burbling beneath the surface. The election cycle and the economy are feeding energy into the cultural stew.
Immortal Technique
Thanks to one of our L.A. readers for sending this clip our way.
Immortal Technique
Thanks to one of our L.A. readers for sending this clip our way.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Politics, public protest
Saturday, February 11, 2012
What's going on?
Marvin might have sung, "Mercy, mercy, mercy..." this year too, had he been here with us to bear witness.1 So much is afoot, and of course, the Man does not like us to know about all of it, lest we start thinking the Mayans are about to come charging out of the proverbial closet. Hence why, the Obama administration is not only shutting down the #Occupy camps, but having them bulldozed and picked clean afterward, to eradicate any memory of the potential efficacy of resistance. By the same logic,2 it is unlikely you heard much about the denial of service attack launched by Anonymous Friday.
All they did was shut down the CIA's website, as reported by CNN here. The CIA, of course, admitted nothing. Remember, folks, "We the People" and the fact that our taxes pay their salaries, guarantees you nada. When the Leviathan takes over, it doesn't answer to Congressional Subcommittees, let alone peon ordinary citizens,3 like us.
The Anonymous team also shut down the State of Alabama's website in what its press release touted as a protest of Alabama's House Bill 56, fascist immigration legislation, that became law in the state last year.4
Voice of America5 reported the CIA would only say, "We are aware of the problems accessing our Web site and are working to resolve them." The site was back online Saturday.
Nothing happening, nothing to see here. Go on about your business.
Notes and Jibes
1Try to imagine this phrase governing actual and active political resistance, rather than a publicity loving, but late game loathing basketball player.
2Quash the knowledge, quash the knowledge and maybe they won't fight it. Sung to the tune of "Oh my Darlin, Clementine".
3Ordinary becomes a necessary and important modifier for citizens in a society in which not all members play by the same rules. See the American judicial system and its treatment of the rich for further clarification.
4You might recall this law, straight out of the Politburo's Central Committee, gave Alabama cops the right to demand people show their papers and prove their citizenship, lest they be summarily locked up until they can.
5You know the government run media-arm. Certain friends of the Clarion Content have vociferously disputed our position that a government for and by the People has no need to run a news information outlet. VOA is only necessary when the government needs its position spun to palatablity.
All they did was shut down the CIA's website, as reported by CNN here. The CIA, of course, admitted nothing. Remember, folks, "We the People" and the fact that our taxes pay their salaries, guarantees you nada. When the Leviathan takes over, it doesn't answer to Congressional Subcommittees, let alone peon ordinary citizens,3 like us.
The Anonymous team also shut down the State of Alabama's website in what its press release touted as a protest of Alabama's House Bill 56, fascist immigration legislation, that became law in the state last year.4
Voice of America5 reported the CIA would only say, "We are aware of the problems accessing our Web site and are working to resolve them." The site was back online Saturday.
Nothing happening, nothing to see here. Go on about your business.
Notes and Jibes
1Try to imagine this phrase governing actual and active political resistance, rather than a publicity loving, but late game loathing basketball player.
2Quash the knowledge, quash the knowledge and maybe they won't fight it. Sung to the tune of "Oh my Darlin, Clementine".
3Ordinary becomes a necessary and important modifier for citizens in a society in which not all members play by the same rules. See the American judicial system and its treatment of the rich for further clarification.
4You might recall this law, straight out of the Politburo's Central Committee, gave Alabama cops the right to demand people show their papers and prove their citizenship, lest they be summarily locked up until they can.
5You know the government run media-arm. Certain friends of the Clarion Content have vociferously disputed our position that a government for and by the People has no need to run a news information outlet. VOA is only necessary when the government needs its position spun to palatablity.
Labels: Politics, public protest, technology
Thursday, January 26, 2012
State of the State
Wait a minute! Is the Clarion Content mistaken or did Obama just start down a path to lose an un-loseable election?
Is he really running the Al Gore 2000 populism playbook?1 Against a Republican field that makes former scion, George Bush II, look like a thoughtful, articulate candidate? Against a a Republican field that Senator Bob Dole could have beaten with one arm tied behind his back?
What gives, Mr. President?
Has no one told you that the only way you can run against the Man in this country is with less regulation, not more. The Reagan narrative, "Get the Man out of lives and off of our back" is alive and well, in the Tea Party freshman of Congress and the Ron Paul zeitgeist."2
But the populist left, Mr. President? This country has been tarring and feathering the populist left as lily-livered commies since before Senator Joe McCarthy was a teenager. The last Democrat to win the Presidency with a true people's mandate from the left was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
And there was a depression. Now, while there is economic malaise, and there are worrying signs of deflation in the United States economy, there is no depression.
Absent times that bad, campaigning from the populist left is a surefire recipe for defeat, Mr. President.
Notes
1 None of this should imply that there are not dangerously high levels of income inequality in America. It is just that a Democrat can't win a national election crowing about it.
2Note that in both these canons the Man is far more likely to refer to the government than big corporations.
Is he really running the Al Gore 2000 populism playbook?1 Against a Republican field that makes former scion, George Bush II, look like a thoughtful, articulate candidate? Against a a Republican field that Senator Bob Dole could have beaten with one arm tied behind his back?
What gives, Mr. President?
Has no one told you that the only way you can run against the Man in this country is with less regulation, not more. The Reagan narrative, "Get the Man out of lives and off of our back" is alive and well, in the Tea Party freshman of Congress and the Ron Paul zeitgeist."2
But the populist left, Mr. President? This country has been tarring and feathering the populist left as lily-livered commies since before Senator Joe McCarthy was a teenager. The last Democrat to win the Presidency with a true people's mandate from the left was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
And there was a depression. Now, while there is economic malaise, and there are worrying signs of deflation in the United States economy, there is no depression.
Absent times that bad, campaigning from the populist left is a surefire recipe for defeat, Mr. President.
Notes
1 None of this should imply that there are not dangerously high levels of income inequality in America. It is just that a Democrat can't win a national election crowing about it.
2Note that in both these canons the Man is far more likely to refer to the government than big corporations.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Politics, Predictions, public protest
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Old North Durham Park
Durham's disputed pitch
The battle over Old North Durham Park was taken up by the Durham City Council this week. According to the News and Observer the council the approved a resolution, which essentially endorses the Durham Park's and Recreation department's plan, for repairing the park's dysfunctional drainage system and replacing the athletic field's rocky surface with topsoil and grass.1
The council, while hiding under the cover of the Parks and Recreation plan, controversially agreed that the size of the field could be reduced by up to 10,000 sq.ft., much to the chagrin of local residents. The residents, despite generally supporting the Central Park School for Children's plans for nature trails, a butterfly garden and picnic spaces, are suspicious about the reduction of the size of the athletic field, the frequent site of community soccer games. The pitch, one of the only public fields of any size in downtown, has been hotly disputed.
The N&O reports Old North Durham residents and their supporters claim the city is cooperating with real-estate interests to discourage the park's use by blacks and Hispanics. Among the organizations lobbying on local residents behalf, the Durham Coalition for Urban Justice and El Kilombo. The school's coalition is represented by the Friends of Old North Durham Park.
The Clarion Content has heard much about the merits of both sides of this difficult debate. It promises to be repeated as downtown and Durham's gritty reputation grapple with avoiding gentrification.2
Notes
1If you have ever had any interaction with Durham Park's and Recreation Department, that alone could make you suspect of their plans for anything.
2It won't be easy. There is resentment, not only among haves and have-nots in Durham, but also between those who invested in the community when it was down and those who could not afford to do so.
Labels: Durham, Politics, public protest
Saturday, December 31, 2011
L.A. Arson follow-up
There is an arsonist or something else still afoot in Los Angeles. The Clarion Content wrote about it yesterday when it was a string of nineteen overnight blazes. L.A. police and fire officials are now reporting there have been more than thirty suspicious fires in the last twenty-four hours. More than three dozen vehicles have been burned from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley.
It would be awfully hard for a single individual to cover all that ground geographically.
To the Clarion Content, it feels more like the work of somebody like ELF (the Earth Liberation Front).
In almost all cases the fires started with a single vehicle being set afire.
It would be awfully hard for a single individual to cover all that ground geographically.
To the Clarion Content, it feels more like the work of somebody like ELF (the Earth Liberation Front).
In almost all cases the fires started with a single vehicle being set afire.
Labels: public protest
Friday, December 30, 2011
L.A. Arson
We saw that there was a slew of suspicious of fires set last night in Hollywood, CA. Los Angeles Fire Department officials today described a series of nineteen arson fires overnight in the Hollywood area as "highly unusual," according to the LA Times. This has the Clarion Content wondering. Single suspect acting alone? A political protest? A criminal?
What does the destabilized, highly charged situation that is America today mean we should expect for this New Years eve? Will there be a bunch of lone gunmen trying to personally fulfill their demented Mayan visions?
We are going to make a rare concession for us: we rather hope the cops are on high alert, paying attention to this sort of thing.
What does the destabilized, highly charged situation that is America today mean we should expect for this New Years eve? Will there be a bunch of lone gunmen trying to personally fulfill their demented Mayan visions?
We are going to make a rare concession for us: we rather hope the cops are on high alert, paying attention to this sort of thing.
Labels: constitutional issues, Politics, public protest
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Human Rights Asserted
All photos courtesy of Scenes from my Lunch Hour
This past Saturday was International Human Rights Day. Durham marked the occasion with a march organized by the “Historic Thousands on Jones Street,” an umbrella community organization that assembled a variety of traditional and newer groups to raise their voices on behalf of the 99%.
All photos courtesy of Scenes from my Lunch Hour
The marchers met at the CCB/People’s Plaza, home of the bull statue downtown. The very dichotomy of the name spoke to the protesters cries and the omnipresence of the debate.
Is the area around the bull, in an Occupy inspired renaming, the People’s plaza? Or is it named after a bank, the CCB plaza? The dominant paradigm inveighed a long time ago. The Occupiers implicitly weighed-in on that issue, too, with flyers referring to meetings and meet-ups at the People's Plaza. The physical terrain represented the meta-debate: Corporations vs. Government vs. the People.
Marchers chanted, “How do we stop the deficit? Stop the wars and tax the rich!” as they walked down Main Street to First Presbyterian Church. There the marchers broke into small groups to talk about issues within the specific framework of human rights. Group leaders facilitated a discussion about how human rights issues have implications that are global, regional and local.
The topics broached ranged from jobs and transportation, to voter registration and schools. The groups represented mirrored the array of themes. The head of the Durham, NAACP, Fred Foster was in attendance, vociferously spreading the message, “Social justice begins with the word ‘We’.” There were also folks from “Occupy Durham,” “The Durham Local People’s Assembly,” as well as the “Mental Health Workers Campaign,” the “Durham Coalition for Urban Justice” and “Health Care for all of NC,” among others.
The questions and challenges raised were as myriad the groups. The underlying feeling across the board was that now is the time. “If you don’t act, you will be acted upon,” was a common thread woven through the conversations. The turnout was not large, just over 100 by our estimates, but the enthusiasm was intense. It was mirrored by the public, numerous cars honked and waved in support as they drove by the march.
Speakers and citizens merged without hierarchy. The spirit of collaboration was evident. Many in attendance contrasted it with the bureaucratic instinct to suppress dissent. Attendees raised multifarious examples of tacit and active government suppression. They ranged from suppression of the right to freely assemble, one protester had been arrested peacefully sitting in her chair in a public park in Raleigh the week previous, to impediments placed in the way of the right to exercise one’s vote1, to arbitrary limits on public comment at public hearings, School Board meetings and similar nodes of interaction between the public and their sometimes elected, sometimes selected representatives.2
The government, of course, was only one of the villains protesters raised their voices against. The other common ogre was big corporations. Numerous members of the assembly expressed frustration with a frequent Clarion Content theme: the absurdity of corporate personhood, a fiction that allows faceless entities to fiat onomatopoeia their existence onto the human playing field.
The all-encompassing irony of the complexity and pervasiveness of the systemic issues in play was made clear by one organizer, who under his breath wistfully sighed, that many if not all of these signs were made possible by, “adhesive tape, brought to you by 3M and their friends.”
All photos courtesy of Scenes from my Lunch Hour
All photos courtesy of Scenes from my Lunch Hour
1The Reverend Curtis Gatewood spoke passionately and eloquently about this topic.
2The Clarion Content noticed this very phenomenon when we attended the Durham Cultural Forum and board members spoke for so long that after four or five public comments the facilities people were flashing the lights to empty the auditorium.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Durham, Economy, Politics, public protest
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Occupied
The mainstream media's interest may have waned, but the Occupy movement is not over and done. The fundamentals that brought people to the streets have not changed. It is our perception that a great cauldron of systemic frustration is still burbling and only a little bit of steam has been released.
Read here a Chomskian perspective from Naomi Wolf in the British newspaper The Guardian. In her view, there is most definitely a coordinated effort underway to supress the Occupy protests.
Read here a Chomskian perspective from Naomi Wolf in the British newspaper The Guardian. In her view, there is most definitely a coordinated effort underway to supress the Occupy protests.
Labels: constitutional issues, cop stories, Economy, Politics, public protest
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Barricades Battle
What does "to the barricades" really mean?
The Clarion Content has largely been a support of the Occupy movement, we feel a certain solidarity with their grievances. It is inarguable that the rich-poor gap in America is growing, that the ultra-rich are advancing faster than anyone else in our society, that the globalized movement of capital has once again tilted the balance radically in favor of investors. (Labor can not move freely in the same way.)
The nature of protest is always complicated, frequently during times of wrenching change things get worse before they get better. Is there the stomach for such change? Our New Jersey based political commentator, Storey Clayton, noted that increasing unemployment and underemployment has given folks more time and energy to examine the fine print of the social contract as it is now playing out. No surprise, people don't like the way the man is putting the screws to them. The question is: Can protest achieve change?
We read a sad story of a battle playing out at the barricades in Lower Manhattan. This battle, unlike Occupy's successful forays in Oakland, is amongst the 99%, rather than worker versus investor.
New York based DNA Info reports that Marc Epstein, the owner of the Milk Street Cafe, at #40 Wall Street, laid of twenty-one employees last week. He says he supports the protesters right to assemble and air their grievances, but feels his employees are collateral damage.1
The Milk Street Cafe says the biggest problem is that police barricades have lined Wall Street since September 17th. This makes it difficult for people to see the restaurant and cross the street to get to it. Local subway entrances are also closed and numerous police checkpoints dot the area.2
Not surprisingly the cops and the administration blame the protesters. Mayor Bloomberg, auditioning his head for a nifty place on stake said, "Protesters are trying to destroy jobs."
Occupy spokespeople noted, "The NYPD makes the decisions on the part of police barricades."
The owner of the cafe said no one from City Hall will return his calls about removing or reducing the barricades. In the most uniquely American twist to it all, he has asked his landlord to intercede with the city on his behalf.
And who might that be? Why, it's Donald Trump.
And the beat goes on.
1Better to be collateral damage on Wall Street than in Iraq or Afghanistan where the phrase is usually code for "Sorry about how that missile killed your family."
2Remember how the Palestinians are always saying that scads of checkpoints choke off their economy's ability to function normally? Well apparently when it happens on Wall Street, it's for real.
Labels: cop stories, economics, Politics, public protest
Monday, October 31, 2011
Occupation
Clarion Content political cartoonist and resident New Bruinswick philosopher, Storey Clayton, walks us through the occupation, eviscerating the media myths behind it. Why have people occupied? What has changed? From whence did they come?
Storey dredges his personal memory to deposit us all, readers and editors alike, in a profoundly thoughtful place. What might Occupy mean? Where might Occupy go? This piece doesn't have all the answers, but it will surely leave you reexamining the questions.
It is long, but very, very worth it---Ed.
Read more of Storey Clayton's work here at the Blue Pyramid. Check out the insights of his famous cartoon Duck and Cover, here on the Clarion Content.
**************************************************
I used to counsel “emotionally disturbed” kids in a group home, the Seneca Center. That was my occupation. We used this system generally known as “behavior modification” whereby we rewarded good behavior and punished (to a degree) bad behavior, usually by changing the meter on what kinds of activities someone could do. There were behavioral levels someone would start out on in the morning based on their behavior the previous day. They were color-coded, running red, yellow, green, and then purple and finally gold, which could only be earned after sequential days on purple. For example, you couldn’t watch TV on red. You couldn’t watch TV after dinner on yellow. On gold, you didn’t have to stand at each doorway announcing yourself and waiting to be permitted to cross a threshold, as long as you told the staff where you were going and responded if they asked you to stop.
There were also behaviors which would warrant an immediate “level drop”. Contrary to my ex-brother-in-law’s assessment, this did not indicate that we would dump a kid off the stairs, but merely that they’d go from yellow to red or gold to purple if they swore or made a threat or tried to make a peer act out. And then violence meant “R&R”, a term I guess we were trying to reclaim for the bad, which would be resolution and restitution in this instance and prompt spending the rest of the day on red, usually after long periods of sitting time to calm down.
A lot of our job, other than navigating and assessing people through the process of earning their levels, was about keeping people motivated to meet their goals and make their level. After all, most of the kids had grown up in households where, de facto if not overtly, bad behavior was rewarded and good behavior was punished. If you were quiet and humble and polite and got your homework done, you’d get neglected. If you set the house on fire and kicked the family dog and yelled and screamed at the table, then you’d get some attention. And in the world of six year-olds whose parents are addicts, any attention is good attention, because it means you get fed or talked to or even physically contacted, even if it’s to be hit.
The hardest part of this engagement and motivation was finding ways to get people on red to believe that tomorrow would be a new day and they’d have some way of climbing out of their bad level. Often they’d be on red after spending significant portions of the day in R&R, which meant no points were being earned toward the next day’s level while they were in the quiet room (an Orwellian term if there ever was one) or restraint or sitting staring at a corner thinking about what they’d done. Usually this meant they’d spent the day not only being unstable and unhappy, but they knew that the next day was doomed to be another day on red – that it’d be 36 hours before they could watch TV or even think about going on the computer. And 36 hours is long enough for a well-adjusted adult human – for an anti-social adolescent, it’s an eternity.
One of the things my boss – an ex-drill-sergeant (literally) and college football player the size of a small house with the voice of an irate seal – was very good at was advising us what to do with these kids in these situations. He told us that the key to their motivation and improved behavior was engagement. Keeping them interested, distracted, putting their minds to something. In a word, keeping them occupied. The man was often a blunt instrument, but he had incredible insight into the mindsets of these kids, having worked in mental health facilities like ours and/or juvenile hall for the better part of two decades. And he implored us to, when times were stable, engage and stimulate the kids who were on red with the few activities always allotted to them – playing outside, playing board games, reading, talking with peers or staff. And there, over time, I learned a fundamental truth: that people act out when they’re bored. It’s something to do.
The human mind despises boredom. Probably more than pain, certainly more than sadness. The brain is too complex, too creative, too active, to tolerate monotony and absence of objects. It will create things to think about where none exist, it will foment processes and possibilities in a vacuum. The only antidote to this is another element of our strategy in engaging red-level kids: exhaustion. Playing outside was not only good because it kept someone occupied, focused, and not-bored, but it also meant they came in too tired to create a ruckus. Adolescents have restless unspent energy in the best of times – abuse/neglect victims triply so. A kid who comes in tired from his day will be disinclined to take offense at a peer’s comment or a staff direction to a time-out. One who has nothing but seething surging energy beneath the surface will be ready to rumble.
This difference of exhaustion is why so many people can put up with assembly-line jobs or grocery-checking or long commutes, but buckle under the universally feared torture of solitary confinement. The capitalist structure of our country went through a really glorious period of getting humans to willingly accept and even embrace monotonous boredom because the tedium of their jobs created the byproduct of wearing them down. So even if they were getting repetitive stress injuries from twisting the same widget the same way and almost falling asleep from the 3,275th time making the same commute, they would arrive at home too beat to complain about it, having only just enough energy to awaken the next day and do it again. Meanwhile, those confined to small dark boxes alone with little or no exercise were slowly driven insane in their prisons.
Something’s been happening in this country the last three years. People have lost their occupations. No matter how small and crappy and minimally engaging their jobs were, they were still jobs that carried the heavily taxing byproduct of exhaustion. They were still something that took enough mental and physical energy to negate the urge to rebel, to foment discontent, to hold out for something better. But one-by-one and in droves, they were turned out of the opportunity to spend their energy flailing in the capitalist mill and instead made to consider the walls and corners and televisions and want-ads of a solitary existence.
Some have turned to creativity. Some have expanded their minds to accept the lack of occupation as a gift and driven themselves to occupy themselves instead. Most have not. Most people turned out of work by downsizing or offshoring or consolidation or automation have turned forlornly and blankly into an abyss of disinterested blandness. They wake each day not even sure what to do without someone telling them. They wander aimlessly through a directionless day, storebought distractions no longer working for them in light of the fact that they are only sufficiently entertaining or engaging for an exhausted person, but not someone with all their faculties at disposal. No longer exhausted, they become restless, agitated, rumbling with a soul-deep longing for something to do, be, create.
This, my friends, is the fundamental root of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is the quest for occupation. And despite my framing the question in the context of a job where I tried to modify violent kids’ behavior toward the more productive, I am very much in agreement with the principles and methodology of this budding revolution. The powers that seek to maintain order, stability, and the status quo in America have overlooked some fundamental tenets of how to stave off rebellion by controlling the masses. They have forgotten that bread must join circuses in sufficiently distracting the people, insisting instead on a system which puts bread at a premium as a mechanical rabbit to hold in front of the racers. They have allowed the attitude of those at the top to become perniciously elitist, rubbing superiority and greed in the face of all society. But most fundamentally, they have forgotten that people must have something to do or they will find something to do themselves. That people accept the terms of their social contract when they are too occupied or too tired to read the fine print, when people have nothing else to do but read the fine print because they are so bored, they will realize what they are forfeiting and rail against it.
What is most exciting and inspiring about the Occupy movement is that it does not overtly seek political solutions. Naysayers and corporate threshers want the occupiers to write their Congresspeople and go to the polls, knowing that anyone accessed in such a way has been bought and paid for to the point of complete imperviousness. Even those not explicitly on the payroll of corporate America are believers in the fundamental tenets of a system that rewards greed and punishes altruism, a way of aligning society to maximize the consolidation and stratification of wealth and power. It is blindingly obvious why this is so, as any student of history (from age eight on) could tell you: those in power like being there and will rig the game so they can stay there. And capitalism is one very effectively rigged game.
I myself have struggled mightily with the advent of the Occupy movement, feeling pulled almost inexorably to the front lines of its tent encampments and yet not even setting foot there, as yet, in the wake of my overwhelmed exhaustion at my full-time job. For me, unlike most, it is not the gun-to-my-head need for the pay of a job or even the expected pressure of finding fulfillment in one’s occupation, but rather the true motivation of actually loving my work and wanting to devote sufficient time to it that it brings me to the brink of capitulation and illness. I hung out with Ariel and discovered yesterday that I may be her only friend whose problems wouldn’t be largely or entirely solved by money. Which itself is no small factor in the Occupy movement, that reality. For me, I work because I want to and I love to, but it has thus far kept me off the sidewalks and streets of a rising tide that could sweep the whole world.
It is hard to feel twin obligations that are mutually exclusive and equally compelling. Even at Glide, I think I might have begged out of work to go join the protests, though there I may have felt the pull of alleviating the suffering that was driving so many to this brink. But I also must self-examine and recognize that each marginal person could be part of a tipping point in creating more change in this country than anyone born prior to this year could have imagined was possible. When I first saw the most recent Zeitgeist movie, I chuckled at the slightly naive vision of hordes of people gathering around Wall Street to give their money back in rejection of the system that printed it. Now it’s underway. And it feels wrong to not only not be a part of it, but to not be a spearhead.
And yet it feels like a hedge is in order too. It is unclear the direction or power the movement will have, whether it can be co-opted by money and politics and all the American powers that have resisted internal change before. And throwing away the best job I’ll ever have, one I created from scratch, and all my obligations to people I feel a deep personal bond with, for what could be a week and a jail term depending on how things bounce, seems crazy.
But it only seems crazy because I am occupied. Were I not, it would be the most obvious thing in the world.
I will continue to wrestle and struggle with the question, continue to dance on the razor’s edge of conundrum. I can’t really see myself abandoning everything to go live in the encampments, at least not yet, so the Rutgers debaters reading this should let out their breath. But there’s a big part of me that feels I should anyway. And I know it’s not zero-sum – I know I can go try to participate without sacrificing it all. And I will. More than anything, though, we need to develop a way that people who are occupied can still Occupy. We need a day where everyone who still wants or has to go to work can show their solidarity and support. Sometimes revolutions can’t all involve defection from the military, because they need people in the military to be quietly sympathetic so they can make sure that institution changes with the rest of society. This revolution needs occupied people too in order to make all the changes necessary.
If those on top of this precipitous pyramid know what’s good for them, they will create new incentives and occupations. They will come up with some way to motivate the masses and make use of their time and brains. But it can’t be through capitalism, at least the way it’s been manifest in society so far. The market is editing out jobs, ensuring they never return. We need a new system to occupy our minds. Until then, we must occupy the streets.
Storey dredges his personal memory to deposit us all, readers and editors alike, in a profoundly thoughtful place. What might Occupy mean? Where might Occupy go? This piece doesn't have all the answers, but it will surely leave you reexamining the questions.
It is long, but very, very worth it---Ed.
Read more of Storey Clayton's work here at the Blue Pyramid. Check out the insights of his famous cartoon Duck and Cover, here on the Clarion Content.
I used to counsel “emotionally disturbed” kids in a group home, the Seneca Center. That was my occupation. We used this system generally known as “behavior modification” whereby we rewarded good behavior and punished (to a degree) bad behavior, usually by changing the meter on what kinds of activities someone could do. There were behavioral levels someone would start out on in the morning based on their behavior the previous day. They were color-coded, running red, yellow, green, and then purple and finally gold, which could only be earned after sequential days on purple. For example, you couldn’t watch TV on red. You couldn’t watch TV after dinner on yellow. On gold, you didn’t have to stand at each doorway announcing yourself and waiting to be permitted to cross a threshold, as long as you told the staff where you were going and responded if they asked you to stop.
There were also behaviors which would warrant an immediate “level drop”. Contrary to my ex-brother-in-law’s assessment, this did not indicate that we would dump a kid off the stairs, but merely that they’d go from yellow to red or gold to purple if they swore or made a threat or tried to make a peer act out. And then violence meant “R&R”, a term I guess we were trying to reclaim for the bad, which would be resolution and restitution in this instance and prompt spending the rest of the day on red, usually after long periods of sitting time to calm down.
A lot of our job, other than navigating and assessing people through the process of earning their levels, was about keeping people motivated to meet their goals and make their level. After all, most of the kids had grown up in households where, de facto if not overtly, bad behavior was rewarded and good behavior was punished. If you were quiet and humble and polite and got your homework done, you’d get neglected. If you set the house on fire and kicked the family dog and yelled and screamed at the table, then you’d get some attention. And in the world of six year-olds whose parents are addicts, any attention is good attention, because it means you get fed or talked to or even physically contacted, even if it’s to be hit.
The hardest part of this engagement and motivation was finding ways to get people on red to believe that tomorrow would be a new day and they’d have some way of climbing out of their bad level. Often they’d be on red after spending significant portions of the day in R&R, which meant no points were being earned toward the next day’s level while they were in the quiet room (an Orwellian term if there ever was one) or restraint or sitting staring at a corner thinking about what they’d done. Usually this meant they’d spent the day not only being unstable and unhappy, but they knew that the next day was doomed to be another day on red – that it’d be 36 hours before they could watch TV or even think about going on the computer. And 36 hours is long enough for a well-adjusted adult human – for an anti-social adolescent, it’s an eternity.
One of the things my boss – an ex-drill-sergeant (literally) and college football player the size of a small house with the voice of an irate seal – was very good at was advising us what to do with these kids in these situations. He told us that the key to their motivation and improved behavior was engagement. Keeping them interested, distracted, putting their minds to something. In a word, keeping them occupied. The man was often a blunt instrument, but he had incredible insight into the mindsets of these kids, having worked in mental health facilities like ours and/or juvenile hall for the better part of two decades. And he implored us to, when times were stable, engage and stimulate the kids who were on red with the few activities always allotted to them – playing outside, playing board games, reading, talking with peers or staff. And there, over time, I learned a fundamental truth: that people act out when they’re bored. It’s something to do.
The human mind despises boredom. Probably more than pain, certainly more than sadness. The brain is too complex, too creative, too active, to tolerate monotony and absence of objects. It will create things to think about where none exist, it will foment processes and possibilities in a vacuum. The only antidote to this is another element of our strategy in engaging red-level kids: exhaustion. Playing outside was not only good because it kept someone occupied, focused, and not-bored, but it also meant they came in too tired to create a ruckus. Adolescents have restless unspent energy in the best of times – abuse/neglect victims triply so. A kid who comes in tired from his day will be disinclined to take offense at a peer’s comment or a staff direction to a time-out. One who has nothing but seething surging energy beneath the surface will be ready to rumble.
This difference of exhaustion is why so many people can put up with assembly-line jobs or grocery-checking or long commutes, but buckle under the universally feared torture of solitary confinement. The capitalist structure of our country went through a really glorious period of getting humans to willingly accept and even embrace monotonous boredom because the tedium of their jobs created the byproduct of wearing them down. So even if they were getting repetitive stress injuries from twisting the same widget the same way and almost falling asleep from the 3,275th time making the same commute, they would arrive at home too beat to complain about it, having only just enough energy to awaken the next day and do it again. Meanwhile, those confined to small dark boxes alone with little or no exercise were slowly driven insane in their prisons.
Something’s been happening in this country the last three years. People have lost their occupations. No matter how small and crappy and minimally engaging their jobs were, they were still jobs that carried the heavily taxing byproduct of exhaustion. They were still something that took enough mental and physical energy to negate the urge to rebel, to foment discontent, to hold out for something better. But one-by-one and in droves, they were turned out of the opportunity to spend their energy flailing in the capitalist mill and instead made to consider the walls and corners and televisions and want-ads of a solitary existence.
Some have turned to creativity. Some have expanded their minds to accept the lack of occupation as a gift and driven themselves to occupy themselves instead. Most have not. Most people turned out of work by downsizing or offshoring or consolidation or automation have turned forlornly and blankly into an abyss of disinterested blandness. They wake each day not even sure what to do without someone telling them. They wander aimlessly through a directionless day, storebought distractions no longer working for them in light of the fact that they are only sufficiently entertaining or engaging for an exhausted person, but not someone with all their faculties at disposal. No longer exhausted, they become restless, agitated, rumbling with a soul-deep longing for something to do, be, create.
This, my friends, is the fundamental root of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is the quest for occupation. And despite my framing the question in the context of a job where I tried to modify violent kids’ behavior toward the more productive, I am very much in agreement with the principles and methodology of this budding revolution. The powers that seek to maintain order, stability, and the status quo in America have overlooked some fundamental tenets of how to stave off rebellion by controlling the masses. They have forgotten that bread must join circuses in sufficiently distracting the people, insisting instead on a system which puts bread at a premium as a mechanical rabbit to hold in front of the racers. They have allowed the attitude of those at the top to become perniciously elitist, rubbing superiority and greed in the face of all society. But most fundamentally, they have forgotten that people must have something to do or they will find something to do themselves. That people accept the terms of their social contract when they are too occupied or too tired to read the fine print, when people have nothing else to do but read the fine print because they are so bored, they will realize what they are forfeiting and rail against it.
What is most exciting and inspiring about the Occupy movement is that it does not overtly seek political solutions. Naysayers and corporate threshers want the occupiers to write their Congresspeople and go to the polls, knowing that anyone accessed in such a way has been bought and paid for to the point of complete imperviousness. Even those not explicitly on the payroll of corporate America are believers in the fundamental tenets of a system that rewards greed and punishes altruism, a way of aligning society to maximize the consolidation and stratification of wealth and power. It is blindingly obvious why this is so, as any student of history (from age eight on) could tell you: those in power like being there and will rig the game so they can stay there. And capitalism is one very effectively rigged game.
I myself have struggled mightily with the advent of the Occupy movement, feeling pulled almost inexorably to the front lines of its tent encampments and yet not even setting foot there, as yet, in the wake of my overwhelmed exhaustion at my full-time job. For me, unlike most, it is not the gun-to-my-head need for the pay of a job or even the expected pressure of finding fulfillment in one’s occupation, but rather the true motivation of actually loving my work and wanting to devote sufficient time to it that it brings me to the brink of capitulation and illness. I hung out with Ariel and discovered yesterday that I may be her only friend whose problems wouldn’t be largely or entirely solved by money. Which itself is no small factor in the Occupy movement, that reality. For me, I work because I want to and I love to, but it has thus far kept me off the sidewalks and streets of a rising tide that could sweep the whole world.
It is hard to feel twin obligations that are mutually exclusive and equally compelling. Even at Glide, I think I might have begged out of work to go join the protests, though there I may have felt the pull of alleviating the suffering that was driving so many to this brink. But I also must self-examine and recognize that each marginal person could be part of a tipping point in creating more change in this country than anyone born prior to this year could have imagined was possible. When I first saw the most recent Zeitgeist movie, I chuckled at the slightly naive vision of hordes of people gathering around Wall Street to give their money back in rejection of the system that printed it. Now it’s underway. And it feels wrong to not only not be a part of it, but to not be a spearhead.
And yet it feels like a hedge is in order too. It is unclear the direction or power the movement will have, whether it can be co-opted by money and politics and all the American powers that have resisted internal change before. And throwing away the best job I’ll ever have, one I created from scratch, and all my obligations to people I feel a deep personal bond with, for what could be a week and a jail term depending on how things bounce, seems crazy.
But it only seems crazy because I am occupied. Were I not, it would be the most obvious thing in the world.
I will continue to wrestle and struggle with the question, continue to dance on the razor’s edge of conundrum. I can’t really see myself abandoning everything to go live in the encampments, at least not yet, so the Rutgers debaters reading this should let out their breath. But there’s a big part of me that feels I should anyway. And I know it’s not zero-sum – I know I can go try to participate without sacrificing it all. And I will. More than anything, though, we need to develop a way that people who are occupied can still Occupy. We need a day where everyone who still wants or has to go to work can show their solidarity and support. Sometimes revolutions can’t all involve defection from the military, because they need people in the military to be quietly sympathetic so they can make sure that institution changes with the rest of society. This revolution needs occupied people too in order to make all the changes necessary.
If those on top of this precipitous pyramid know what’s good for them, they will create new incentives and occupations. They will come up with some way to motivate the masses and make use of their time and brains. But it can’t be through capitalism, at least the way it’s been manifest in society so far. The market is editing out jobs, ensuring they never return. We need a new system to occupy our minds. Until then, we must occupy the streets.
Labels: corruption, economics, Guest columns, Politics, public protest
Friday, October 14, 2011
Occupy, one view
Thinking about the Occupy movement?
Labels: 2012 presidential election, constitutional issues, Ethically questionable, political quips-n-quotes, Politics, public protest
Monday, October 10, 2011
Violence flares in Egypt
Reports out of Cairo indicate there have been violent clashes between Egyptian demonstrators and the Egyptian army. Government sources told Stratfor that demonstrators outside the state television station began firing on soldiers patrolling the area, and that two soldiers were reported dead and twenty-five wounded. Statfor goes on to note, "the military now has an opportunity to use the incident to justify an increased crackdown..."
Conflicting reports from the BBC indicate that plainclothes state policemen instigated violence with peacefully marching Coptic Christians. They say the violence began outside the state TV building and quickly spread to Tahrir Square, where there were reports of thousands joining in the street violence, attacking both sides. Rioters tore up the pavement and hurled stones.
The BBC says that the march was to protest against an attack on a church in Aswan and that many of those who were injured were protesters not soldiers. The Copts make up about 10% of the population of Egypt. The governing military junta has been lenient on, and possibly even tacitly encouraged, the perpetrators of a string of anti-Christian attacks. Reports of protesters in Cairo being crushed by military vehicles have further heightened tensions.
Conflicting reports from the BBC indicate that plainclothes state policemen instigated violence with peacefully marching Coptic Christians. They say the violence began outside the state TV building and quickly spread to Tahrir Square, where there were reports of thousands joining in the street violence, attacking both sides. Rioters tore up the pavement and hurled stones.
The BBC says that the march was to protest against an attack on a church in Aswan and that many of those who were injured were protesters not soldiers. The Copts make up about 10% of the population of Egypt. The governing military junta has been lenient on, and possibly even tacitly encouraged, the perpetrators of a string of anti-Christian attacks. Reports of protesters in Cairo being crushed by military vehicles have further heightened tensions.
Labels: Middle East, public protest
Saturday, August 06, 2011
Cops convicted
Transformed
In a case out of the stuff of nightmare, five New Orleans cops were convicted in the killing of unarmed civilians in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One of the most amazing parts of the story is that the shooting spree, that left two unarmed victims dead and four others wounded (one of whom ultimate lost her arm), took place six days after city flooded. Six days! What does that say about the conditions in the area and the authorities? Law and order were clearly on the run, the cops were told that they were responding to a radio call of officers down and under fire at the Danziger Bridge.
Another detail that tells one just how far off of the civic rails things were at that moment in Louisiana, the 5-0 was rolling to the call in a Budget Rental truck. Literally. One of the officers was riding in the back of the box truck carrying his personal AK-47.1 They jumped from the truck firing. According to reports, a family walking in search of food and supplies, the Bartholomews, ended up on the bridge that September day heading to a supermarket on the other side of the Industrial Canal that bifurcates the 9th Ward. The hail of New Orleans Police Department bullets killed seventeen year-old family friend James Brissette and wounded four other family members.2
Moments later, the cops open fire on two brothers, Lance and Ronald Madison, according to a Justice Department summary, one officer shot the mentally disabled Ronald Madison in the back as he ran away, another cop stomped and kicked him as he was lying on the ground before he died.
This is the small "c" conservative's nightmare, the state, who has its constituent citizens massively outgunned with its governmental arsenal, incidentally, paid for with tax dollars, turns its guns on the people in a climate of fear. This is the case for repealing the Patriot Act and eliminating the Department of Homeland Security. Guns in the hands of the state, while scary, is likely inevitable in a globalized society. Impunity to open fire on the citizenry, the presumption of guilt, is what must be fought at all costs.
In this federal courtroom, the officers ultimately lost when their fellow cops started to go state's evidence on them. As is so often the case, it was the cover-up that got them. Initially, it was not at all clear that the policemen were going to pay for this heinous incident. State of Louisiana murder and attempted murder charges were thrown out against the cops when the Criminal District Court ruled that the state had misused grand jury testimony. In a racially charged case and city, they were greeted by a cheering throng of supporters when they beat the rap.
The Clarion Content does not have enough information to make a definitive stand on one side or the other of this case on the basis of the facts. In a federal court, in front of juror of their peers these men were found guilty. We can only say that we are heartened that justice did not automatically pardon the powerful and armed against the dispossessed and unarmed. The presumption so often goes the other way.
1Brady Bill anyone?
2After an initial cover-up, in later testimony it was revealed that the officers kept firing at the unarmed family as they cowered behind a bridge abutment. "The police just kept shooting and I just kept feeling myself being hit," testified Susan Bartholomew who lost her right arm.
Labels: cop stories, corruption, public protest
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Confidence declining
From the America is going to H-E-double hockey sticks in a handbasket files, as seen in the USA Today: the percentage of middle-income American families that think it is possible to save for a secure retirement 37% in 2007, only 28% in 2011. Only 28% of American families think it is even possible to save for a secure retirement? The tiderbox is primed.
Labels: economics, Pop Culture, public protest
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Youthful Patriots
Spotted this on Texts from Last Night, ahhh, American youth culture.
"Went from writing my paper to watching obamas speech to crushing beers and singing springsteen in a crowd of 100 within 20 minutes. I love this country!" ---from New Hampshire.
Labels: Politics, Pop Culture, public protest, quotes
Monday, May 02, 2011
Patron saints of PC strike again
The dark forces of political correctness have struck again, once more trumpeting morality over truth. As smarter political commentators than the Clarion Content have noted, these paragons of political correctness set the stage for King George the II and his lackey, the Dick, Cheney. Their willingness to put a moral code above the truth gave King George solid firmament to stand on as he blithely lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, like the PCers he knew what was best for the country, the facts be damned.
Unfortunately, those cardinals of political correctness still haven't learned their lesson. We read this week, in the Huffington Post, where they bludgeoned the President-elect of the American College of Surgeons into resigning, a man who invented the Greenfield Filter, a device that has saved countless lives as a means of preventing blood clots during surgery, a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan, who has written more than 360 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, 128 book chapters and two textbooks and served on the editorial board of fifteen scientific journals.
His crime? Citing a peer-reviewed scientific study that suggested semen had health and psychological benefits for women.
The sentence in question, "So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates."
His intention as he told the Detroit Free Press, "The editorial was a review of what I thought was some fascinating new findings related to semen, and the way in which nature is trying to promote a stronger bond between men and women. It impressed me. It seemed as though it was a gift from nature. And so that was the reason for my lighthearted comments..."
The response from the Inquisition on behalf of Political Correctness? You're fired.
What a country!
Labels: media, Politics, Pop Culture, public protest, thought
Reaction
This is what we hope the reaction to Osama bin Laden's death is across all of America. Let us support peace.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Central Asia, Politics, public protest, thought, war
