Today's poetry draft: Landscape

Landscape

Pink age, blue
Twisted limbs fight
Perched on plastic
Who are you?
That first light
Stretch elastic
Trajectories in air
Always land somewhere

Green age, brown
Growing schemes
Until the hoped-for second
Drive out of town
School clocks redeemed
Coin clicks reckoned
Moment of panic
Machines are organic

Red age, gray
Heart pounding still
Potential gone kinetic
Accumulate the day
Do what you will
All apologetic
Just three days more
This is what you're for

Age of gleaming white
One fourth less
Starting to stammer
Was that right?
Ordinary mess
Waiting for a hammer
Goes fast and slow
Hard to let go

Occupy series

I wrote a 5-part series on the life and death of the Occupy movement, as seen through my small-town experience. Links to it are:

I. What did Occupy want?

II. The encampments

III. The clash

IV. Homelessness

V. The post-encampment phase

I plan on writing a sixth part, about ideology and organization, at some point.

Lesser evil won

Today the liberal blogosphere is full of everything that annoyed me about it ever since Obama made it clear that he'd continue Bush's most objectionable Presidential policies. We won a great victory, apparently, because the GOP would always be worse. And those reality-denying Republicans fooled themselves, unlike us, and we can contentedly laugh about that, while of course not expecting any actual political progress beyond Obamacare because " with Republican control of the House an ambitious agenda is moot".

At least the orc rogue won.

Good for Mitt

From: David Atkins:

Mitt Romney may be the most dishonest politician I've ever had the misfortune of watching. This is a man who seems to literally believe that there is no consequence at all for shamelessly contradicting himself from one week to the next.

Those who believe that Mitt "won" the first debate hands down seem to believe that Romney is justified in his complete cynicism about the process and the electorate. Those who believe, as David Axelrod and I do, that Romney mortgaged long-term political pain for a 24-hour news cycle win, have just a little more faith in this creaky old electoral system.

American democracy is broken. But it's not that broken.

Mitt was losing. So he decided to win. And everyone agrees that he won the debate. So far there have indeed been no consequences for him shamelessly contradicting himself from one week to the next. And why should there be, among the small pool of voters who have not yet made up their minds?

Meanwhile, why didn't Obama talk about Romney's 47% comments in the debate? From here: "'It just didn’t come up in the debate,' Messina said. 'It wasn’t a deliberate decision.'” I guess that no one in the Democratic Party has ever heard of bringing up talking points about one's opponent in a debate, to define them. They didn't think about it so hard that it wasn't even deliberate that they didn't think about it. After all, the basic attitude is this: We must be bipartisan -- above the fray -- and work together on a Grand Bargain to destroy Social Security. And those 47% are sort of shameful, aren't they? Why would anyone speak up about them when they don't have to?

American democracy is that broken.

That's not how it works

More about voting, or not voting, in the upcoming U.S. election. I know that I should just let this go, but it beats writing the last few posts about Occupy that I feel like I should finish.

Jim Henley suggests individual trade-offs here, of the form "If [loyalist progressive] wants [disgruntled anti-militarist] to vote for the Democrats, then [loyalist progressive] should trade that person something they want, like a letter to a politician." The basic problem with that is that signatures on petitions, letters to politicians, and so on are valueless. We've already determined that -- that's a major reason why movements like Occupy spring up. Petitions, letters, one-day protests and so on don't cause anyone to do anything. So trading a valueless political action for a valueless vote is like some kids pretending to play poker but they can't really keep track of whether one red chip is worth 5 black or vice versa.

Let's consider the disgruntled anti-militarists as a bloc, at least in potential. They're not negotiating with individual Democrats. They're negotiating with the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has the power to give them at least some of what they want, in the form of actual changed policies. And the anti-militarists, at least in potential, would have the power to give the Democratic Party what it wants, in the form of won elections.

In fact, the disgruntled anti-militarists are not a bloc, and do not have the power to make a difference in elections, mostly because most people in America like war, assassination, and torture, or at least don't see why anyone but a nut would object very strongly. So we have a trading situation going through supposed middlemen (i.e. the individual voters or letter-writers) in which none of the middlemen have the power to carry out the deal. I don't think you need to have a libertarian background to see why this may not be a good idea. "Here, kid, I'll give you 5 black chips for your red one. Aren't you happy now?" You might equally well object that the red chip is valueless too, so if there is condescension or futility it's going both ways. But.

But the important part of not voting is to say that you're not playing the game. People want the reassurance of knowing that settled, middle-class people with young children, like me, are still dutifully going through the motions, and are not seriously saying that maybe it's time that we just stopped supporting the whole American political system. That's what you lose if you trade the red chips for the black chips. And that's why I don't expect there to be a lot of people taking this deal.

Signals

I wrote this poem a few months before Bush's re-election, I think. Strangely enough it still seems to be relevant now. It must be Timeless Art!

Signals

When we were waiting in the line
It passed hand to hand to hand
“Ten”, the note read
We looked at, up, eye to eye
And waited
For the branded bottles of water
Among the flies
The mold, the crooked sign
Unmoving

"It's time to go" he said at the bar
"Time to join up"
His recruiter would get a bonus
His face gleamed
Shiny
And the TV static
Formed a nine, circled,
Testing

He had a job
Coordination
The dismal flicker of eight
On the CRT
The flights sent to Uzbekistan
Dropping people one-way
Only digits came back
"Eight" he Emailed
Broadcast

"Seven" puffs the sky writing
Over the assembled cameras
The backdrop
The camouflaged ranks
The mike

They were well dressed
Celebration signs waved decorously
Conversationally
"We want the Rapture"
"666 is the second coming"
Crosses
And forward-looking smiles
And a wind-blown sign tumbling
With one more six

"Five" whispered the voice on the phone line
It was recorded
Aren't they all?
In a special file
Played over and over
Scanned for hidden messages
"Five" it said "five"
They let it alone
There was so much else

"Four" he laughed crazy
To the people at the nation's mall
"More years" he laughed
"You all want more"
And they nodded,
More

The radio said three angrily
In between the uncanny voices
The old-time talk
They had been talking from the beginning
About three-fifths,
Three fifths
And how that was always
Written, always should be

When all the LEDs
On all the alarm clocks
Blinked two endlessly
The people
Who were to have awoken that day
Looked, groggy,
Decided to get up, go on,
Wanting it over with
Wanting it the same

On the final day of that country
The voice said One, everyone heard it
"One" and they took out matches
"One" and burned the books that told them they were good
"One" and stumbled, footsore, into the wilderness

Occupy (V)

The post-encampment phase

This is the most difficult part of this series for me to write, because this phase was both the chronologically longest part of Occupy and, at least for me, pretty annoying. Encampments started mid-September 2011 and were essentially over by the end of December. If you arbitrarily choose the one year anniversary September 2012 demonstrations as the end of Occupy in its current form, then it's spent a good deal more of its existence without encampments than with them.

I'll use the Occupy group that I was involved with as an example once again, because I know more about it than any other. We did quite well for a small-town group. In our post-encampment phase we had weekly demonstrations in front of our local Bank of America branch in the town center. At the end of February, we had a visit by activists from OWS who did trainings, and we hired a movie theatre and showed short Occupy documentaries to 600 people, who then marched around the town to call attention to a number of places where big-money interests impinged on our communal life. In mid-March, we called a public meeting to discuss city finances with the mayor and town council which hundreds of non-Occupy people attended. We got local press for all of these activities and contributed to national press. Some of our more active people helped to oppose foreclosures at a nearby major city, and we opposed a proposed three-strikes law at the state level.

None of this made any discernible difference in actual political outcomes. Not that any experienced activist expects this kind of thing to make a difference in the short term. But that's who the majority of people were in Occupy at this point: experienced activists. And they'd done this kind of activism before Occupy and would individually continue doing it after Occupy, as part of existing groups that had lasted for much longer than it appeared that Occupy was going to. The major Occupy encampments served some hugely important functions besides those I've already mentioned: they provided the critical mass of people who made us into part of a global movement, and they supported the people who thought strategically about what was going on and could provide some sense of direction and response to events to the movement as a whole. Without them, it wasn't clear what we were gaining by doing this kind of thing as Occupy rather than as the kind of groups we'd had before.

And we were certainly losing something by being part of Occupy. I've been in a whole lot of movements, non-hierarchical co-ops, nonprofits etc., and when a Occupy General Assembly became dysfunctional, it became more dysfunctional than any other kind of arrangement I've seen. "Infighting" is a very common word that I've seen in any description of a late-stage Occupy GA. I'll write more about the organizational problems of this kind of structure in the next post.

Still, the Occupy General Assembly can inspire new people, even as the older ones leave. A sort of steady state might have been achieved. But here is where larger-scale considerations start to become important. How do middle-class protest movements end?

Occupy's debt to the Spanish Indignados and the Arab Spring protestors is well known. Perhaps less well known is that there have been middle class assembly movements in a wide range of industrialized countries. The Israeli #J14 protests, for instance. Or the Argentine Neighborhood Assembly Movement. Both of the articles that I've linked to are, I think, worth reading. I'll leave aside the question of ideology and the coexistence of moderate and radical politics for now, and sum up the two main long-term threats to these kinds of movements as co-optation and conciliation.

If repression fails, then existing power centers in a society naturally try to absorb the energy of the new one. In the Argentine case, their assemblies became sites of competition by various left-wing parties. America, of course, has no functioning left-wing parties, and the Democrats never made any serious effort to co-opt Occupiers into becoming electoral activists. The only organizations that made a serious effort to turn Occupy towards its purposes were the unions, who ran a sort of national campaign to have Occupy assist in union community outreach. We saw the effects of this in our small area -- our major protest somehow ended up stopping at areas that were of interest to unions but hadn't been of interest to anyone in our group before then, and well-prepared young people who were theoretically "Occupy" but who no one had ever seen at a GA showed up and helped to run a major event and spoke out on union issues. This was helpful, and since we had no real difference of opinion with the unions, people noticed it and then shrugged.

Conciliation was a much greater problem. "Conciliation" may be the wrong word, since very few people in power took deliberate action to conciliate Occupy -- repression had worked. Still, a basic characteristic of middle-class economic protest movements is that as the economy gets better, people go back to normal life, because normal life for them is after all pretty good. Duncan Black periodically posts what he calls the Scariest Chart Ever, a graphic which shows the percent job losses in post WW II recessions in the U.S. If you look at that chart, it is indeed scary in terms of the depth and length of the employment loss. It is less scary in that the employment has been steadily trending upwards for a long time now. If it took the depth of the recession to create Occupy, then that slowly trending upwards line meant that we weren't getting replacements for the people who left. The educated young people who'd been out of a job were getting jobs and leaving, and the experienced activists who were left weren't seeing a great benefit in doing what they did as Occupy.

That might have been what eventually did Occupy in even if the encampments had remained. That is the narrative that a lot of people both inside and outside of Occupy would prefer -- a sort of gradually-drifting-off end suitable for whatever interpretation the teller wants to hold. But it will forever remain a hypothetical, because by the time it arguably started to happen, Occupy's main strengths had already been taken away.