I couldn’t bring myself to watch the final State of the Union address of the 2008-2012 presidency. I took myself off the grid just in case a knee-jerk temptation would change my mind. It didn’t. It can be important (or feel important) to watch political theater—I’ve always found it hard to tear away from the interconnected fabric of the Stagey National Things, especially when commentary about them erupts in real-time. But I couldn’t stomach this one, and in hindsight I register it as a one-person act of refusal and protest against the stealthily creeping covert war on Iran.

Acts of invasion might be easier to universally condemn when the public is allowed to view the cities, structures, and even citizens of the enemy in the crosshairs of war’s talons. I don’t remember the last time that happened in my lifetime; when it did, say in the Gulf War, the principal instruments of visualizing the enemy were green-lit night vision and birds-eye-views of dusty stretches of land. Even the Collateral Murder video demands context and explanation behind the cold calculability of the airborne soldiers’ footage.

So I use covert war deliberately to describe the feeling reverberating in Iran these days. The sense of disaster is not necessarily tied to the future movements of the gifted-and-talented air force of the U.S. military, or ‘boots on the ground,’ or whatever post-Bush, post-shock-and-awe neologisms have been invented under the Obama presidency. It’s absolute doom. Doom about the open-air, daylight drive-by assassinations of young Iranian scientists. Doom about unprecedented U.S. sanctions of Iran on top of the heap of thirty years’ worth. Doom about official sanctions on Iran’s third-largest bank, Bank Tejarat (‘the 23rd Iranian-linked financial institution to be blacklisted by the U.S. since 2006′), effectively ending a last-remaining trade route. Doom about the unanimous House approval of sanctioning the Iranian Central Bank. Doom about the European Union’s ban on further sales of Iranian oil. Doom about the colossal spike in gold prices. Doom about the exorbitant price of daily goods (not just luxury goods). Doom about how far ordinary people will be pushed, strangled, and bankrupted.

The language of the Obama presidency exhibits a love affair with using pain management terms in describing its ongoing plans for Iran (Republican candidates, with a single exception, ‘mostly agreed on Obama Iran policy’). I would pay incalculably to never again hear the words options and on and the table used in the same sentence again—as though one were slapping on a pair of disposable nitrile gloves in a dank, perverse, and unlicensed medical lab. Sanctions bite, one headline read, and Iran feels the pain. We will bring Iran to its knees. Sanctions will cripple Iran.

I couldn’t bring myself not to look up the text of the speech to see the word choice Obama’s speechwriters panned out. Iran was mentioned four times in the span of one paragraph.

And we will safeguard America’s own security against those who threaten our citizens, our friends, and our interests. Look at Iran. Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one. The regime is more isolated than ever before; its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions, and as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent. Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better, and if Iran changes course and meets its obligations, it can rejoin the community of nations.

There is nothing new here whatsoever, though if the ‘progress report’ tone of the exchange is ignored the American presidency’s fungible logic does get revealed in its full glory (the crime-and-punishment story is interchangeable with Iraq).

I ran away from this speech on account of this exact point: fabrications that border on stupidity repeated over and over become too painfully sardonic to bear. This stupidity has nothing to do with intellect. Imagine giant mechanical robots stamping their giant metallic robot hooves on the people of a little town. Now imagine the commander-in-chief of the robots claiming that the stamping only hurts the town’s leaders, makes them look weak and ineffectual, and forces them to bear the brunt of the town’s demise alone. This is the stunted and insulting panorama that the Obama administration affords its denizens while ordinary people in Iran, upwards of 70 million people, are watching their currency, livelihoods, and hope evaporate.

Art by Saeed Ensafi, from the ‘War or Peace’ collection, Tehran.

A mystic lost his head on the Lower East Side. Then a madman, then a murderer.

An imploded television on Smith Street. In 1966 the Sony Trinitron was held to ‘wide acclaim for its bright images.’

If you see nothing say nothing, displayed at the window of Icy Images in Brooklyn.

Another version on the same theme on the Lower East Side.

I found some toys still wrapped in their original plastic with a factory tag on the ground on Jay Street.

Giving looks on Rivington Street.

The stencil gun seen in the last image was probably used to make this one.

Charles Simic at bookbook on Bleeker Street.

Charles Simic at McNally Jackson on Prince Street. (‘In no other century, in no other literature of the past has the image been this important. In the age of ideology and advertisement, the poet, too, trusts the eyes more than the ear.’ p. 57)

Allahu Akbar at Icy Signs.

Modernist bird feeder at the High Line.

The monochrome arrangement of these worn gloves reminded me of Mags Harries’ Glove Cycle bronze sculptures at Porter Station in Cambridge, MA.

An underground subway is tiled in gigantic fish faces.

A $2 painting I bought at Housing Works Thrift Shop.

Projection in Liberty Square as the clock struck 12:00 on 1 January 2012.

The Palestine/Israel and U.S. narratives on Palestinians coincided in a haphazard way this month. While the popular resistance committee in the village of Nabi Saleh mourned the killing of Mustafa Tamimi, which it named its first martyr, an American presidential candidate resurrected the British Mandate-era mythos about the ‘invented’ Palestinian people.

Joe Sacco in Mondoweiss:

The Israelis are still blockading Gaza. They control things that are going in, they control to a large extent, the goings and comings of people, and they’re blockading Gaza. So people have a doubly miserable life. It’s miserable from the inside, I would say, and it’s miserable because of the external pressure. And then you hear someone like Newt Gingrich say something like ‘the Palestinians are an invented people,’ and these people are terrorists, and you realize that there’s still people in public office, or who had public office in this case, running for president, who feel they can say this sort of thing because it’s okay to disparage the Palestinians in this really disgusting way.

In Gingrich’s orbit of rhetorical muck it’s also okay to disparage African-Americans and the poor with impunity.

Chauncey DeVega in We Are Respectable Negroes:

Newt Gingrich has repeatedly demonstrated that he is an existentially ugly person. Therefore, his repeated comments about the black poor, and ‘inner city’ communities, where people ‘don’t have a work ethic’ are not at all a surprise. Primarily,Gingrich is recycling the ugly and deeply racist belief that black people are inherently lazy: poor children who don’t see people around them working apparently grow up to be lazy adults, who are on welfare, dependent on the state, and have no understanding of how to put in an honest day’s work. In all, Newt Gingrich is offering up aDickensonian fantasy of workhouses in which African American wastrels and street urchins learn the value of hard work from benevolent white folks like him.

Vigils for Tamimi were commemorated internationally (we organized a candlelit memorial seven days after his killing in Cambridge, MA) including in Tel Aviv, though it would shock no one that mourners at his funeral procession from Ramallah to Nabi Saleh were teargassed, ferociously beaten (as well as stamped on their heads), and arrested by the World’s Most Moral Army (some images of those scenes, including the one below, here).

Holly Rigby on Tamimi’s funeral (converging with Israeli Central Command spokesperson Major Peter Lerner mocking his death):

As they tried to arrest more and more people the group of strong and defiant Palestinian women we were with threw their bodies over the men they were trying to drag away, and the soldiers began dragging these women by their hijabs, their clothes, wringing the necks of the men who were under this pile of women and trying to pull them from underneath. Covering and protecting the bodies of those trying to be arrested, the women were screaming so loudly for the soldiers to stop and this sound pierced my heart more deeply than any sound bomb could ever have done.

Narratives which pin unbridled violence on the uniformed lionhearts can be confusing.

From his introductory essay in an important volume of Zapatista writing (I don’t love everything about this piece, such as its pseudo-stereotypical description of the ‘simplicity of the [indigenous] grouping, feeling and thinking together,’ but the historical range it presents is still compelling), José Saramago’s ‘Chiapas, a Name of Pain and Hope’ expounds on invented Persians.

In 1721, with a feigned innocence that couldn’t conceal his tart sarcasm, Charles-Louis de Secondat asked, ‘Persians? But how is it possible for someone to be Persian?’ It’s been almost 300 years now since the Baron de Montesquieu wrote his famous Lettres Persanes, and even today we haven’t succeeded in putting together an intelligent answer to this most essential of all questions on the historical agenda of human relationships. As a matter of fact, we still can’t understand how it was ever possible for someone o have been a ‘Persian,’ and furthermore, as if such a peculiarity were not out of the question, to persist in being one today when the world seeks to convince us that the only desirable and profitable thing to be is what in very broad and artificially conciliatory terms is customarily called ‘Western’ (in mentality, fashions, tastes, habits, interests, manias, ideas)—or, in the all too frequent case of not succeeding in reaching such sublime heights, to be “Westernized” in some bastard way at least, whether through force of persuasion or in a more radical way, if persuasion should fail.

To be ‘Persian’ is to be something strange, someone different—in simple terms to be the ‘other.’ The very existence of the Persian has been enough to disturb, confuse, disrupt, and perturb the workings of institutions: the Persian can even reach the inadmissible extreme of upsetting what all governments in the world are most jealous of: the sovereign tranquillity of their power.

The indigenous were and still are Persians in Brazil (where the landless now represent another type of Persians). The indigenous in the United States once were but have almost ceased to be Persians. In their time Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs were Persians, as were and still are their descendants, wherever they have lived and still live.

The Guardian has released historical footage from the British Pathé digital archives. I was deeply struck by two short reels in particular.

In the first, British troops in Nablus in ‘disturbed’ Arab districts deign to interrupt their innocuous game of football in order to corral the unruly natives. (If you think I’m editorializing just watch the footage.)

In the second, the British-backed coup of Mohammad Mosaddegh is re-imagined as a salient regime change while Mosaddegh himself—a wildly popular democratic figure and the first prime minister to nationalize a prime resource in Asia—is painted as  ’virtual dictator of Iran.’ The Iranians themselves are little more than ‘rioters.’

If I can be forgiven for stating the unadorned obvious, the ‘invention’ of 18th-century Persians and 20th-century Palestinians and every-century black people has everything to do with the self-invention of the inventor. Fabricating the victor and the vanquished is neither particularly new or novel but it appears to proliferate when an erstwhile politician or still-born political establishment attempts to seize power, and in doing so, must regenerate counterfeit but powerful narratives about the ‘Persian’ other whose pesky existence as a survivor has been enough to disturb, confuse, disrupt, and perturb the workings of institutions.

THE RISING BRICS. It is difficult to come by a news item about South America and the economy that doesn’t include the phrase ‘Brazil rising’ in it. When I did a Google search for the term a few months ago I yielded 46,100,000 results. Arguably ‘Brazil rising’ has become as much a packaged, catch-all term as ‘China rising’ in the 1980s, with significant socio-political differences. (The news items rarely get that far.) Brazil is a rising food power in a hungry world as the number one exporter of beef, chicken, soy, sugar, orange juice, and coffee (it is also ‘rising’ in pork). When Christine Lagarde was anticipated to lead the IMF, her first and immediate stop along a several BRICS-nation tour was Brazil. Not to be cast into obsolescence 60 Minutes filmed a highly circulated segment called ‘Brazil’s Rising Star‘ in which the ‘country of the future’ seemed to be finally arriving.

The term BRIC was coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The ‘Goldman Sachs rock star’ economist (that’s what he’s called on the front book cover) has since written The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICS and Beyond and used the occasion to turn another coinage, ‘growth markets.’

Who are the lucky risers in these emergent wicker baskets of potential? According to salivating financial investment firms, they are not so much the ’80 percent of the world’s population of six billion people’ (or affable mass that make up the Morgan Stanley Capital International Emerging Markets index) themselves as they are the fortunate few who can tap into their production and purchasing power. (The MSCI index includes not only the Riser in Chief Brazil but Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Hungary, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey.)

These firms tout resource-heavy ‘growth markets’ as blessed avenues for investment portfolios for reasons that can be readily summarized: rapid urbanization, loads of new consumers, and high exporting potential. (If you are a major beverage producer, an emerging market would not only present a novel manufacturing enterprise but a bushel of high-volume customers to whom you can aggressively promote your fizzy product.)

But it doesn’t stop there. Growth markets also present an opportunity for brandishing corporations as creators of ‘social citizens.’ A little of this goes a long way. Instituto Coca-Cola Brasil, for example, says it was founded with the idea of expanding public education. In return:

O crescimento das vendas da Coca-Cola em mercados emergentes como China, Índia e Brasil ajudou a companhia a registrar um aumento de 55% no lucro do quarto trimestre, embora os negócios na América do Norte continuem sendo pressionados pela fraqueza no consumo.

Coca-Cola’s sales growth in emerging markets like China, India and Brazil helped the company record a 55% growth in profits in the fourth quarter, even as business in North America continue to be pressured by weakness in consumption. (My translation.)

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There is a lot to criticize and discuss but I fear that few are doing this issue justice.

And this is where I shift gears to a very brief reading of Mike Davis’ recent New Left Review editorial on global upswells. (It is written about 2011 but set in various parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, give or take a few passages.) I read more than a tinge of heady populism in Davis’ divinations and after thinking about it aloud on Twitter for awhile (thanks to everyone who engaged with my crude first impressions, though what follows continues to be more of a start than an adequacy) I wish to connect it to the skewed but prevailing discourse on the rising BRICS.

Davis isn’t shy about projecting the BRICS—never you mind their colonial pre-histories and relatively new reach toward self-determination—as anti-revolutionary.

Marx blamed California—the Gold Rush and its resultant monetary stimulus to world trade—for prematurely ending the revolutionary cycle of the 1840s. In the immediate aftermath of 2008, so-called BRICs became the new California. Airship Wall Street fell from the sky and crashed to earth, but China kept flying, with Brazil and Southeast Asia in tight formation. India and Russia also managed to keep their planes in the air. The resilient levitation of the BRICs astounded investment advisors, economic columnists and professional astrologers—all of them proclaiming that China, or India, could now hold up the world with one hand, or that Brazil would soon be richer than Spain.

With Tunisia and Egypt beheaded—again, never you mind that Brazil (and India’s) transformations preceded the 2011 MENA uprisings (which Davis, who knows better, nauseatingly calls a ‘Spring’)—his true revolutionaries are the ’200 million Chinese factory workers, miners and construction labourers [who] are the most dangerous class on the planet.’ While there is more than enough anti-revolutionary blame to go around it appears that Davis wishes to pin it, through osmosis, on Lula, Dilma, Indian President Pratibha Patil, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, among others. Millions of Brazilian workers unionized and afforded passable health care is a revolutionary deterrent. The as-yet largely dormant Chinese workers are our true revolutionary salvation.

Another issue is that Davis juggles two or three global narrative frameworks (if we focus solely on his 20th-century analogies, which he readily admits get stretched ‘to the breaking point’). Framing the late and post-1990s environ on the floundering results of 1968, the Cold War, and the Eurozone disaster means one is forced into viewing the global South as a sideline geography to the cartographic duels of the Old Guard global North.

For example, on Israel/Palestine, Davis writes that Israel is an ‘obsolete outpost of the Cold War,’ which would be risible (just look at their architecture!) were it not highly misconceived. The active and repressive presence of the British military in Palestine in the early 20th century is but one possible beginning whose extra-narrative thread gets lost in the Western/Eastern Bloc enmity that Davis presupposes on nearly everything. In fact, nearly the entirety of Davis’ global South narrative is read from the perspective of Cold War dissolution, anti-revolutionary reformism, and party systems. His casual, throwaway dismissive sums up Marxism’s ‘outreach problem’ beautifully: ‘”multitudes”, horizontal spontaneities, whatever.’

Mr O’Neill has little time for western criticism of Russian authoritarianism or one-party rule in China. He quotes an American businessman recounting a line from a Chinese person, who had said: ‘What’s the big deal about voting? In the US everyone can do it and only half the people do. If voting were that great a thing, like sex for example, everyone would do it.’

This is a little story about how the grinchy MBTA is trying to steal Christmas. (UPDATES: MBTA General Manager Richard Davey appeared on Fox News to say that the ‘Deck the Halls’ dispatcher will not be punished, however, I’ve gotten word from Channel 5 and Metro Boston that he will face a written warning. The Boston Globe‘s Eric Moskowitz who wrote the first major story on the incident writes that the anonymous 20-year MBTA veteran has become a ‘Twitter hero.’ The Globe even wrote an editorial in defense of the dispatcher in ‘Falalalalagate.’)

Yesterday was Christmas Day. I was returning from an Occupy Boston general assembly downtown. There weren’t many people on the subway train (or T) platform. I helped one man with directions, then fumbled in my bag for the book I was carrying (which incidentally included chapters with vivid descriptions of high-tech pranks the city is known for).

I happened to be in the T during the exact, narrow window of time that something unexpected happened. I happened to film it.

I heard an unusual sound from the main announcement message board. The LED screen lit up, and with it people’s faces. A droning robot voice repeated:

Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la la la la la. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, Fa la la la la, la la la la.

The machine’s emotionally indifferent delivery and the repetitive, familiar merriment of the lyrics created a burst of palpable social energy.

Like the people around me I was in a state of happy disbelief. The metro—usually a space of dreary tedium, boredom, silence, rudeness, performed apathy, mild alienation, or just staring-into-the-air non-thereness—for a brief moment became a source of collective bemusement. People don’t generally laugh without abandon on the rails but now everyone around me was grinning.

I filmed a 10-second clip of the screen before the oncoming train arrived and posted it on Twitter. You didn’t have to be a connoisseur of Keith Haring’s ‘subway drawings’ to get that this was cool and funny and alive.

I didn’t stay glued to the reaction but gathered that it ranged unanimously between ‘This is awesome’ and ‘The MBTA actually has a sense of humor.’ Friends and I speculated who its author(s) could have been. Too local (and target-less) for Anonymous. Too securitized a system for MIT students (not that I doubt their ingenuity, but train systems are highly systemized) to hack into. We figured it must’ve been someone  within the MBTA itself.

I casually tipped off a local reporter who was the first to mention it in a brief article. Later the Boston Globe contacted me for an interview, reporting:

A Globe reporter first told me that the art piece, or art happening—and I am committed to calling it that—was an ‘inside job,’ and unnervingly, that the MBTA was considering reprimanding its maker. The reprimand being considered this week (anything from a write-up, a suspension, or a termination) is for ‘unauthorized messaging.’

I was shocked to hear that a serious rebuke is being considered for a small, innocuous (and well, totally wonderful) occasion. The operator hadn’t used his privileges selfishly or detrimentally—just the opposite. In fact, the entire ethos of the surveilling, Homeland Security-like securitization people have become acclimated to rests on asking these questions in the negative rather than the affirmative, and viewing them through a lens of hysterical safety psychosis.

Other reactions:

@SubwayArtBlog: Baby Jesus forbid anyone from smiling on their commute.

@MBTAassholes: It comes down to intent, did he/she try to harm anyone or operations? Were they abusing resources for self gain? No and no.

@JPatienceB: How is Deck the Halls different than ‘Go Pats’ on buses?

I agreed to give interviews to two local television stations and share the video with a third (these two are also doing stories), with the understanding that the added exposure could help produce leniency for the T operator.

Instead of considering that a Christmas carol risk someone’s job, perhaps the MBTA should consider that this tiny, single act arguably had a more positive public effect than all its organizational PR stunts combined. (Several trains on this same Red Line, for example, are inoperative until March 2012, something which has cost the train system considerable points in public satisfaction. Also, I’ve seen my own death flash before my eyes by a hair’s breath on the Green Line, which houses the country’s most ancient subway tracks.)

And what usually greets commuters on Boston trains? Alarmist signs like this one.

Is the MBTA’s super-securitized, super-alarmist, and super-paranoid radar on such a dominant blast that it can’t detect mirth? Ironic too that the prank simulated a jolly human within a machine and the MBTA’s response constitutes an unfeeling machine within humans.

Back in October I reviewed David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years for Social Text. One of my friends says this is the one book this year worth evangelizing to everyone you know. I can’t disagree. It’s the single most affecting and agitating book I read in 2011.

W. H. Auden said poetry is rhetoric, and rhetoric moves. I sometimes turn to this description in thinking about how essayistic forms of writing move me. Regardless of topic or content, rhetorical movement implies transgression—at least etymologically speaking, stepping deliberately over a line. It can also mean pointing out that there was a line to step across in the first place.

(Parenthetically, since I read 100% of these titles on the web, one could say that they are a list of longreads, but I tactically shun that word because no one has been able to satisfactorily answer how long a longread is. It’s a product of an insecure internet language that defines itself by what it is not: not a tweet, not a book, etc.)

Turning in earnest to the writing that moved me this year induced a disconcerting mental fog. Hundreds upon thousands (literally thousands I’m sure) of browser tabs later, when the only movement that muscle memory could readily recall is the errant gyration of a mouse click, I’m trying to be mindful about what it was that stirred me about these pieces. In the public duel between fast data (the fetishization of information) and slow knowledge (the mastery of a body of information) I am at pains to describe what that stirring is or what it does. But I know that whether it was reflexive or investigative or polemical or distancing or expository it moved.

I’m still cutting through a faulty, half-eaten memory and several thousand bookmarks, so in the spirit of Occupy I want to say that this is a living document.

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Max Blumenthal on the ‘Israelification’ of American domestic security.

Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much it will inform police repression of future upsurges of street protest. But already, the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”

Jenny Turner on North/South feminism, class, work, and eating one’s cake.

Feminism, according to the sociologist Angela McRobbie, has been ‘disarticulated’ and ‘undone’, bits pulled out, reworked and retwisted, and other bits dumped. At the moment, the popular elements include ‘empowerment’, ‘choice’, ‘freedom’ and, above all, ‘economic capacity’ – the basic no-frills neoliberal package. It’s fine for any ‘pleasingly lively, capable and becoming young woman’ to aspire to this. It doesn’t matter if she’s black or white or mixed race or Asian, gay or straight or basically anything, so long as she is hard-working, upbeat, dedicated to self-fashioning, and happy to be photographed clutching her A-level certificate in the Daily Mail. This young woman has been sold a deal, a ‘settlement’. So long as she works hard and doesn’t throw bricks or ask awkward questions, she can have as many qualifications and abortions and pairs of shoes as she likes.

Captain America punching Hitler in the jaw is Captain America knocking him across the room with the weight of the culture. The X-Men going from multiracial to white to needing a white Messiah is the weight of the culture. The Avengers becoming black-ops agents is the weight of the culture. Thor, Captain America, and X-Men movies coming out simultaneously this summer is the weight of the culture. If a comic book can get us into World War II, can one get us out of Afghanistan? When can a hero be someone without a mask, who ends a war?

Adam Curtis on the rise of the TV hug.

Maybe it was a lotus-eating moment, a dream allowed at a moment of incredible prosperity in the west. But as you watch everyone hug and cry on television you do get a sense of how much it was a society looking inward – and that was blind to  the giant, dynamic forces of history outside. Or maybe they were hugging because they actively didn’t want to see what was happening outside?

Sara Wookey on refusing to perform art under exploitative conditions.

If there is any group of cultural workers that deserves basic standards of labor, it is us performers working in museums, whose medium is our own bodies, which deserve humane treatment and respect. Artists of all disciplines deserve fair and equal treatment and can organize if we care enough to put the effort into it. I would rather be the face of the outspoken artist then the silenced, slowly rotating head (or, worse, “centerpiece”) at the table. I want a voice, loud and clear.

Isaac Miller on sampling, race, and power in music.

Watching the video, as a white person, I immediately felt uncomfortable because it seemed made by and for white people. That is to say it felt exploitative, racist, disingenuous, and totally uncritical of its own white gaze. The video was filmed by a white director (Eric Wareheim) for a group of white DJs. Though the vocalist on the track and the dancers in the video are all people of color and the song, as a Dancehall track, draws on a genre that originates from a community of color, it is interpreted through the gaze of white artists.

There was an interesting study published recently about voting habits. It sought to discover why poor voters would willingly vote for lower taxes for the rich. The assumption had always been that they did so because they hoped to one day be rich and therefore developed an identification with the interests of the class to which they aspired. What the study found, however, was much more base in nature. They discovered that people voted for lowering taxes on the wealthy not because they aspired to personal wealth, but because they wanted to be certain that someone else was always poorer than themselves. This, I think drives much of the status-seeking in Poetryland.

Before we condemn or praise Alia’s decision to take a naked picture of herself and circulate it as either revolutionary or not we must understand the context in which her statement was made. It is not a context where the nude female form is foreign, and it is not a context where people don’t talk about sex. In fact, sex is at the center of much public anxiety and government policy. This is not surprising, given that at times of great social upheaval, much of a public’s anxieties about political change are fought on the terrain of sex and gender roles.

The riots were an assault on something entirely unexceptional, something all around us, something inescapable, something as fundamental to the city as oxygen or gravity. As everything in the neo-liberal city is a commodity, then it is logical that everything is attacked. As the city has become a machine for surveillance, a mechanism for extracting capital, a place where our liberty is framed by the spectral neo-liberalist arguments of terrorist paranoia and economic pragmatism, the riots perhaps recognise the city itself as a device of control and so lash out at its most symptomatic space: the high street and the shopping centre—what is described in developer-speak as the ‘retail offer’.

And then, we must occupy ourselves with our lives. We work and we have families and we have lovers and children or the idea of children that we hold in our hearts or that slip through our fingers. We have petty concerns and serious problems and complex histories. Somehow, we need to create room within ourselves for these things too. How do we find the time to care? How do we make the time to care? How do we remember what happened last month and four months ago and last year and ten years ago? How do we keep from going numb?

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.

But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.

Three years of waiting. Everywhere around us there are waves of bouncing sons, bounties of daughters, stroller wheels creaking under the cheerful load. Facebook updates, email messages, and Christmas cards arrive with pictures of tots, their faces smeared with avocado or cake frosting. Babies on rugs, babies in hats. Invitations to baby showers with cursive script and cartoon storks. Over a beer an expectant father—another expectant father—gives me the news, tells me that his wife will soon have her second or third. Am I happy for him? What else can I be? Once again I put out my hand, close my eyes, and wish them joy.

The blood on his hands — and on the hands of those who played an even greater, more direct role in all of this totally unjustified killing of innocents — is supposed to be ignored because he was an accomplished member in good standing of our media and political class. It’s a way the political and media class protects and celebrates itself: our elite members are to be heralded and their victims forgotten.

Sexy is real and true, but the performativeness of sexy – of tight clothes and short hems and high heels – means that true sexiness is a choice. Sexiness does not just happen. It is observed and then developed. It is executed and then maintained. It morphs through time and situation.

The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

Penn State seems, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, not to have known what they did not know: society and the law have much stricter rules when child abuse is finally uncovered. Since most people don’t believe that ten year olds want to be anally penetrated by grown men, once there is credible evidence that the sex happened, people tend not to spin alternative scenarios about little boys like:  ”look what he was wearing;” “he’s probably just mad that Coach Sandusky wouldn’t hook up with him;” “he was drunk;” or “it was just bad sex and he’s trying to get back at Coach.”

After a choir rehearsal during my junior year, Jill Denny, the choir director, told me she was considering a Japan trip for our singing group. I told her I couldn’t afford it, but she said we’d figure out a way. I hesitated, and then decided to tell her the truth. “It’s not really the money,” I remember saying. “I don’t have the right passport.” When she assured me we’d get the proper documents, I finally told her. “I can’t get the right passport,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of “one people” reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq’s destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran.

In the words of the inimitable Will Hunting, how you like them coals?

                                                                    ”At the gate, he drenched himself in paint thinner and lit a match.’
(Photo: Mannoubia Bouazizi in Tunisia, by Peter Hapak.)

Eight months ago I wrote a piece on the particular personhood of Mohamed Bouazizi and Bradley Manning. I took keen interest in the near-miraculous folds of their lives but a crucial bit of history escaped me. 17 December simultaneously marks the day Bouazizi lit himself afire outside the Sidi Bouzid capital building. It also marks Manning’s birthday.

To say that I continue to be fascinated by the impact of these men would be an understatement because I find it impossible and even undesirable to view their actions through a cold observatory distance.

Time magazine has named the protester as its ‘person of the year,’ beginning its centerfold piece with a story about Bouazizi. Inarguably they are the names of the year for their remarkable negation of the dehumanizing, and seemingly inescapable, machines that formed their habitat. I doubt, however, that their actions (in the case of Manning, insert the obligatory ‘alleged’) could be described as mere protest. Sometimes the very bricks of an institution—a defiled madhouse in both Bouazizi’s and Manning’s case—have to be burned down before its fire catches on.

And even then, the habitual indignity that threatened to strip each of them of the very foundation for personhood hasn’t ceased. Nor have the government and army of the United States been investigated, let alone prosecuted (I’m sure even the suggestion invokes snorts of laughter) for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, what Manning witnessed and irrefutably refused to take part in and for what he is now being prosecuted in a largely closed and ineffectual trial 17 months after imprisonment.

UPDATE:

If you haven’t read JR’s post about the de-queering of Manning, you might:

But I want to say: Manning exists; Manning’s motives and actions with respect to WikiLeaks were heroic, even specifically queerly heroic; and, in some senses, maybe Manning is a queer child, who should be celebrated as such.

And here’s Larry Goldsmith on on how the professional gay consensus has abandoned the ‘poor (gay) man’s fight’ to promote the ‘rich man’s war’:

This is, of course, the classic argument about gays and national security–they’ll get beat up or blackmailed and reveal our secrets.  And NGLTF, Lambda, and HRC, with their impeccably professional media and lobbying campaign, based on the best branding and polls and focus groups that money could buy, have effectively demolished that insidious stereotype. They have demolished it by abandoning Bradley Manning.

If the seismic events of 2011 are any indication, the neoliberal model that the global South rejected during the 1990s has finally come to the fore in the global North.

I participated in the 2003 FTAA demonstrations in Miami. Working with Indymedia I contributed video (especially taken at the edge of riot police lines, or what the LAPD sportfully calls ‘skirmish lines’) to the collaborative production of The Miami Model, the documentary film that emerged. Last week Natasha Lennard interviewed me for this Salon piece called ‘Robocops vs. the Occupiers.’ It is promising to see a journalist investigating the connections between a ‘model‘ of militarized police tactics and media co-opting that was slated to endure for years following the FTAA.

Gharavi’s mention of ‘unembedded press’  illustrates one aspect of the Miami Model that is not being used against the occupation movement. At least five independent journalists were arrested covering the 2003 FTAA protests but there were also reporters on the other side of police lines – embedded with Miami Police Department, as war reporters often are with the military.

The LAPD created an elite ‘pool’ of media outlets that were not only embedded with police, but according to CBS News, instructed to not share their knowledge of police tactics with the public in exchange for access. Tweeting was also banned. As in Miami, ‘pool’ reporters were given protective gear (surely this has to be one of the most bizarre aspects of embed gigs, the sartorial prepping for a forceful action against civilians while you ‘tag-team’ with the police.)

From LA Weekly‘s Occupy LA blog:

Gregory said on air yesterday that pool elite will be outfitted in special protective clothing before the raid. They’ll be notified an hour before police dive in, and won’t be allowed to phone home with their juice until the eviction is over.

More bizarre still: Reporters in the pool will have to submit their entire ‘pool reports’ to the wire (City News Service) before any news outlet can post an exclusive. This is supposed to make the LAPD’s restrictive approach fair for all non-pool outlets – but ironically just gives the brave embedded bloggers and rubberneckers on the sidewalk the clear advantage.The whole thing smacks of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s obsession with having the Occupy experience turn out swimmingly in his harmonious kingdom – and of City Hall and the LAPD’s utter incomprehension of media in the 21st century.

Back to the FTAA, especially from a personal vantage point. What took me to Miami was the same impulse that brought so many to convergences actively resisting the IMF-ization of the world and visibly demonstrating alter-models to that destructive process. I participated in the anti-WEF convergence in 2002 in New York, and before Miami in 2003, I had worked with the Porto Alegre Indymedia at the World Social Forum in Brazil. The anti-FTAA convergence seemed like the kind of place that needed eyes and lenses, and as a film student it was unquestionable to me that I would join the Indymedia efforts there. I worked as a videographer using my own equipment, and we would leave our tapes to get logged and edited. It was laborious, round-the-clock work, and that was after coming indoors to the media warehouse after facing riot police lines and tear gas.

Calling them ‘trade agreements’ made them seem so innocuous. The kind of militarized response to a convergence proved what kind of violence is behind these models of extraordinarily concentrated capital. Our tagline to the film was ’the documentary with an $8.5 million security budget.’ I remember we were raided twice by the police in conjunction with the FBI. And I’m talking about a media space where reporting and a documentary were being produced being turned into a crime scene.

It was a tense national period. George W. Bush was president and he’d invaded and incapacitated two countries in two years. His brother Jeb was Florida state governor. Locally the police chief Timoney was notorious for quite literally smashing protest. He openly boasted about it to television networks.

The legacy of the ‘Miami model’ is that even the most obvious forms of dissent—marches, gatherings, signs, puppets—rang a national security alarm for police and city officials. They banned the assembly of more than seven people. This county was basically telling the United States, ‘The constitution doesn’t count. We say you can’t be together in groups of more than seven.’

It was not my first experience of ‘unprovoked’ police pepper spray, as I have written about here and elsewhere. I was attacked with pepper spray by police at the WEF and it landed me in the hospital (I eventually developed hypothermia and had to be separately treated for that). But it was the first time I saw someone get Tasered. An undercover police officer Tasered someone in the crowd not far from me. The young man was immediately immobilized and writhing in pain on the concrete. The police indiscriminately fired rubber-coated steel bullets and ‘bean bag’ rounds. In some of our footage you can see officers essentially emptying rounds onto people.

It was also my first time getting kettled. As I told Lennard, downtown Miami is built on a grid structure, so in terms of city planning it’s almost a gift to law enforcement. They kettled protesters, unembedded press, everyone together into giant squares and would push into them and beat people severely with batons. During all this there were helicopters overhead nonstop, and at one point we saw military tanks. I was carrying a press card with me and filmed from the riot police line at one point, but they were so heavily suited and helmeted I couldn’t see any of their eyes.

What struck me about the reaction—what struck everyone at the time who was watching closely—was the level of coordinated, escalated, militarized, and overpowering police reaction. Their presence was visually stunning and enough to create a desert out of downtown Miami. It was deserted in expectation of this huge ‘clash’ when in reality, the numbers of police to protesters was ghastly. You can see it in the footage too: a mass of black Kevlar against defenseless bodies.

The similarities with Occupy mobilizations strike me as the following: ready and casual use of chemical weapons (most recently the officer who deployed pepper spray point-blank in students’ faces at Davis), rubber-coated steel bullets, and other battleground weaponry. The pre-emptive nature of several cities ‘suiting up’ their police squads before an Occupy encampment or action has even happened is also in tune with the Miami model. The widespread use of undercover agents. The unprovoked raids on collectives—as I mentioned there were FBI raids on media spaces in Miami.

But there are differences, too: there is a longer history of post-9/11 militarism and domestic surveillance. Most importantly, the marginalized anti-capitalist activism of the past decade, going as far back as Seattle, has now become far more difficult to marginalize. The recession was a catalyst for that, but people have been left with fewer and fewer options but to create and expand those alter-models for themselves. And as more people get involved, more people are watching. The demonization—I’m talking about total news spin (see how that works in this on-air police apologia by a local LA anchor as a photographer is beaten)—of activists is still prevalent but getting harder to do. (In Miami we’d face tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets from riot police in the street, then watch the television coverage spin that into a narrative of police saving besieged downtown from the mayhem of angry, violent mobs.)

The coordinated nature of Occupy crackdowns has been insufficiently investigated. We are still learning more and more about how DHS is involved with these nationwide blitzes, but by and large very few journalists and editors are challenging the dominant narrative. Disarming the police is not even discussed. The ‘clash’ narrative—as though militarized police forces and unarmed civilians can be equalized—is still prevalent in headline coverage. Police acquittals after major onslaughts (such as paid or administrative leave for Captain Bologna in NY) are largely unchallenged by the press.

_____

UPDATE: The Associated Press reports that the Bahrain government has hired John Timoney, former Miami Police Chief (2003-2010). Timoney will ‘head a team of law enforcement advisers from the U.S. and Britain,’ adding another global layer to the twisted saga of coordinated executive police and Homeland Security action in the wake of Occupy.

A commenter also reminded me of former Colonial Police Officer Ian Henderson, known as the ‘butcher of Bahrain’ in the Gulf states (but only after sweeping up the title ‘torturer-in-chief’ in Kenya). As head of the security services and director of intelligence Henderson ‘gathered around him the kind of British dogs of war, mercenaries, whose guns and electric shock equipment are for hire to anyone who will pay the price.’

I haven’t lived full-time in this city for several years but know it more intimately than nearly any other East Coast city. When I first became a tax-paying DC resident the fired-up Taxation Without Representation license plates on vehicles became, well, personal. Taxes are high and largely feed the needs of commuters flooding in and out of the ‘Beltway’ city rather than serving the majority of District denizens who are largely and unsurprisingly non-white and poor. The number of homeless people is staggering. Broken roads and pot holes are the stuff of legend. The public school system is at best controversial and at worse derided. Gang-related violence has rivaled Los Angeles statistics, ‘crime-deterrence’ programs once included checkpoints in immigrant communities, and for the entirety of the ’90s the city was referred to as the ‘murder capital’ of the U.S.

Since Occupy DC began the alter-tagline has become Representation Through Occupation. It was nearly surreal to pull up to the site/sight of a tent city in a District which is the near-perfect symbol of political resignation, aberrations of power, and local alienation.

But potential political empowerment can’t afford romanticism either. Like the city itself, this is an Occupy with its fair share of internal strife, alternately described as ‘creative’ or ‘dysfunctional’ depending on whom you ask and when you ask it. One observer told me drug abuse and prostitution are major issues. So is violence, and because of the large presence of the homeless community there are concerns that untreated mental instability will give way to serious and life-endangering acts. Class rifts run deep. Some African-American members don’t feel like they are being listened to or given an equal footing.

Organizers told me the park is considered a national park, and the mobilization has been thus far left standing rather than raided or razed like many other cities (not that people unduly trust the police or mayoral politics, but the relative détente does put the focus on every day problems that need fixing rather than a heightened existential crisis like at many other encampments).

McPherson Square: ‘Owing to its proximity to the White House, it is also the site of political rallies and falls on the path of various protest marches.’ No kidding.

An equestrian statue of James Birdseye McPherson in the middle of the square.

Thanks to my mother, they’ll never, ever need to list Persian pistachios as a Needs of the Occupiers.

The best-placed water fountain in Washington, D.C.

The growing (and organized) library. The book titled Love was not a cheeseball placement prop for this photo.

Making these….

Out of these.

Occupy DC is the fourth fifth Occupy city I’ve visited since OWS began, and the most visibly busy. People never stopped working, even with fewer daytime attendance on the day before a national holiday.

Becky, originally from Occupy Memphis, on media duty at Occupy DC. ‘We drove in this morning and we’ll be here for a while.’

The Occupied Times: ‘Waking up from the American dream.’

These levers used to raise the tents and protect them from moisture and the cold were really impressive—

—and equally if not more impressive, these solar panels.

(‘George with a Gas Mask’ from F’NRAD)

An anaphoric Twitter-essay.

For the health and safety of UC-Davis students we deployed chemical weapons at point-blank range three times all over their bodies and faces.

For the health and safety of Egypt’s elections we killed 35 people including a 13-year old child, and blinded several civilians.

For the health and safety of Zucotti Park we conducted an overnight raid gassing and beating civilians and destroying everything in sight.

For the health and safety of Oakland we sent two anti-war veterans to the hospital with a ruptured spleen and a speech-robbing head injury.

For the health and safety of UC-Berkeley students we charged with batons into their ribs, intestines, and heads until hospitalization.

For the health and safety of Egyptian democracy we manufactured Pennsylvania tear gas and Italian 12ga bullets to pierce their bodies.

For the health and safety of American democracy we conducted a nationwide assault on encampments in coordination with Homeland Security.

For the health and safety of Seattle’s people we gassed an octogenarian woman in the face.

For the health and safety of privately-owned shrubbery we sent helmeted riot police to destroy collectively-made tent communities.

For the health and safety of Egypt we blinded its young men.

For the health and safety of our claims to objectivity we rearranged narratives about ‘clashes’ between the armed versus the unarmed.

For the health and safety of Egyptian activists we looked to the American example of health and safety standards for treating activists.

For the health and safety of American academia we placed Harvard Yard under 24-hour lockdown and surveillance.

For the health and safety of public education we became university chancellors, joined corporate bank boards, and drowned students in debt.

For the health and safety of Egypt’s revolution created a generation of political prisoners awaiting military tribunals.

For the health and safety of all New Yorkers we trashed a library.

For the health and safety of all Egyptians we dragged dead bodies into a trash heap.

For the health and safety of our sidewalks we arrested those standing on them during encampment raids.

For the health and safety of American journalism we barred, arrested, or beat any press not approved or embedded with the police.

For the health and safety of the voting elections to come we have created the funerals to come.

For the health and safety of the electorate we will create an atmosphere of so much fear that voting will appear like safety.

For the health and safety of chemically sprayed Davis students we scared them from speaking to press or threatened expulsion if they did.

For the health and safety of the United States we will only decry militarized violence used to crush dissent if it belongs to our enemies.

For the health and safety of our fragile authority.

In ‘Here’s What Attempted Co-option of OWS Looks Like‘ Glenn Greenwald slammed the disingenuous and immoral ‘Occupy Congress’ effort to siphon the energy, labor, mass appeal, and success of the growing Occupy mobilization into electoral and presidential support. I want to make it clear that I support actual SEIU custodial workers—last week I signed a pledge saying I would respect and help mobilize for their strike at Harvard and not cross picket lines, though a settlement with the University has since been reached—even as I join in the outcry against their hierarchical, co-opting leadership. I’m quoting at length because of the urgency and research (for anyone having slept through the last three years) behind this:

Having SEIU officials — fresh off endorsing the Obama re-election campaign — shape, fund, dictate and decree an anti-GOP, pro-Obama march is about as antithetical as one can imagine to what the Occupy movement has been. And pretending that the ongoing protests are grounded in the belief that the GOP is the party of the rich while the Democrats are the party of the working class is likely to fool just about nobody other than those fooled by that already. The strength and genius of OWS has been its steadfast refusal to (a) fall into the trap that ensnared the Tea Party of being exploited as a partisan tool and (b) integrate itself into the very political institutions which it’s scorning and protesting.

I disagree with the prevailing wisdom that OWS should begin formulating specific legislative demands and working to elect specific candidates. I have no doubt that many OWS protesters will ultimately vote and even work for certain candidates — and that makes sense — but the U.S. desperately needs a citizen movement devoted to working outside of political and legal institutions and that is designed to be a place of dissent against it. Integrating it into that system is a way of narrowing its appeal and, worse, sapping it of its unique attributes and fear-generating potency.

Beyond that, and more important, does SEIU think that people will just ignore these key political facts? How does anyone think these protesters will be convinced that it’s exclusively the GOP — and not the Democratic Party and the Obama WH — who “protect the rich” when: Wall Street funded the Democrats far more than the GOP in the 2008 election; the Democrats’ key money man, Charles Schumer, is one of the most devoted Wall Street servants in the country; Obama empowered in key positions Wall Street servants such as Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Bill Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and an endless roster of former Goldman officials; JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has been dubbed “Obama’s favorite banker” after Obama publicly defended his post-bailout $17 million bonus; the President named the CEO of GE to head his jobs panel; the DCCC and DSCC exist to ensure the nomination of corporatist candidates and Blue Dogs whose political worldview is servitude to the lobbyist class; the Democratic President, after vocally urging an Age of Austerity, tried very hard to usher in cuts to Social Security and an increase in the age for Medicare eligibility; and the Obama administration has not only ensured virtually no accountability for the rampant Wall Street fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, but is actively pressuring New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and others to agree to a woefully inadequate settlement to forever shield banks from the consequences of their pervasive mortgage fraud.

(Photo by South/South.)

This piece I wrote was published today in The New Inquiry. I am reposting it here with permission.

One of the most heated aspects of the Occupy mobilizations—from the Occupy Wall Street mothership to Occupy Boston (the base of my own direct observation) to Occupy Oakland (arguably the worst police onslaught thus far)—is their relationship or non-relationship to the police. Before launching a critique on that matter I wish to present two excerpts, one by a preacher in 1963 and another by a physician in 2011. It is very important that I mention their upstanding professions first, because of the troubling occurrence (and sometimes, though not always, establishment appropriation) of the anarchists versus everybody else. That this discourse is so recurrent in the shadow of a hawkish, conservative Democratic presidency is no great surprise, but rarely do we stop and seriously reflect on what this cleavage means about how we make sense of ourselves as a body-politic. Physicians and the clergy are emblems of care and conscientiousness in polite society, while ‘anarchists’ in the dominant lingo imply a shadowy group of subversives (usually men, usually white, usually angry), so it is from this intersection of seriousness of aims and moral purpose, regardless of the dictates of polite society, that I want to read Occupy and law enforcement. Neither letter writer has ever publicly avowed himself or herself an ‘anarchist’ in the definition of the dominant lingo, and neither is a white male.

This is Dr. Martin Luther King on the police in Letter from Birmingham Jail, written on 16 April, 1963 from his jail cell and addressed to eight fellow clergymen:

I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping ‘order’ and ‘preventing violence.’ I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handing the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather ‘nonviolently’ in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: ‘The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.’

They have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. The greatest treason is to do the right deed for the wrong reason. One would be hard-pressed to find one police blitz on an Occupy mobilization that could be described as “nonviolent” but these words from Dr. King and T. S. Eliot (of all people!) still read truthful, plausible, and importantly, morally logical. They get to the heart of the fallacy of good cop/blue shirt versus bad cop/white shirt, as if the role that the police play is contingent on circumstance or even personality and not an oath to enforce civil and penal law by the power invested in them by authoritative owners of property.

Here is a letter by Dr. Rupya Marya, a doctor whose former patient Charles Hill was killed on the Civic Center platform by BART police over Fourth of July weekend this year, just five months after the police killing of Oakland resident Oscar Grant. Her letter on why she joined the BART protests bears reading entirely but here’s a brief takeaway:

Last month, I learned that one of my former patients Charles Hill was shot and killed by BART police. Per the police, he was armed with a bottle and a knife and had menacing behavior. Per eye witnesses, he was altered and appeared to be intoxicated but did not represent a lethal danger. I remember Charles vividly, having taken care of him several times in the revolving door which is the health care system for the people who do not fit neatly into society. Charles was a member of the invisible class of people in SF—mentally ill, homeless and not reliably connected to the help he needed. While I had seen him agitated before and while I can’t speak to all of his behavior, I never would have described him as threatening in such a way as to warrant the use of deadly force. We often have to deal with agitated sometimes even violent patients in the hospital. Through teamwork, tools and training, we have not had to fatally wound our patients in order to subdue them. I understand the police are there to protect us and react to the situation around them, but I wonder why the officer who shot Charles did not aim for the leg if he felt the need to use a gun, instead of his vital organs. I wonder if he possessed other training methods to subdue an agitated man with a knife or bottle.

I feel this situation quite deeply. It is hard to watch our civil servants (police) brutally handle a person and their body when i spend my time and energy as a civil servant (physician) honoring the dignity of that person, regardless of their race or social class, their beliefs or their affiliations. I know it is not my job—nor the police’s job—to mete out justice or judgment of a person’s worthiness. It is also hard because Charles has no voice, no one to speak for him now that he is gone. It would be easy to let this slide and move on with our busy lives, as we all struggle to make ends meet in this expensive city during a recession.

Through teamwork, tools and training, we have not had to fatally wound our patients in order to subdue them. Charles has no voice, no one to speak for him now that he is gone. Dr. Marya’s testimony to the practicalities of physicians’ Hippocratic oath—that they will practice medicine ethically and soundly—is revealing. A physician’s duty is to heal without doing harm, and that extends even to the most marginalized and vulnerable classes. She also speaks to police in a horizontal fashion, from one civil servant to another; it’s a perceptive move not because she is saying that police and doctors play the same role in society but because the fractured bodies of persons in police custody take up a wholly different social meaning than they do in physicians’ care. Physicians may “serve and protect” (the universal police motto) but they cannot legally enact force on their patients as the police legally can (and do) on those they apprehend. This is a crucial distinction.

Consensus with police regimes

I will comment at length on two pieces by Jeremy Kessler called “The Police and the 99% Percent” and “An Open Letter to the Men and Women of the New York City Police Department.” Before doing so, I note some of the exchange that has preceded my writing: a response to Kessler by Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clovers, and Annie McClanahan was published on the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kessler’s response was generously published on the LA Review’s blog. Willie Osterweil responded to both Kessler and Bernes, Clovers, and McClanahan on his blog, Wasted Ideology. My purpose in writing is not to respond to Kessler but to problematize his worst assertions, draw attention to an endemic public-police dilemma at the heart of the Occupy mobilizations (unlike Kessler, I do not refer to them as merely protests—a protest to what or whom?), and create some openings to how we might collectively sort through the dilemma through both theoretical and practical judgment.

Beyond the extended rebuttals to Kessler’s original pieces, published on the n+1 magazine site, it is worth noting that the eponymous article on the police and the “99 percent” is one of the few pieces posted on the nascent Occupy Police website. Further, the sudden appearance of Occupy Police on the web a few days ago (on the heels of the national day against police brutality), the managers of the Occupy Wall Street Twitter account gave it their endorsement:

Also, n+1 magazine, in addition to publishing Kessler’s pieces, retweeted this police sighting that unless they say otherwise appears approving:

I have no further information on Occupy Police than its own website, a few tweets (the Twitter account writer has mentioned that s/he is “an advocate for homeless people here in Boston, and we have sympathizers from BPD”) so without any further identifying data on the site’s managers nor their ambitions I choose to read the mystery it produces as less a product of bad publicity than circumspect goals until proven otherwise. I am not suggesting that appealing to cops to lay down their uniforms and arsenal of weapons and join the mobilization is at all undesirable. However, since I have no other fact-based knowledge about this particular entity or its ambitions I will comment on the text they promote—Kessler’s—which is readily available.

In Kessler’s first piece, called “Police and the 99 Percent,” he begins with infamous cases of recent police brutality during Occupy Wall Street, such as Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna (already under investigation for previous claims of brutality) pepper-spraying young women in a police net cage (he has since been docked 10 vacation days) and the unprecedented and violent Brooklyn Bridge arrests of over 700 people (a mass class action civil suit has been launched). He contrasts this with the news about JP Morgan Chase’s gift of $4.6 million to the NYPD to ‘“strengthen security in the Big Apple.”’ Kessler acknowledges what “any good American protester knows about the police: they’re bought and they’re brutal.”

Despite this nod to the monied and armed nature of U.S. police departments, in the next paragraph Kessler takes it upon himself to prescribe what the Occupy mobilizations should do. Namely, they:

should not be too eager to escalate confrontation with the police. The tedious transformation of substantive political protest into protest against police abuse of protesters at times can be ideologically appropriate and tactically useful. But unlike student, neighborhood, and even civil rights protests, whose participants generally present themselves as a conscientious minority oppressed by larger forces—particularly police power—the Occupiers’ central claim is that they are the ‘99 percent,’ the moral majority of the nation.

By including police in the “99 percent,” Kessler reduces class antagonism to a quantitative division and props up two myths:

Myth #1: Police participation [if we stay deliberately blind to what this even means] will increase Occupy’s longevity and diversity.

Making a miscalculation about “99 percent” as literal numbers rather than a picture of dissensus allows Kessler to suggest that “police might even become participants, taking a large step toward confirming the radical 99 percent claim.” In his words:

Such an ambitious recipe calls for two ingredients that more targeted protests don’t—longevity and diversity. The police who currently ring the park could provide both.

His point about longevity is a straw man because he fails to produce any argument connecting police participation (active duty? retired? uniformed? undercover? he doesn’t say) to how long the occupations last. The reality-based fact is that each and every police crackdown on encampments have led to soaring numbers, from New York to Cleveland to Chicago to Oakland to Philadelphia (I documented the crackdown on Occupy Boston here, and as predicted, participation has grown considerably since).

Kessler continues:

The absence of the police themselves from the Occupation chips away at the 99 percent claim that is central to the movement’s populism. Here, the first problem—of police power—produces something of a vicious circle. To the extent that police power limits the protesters mainly to the young and the nomadic, individual police will find few protesters with whom they can identify.

I deliberately limit myself to Kessler’s claptrap logic to debunk his claims, but let’s stop and ask: where does he get “populism” from? Rather than attributing the relatively young median age-range (and even this is arguable) to the class consciousness of young people and students who have played by the rules only to be discarded and divested of aspirational mobility or even dignity commensurate with their education or work experience, Kessler merely resorts to the idea that police can “identify” with older, more stable people. He does say that the Local 100 Transit Workers Union joining Occupy Wall Street suggests “more middle-class participation” but fails to mention that the union workers went to court not wanting to bus protesters rounded up by the NYPD, its president stating “TWU Local 100 supports the protesters on Wall Street and takes great offense that the mayor and NYPD have ordered operators to transport citizens who were exercising their constitutional right to protest—and shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place.”

Kessler’s follow-up pieces make no mention of major contradictions to his claims about the supposedly too young, too aimless, and too nomadic occupiers versus the great water bearers of social stability, the police. For example, thousands of observers of the police incursion on Occupy Boston’s second encampment watched as a line of riot police with the Special Operations unit of the Boston Police mowed down elderly members of Veterans for Peace that stood between the masses of people and the police. But instead of illuminating these moments of highly charged political polarization, Kessler papers them over in favor of flimsy promotions of cooperation. He manages to take the one thing about Occupy Wall Street and its sister Occupies that nearly everyone agrees on, namely its highly broad social and economic base, and turn it into a weird apologia for why more police haven’t joined the movement. He even concedes that “there is something boring and obvious in this sociological calculus” but rather than heed his own assessment about himself, he turns it into a conclusion: “But it is the only hope of the Occupation.”

Myth #2: It is important to court the police, despite the objections of “many anarchists at the center of the Occupation [who] have no love for the authorities.” (This is connected to a corollary, as pointed to previously.) The mobilizations are responsible for keeping violence at bay.

The most striking thing about this visionless pronouncement is the loud and notably present absence of any attempts to grapple with race, gender, or class. Why on earth would people of color and immigrants and poor people and women and service workers and queers and the disabled and any other marginalized majority/sizeable minority not wish to “court” the police? This is a profoundly important void.

In his open letter to the members of the New York Police Department, Kessler displays the sycophancy to power that one would expect from the police themselves on the difference between modestly behaved protesters and angry mobs:

As in any crowd, there are some who make the lives of police personnel harder than they ought to be. But as the police assigned to the Park over the last month can attest, the vast majority of protesters are peaceful, passionate, and good-humored. They have come to the park not to wreck property or insult hardworking citizens. They have come to the park because they believe in a fair shake, and know they haven’t gotten it.

This is sheer and reckless groveling, the kind of distortion one expects from the dominant press that for weeks either ignored (or in the case of the New York Times, mocked) Occupy Wall Street until the spectacle of police brutality became so great that they either had to cover the mobilization or become irrelevant.

American citizens have a right to assemble in public in order to communicate with one another and with their elected leaders.

If Kessler believes the Occupy mobilizations are about seeking redress with elected officials, I have fear I have nothing further to add as far as he’s concerned.

In responding to the authors at the LA Review who artfully invalidated his “99 Percent” piece, Kessler writes:

They incorrectly state that my piece advocated a strategy of ‘police compliance.’ It did not. Rather, I spoke to a very specific question: to what extent should the Occupation—circa early October—actively seek to escalate police violence.

Again, we are reverted back to police logic itself about the aims of Occupy, not the finely-tuned and process-oriented way the mobilizations have grappled with difficult questions about expansion of space, growth of numbers, greater participatory reach, etc. and crucially, how to escape violence. If there is one point Kessler appears to willfully dismiss, it’s this one.

At this point, his response to the LA Review authors descends into outright offensiveness:

At the Occupy Philadelphia protest, we have recently seen how calls for violence by an ill-positioned minority retard rather than energize the movement.

A commenter on the piece writes: “What on earth is this about? I ask as a participant in Occupy Philly who has seen nothing of the sort.” In stark contrast to Kessler’s puzzling claim, Occupy Philly produced its own Statement from the Occupiers Protesting Police Brutality. Not only is the statement rightfully defensive and protectionist about police repression, it even outlines community demands on police officers and condemns the “treatment by the police of Occupy community members in New York City, Boston, Denver and other cities across the country” as it suffers its own egregious abuses:

• A personal apology to Occupy Philadelphia community member Deborah VonBerg for refusing to adequately investigate her sexual assault case; for ignoring her, for making her insignificant, and for giving her a reason not to trust anyone.

• An apology for the police brutality inflicted on Ian, Shane, and Kayla (Occupy Philadelphia community members) at a private, off-site event where they were beaten with batons, ridiculed, and unjustly detained by the police and for the bigoted behavior of the police officers involved.

• An apology to the family of Billy Panas, who was murdered by Officer Frank Tepper, who remains on desk duty.

• An apology for failing to adequately investigate, because of their transgender identity, the murders of Nizah Morris and Stacey Lee Blahnik.

In contrast to Kessler’s incomprehensible preamble on Occupiers seeking violence, note the verbal nature of Occupy Philly’s demand, even at the expense of sexual assaults and death in their communities: they are seeking an apology.

But what about violence in tactics police? What should occupiers do when confronted with incursions?

Here’s an account of outwitting police violence by Egyptian political revolutionaries in a statement of solidarity they sent to Occupy Wall Street.

We faced such direct and indirect violence, and continue to face it. Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities. […] Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

The activists use of the means to defend themselves were directly related to protection of occupations and spaces in the face of tear gas and live ammunition. Tear gas, “bean bag” bullets, and rubber-coated steel bullets were used in this week’s Occupy Oakland police assault, which Esquire called “a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration.”

(It’s also worth mentioning that I spent much of August in Cairo and only add that by all accounts, the nearly simultaneous torching of 99 police stations is still attributed to proxies of the Mubarak regime, and I have yet to locate one Egyptian who believes demonstrators could even manage to set them on fire in such a calculating and orchestrated way.)

Dissensus from police regimes

One of the most useful and succinct definitions about a relationship or non-relationship with police regimes has been contributed (but does not originate with) the contemporary French social theorist and labor historian Jacques Rancière, who I think will prove to be a crucial theorist for how we observe the rise of the current political mobilization that necessitates reclaiming space.

Politics stands in distinct opposition to the police. The police is a distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible) whose principle is the absence of void and of supplement.

What does this mean? For one, politics does not have a commonsensical meaning of politicians, citizenry, etc. Instead, Rancière defines politics as the distribution of the sensible. On the surface this may not appear to stray so far from the tepid one offered in millions of high school Government classes in the U.S., namely who gets what, when, and where. But where it diverges strongly is the element of partitioning space and roles.

Political dispute is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police, which causes it to disappear continually either by purely and simply denying it or by claiming political logic as its own. The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen.

Rancière’s contention is that what politics does is to claim and create a space. Crucially, that space is a reclaiming separate from the police. His essential argument is developed along Louis Althusser’s work on the police, arguably the most frequently cited principle on the police. Althusser, who was Rancière and Michel Foucault’s teacher (Rancière broke with him following the May 1968 worker-student rebellion), wrote that law enforcement works through interpellation, or “Hey, you there!” In Rancière’s notion of politics as a circulation or distribution of the sensible. “Hey, you there!” becomes “Move along! There’s nothing to see here!” The deflection from spaces or places not under the state’s “protection” (the “void” alluded to earlier) consists in “recalling the obviousness of what there is, or rather of what there is not.” Rather than viewing the Occupy mobilizations as ordinary denizens do—that it is a space that does and is—the state and its police proxy see it merely as a nullity (or defiance) of their care.

Politics (insert Occupy here for the same effect) consists in “transforming this space of ‘moving-along,’ of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens.” Politics refigures space, or what is to be done, to be seen, and to be named in it. If you have been to an Occupy in your city, regardless of a positive or negative experience, this is what you would have seen: a dispute over the circulation of space.

If politics, seen this way, is by its very nature a dispute, then its essence is dissensus. Dissensus doesn’t mean a clash of opinion or desire. Instead it points out the “gap in the sensible itself,” demonstrating worlds within worlds that were not meant to be seen. “It places one world in another,” and the way I read Rancière’s example of workers in a factory is that dissensus breaks down the traditional understanding of public and private. If a Wal-Mart worker expresses a cry of pain, for example, we might think of this cry as a private world. But:

The worker who puts forward an argument about the public nature of a ‘domestic’ wage dispute must demonstrate the world in which his argument counts as an argument and must demonstrate it as such for those who do not have the frame of reference enabling them to see it as one. Political argumentation is at one and the same time the demonstration of a possible world in which the argument could count as an argument, the construction of a paradoxical world that puts together two separate worlds.

One might pose a counter-argument: the police are part of us. We pay the police’s salary. Therefore, like all other civil servants, they work for us. (This is also summed up in the frequent chant, “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?”)

An anonymous Occupy Wall Street writer addresses this question head on: “Are cops part of the working class?”

Cops depend on wages and salaries like the rest of us—that is true. They might have a series of grievances against their ranking officers and the government.

But every cop knows that the moment they publicly sympathize with a people’s movement, or refuse to carry out repressive order, they will be out of work. They understand that part of their job is to stop the people from rising up.

Rank-and-file soldiers in the military, who typically serve only for a few years, have at several key historical moments defected, torn off their uniforms, and switched back to the workers’ side in large numbers. Professional police officers, who have chosen to join that institution of repression as their life’s work, almost never do.

Professional police officers, who have chosen to join that institution of repression as their life’s work, almost never switch back to the workers’ side in large numbers. Are there incidents of disobedience on the part of the professional police class? I can cite two. In February 2011, hundreds of cops marched into the Wisconsin State Capitol building to protest the anti-union bill, and were quoted as saying: “We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!”

More recently at Occupy Albany, cops defied an order to arrest hundreds at a publicly-owned park.

On a personal note, police in Iran have both tried to jail my cousin for taking part in protest and protected her from the Basij militias that beat her for showing up to an anti-establishment street demonstration. Police have both been friendly to me—in college one Korean officer sympathized with our cause of occupying a building in protest of our university’s business-military dealings with Israel and explained he took the job that he did to support his family and make a great living (around $74,000 annually, adjusted for inflation), and a black officer openly wept as he arrested us at that same occupation. I’ve also been hit, pushed, and pepper-sprayed by police so severely it landed me in the hospital.

But the greatest fault with exceptions-prove-the-rule argument (that individual police have interior lives, that they are human too, etc.) is that they again ask us to forget the socio-political role of the police. What may be ideal—”nice” police petting kittens, as seen in this Washington Post report on the heels of the Oakland assault—is not the reality or even the norm. Anecdotes such as these do not get to the heart of the politics-police separation that is embedded within the distribution of the sensible, seeable, and sayable. The appeal that the “police are not your friend” is shorthand for the constitution of our polity, handed down to us from Roman law and several centuries of coercive bondage, about enforcers of authoritative justice. Mike Davis has written on the Occupy mobilization: “My generation, trained in the civil rights movement, would have thought first of sitting inside the buildings and waiting for the police to drag and club us out the door; today, the cops prefer pepper spray and ‘pain compliance techniques.’” The severity of bodily harm and the discourses used to justify that harm may fluctuate from one generation to the next but the logical kernel remains intact.

What would police “involvement” even look like? Kessler doesn’t say, although he does write in his open letter, “We appeal to your conscience as men and women and to your sense of justice as American citizens. If you are ordered to disperse the Occupy Wall Street protesters, please refuse.” As I have outlined, professional police refusal is very rare in American history, though if Kessler were serious about his point that the police join the “99 percent” he may ask them to walk away from the job entirely.

Parenthetically, my argument does not extend to veterans and former military officers, who are known to join in sizeable numbers, but it is worth noting the Department of Defense directive on the authorized political activity of active duty officers. I have pulled a section of the directive that may apply to Occupy actions. Per section 4.1.2. the directive states that a member of the Armed Forces on active duty shall not:

4.1.2.5. Speak before a partisan political gathering, including any gathering that promotes a partisan political party, candidate, or cause.
4.1.2.10. March or ride in a partisan political parade.
4.1.2.11. Display a large political sign, banner, or poster (as distinguished from a bumper sticker) on a private vehicle.
4.1.2.12. Display a partisan political sign, poster, banner, or similar device visible to the public at one’s residence on a military installation, even if that residence is part of a privatized housing development.

Further, directives like Kessler’s would have us ignore what we explicitly know to be true about policing in the global North, just as the local municipalities and mayors they answer to decry civil disobedience. This includes:

Outright distortion, such as the NYPD blaming Occupy Wall Street for a rise in murders. The Gothamist writes: “Perhaps the flimsy excuse for an uptick in shootings stems from the NYPD suffering from a lack of esprit de corps. ‘Morale is as bad as I’ve ever seen it,” the president of the PBA tells the Daily News. Why? Take your pick of headlines: Rape Cops, ticket-fixing, flaking, Tony Bologna, racism.

The heavy surveillance of Occupy campsites.

Even before the stunning Oakland raids, police brutality charges at Occupy mobilizations across the United States.

A personal account by a young woman at Occupy Melbourne: Why I was ridden down by a horse and punched in the back of the head.

An account from a Baptist reverend at Occupy Melbourne: Physical violence only went one way.

Outside of Occupy proper, we would have to ignore rapes by police officers (at least four NYPD and two Chicago police officers in recent public memory), prisoner sexual abuse (most recently by the LAPD), and the fact that no charges were brought on the police who body-slammed a wheelchair-bound man.

We would also have to ignore the regular use of infiltration and sexual manipulation as a police tactic to break into activist circles.

Keeping the peace, “internally” or “externally,” and where we go from here

Kessler produces one anonymous, succinctly cop-hating person at Zuccotti Park who objects to outsourcing “peacekeeping” outside of the Occupy mobilization:

[A] handsome, dark-haired man in his mid-twenties, who has taken on an increasingly central role in the daily discussions, stated unequivocally, ‘I hate the police.’

This is at best a disingenuous move by the author, as the issue of whether or not to report “internal” crime to the police is a major source of (healthy) debate at nearly every Occupy I’ve followed. Kessler’s off-the-cuff dismissal shows an unwillingness to acknowledge that several worlds of what we might call social crime co-exist. We currently live in several social worlds at once, and violent crimes like rape and sexual assault are a hugely disconcerting part of even our alter-worlds. Since legal action following a sexual violation frequently relies on police reports, the option of police reporting absolutely belongs to the victim of that crime.

One illuminating and complicated personal account of this conundrum that I’ve come across is in one of Eileen Myles’s books, in which she recounts calling the cops on her “violent girlfriend” despite opposition to the police in the lesbian community and encouragement to work out problems privately “in ‘the community’”:

Some of this feeling I knew was about the ugly history of homos in America. Those famed police stings on gay bars. And anyone political (including myself) had been jailed on several occasions for civil disobedience. But this was violent crime and I had been the victim. But most of the angry people in the community were younger than me. They hadn’t been getting busted pre-Stonewall. So I smelled a rat. If any of them had a problem I felt certain that there was a ready system of privilege for them to draw upon—lawyers, family friends, people they went to college with, husbands and wives. None of these social networks were every publicly acknowledged in ‘the community.’ No one I knew had ever gone to jail for drugs for instance. Meanwhile US prisons are loaded with black and Hispanic men and women who in many cases did a lot less buying and selling of drugs than my friends. This is in fact the American way—and meanwhile I was being blamed for being so stupid (as in lower class) as to find myself in a violent situation, to not have known it inherently. In my subsequent years of thinking it over I wondered if anyone actually believed that lesbians were not entitled to the use of the court system, the police department that had worked so well for me, the hospitals and schools. Did they really believe we were supposed to reinvent these institutions on our own?

Myles’s account points to the complexities of internal/external divisions that marginalized communities and Occupy mobilizations are contending with. Sexual assaults and rapes do occur, and frequently, and no liberal, leftist, radical, etc. community is immune from them. By all accounts, Occupy mobilizations are having these debates, some more successfully than others, and it remains to be seen how they choose to evolve. But they need to be given that chance. People in each disciplined, process-oriented mobilization decide this together. Can several truths about the police co-exist? I believe so. It is possible to be protected by police, just as it is possible to be brutalized. But that police are emboldened by legal authority to enact force—and in the United States this includes lethal, militarized weapons of war—makes the police, to put it in colloquial idiom, “not your friend.”