I finally made it down to Occupy Wall Street today. I've been trying to find the time to go down to Zucotti Park, to check out an actual outpouring of American dissent, but I've been much too busy working for a living. My schedule as a freelance cameraman, musician, and husband (soon-to-be father of twins) has made it impossible for me to make the trip down to the designated protest center of American leftist activism thus far. But this afternoon I finally found the time to venture down there with my wife and a friend to see what all the fuss is about.
First, I have to briefly describe a telephone conversation I had with a friend who works in the banking industry about Occupy Wall Street two days ago. We were in college together, we were amateur agitators together, we protested the perceived evils of capitalism together. In college in the early 90's, we sat shirtless on a freeway in San Diego playing bongo drums, in collusion with five hundred passionate activists blocking traffic for five hours until the SWAT team came and forcibly removed us. We were protesting a fee increase in tuition at UCSD and demanding that the President of our university explain his actions publicly to the student body and the media. On many other occasions, we took to the streets, marched, chanted, disrupted business, and occupied student buildings, demanding justice. Our causes seem scattered at best today. We were angry about arbitrary University fee hikes. We were outraged about the Rodney King verdict and demanded that our school officials make a public statement of dissent. At the drop of a hat, we organized rallies and concerts and marches. We were privileged university students using our free time, blanketed in the knowledge of our safety from harassment and violence to make our voices heard.
So yesterday I spoke to my old protest buddy about Occupy Wall Street. He told me that he went down there after work, walking the few blocks down from his job at a major financial institution with a colleague. His impression was that these were a bunch of trust fund kids, a gaggle of professional protesters who were there for the party, for the spotlight, for the food, for the drums, to meet members of the opposite sex, to get laid, to rant, to play bongo drums. They had no real political agenda, no clear goal, no stated purpose. He felt they were dangerous, irresponsible, useless burning man types. His reaction surprised me, but I hadn't yet been down there so I reserved my judgment till I had a chance to see for myself.
He was right and he was wrong. Occupy Wall Street is a spontaneous cry for attention. It is a collective voicing of American discontent with no clear focus, no concensus on policy or process, no leadership, and no hierarchy of purpose. It is an unorganized outpouring of liberal frustration. If you were to ask every person holding a sign what his or her underlying philosophy is, the unifying thread might be something along the lines of "Capitalism in America is not working." And this vagueness, this lack of clear focus is what gives this protest its power. No one is holding the reins. No one is in charge. People are just simply angry, sad, and disillusioned. And we live in a country that allows us to voice our protest with very little risk of serious consequences. But to say that we have the unconditional freedom to protest in this country is to give much too much credit to the police.
I have taken part in protests in New York before, once at the outbreak of the war in Iraq, when 500,000 protesters attempted to march up Fifth Avenue. The police cordoned off every block, forcing people into crowded holding pens. Policemen on horseback rode into crowds with no escape route, forcing them to push down barricades and be arrested. I was standing with a group of people when we were charged head-on by a horse, forcing me to run onto a parked car to avoid being crushed. A woman who was with me, eight months pregnant and fearing for her safety, had to quickly run to the subway and go home.
The situation in Zucotti Park right now is no different. The police are firmly in charge. Make no mistake, if you make a wrong move, they will take you down. The whole happy, hippy, freaky protest is reigned in on all sides by barricades and cops with guns. If you stop too long to look or take a photo, a cop yells at you to keep walking. Since when is it against the law to stand on a sidewalk?
Which brings me back to my impression of the protest; I love it! Finally people are going out of their way to poke a hole in the bogus charade that consumerism works and the market will take care of everything. People don't really know why they are unhappy, or what to do about it, but they know that something is very wrong. And it's not just trustafarians, anarchist hobos or burning man travelers looking for the next good drum circle. It is people from every walk of life, representing every level of education and employment who are deeply dissatisfied with the deal we've been given here in America. Granted, there are a lot of lost souls looking for a movement to grab onto. You have to have the time to afford being arrested if you actually march outside of the park. But in the park, there are all types.
Some are angry at the finance industry, the cycle of consumerism and credit that leads down the dark hole of unmanageable debt and despair. Some are mystified by the endless cycle of military spending and the wars created and continued to justify it at the expense of education and social services. Some are outraged by multi-million dollar bonuses being awarded to the heads of corporations in the same years that thousands of jobs are being cut. Some resent bank bailouts and the whole "too big to fail" mindfuck. Some want solar power, wind power, an end to nuclear arms, whatever. A lot of people are just there to say fuck you to the Tea Party. Whatever the reasons, Americans are actually getting off of their asses, taking their eyes off their computer/tv/phone screens, meeting in public and rallying together as a force for liberal thought.
This is a wonderful thing. I have no idea if anything will come of it. My feeling is that it will basically become a "People's Park" of New York, a perpetual carbuncle on the ass of capitalist America. I think Bloomberg would never risk the ire that would come from forcibly stopping the party. And I think America needs a lot more carbuncles of this kind. In my native country of France, people protest every single time anything happens that they disagree with. They prostest way too much. They shut down the country, they cripple transportation, all to get their point across. It is a huge pain in the ass, but it works. We could stand to take a page from the French when it comes to protesting. Though if it actually effects change remains to be seen. Maybe the kids who met at OWS go on to form PACS, to lobby their congresspeople, or to run for office. Maybe the tourist from Nebraska who stops there on her way to the 9/11 memorial with her family gains the courage to oppose the dominant viewpoint of her high school or her church. Whatever the outcome, it is a beautiful thing to behold.
Because of some inane law, there is no amplification of any kind allowed at Zucotti Park.(Where is that law when it comes to car alarms, or car stereos blasting shitty music outside my window at 3AM?) As a result of this, there is a corner of the park where people take turns voicing their agendas at a normal speaking voice, line by line, and their statements are then echoed by a throng of bystanders, effectively amplifying their statements in an ancient ritual. The process is enough to send chills down the spine. The truth will out.
If you live in New York, go down there. If you don't, occupy your own Wall Street or Wallmart or Sesame Street or any other street, real or imagined, where money is not the answer.
I've been making and collecting music for the past twenty years or so. This means that most of the creative output of the musicians in my world, my friends and collaborators, is represented by shiny little discs. My music and that of my peers exists exactly in the era between the time when the CD first became the standard, and the present time, in which digital media is king and the CD is on the verge of obsolescence. So I have a big collection of CD's, and they mean a lot to me. Each one is a little time capsule and a magical window into a world that existed with perfect technicolor clarity. For me, the entire CD is part of the package, including the CD itself, the front and back cover, the booklet, the spine, all of it. So it a lttle painful to separate CDs into two parts.
And since the advent of the CD in the early 90's came at the expense of the vinyl record, many of the artists in my collection had a very ambivalent and even adversarial relationship with the CD as a medium. As they started to become the standard, CDs were considered evil and insidious by indie rockers, sonic purists, and hipsters (as they still are.) They were considered a ploy by the music industry to justify raising prices. Most featured an overabundance of packaging, making them extremely wasteful as well as over-priced. And compared to vinyl records, which emphasized the low end and added a level of compression and warmth, CDs were bright, sparkly, and cold. This Drive Like Jehu CD, called Yank Crime, came out in 1991. The only thing written on it, besides the record label info, is "CD's REALLY FUCKING BLOW."
