While visiting Seattle last fall, I observed the Occupy Seattle for a couple of days. I thought it would be interesting to see what was going on in that city's setting where riots had erupted in 1999 during the World Trade Organization meeting. It was.
One thing I noticed at Occupy Seattle was a particular mask--several of them, actually--being worn by some of the Occupyers. You may have noticed it in a photo or two taken during the coverage of that movement last year. The face depicted on the mask resembles the classic Greek drama/comedy symbol. It is male face with a thinly styled handlebar moustache, presenting a rather bizarre plastic smile.
My later research revealed the visage to be a representation of some guy named Guy Fawkes. Guy who?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film)
Guy Fawkes was a fanatic Catholic terrorist who almost succeeded in blowing up the House of Lords in the year of our Lord 1605. http://www.britannia.com/history/g-fawkes.html
England and Scotland had been all asunder over religion at that time. The great divisive issue of the day was whether the Protestants were to have the run of Great Britain, or whether the Catholics could muscle their way back into power after the 1603 death of Queen Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth's father, the infamous King Henry VIII, had brought the religious contentions to a boil during his reign (1507-1547.) His multiple marriage escapades, along with an independently brewing Protestantism in England, had severed the ecclesiastical bonds with the Roman church. Elizabeth I had sought, after her father's death, to stabilize the church of England by encouraging both strains of Christian religious devotion--the popish ceremony and the protestant emphasis on holiness.
According to David Starkey, http://acornonline.com/product.aspx?p=monarchy&sid, the accession of King James I after Elizabeth would manifest an even more Protestant direction for Great Britain. Certain extremists of the Catholic faction did not like this development one bit. So they decided to take manners into their hands with some strategically placed gunpowder fireworks.
Sound familiar? Very modern it was. This sort of thing has apparently been going on all along in human history, perhaps directly proportional to the pyrotechnic capabilities of each era.
In our time, what's alarming about the Occupy movement is this terrorist revolutionary undercurrent. Are they willing to identify their movement, and their tactics, with this Guy Fawkes guy? He was a terrorist, outright--caught red-handed on the night Nov 4, 1605, with a fuse to detonate a large gunpowder stash that had been gathered in a cellar chamber directly beneath Parliament in London.
Early IRA stuff it was, and Al Qaidaesque too.
Fawkes and his popish co-conspirators should have been taking their inspiration from the founder of their faith-- the Risen Savior-- instead of bullish church politics. And that goes for the protestants too. Damn their death-wielding tactics and machinations!
As for the Occupyers, they would do well to take their cues from the Prince of Peace, resurrected from being dead, instead of any violent revolutionary like that Guy guy. And I think Rev. Dr. King would agree if he were here.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress
Showing posts with label Occupy Seattle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Occupy Seattle. Show all posts
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Organizing the 9%
As much as the Occupy movement would aspire to represent 99% of the people, they can claim to persuasively echo the opinions and active strategies of...maybe 9%.
Although far more than nine percent of people have become disgruntled because Congress bails out the corporate cronies, and although far more than nine percent of folks are frustrated with ecological disasters and abuses that have been mismanaged through gov/corp collusion, and although far more than 9.1% of the people feel as if their labor and resources are being jerked around by the soulless machinations of greedy, outsourcing corporations, there are really only about nine percent of We the People who are willing to be associated with and directed by Occupation activists.
However, if the Occupyers could manage somehow to effectively represent, say, a mere 9% of the people, that is nine times as many as the 1% whose bank accounts they are trying to siphon. But their first major hurdle in that wealth redistribution quasi-socialist quest would be to get organized. That is no simple task, as I recently witnessed firsthand. In fact this whole movement will be a marathon of dedicated organizing if it is ever going to amount to anything besides a series of sign-wielding collective walks in the park.
At the stone staircase of the Vancouver Art Museum on Saturday and Sunday, I watched as a core group of intense activists initiated in their city what has become the Occupy movement's "achieving consensus" process. It is a tedious sequence of speaker/crowd interactivity that appears, from my observer perspective, laboious and perhaps somewhat self-defeating.
Nevertheless, the agenda-writing nucleus of organizers seemed quite intent on building consensus from their small activist cadre outward amongst the gathering legion of discontents. They wanted it done a certain way, at the risk of appearing, to an instant-breakfast world, disorganized.
The use of amplified sound through use of a microphone was a point of subtle contention among two factions of the the leader group. It took a few hours on Saturday morning as well as Sunday to work out the kinks. A speaker-call / crowd-repeat procedure that must have originated with the wallstreet cadre had already become dogma for some of the agenda-setting core, while other initiators among them obviously preferred the pragmatically loud use of the microphone. Technological enhancement uncovers undesirable bourgeois luxuries. Such subtle concessions to capitalist convenience can easily lead to domination of the gathered crowd by gifted orators, or "showboaters" as one humble speaker referred to them. Amplified rhetoric can enable, theoretically, opportunitstic demogogs to manipulate the assembled masses. Thus can the ideal of egalitarian democracy be undermined by silver-tongued soapboxers. Not good.
I observed with interest as a purist group within the agenda-setting core labored tediously to lay a foundation of simple unamplified call/response democratic consensus building. It was, let's face it, primitive, although I could surmise the solid ideologic basis for it. Over the course of two disjointed hours, however, the pragmatic faction was able to procedurally insert selective use of the microphone into the nascent consensus process. This distant listener thought the microphone use lent a definite improvement to their presentations.
By and by, the Vancouver Occupy agenda-setters were able to establish a sequence of procedures by which their two-hundred-or-so core of gathered faithful (while hundreds more of curious bystanders watched) could voice some procedural decisions about where this thing was headed. Past mid-afternoon on Sunday, I don't know what Occupy Vancouver did, but their inception was fascination for this detached observer.
I departed the scene several hours later, thinking it would be a long time before this movement accomplishes anything substantial. Leaderless democracy, which appears to be the gold standard among this movement's initiators, initially produces apparent chaos. At least that's the way it seemed to me as I witnessed the Occupy Vancouver public inception. What fundamental organization may have been established beneath that irresolute exterior, only time will tell.
After a dusky train ride with wife and son back to Seattle, I returned on nippy Monday morning, with journalistic curiosity, to the Occupy site in Westlake Park, downtown. Previously, I had witnessed parts of the Wednesday and Thursday daytime sessions there. The Seattle crowd seemed, to me, much scruffier and streetish than the intense Vancouverites. A rag-tag band of pierced, tattood occupyers hung out where the podium had been last week. They were meagerly holding on to this public square, insofar as it was possible amidst the gently ominous peripheral police presence. While most lingerers were milling around in apparent aimless expectation, an ameobic bundle of them languished near the low stone platform that had been the focal site of last week's rallying excitement. A pervasive attitude of don't let this magic moment slip away hung in the air like contraband smoke.
A plethora of handmade signs was constant, hundreds of them, in both Vancouver and Seattle, many of them quite clever. By mid-afternoon on Monday, I saw from my Starbucks perch a bearded Seattle protester with a large, neatly lettered green on white that read: PROSECUTE BANKSTERS. It was a distilled message that indicated what might become an actual judgemental plank of the emerging Occupy platform. This was the goal that I had heard a week or two ago, spoken by Michael Moore in an NPR interview.
Such an indictment would materialize only through a very long, drawn out campaign by the Occupyers.
Canadian columnist Conrad Black wrote insightfully in last Saturday's National Post:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/15/conrad-black-why-theyre-occupying-wall-street/
"Assessing blame is complicated. This (the wallstreet meltdown of '08 and its economic fallout) was not a case where an easily identifiable group committed monstrously illegal acts in the manner of Bernard Madoff....financiers cannot be prosecuted for mere acts of stupidity. There have been prosecutions, most of them unsuccessful, and the whole retrubitive effort has been mired in the name-calling between the financial and political communities."
My present uptake from all this observation is that the derivatives-wielding wallstreet 1% better clean up their act before the radical rabble 9%, claiming to speak for the 99, decides to ditch the consensus process and take matters into their own revolutionary hands.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress
Although far more than nine percent of people have become disgruntled because Congress bails out the corporate cronies, and although far more than nine percent of folks are frustrated with ecological disasters and abuses that have been mismanaged through gov/corp collusion, and although far more than 9.1% of the people feel as if their labor and resources are being jerked around by the soulless machinations of greedy, outsourcing corporations, there are really only about nine percent of We the People who are willing to be associated with and directed by Occupation activists.
However, if the Occupyers could manage somehow to effectively represent, say, a mere 9% of the people, that is nine times as many as the 1% whose bank accounts they are trying to siphon. But their first major hurdle in that wealth redistribution quasi-socialist quest would be to get organized. That is no simple task, as I recently witnessed firsthand. In fact this whole movement will be a marathon of dedicated organizing if it is ever going to amount to anything besides a series of sign-wielding collective walks in the park.
At the stone staircase of the Vancouver Art Museum on Saturday and Sunday, I watched as a core group of intense activists initiated in their city what has become the Occupy movement's "achieving consensus" process. It is a tedious sequence of speaker/crowd interactivity that appears, from my observer perspective, laboious and perhaps somewhat self-defeating.
Nevertheless, the agenda-writing nucleus of organizers seemed quite intent on building consensus from their small activist cadre outward amongst the gathering legion of discontents. They wanted it done a certain way, at the risk of appearing, to an instant-breakfast world, disorganized.
The use of amplified sound through use of a microphone was a point of subtle contention among two factions of the the leader group. It took a few hours on Saturday morning as well as Sunday to work out the kinks. A speaker-call / crowd-repeat procedure that must have originated with the wallstreet cadre had already become dogma for some of the agenda-setting core, while other initiators among them obviously preferred the pragmatically loud use of the microphone. Technological enhancement uncovers undesirable bourgeois luxuries. Such subtle concessions to capitalist convenience can easily lead to domination of the gathered crowd by gifted orators, or "showboaters" as one humble speaker referred to them. Amplified rhetoric can enable, theoretically, opportunitstic demogogs to manipulate the assembled masses. Thus can the ideal of egalitarian democracy be undermined by silver-tongued soapboxers. Not good.
I observed with interest as a purist group within the agenda-setting core labored tediously to lay a foundation of simple unamplified call/response democratic consensus building. It was, let's face it, primitive, although I could surmise the solid ideologic basis for it. Over the course of two disjointed hours, however, the pragmatic faction was able to procedurally insert selective use of the microphone into the nascent consensus process. This distant listener thought the microphone use lent a definite improvement to their presentations.
By and by, the Vancouver Occupy agenda-setters were able to establish a sequence of procedures by which their two-hundred-or-so core of gathered faithful (while hundreds more of curious bystanders watched) could voice some procedural decisions about where this thing was headed. Past mid-afternoon on Sunday, I don't know what Occupy Vancouver did, but their inception was fascination for this detached observer.
I departed the scene several hours later, thinking it would be a long time before this movement accomplishes anything substantial. Leaderless democracy, which appears to be the gold standard among this movement's initiators, initially produces apparent chaos. At least that's the way it seemed to me as I witnessed the Occupy Vancouver public inception. What fundamental organization may have been established beneath that irresolute exterior, only time will tell.
After a dusky train ride with wife and son back to Seattle, I returned on nippy Monday morning, with journalistic curiosity, to the Occupy site in Westlake Park, downtown. Previously, I had witnessed parts of the Wednesday and Thursday daytime sessions there. The Seattle crowd seemed, to me, much scruffier and streetish than the intense Vancouverites. A rag-tag band of pierced, tattood occupyers hung out where the podium had been last week. They were meagerly holding on to this public square, insofar as it was possible amidst the gently ominous peripheral police presence. While most lingerers were milling around in apparent aimless expectation, an ameobic bundle of them languished near the low stone platform that had been the focal site of last week's rallying excitement. A pervasive attitude of don't let this magic moment slip away hung in the air like contraband smoke.
A plethora of handmade signs was constant, hundreds of them, in both Vancouver and Seattle, many of them quite clever. By mid-afternoon on Monday, I saw from my Starbucks perch a bearded Seattle protester with a large, neatly lettered green on white that read: PROSECUTE BANKSTERS. It was a distilled message that indicated what might become an actual judgemental plank of the emerging Occupy platform. This was the goal that I had heard a week or two ago, spoken by Michael Moore in an NPR interview.
Such an indictment would materialize only through a very long, drawn out campaign by the Occupyers.
Canadian columnist Conrad Black wrote insightfully in last Saturday's National Post:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/15/conrad-black-why-theyre-occupying-wall-street/
"Assessing blame is complicated. This (the wallstreet meltdown of '08 and its economic fallout) was not a case where an easily identifiable group committed monstrously illegal acts in the manner of Bernard Madoff....financiers cannot be prosecuted for mere acts of stupidity. There have been prosecutions, most of them unsuccessful, and the whole retrubitive effort has been mired in the name-calling between the financial and political communities."
My present uptake from all this observation is that the derivatives-wielding wallstreet 1% better clean up their act before the radical rabble 9%, claiming to speak for the 99, decides to ditch the consensus process and take matters into their own revolutionary hands.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
I am the 50%
Our hard times polarize us, but I am the 50%.
Pat and I deplaned this afternoon at Sea-Tac airport, caught the rail to downtown Seattle. We ascended the stairs from Westlake Station up to street level, and walked, as chance would have it, into Occupy Seattle. Imagine that. I saw a crowd of people there and heard some speeches.
America used to be a young democratic republic, starting 235 years ago when those upstart colonials convened in Philadelphia and cut the tether that George III had used to keep us bound in unrepresented taxation.
But now we are aging, becoming every day more and more like our European forebears, taking upon ourselves those classic ideological divisions of left and right. With hard times upon us, its not really about democrats and republicans any more. Its about socialists and libertarians, and everything in between. Just let me say: I am the 50%(ile).
Being a baby boomer, happenstancing today upon the Occupy crowd at Seattle, I caught a whiff of, and recognized, the old 60s counterculture zeitgeist. I remember it from back in college days, but of course it is different now. The spirit of anti-war anti-establishment discontent is the same, but the issues are different; the costumes are different. Whereas we were flower children back in the day, all about peace and love, these days the mood is edgy and punky, and definitely socialist. A little more threatening, or maybe thats because I'm older, and more comfortable, and Christian.
The first speaker was actually a rather pleasant surprise. A young fellow named Michael started out his message speaking of Moses and delivering his people from slavery in Egypt. I can relate. I do not want want to diminish the passionately eloquent appeal about very real economic issues that he made to the hundreds of mostly young occupiers gathered there. He was encouraging the people to get involved with the movement.
But what this old guy (me) appreciated at the end of Michael's speech was his exhortation to keep it peaceful. I appreciated that, although Michael said much more about what's happening now than just work in the system and be non-violent.
Not all the speakers were as peacefully oriented.
I am, btw, a person whose worldview is defined by the original non-violent resister, Jesus. Athough Y'shu haMeshciach was much more than that, since he was also the redeemer of all mankind, or the redeemer of, all those mankind who are inclined to receive his redemptive, resurrected grace.
Anyway, once the Occupy rally got cranked up, and they got the microphone going, I'm just old-fashioned enough to appreciate speakers who can be heard and have something to say, which is better than the un-amplified call and response drill that I had earlier seen on the news of Occupy Wherever a few days ago.
Bottom line about the speakers: We are definitely dealing with a brave new paradigm here, of socialism vs. conservatism in America. And so I say it again: I am the (of) the 50th percentile. I'll walk the middle road as long as I can, even though after every speaker a young very attractive Latina got on the mic, and she would lead, exuberatly, the crowd, in chants about the gathered ones being the "99%.
In spite of the anti-establishment mood, one young man encouraged the gathered protesters to work toward passage of a new Glass-Steagall Act in Congress. I was impressed with the constructivity of that. I think the basic message there is let the bankers and the wall street crowd eat their own losses, instead of hitting up the taxpayers for the bill, based on the "too big to fail" bluster. Yeah, right. I never did appreciate that midnight deal that Hank Paulsen talked the Congress into bailing out the banks back in '08. I would think even some Tea Partiers out there would find common ground on that.
In a way, I guess that's what got this whole thing going, that bank bailout in '08. Its what the Republicans call crony capitalism, as opposed to true capitalism, which is what mom and pop used to do on main street, not wall street, back in the day, before Disney co-opted Main Street as a theme park in Orlando and Anaheim.
Next, and olf guy, Joe, older than me, went up to the mic and spoke of his dad and mom raising him in the socialist movement in New York City back in the 30s. This fellow had later gone on to a career in the movies. He worked with Ronald Reagan in the movies, in the movie Hellcats of the Navy. He spoke glowingly of Reagan , and how friendly and charismatic Reagan was (surprise! at Occupy Seattle) but said that Reagan had changed and gone over to the other side, to follow "the money" instead of his heart.
Joe also spoke about F.D. Roosevelt--who has taken on a kind of sainthood in this retro-new-deal environment in which we are now finding ourselves. According to Joe, Franklin sent his wife Eleanor out to scope out the country, shortly after he was elected. She went all over the country and talked to a lot of folks, came back and, according to Joe, reported to her husband FDR that the communists would be taking on a bunch of support among workers during those hard times if something wasn't done to relieve the desperation and unemployment and poverty that was so rampant during that time, the "Great" Depression. And that's where the New Deal came from.
Sounds familiar doesn't it. Our present President is in the same predicament, and that's why this whole Occupy thing is going down now.
And I'm thinking of John Lennon, the working class hero who's dead, but really it reminds me of Ringo, in his post-Beatle role. He did a commercial in which he told some young lady "this is not your father's Oldsmobile."
This is not your father's politics either. This is something new and different. America, get ready. The times they are a polarizin'. And I'm just praying there's no Kent State thing that's gonna happen.
These Occupiers may the 99%, and the Republicans may be the 1%.
As for me and my house, we are the 50%ile, and proud of it. As we southerners used to say: Well, shut my mouth.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress
Pat and I deplaned this afternoon at Sea-Tac airport, caught the rail to downtown Seattle. We ascended the stairs from Westlake Station up to street level, and walked, as chance would have it, into Occupy Seattle. Imagine that. I saw a crowd of people there and heard some speeches.
America used to be a young democratic republic, starting 235 years ago when those upstart colonials convened in Philadelphia and cut the tether that George III had used to keep us bound in unrepresented taxation.
But now we are aging, becoming every day more and more like our European forebears, taking upon ourselves those classic ideological divisions of left and right. With hard times upon us, its not really about democrats and republicans any more. Its about socialists and libertarians, and everything in between. Just let me say: I am the 50%(ile).
Being a baby boomer, happenstancing today upon the Occupy crowd at Seattle, I caught a whiff of, and recognized, the old 60s counterculture zeitgeist. I remember it from back in college days, but of course it is different now. The spirit of anti-war anti-establishment discontent is the same, but the issues are different; the costumes are different. Whereas we were flower children back in the day, all about peace and love, these days the mood is edgy and punky, and definitely socialist. A little more threatening, or maybe thats because I'm older, and more comfortable, and Christian.
The first speaker was actually a rather pleasant surprise. A young fellow named Michael started out his message speaking of Moses and delivering his people from slavery in Egypt. I can relate. I do not want want to diminish the passionately eloquent appeal about very real economic issues that he made to the hundreds of mostly young occupiers gathered there. He was encouraging the people to get involved with the movement.
But what this old guy (me) appreciated at the end of Michael's speech was his exhortation to keep it peaceful. I appreciated that, although Michael said much more about what's happening now than just work in the system and be non-violent.
Not all the speakers were as peacefully oriented.
I am, btw, a person whose worldview is defined by the original non-violent resister, Jesus. Athough Y'shu haMeshciach was much more than that, since he was also the redeemer of all mankind, or the redeemer of, all those mankind who are inclined to receive his redemptive, resurrected grace.
Anyway, once the Occupy rally got cranked up, and they got the microphone going, I'm just old-fashioned enough to appreciate speakers who can be heard and have something to say, which is better than the un-amplified call and response drill that I had earlier seen on the news of Occupy Wherever a few days ago.
Bottom line about the speakers: We are definitely dealing with a brave new paradigm here, of socialism vs. conservatism in America. And so I say it again: I am the (of) the 50th percentile. I'll walk the middle road as long as I can, even though after every speaker a young very attractive Latina got on the mic, and she would lead, exuberatly, the crowd, in chants about the gathered ones being the "99%.
In spite of the anti-establishment mood, one young man encouraged the gathered protesters to work toward passage of a new Glass-Steagall Act in Congress. I was impressed with the constructivity of that. I think the basic message there is let the bankers and the wall street crowd eat their own losses, instead of hitting up the taxpayers for the bill, based on the "too big to fail" bluster. Yeah, right. I never did appreciate that midnight deal that Hank Paulsen talked the Congress into bailing out the banks back in '08. I would think even some Tea Partiers out there would find common ground on that.
In a way, I guess that's what got this whole thing going, that bank bailout in '08. Its what the Republicans call crony capitalism, as opposed to true capitalism, which is what mom and pop used to do on main street, not wall street, back in the day, before Disney co-opted Main Street as a theme park in Orlando and Anaheim.
Next, and olf guy, Joe, older than me, went up to the mic and spoke of his dad and mom raising him in the socialist movement in New York City back in the 30s. This fellow had later gone on to a career in the movies. He worked with Ronald Reagan in the movies, in the movie Hellcats of the Navy. He spoke glowingly of Reagan , and how friendly and charismatic Reagan was (surprise! at Occupy Seattle) but said that Reagan had changed and gone over to the other side, to follow "the money" instead of his heart.
Joe also spoke about F.D. Roosevelt--who has taken on a kind of sainthood in this retro-new-deal environment in which we are now finding ourselves. According to Joe, Franklin sent his wife Eleanor out to scope out the country, shortly after he was elected. She went all over the country and talked to a lot of folks, came back and, according to Joe, reported to her husband FDR that the communists would be taking on a bunch of support among workers during those hard times if something wasn't done to relieve the desperation and unemployment and poverty that was so rampant during that time, the "Great" Depression. And that's where the New Deal came from.
Sounds familiar doesn't it. Our present President is in the same predicament, and that's why this whole Occupy thing is going down now.
And I'm thinking of John Lennon, the working class hero who's dead, but really it reminds me of Ringo, in his post-Beatle role. He did a commercial in which he told some young lady "this is not your father's Oldsmobile."
This is not your father's politics either. This is something new and different. America, get ready. The times they are a polarizin'. And I'm just praying there's no Kent State thing that's gonna happen.
These Occupiers may the 99%, and the Republicans may be the 1%.
As for me and my house, we are the 50%ile, and proud of it. As we southerners used to say: Well, shut my mouth.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress
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