Fools and rules and pepper spray

Hey there.  Well, the Super Committee is failing.  But here's something that the U.S. Congress seems competent to do.


Did you hear that they might actually get their shit together to classify pizza as a vegetable for the purpose of school lunch menus?  They say it's just too expensive to provide healthy foods and besides, food companies that make frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers are sad at the prospect of losing so much business.  Ah, there's the propulsion for forward momentum.  Of course, it's not parents.  Despite the fact that the lunch program was modified based on recommendations by the Institute of Medicine, as an attempt to curb childhood obesity and skyrocketing future health care costs, Republican Congressional members say that the government shouldn't tell kids what to eat.  Unless, I guess, it's telling kids to eat frozen pizza and french fries in support of the food lobby.  Then it's a-okay.


And people wonder why protestors won't break camp and head on home.  Speaking of.

Have you watched the paramilitary forces of the UC campuses brutalize its students?  At UC Berkeley, students who linked arms took the brunt of baton-weilding policy in their bellies, ribs and spines before many were arrested.  A former U.S. poet laureate was bashed.  And the UCB chancellor said "linking arms is not non-violent civil disobedience."  Um. 


And then, this past weekend, it was time for the junta of UC Davis to give their arsenal an airing.  The students of UC Davis-- truly my alma mater-- sat quietly on a path running through the student-occupied quad and refused to move when the cops demanded.  They refused quietly.  They refused non-violently (as per the standard definition and not Chancellor Birgeneau's inexplicable misconstruction of it-- would he even get into Cal?).  And because they didn't move, and perhaps because they didn't threaten enough to warrant the frustrated presence of the police force, the cops vented their pepper spray directly into the somber, scared faces of the students.  From three feet away.  Students gagged, coughed, coughed blood.  But they didn't fight.  They sat.  And others, who were not in need of medical attention, kept the peace where the cops could not.  After a mic check, the UCD protestors informed the cops that they could go in a chant.  And the cops, proving themselves to have an ounce of common sense, went.  This was the most impressive demonstration of peaceful protest I've ever seen.  The protestors released the cops and the power of calm prevailed over force.  Hold your tears or maybe let them flow.

The First Amendment is always messy and often expensive.  Violent police response in the manner we're seeing will only accrue benefit to the protestors.  Leadership, whether on campuses or in cities, has failed to recognize that the media savviness of these camps is far beyond government understanding.  Videos of peaceful protests join our second lives on Facebook among pictures of friends and family.  The old red herrings of black-hooded anarchists have rotted to nothing but a stink, which is all they ever were.  The protestors hold each other up intelligently and amorphously; they have books and self-control.  And, in a resounding censure of government, they don't talk politics.  It's their silence on this particular issue that peals loudly against the current status quo.  The system as it stands is too dysfunctional to even contemplate the changes that would be required to alleviate its problems.  And the leadership is forced into a corner of befuddlement.  Confusion among those who hold power makes them vulnerable; they act stupidly. See Mayor of Oakland and the dumbs chancellors of UCB and UCD.


For those who squealed with delight at the pepper-spray that saturated the scarves and hoods of the UCD students because you thought "that's good, they were breaking rules," I'll wage a gentle disagreement.  When you consider rule-breaking, also consider the surfeit of rules codified to the benefit of those who hold power already.  "Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it," said Thoreau.  There is always a rule or law to be broken, without even an intent.  Standing for too long becomes disorderly conduct.  Not moving quickly enough becomes failing to obey the order of an officer or, worse, obstruction of government action.  So the rule becomes convenient for the imposition of power.  The First Amendment states that freedom of expression may not be abridged but you can't stand there, sit there, stay there after a certain hour.  Only fools would grant priority to these rules over the peaceful objections of those who suffer.


Finally, Go Ags.  Continue to be great.

Fear and Loathing

Occupy Wellington.

Woke up this morning to hear that the folks of Occupy Wall Street had been forcibly removed in the early hours of the morning by the NYPD.  I sighed.  And then of course, there were the ridiculous status messages on Facebook that insisted that this was exactly the right course.  A lawyer "friend" rejoiced that the court action considering the protestors rights to remain in the park meant that the lawyers win.  This particular guy is always on the side of lawyers making money.  At least he's consistent if not cynical.

More troubling is the subscription to a belief that the first amendment can be abridged by a frustrated government.  That, actually, is precisely the purpose of the First Amendment.  In a New York Times article, Mayor Bloomberg is described as becoming increasingly "fed up with their inability to police the park, with complaints about noise, disruptions to businesses and odors, and a leaderless movement that they just could not figure out how to deal with."  The Mayor ordered the middle of the night raid ostensibly because public health and safety demanded it.  That was his message to the media anyway.  There had been a few assaults among campers, true, and a large encampment, as all summer campers know, generates less than lovely smells.  But when the cops surrounded Zuccotti Park to vacate the occupiers, they also threw 5000 books into a dumpster.  And when the occupiers who were not arrested-- as approximately 200 were, including a City Councilman-- walked off to find other venues, the cops appeared to disrupt their continued efforts.  As in, your first amendment rights are no longer welcome here.  Anywhere.  The protestors set up in front of City Hall and were dispersed.  They went to a park along Canal Street: same thing.

Now, less than 24-hours after the raid, and a court hearing that validated the city's assertion that the first amendment does not also guarantee the right to form an encampment-- funny because it does guarantee the right to spend money on elections, so maybe the NLG lawyers could have argued the value of the tents as expression-- the protestors have reclaimed Zuccotti Park.  It's been power washed and barricades surround it.  Cops line the perimeter and have formed a bottleneck to permit (slow) re-entry.

Whatever you want to think about the Occupy movement, it's a tribute to them that they've successfully confounded the leaders of several major cities across the country.  Portland and Oakland camps have been raided; leaders of cities are trying to coordinate with each other to deal with the predictable joining of cities'  homeless populations-- and their drug and mental illness problems-- to the movement.  It is to their credit that cities are trying to determine how to balance the expression of the movement against the possible infiltration of a criminal element, but I have to wonder, just how much of a criminal element is present?  It's convenient to assert that bad things-- crimes!-- are occurring among a large gathering of people seeking to claim their pro-rata share of governance in this world.  And to object to the possibility of crimes preemptively, as UC Berkeley did last week when the cops violently "nudged" with batons an incipient group of Occupiers, well, then, it's clear that the vulnerability of the leaders is their befuddlement and not a more media-friendly concern for public safety.  I've got an idea!  What if the cops, who clearly want something to do and are getting a lot of OT hours to do it, were to target the crimes that have been committed by the bankers from their lofty offices in skyscrapers looming over these paltry encampments?  Yeah.  What if.

Occupy Wellington's second suburb.

What I hope people come to see in this cycle of protests is precisely the vulnerability of their leadership.  Because that's who we have the power to seat or unseat in elections, to call upon for assistance in our communities, and to demand accountability from throughout their tenure.  And I hope that people come to see that these leaders must be accountable to us, and not to the corporate interests who pay for their protection.  I hope people are inspired to become leaders themselves, for the good of the people and not the possible girth of their wallet.  And finally, I hope that people come to see that we are all given a voice that we can use to seek change.  When we finally start using it again, for our own benefit and not the benefit of banks and multinational companies, then we will indeed be more powerful than the corporate interests currently in control.  At least, I hope.  We can and should first say, "fuck this system."  Then we need to demand another.

I also hope that despite their frustration, our leaders will remember that we have rights to assemble and rights to speak.  The First Amendment-- shit, democracy-- is inconvenient, expensive, messy.   No one likes to hear things that question their imperatives but, hey, if they relax and listen, they might see that they have a player in the game as well.  And when they say that our rights are guaranteed for only as long as we break no laws but there are far too many laws at their disposal, then we need to sit down and resist.  Some laws are going to be broken; I hope that the offenses are nonviolent and the response as well.

Cry me a river of molten gold

In NZ, I don't think there are 90,000 square foot houses.

I started to write about whinging, because I'm playing with the sound of the word in my head.  Whining is totally onomatopoeic, right?  Whinging, however, well, I'm not so sure.  I'm trying to decide.  If I whine, I sound like "whiiiiiiiiieeennnneee."  I don't really play with that soft /j/ palatal while I'm complaining.  My whines are pretty strictly comprised of screechy vowels let loose like a punctured balloon.

Anyhoo, whether you whinge or whine, please join me in a collective gasp of offense at this article from Saturday's Wall Street Journal, which describes the awful-- just awful-- economic woes of the 1%.  These folks are struggling.  Did you know?  It's heartbreaking.  Go ahead and cry in your ramen.  I'm wringing  tears from my sleeve to use for laundry later.

I like to cruise the Wall Street Journal.  I do it with the same tourist sensibility that I use when I ogle La Jolla or Malibu homes.  I like to imagine where the dirty laundry is piled, whether the toilet lid is up or down, whether the puppy's pee stain ever really came out of the carpet.  I imagine the fights between mothers and daughters, because these always happen, and the just as inevitable silence between fathers and their adolescent sons.  And I imagine how much more effort all these things might take because of the colossal scale of the living quarters.  Like, how many toilet lids are there to close?  How many hidden corners did the puppy exploit?  If you've got room, someone's going to get lost in it.

Which is why it's always boggled my mind why someone would want to showcase their wealth so ostentatiously.  Do you really need two home theaters and thirteen bathrooms?  Do you have to have a bowling alley and six soaking pools inside?  Why would you ever make use of the 20 cars in the garage if you had all that at home?  Why bother with a yacht if you can roller-skate around your great hall when there aren't 500 people doing the Viennese waltz or cabbage patch in it?

I mean, really, we're all going to suffer the same first-world problems.  We have a choice, however, of how much harder we choose to make it on ourselves.  If I ever have millions, I can promise you that I'm not building a house with it.  Unless it's one of those prefab enviro things with a small, sunny courtyard in the middle and a lot of solar panels.  Multiple bathrooms are really overrated.  And 20 cars.  Can you imagine dealing with the registrations on all of them?

But clearly, I am unAmerican in my dreaming.  If I was a true patriot, maybe I would want more.  Like, say, the Siegels did.  In the article, the Siegel family laments the calling of multiple loans on a 90,000 square foot property they were building in Florida.  Mrs. Siegel wanted enough space for 500 guests because the 26,000 square foot place they have now doesn't fit more than 400 people comfortably.  Her husband made bank selling timeshares, I guess.  It's been tough over the last few years so the plans they laid to own the largest single family home in the States have been scraped.  Poor family.  They had to give up their Gulfstream too, a tragedy which caused one of their children to question the presence of strangers on a commercial flight they recently took.  (I'm going to guess they were in first class when the kid asked because in economy, someone surely would have alerted an air marshal.)  Don't be too sad, though.  The Siegels still get to use their Gulfstream on occasion with the bank's permission.  Just like all those people who are losing their homes and cars get to use... oh wait.  Nevermind.

The article makes all these points about the taxes the wealthy pay and the problems they're having in keeping their income stable.  It mentions that there are other assets available for their use, when, say, they have to let go of the over-compensating skeleton of a house in a fire sale but really, come on.  Does the WSJ really expect that the wild ride of the 1% is in any way similar to the plight of the millions of people who can't negotiate with banks to stay in their homes, who have lost their jobs and exhausted their savings, seen their retirement accounts eviscerated and security upheaved?

Unfortunately, we're all going to suffer our first world problems.  We're going to have plumbing problems and broken computers.  We're going to get frustrated by our children and angry at our spouses for their neglect with the toilet seat.  The bright side of these issues?  They make up the human experience that unites us.  But we don't remember because all of that is behind closed doors-- mahogany or steel, hollow or grand.  Our lives are magnificently parallel.  But some of us have money and most of us do not.  It would be really super awesome if those who had the money recognized that the ability to contend with the first world problems is severely compromised by homelessness, unemployment and financial insecurity.  And, you know, there are a whole lot more of us than there are of you.

The 99% is kicking and screaming.

It seems that winter is reluctant to leave.  Or at least, it's interested in making a statement before it does.  We had beautiful, windless sunshine for six days straight last week but it couldn't stand up to the rain.  The rain is here.

Maybe the weather reminds me a little of the incipient protests on New York's Wall Street and in other US cities.  A little heat comes along to remind folks of their position: they're free, they have voices, they can wear shorts and liberate their legs.  And then the cold front returns, forcing everyone back into their homes to stew miserably in their frustrated efforts to surmount these crazy bad times.  Maybe I see the weather-- so out of my control-- a little like I see the many, many things that stand in the way of making things a little better.  Maybe I'm a cynic.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure I'm wrong.  I'm right that the weather will do as it does.  But it's no use feeling powerless against the powers that be.  That, actually, is not beyond my position.  Or your position.  That is actually our obligation.

We have no reason to be ashamed of our naked legs when the sun shines.  And despite major news outlet commenting that the Occupy Wall Street bunch seems somehow disorganized, off-point, dirty, young, aimless or rambling, they're out there and they're trying to make springtime come. 

When I see the thousands of people gathering to stake their claim as the true majority, I cross my fingers that more will join them.  When I see the police lines confronting them, I wonder how long before show of solidarity outweighs the show of force.  (I also say a little prayer that the cops, based on pay scale, might empathize or at least keep their guns holstered.)  There must be a tipping point, when the people realize that the means of control used to silence them are no longer stronger than the force they can exert for themselves.  That said, any tipping point achieved would be but a brief moment in time that sets off its own consequences.  Power shifts quickly and radically and usually remains in the hands of those who know how to juggle it.

That power seems bound by inertia is no reason not to push to reverse its direction.  I hope more people join the Occupy Wall Street movement.  I hope they find a decent set of talking points to appease a media hungry for soundbites over more substantive meals.  But most of all, I hope everyone remains courageous in the face of angry cops threatening force against them.  Standing up to power is the only thing that ever made it change.