They say Paris in the rain is sublime. Full of whimsy and romance, of passionate broken hearts and the souls of a thousand years of artists wetted by the drops. On the other hand, Hollywood in the rain is a strange dystopian vision of the future, a cold, bleak slab of cracked concrete under gray palm trees, with people afraid to step outside their doors, streets unnervingly empty, life frighteningly standing still. Still, it sets a perfect tone for the All in for the 99% celebration this last Saturday, 3/31, a bold convention of art and rhetoric trying to gather the energy riding America's current hottest wave of outrage, energy both positive and negative, and focus it into some sort of massive laser beam searing "Justice to All" across the foreheads of Mt. Rushmore, trying to fight a future which, if left unaltered, will be like that rainy afternoon but full of giant shiny rectangles run by greedy grosseros licking their lips as the force the proletariat into labor for pennies on the dollar. Yes, they're doing something here, they're trying to pull together this magnificent wellspring of passion into a single fire hose of equality. And yet, like the rain, instead of a focused beam this collection of enthusiastic, nay passionate, young people felt just as diffused as the rest of the Occupy Movement.
"What is the chief end of man?--to get rich. In what way?--dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must."
-- Mark Twain-1871
Now let me get this off my chest first. I support the IDEA of Occupy. There are certain very real and glaring improprieties and inconsistencies in the way supposed open-market capitalism is conducted in this country. Of course the most obvious is the intervention from the government on behalf of the "Too Big to Fail Companies" which not only cost taxpayers large chunks of money (while politicians are arguing over taxes for social programs), it also reinforced to these companies that it's okay to mess around, play it loose, take enormous risks, like some spoiled trust funder who can fuck around all he wants because Papa Sam's there to pick up the tab. Just think, the Right decried Obama's proposal of Universal Health Care's $1.3 trillion dollar cost as socialist since it would have allowed the 48 million Americans who are currently uninsured to get medical treatment so they can buy, you know, something as important as, I don't know, NOT DYING. And yet the government, in a hangover from the previous presidency, lent out $1.2 trillion dollars to companies which had spent the last decade raking in money hand over fist by using ever-more-complex machinations to hide exactly what they were doing and then paying their top executives outrageous bonuses based on these outrageous (and we know now artificially-propped up) profits instead of maybe putting it aside to keep up their margins, a "rainy day fund" so to speak. At one point some of these companies were creating investment products they sold to their clients while internally betting against them using naked calls. That's like selling somebody a car that'll probably blow up and then taking out a life insurance policy on the person you sell it to; then, once the car's blown up you give the gains from the insurance to all the weasels involved so that it can't be included in the profits, point to your "losses" from the few cars you still own, and convince the government to pay you for making such a shitty car.
I could list all the fucked up ways that the system has been manipulated over the last 11 years - from deregulation in the energy sector that resulted in the Enron implosion (George W. Bush) to deregulation in the financial sector resulting in the current recession (Clinton and W.) to the fact that CEO pay has risen much faster than the average American worker pay without significantly raising accountability or performance requirements - in fact 23% just since 2009, vs. the less than 1% for the average worker - to the revolving door between regulator (SEC) and regulated (financial and securities firms) to the no-bid military contracts with croneyist companies like Halliburton - to Bank of America essentially sidestepping laws against banks being allowed to operate in other states and thereby becoming just another example of monopoly's stronghold on the current American form of capitalism (alongside silicon valley companies who operate as hegemonies attempting to either purchase or strong-arm their smaller competitors out of business and chain stores running out the mom and pops) with full knowledge that monopoly is the economic form of monarchy - whether you're on the left or the right these are all outrages.
THAT. BEING. SAID.
What's the point of the Occupy movement?
Then it's up a long concrete ramp like we're heading to some clandestine meeting of "le resistance". Strung along one wall are statements about how disconnected the 1% is, how they've never had to watch their children starve (how many in Occupy have?) or had to worry about getting sick and not being able to see a doctor. On the other wall stuffed animals have been hung to spell "Revolution" and all I could think about is that you can't spell "Revolution" without "Evolution" and right now this Occupy movement is closer to fish with feet than upright-standing bipeds.And then at the top of the ramp it's a right turn into a room with crowds and clumps milling about and wandering around, half-listening to readings from Slake contributors as they stare at pictures and paintings (a few of which I've used to add some color to this post) which present a better vision, provide a better mission statement than anything I've seen written, better than any videos or rallies or claims or press releases I've come across, better than any of the readers I'm hearing. With art's inherent ability to transcend definition and limitation, its ability to cut through the superficial and connect with the visceral, the photos and paintings and mixed-mediums along the wall were the most impactful elements of the whole day, things like Matt Furie's colorful, other-worldy twisted incarnations, as if to say "Occupy DMT".
Sure, Val Kilmer as a perfect Mark Twain reading for a few minutes at 3 was pretty cool. And Jason Alexander in a toupee interviewing people for Funny or Die was a neat touch, as was seeing Jena Malone alongside the poignant pics she took. But once you got past the art (and its price tags, most of which reached into the thousands, some into the ten thousands, one I saw was $40k, and a very select few, like the Shepard Fairey revolutionary, sure to be in a museum someday, were priceless) and tried to pay attention to what was happening on the stage, it sort of all fell apart.
A few months ago I considered joining Occupy LA or at least going to a few rallys. Check out the scene, see what these people are accomplishing. I went on the website, started reading the forum and quickly found myself in a pissing match between two members. One, let's call him "Higher-up" had apparently been talking about moving things forward in the last meeting but he'd been describing their movements in a way that the second guy, let's call him "Hapa", didn't agree with. This soon became Hapa accusing Higher-up of Cultural tourism, saying it harkens back to Kerouac, as a white suburban male, attempting to live among the poor and destitute, attempting to project a vision of himself as a jazz musician and then a poor Mexican and all along having a white picket fence to return to when things got too real. These two started bickering back and forth, Hapa talking about his proud half-Hawaiian heritage and how that made him a greater authority on being a minority than Higher Up. Higher Up yelling back that Hapa was just trying to discredit him to assert his own power. Then Hapa writing something about how wrong it was all these rich kids were coming out trying to pretend to protest for the working man when they were actually all spoiled kids themselves and this went on and on until I decided simply not to join.
On Saturday there was an excitement that what they were doing was right, or at least right minded. I spoke to one woman, Juanita Burnett, from the Time For a Change Foundation, who showed me various causes her organization was championing. One particularly was the fact that a person convicted for a Drug-related Felony will forever have trouble getting a job. So if somebody had some weed and a scale in his car (intent to sell) or over an ounce (before decriminalization last year), and God forbid said person was in possession of some blow, crack, meth, heroin, this person would for the rest of his or her life have to check the same box on a job application as a child molester or a meth dealer. She and her associates are trying to support a bill to get those felonies turned into misdemeanors so these people can get jobs, treatment, go on with their lives. Become positive, contributing members of society. Such things have a place at the Occupy Rally.
But the problem is that this doesn't technically fit into what Occupy SEEMS to be calling for, namely some sort of reform in which the 1% is forced to give up some money and control to the 99%. And yet never once has anybody told me why that was, how it would occur, or what a solution would be.
The documentary starts with the Tunisian man who self-immolated to protest Tunisia's fucked up government and authorities which in turn began the Arab spring. Then the documentary claims that fire made its way to Los Angeles and suddenly we're going from oppressed middle-easterners fighting their neo-dictatorial governments during the Arab spring to a bunch of young people living in tents in nice, clean cities surrounded by cops who, compared to the rest of the world, are downright accommodating. It strings together stories like that of a former gangster who joined Occupy to follow a girl but stayed to follow the cause. And of the fiery leader, a 20-something woman brimming with purpose and excitement. But as I watched footage of them standing with placards in front of Bank of America and their dancing-to-block-traffic march, I was overwhelmed by a feeling that this was little more than an attempt to feel part of something that was, sadly, more contrived than anybody is willing to admit.
Best case scenario, this is an attempt to harness a collective unhappiness and give it a direction but, since we're rusty, what after over 3 decades of "apathy is cool" culture, it's gonna take some time - evolution - to make anything real and meaningful. Right now Occupy is just kicking off the rust on the American protester and it'll take a bit before our protest machines are all shiny and driven again.
Most likely scenario, it's a tricky situation and the inability to have organic rebellion is due not only to the artificial and highly-complex machinations against which Occupy is protesting (it was much easier to rebel against the fact that blacks weren't allowed to drink from the same water fountains or in Arabia to rebel against oppressive regimes; it's much more difficult to rebel against derivative option swaps and oil commodities futures and CDO's and hedge funds and people getting foreclosed on because they signed loans for which they should not have qualified with huge balloon payments because first you have to understand what these things are and that takes mathematical and economic knowledge that few people outside the financial sector would ever have the wherewithal to try and attain) but also to the simple fact that it's hard to point to who and where, exactly, the enemy is. Is it Goldman Sachs? Because if so, no amount of protesting will win. Matt Taibbi brought up the fact that Lloyd Blankfein doesn't care how many people protest him because the only people he has to answer to are Goldman's alums (SEC) or the president and he'll beat a bunch of unemployed hipsters in campaign funding every time. So that brings us to the government as enemy. That's as old as civilization, government as enemy but perhaps that's the real direction to go. But what do you want to change about the government? More regulation? Half the country won't go for that, they're being brainwashed by the right wing media, and specifically the GOP candidates, that the financial crisis and current joblessness (which, incidentally, no longer exists) is the result of too much regulation. So the enemy then is right wing media, right? But they're just responding to the Michael Moores of the world who take videos and statements out of context and paste them together with a liberal agenda. Is it Michael Moore? No, he specifically said capitalism is the failed ideal currently pummeling our fair country. Do we blame capitalism? Jen-Baptiste Colbert is considered one of the forefathers of laissez-faire economy. Is it that sonuvabitch's fault? Now we're getting to the SOUTH PARK episode with the sue-ance.
No, no, that's absurd, let's get back to the present. So Blankfein and BofA and JP Morgan and so on are evil because they and their ilk manipulate the government into loosening restrictions on how they can make money and what they can get away with, thus concentrating power and influence and money in the hands of a few robber barons a la the gilded age. But the Carnegies and Rockefellers of the gilded age made America great, what's so wrong with that? Well let's attack it from another angle; Rockefeller and Carnegie and Astor and Stanford and Gould and Vanderbilt - all these people built infrastructure into America, whether railroads or trading routes or factories, all of which established America as the fully-realized, industrialized and actualized capital of the world. They wanted to make the country bigger while making themselves richer - thus all the colleges and famous New York hotspots named after these robber barons. They oppressed the average man, sure, but they did it for some sort of good purpose, the building of America, right? Maybe. Certainly people aren't picketing in front of Rockefeller Square or Carnegie Hall or Stanford University. So maybe that's it, Occupied is tired of the fact that the best and brightest of our country, instead of building trans-Atlantic bridges or curing cancer or establishing trading routes with asteroids carrying precious metals which would reduce our dependence on harmful mining practices, are spending their genius on inventing and then taking advantage of increasingly complex ways to move and represent money. Try putting that on a placard.
In TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT Hemingway goes along the yachts docked in Key West and details what each man did to buy it. One man was a Wall Street trader who hates his family, hates his life, hates everything but money. The next man invented something useful and sold it en masse, making enough small profits off each unit of a product that benefits its many purchasers to live a good life as reward and without hurting other people or, as Hem puts it, without playing around with something that makes other people kill themselves (Ernest Hemingway's father, a doctor, killed himself after he lost all the family's money in the stock market). So maybe that's the slogan "We're protesting people who make money by playing with other people's lives and livelihoods."
No that doesn't work. It's a tough one. And I could spin my wheels for hours trying to understand and define what Occupy is really protesting so let's move on to the worst case scenario and the one that, from the right angle, is the most glaring.
Generations X, Y, Z and beyond are not cool. We're a whole population of geeks and freaks, spoiled brats who've never had to sacrifice a single creature comfort (70's gasoline quotas? what?) who regularly find ourselves proving our coolness by pointing to our appreciation of previous generations' music. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Stooges, all the way back to Muddy Waters and even Robert Johnson and then forward again to Led Zeppelin and the Stones. Just look up that music on YouTube (in full disclosure, I am one of those who prefers old blues and rock to Bruno Mars) and you'll find them trailed by comments from people of our generation lamenting the fact that music isn't like this anymore, even if we don't have any memory of when music actually WAS like this. So the Occupy movement is an attempt to be cool like the hippies, to embrace some sort of movement, even if we have to manufacture it. Thus the reason nobody can say, exactly, where it's going or what, truly, it's about. Because it's really about the fact that we're just too unoriginal to think of our own generational get-together. Dancing through rush hour traffic in a city notorious for endless rush hour traffic has nothing to do with Tunisians burning themselves to death to fight tyranny. Stop trying to force it. We're not the hippies; we're not gonna win with rallies and sit-ins and protests. It's like fighting an American war in Vietnam; if we want to win, we have to evolve, not try to recreate what another generation, no matter how cool they may have been, did 40 years ago. We need to try something new and be honest about ourselves about what, really, we want and who we are. Which is tough today with everybody so distracted by who they WANT to be. I understand, we all need something to believe in and certainly the current economic and political quagmire that is America is not it. But while getting beaten by cops will make people sympathize with us, and maybe even respect us, it's not gonna change the opinions of the people who sent the cops after us in the first place and who have much more pull than we do.
Anyway, after the documentary ended I slunk out a bit deflated. There's something here, I can't deny it. Some tectonic movement shaking the crust, running up the San Andreas fault to try and split this rotten granite monolithic 1% and those bastards are dug in deep. No doubt about it, there are some very serious problems currently facing out country and these are foundation problems, reaching down to America's own Moho Discontinuity to affect not just one city or one state but the whole goddamn continent and even the whole world. Hell, we took down Europe. But seriously, in the immortal words of the good Doctor Thompson himself, what's the score here? What comes next?
I don't think picketing and dancing will stop these problems. It'd be like trying to take down a monster with positive expectation or healing a sick child with prayer.Matt Taibbi has been doing more than almost anybody to fight this cause by exposing in his well-researched and well-explained articles in Rolling Stone and his personal Taibblog all this corruption which seemingly nobody else in the media had either the balls or the brains to point out. He's started working with Occupy Wall Street so maybe he'll be able to steer them in a stronger direction.
Perhaps it'll take bold consumer action - Bank of America can't keep on gouging its customers and lending government money (yes, BofA's mortgages are now all federally insured so essentially you're borrowing from the government with BofA acting as a sort of middle man but profiting like a supplier) if we all close our BofA accounts and get our mortgages elsewhere; Wall Street can't sell us bullshit derivatives where they make astronomical profits on our ignorance if we refuse to invest in vehicles we can't understand (even most 401k's are customizable and even more, included in your work 401k's are fees you pay for financial guidance so you should demand somebody explain your investments to you if you don't understand them). That'd be a good start.
Political activism is a viable option but real action, like with a leader and stuff, and form, like, I don't know, a caucus, yeah, or even better a special interest group, an Occupy lobby. A lot of big (read: rich) names have begun to attach themselves to the Occupy Movement, from Howard Buffett to George Soros to Russell Simmons. In fact most of the entertainment world's behind them. I remember a business teacher telling me about how he laughs at all the tree-huggers who go around and protest and have marches for the rainforest. He had a real solution - he and a bunch of his friends were buying chunks of the rainforest and making it into private reserves. The 60's did a lot of great work but in spite of all their talking about free love, rejection of materialism and greed, we're more two-faced and corrupt than we had been You're not gonna change the system so do what the other side does - figure out how to manipulate it to your own ends.
These are just a few ideas, some place to start. And as Occupy grows louder, more powerful, more organized, more real perhaps they'll start putting forth real action that will affect real change.
On my way out I passed a mixed medium, my favorite work in the place, of Blankfein and pals encircled by a cartoon octopus (reminiscent of Taibbi's vampire squid).
It was on sale for $40,000, a little less than the average American annual income. The money's for a good cause and certainly the statement is clear - that most of the 99% can't afford art. Wait, is that the statement? Hell, it's a fundraiser, might as well give the bastards something for their donation to the cause, right?
On my way out I heard somebody ask one of the Occupy folks trying to get people to sign up for the newsletter what would the anthem of occupy be. The man, tall, a bit balding in the crown, with lanky rock climber arms thought about it for half a second and then spat out "A Song for the Working Man."
But now the world's listening. And listening. So it's time to say something grounded in fact, in action, in concrete. Because our world has a short attention span and if you don't start saying something more substantial than "We're really pissed off because they're rich and, like, they cheated and it's not fair," the world, especially as things continue improving, will stop listening. And if it blows this opportunity, Occupy will be no better than the people and corporations it hates.
- Ryan
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