alias Bruce.

The irony of Newt Gingrich and the Democrats

is that the Dems still don't understand Newt's crystal-clear, in-your-face tutorial about the raw force of audacity.

Gingrich is surely doing his best to teach them. What better lesson could there be than the example of a hamster-faced, philandering, hypocritical ingrate soaring to top-level contention on the mere strength of defiant, eloquent passion?

As I've said before, a core truth of populist electoral power is that voters like a candidate who is unafraid to lose.

A savvy and principled rival candidate's takeaway from The Newt Tutorial would be: "Wow. If a repulsive liar blowing smoke for the most unpopular schemes of the rich can make that ruse work via pure rhetorical fury, imagine what a fearlessly passionate advocate for truly popular causes like expanding health care and reining in corporations could do."

But the Dems, terrified of the class consequences of true populism and schooled in the Democratic Leadership Conference legacy of business-driven lip-synch messaging, are not teachable on the subject of real mass appeal. And so President Irrelevant continues to go robotic on the campaign trail, mouthing tepid generalities and sleepy slogans such as "change will come." And his party remains allergic to the kinds of messages that could electrify voters.

All of this is for a very logical reason: Dems in the service of Wall Street do not want to electrify voters with compelling arguments that undercut the fiscal sponsors of the Dems' political campaigns. Democrats are betting, instead, that they can win in 2012 with lukewarm ad-slogan versions of voter grievances that, like most successful advertising campaigns, imply just enough to make the sale while delivering nothing.

Still, it's an interesting irony: The corporate candidate whose positions are furthest from the public interest makes the most of populist emotion. And the corporate candidate who could come closer to voters' actual passion makes the least of it.

I'm interested in losers.

I think they are more interesting than winners.

Well, no, I don't mean exactly that. Because winners are interesting in unexpected ways, too. Winning, you realize, rarely turns out to be what the winner expects it to be.

But what I mean about losers is that they are so unexplored and under-exposed. A team or a candidate or a contestant wins The Big Prize and we learn all about their long struggle, their inspirational grandmother, their hard personal choices, their personal daily routine for getting up in the morning and making green tea or oatmeal and doing their Winning Work. Winners want to talk about being winners and reporters want to report about winners and readers and viewers want to know about winners. For a few days or months or years apiece, anyway.

But losers don't always want to talk about losing, and when they do we don't hear enough about it. And we should, because I think it tells us a lot more than winners do.

For one thing, one of the hidden truths about winners is that they were losers, sometimes for a very long time, before they were winners. They tried and lost, tried and lost, again and again, while nobody was watching. They were invisible to nearly all of us while they scuffled along, disheveled and disreputable, and for years and years they kept on doing what they did, in the shadows, for reasons that I'm betting would excite us and teach us a ton if we only knew. That is, before they were suddenly pronounced "winners" by TV hosts and media columnists.

Moreover, losers who never end up winning have a lifetime of that kind of story. Decades and decades of sacrifice and failure and delusion and hope and screaming fights in the kitchen and quiet -- or crazed -- acceptance. If they don't give up, anyway. And even if they do finally give up and let it all go, that in itself is a hell of a tale to be told.

I'm thinking about all of this because my town, Baltimore, is still in shock from watching the Ravens miss a chance to go to the Super Bowl this year after kicker Billy Cundiff missed a 32-yard field goal with 11 seconds left against the New England Patriots. For you non-footballers, translate 32 yards as "a kick you can make with your eyes closed." A newspaper photo showed Cundiff, moments after his life-altering miss, walking toward the sideline, head down, body deflated, the picture of numb defeat. News coverage in the following days had him saying all the true and expected things: he couldn't explain it, he had no excuses.

But that photo of Cundiff raised all the other questions for me: What happened when he and his wife put their kids to bed after that awful day and shut the door to their own bedroom and were alone together with that moment? How does he weave that reality of public failure and humiliation, the worst nightmare of his entire career as an athlete, into the fabric of what is meaningful in his life? How does he see himself? What does he need from his life partner and his friends? How, if at all, does it change who he becomes and what he builds? How does he carry it, use it, release it, feel it? How will it affect the next year, 10 years, entire remainder of his life?

That's what I want to know.

 

I'm making changes

to this blog.

You may have noticed it's been more than two months since I last posted. I'm just not into continually opinionizing right now. There is an entire online culture that opinionizes in the continual present tense: "Here is what I think about what just happened in (insert political entity here)." I don't see it doing us much good. Certain things are true, and they will remain true until we act to change them, and until we do, opinionizing once a week about the same truths is like shouting at each other weekly that the sky is blue.

Truth: The United States is a corporate monarchy in which the state has been purchased in service of monopoly capitalists.

Truth: Elections will remain a sham as long as private money is allowed to dominate them.

Truth: Privilege and continued combat among we non-plutocrats -- by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability and other distinctions -- is the best divisive tactic the ruling class has at its disposal. If not for this, we'd have stormed the Bastille long ago.

We know these things. What we need to do is change them. There is more than enough repetitive stating of the obvious already. That's one reason I'm changing the blog.

Another reason is that my life has grown. I'm a working musician, a perfoming poet, an author working on my next book, and a person like you who walks around seeing and hearing stuff I sometimes want to share because it helps me become more aware of life, period.

So you'll see a lot more here than you've seen before. Sure, it will include political opinions, but it will also go further.

I can't tell you yet where this will go. But in the coming weeks you and I will both start to find out.

The video of police pepper spraying peaceful students at UC Davis

 

doesn't require a lot of commentary: an overweight, battle-outfitted cop following orders and flexing his flabby sense of power over a group of passively sitting demonstrators because somebody told him he should or could. The message is clear: The ruling class understands that OWS is ripping the scab off the suffering of the working and middle class and the poor, and the elites are afraid of the truthful and disciplined anger cultivated by the OWS movement, and they are determined to shut it down before it spreads into anything like a mass uprising against corporate monarchy. The bosses' chief weapon, to paraphrase the hysterical enforcer in the old Monty Python "Spanish Inquisition" sketch, is fear: fear that if you protest you will be injured, fear that your dissent will place you in personal physical danger, fear that gathering in public against a Wall Street dictatorship will put you more at risk than you can possibly afford. You can be angry, is the message, but you'd damn well better keep your anger at home and not make public trouble for us.

This may well be an explicitly coordinated strategy. We know, for instance, that the mayors of many cities with active OWS movements have shared ideas in large-scale conference calls about how to respond. We also know that law enforcement has both the national means and the motive to share recommended methodologies for cutting off OWS participants at the knees.

In any case, the plutocrats are scared, and police are being called upon to kick serious ass. This isn't at all new in poor communities of color, where illegal and humiliating public body searches and sodomy attacks and cold-blooded murders by police have been going on for decades as a tool of terror and control. But it is new for today's generation of college-aged and twenty-something mostly-white Wall Street occupiers and protesters, accustomed as they are to freedom from rampant police abuse. Further, this kind of explicitly political national movement of young people (of all colors) against capitalist injustice is something the United States has not seen for nearly a half-century. And so police at places like UC Davis, and Oakland, and Portland, are now being called upon to review the DEFCON pages of their manuals, to pull on their riot gear, and to report for Conan the Barbarian duty.

White kids being brutalized by swaggering over-armored cops doesn't play well on national television. The courage and discipline of a crowd of students who responded by peacefully forcing the storm troopers to retreat while they chanted "Shame on you!" and "You can go!" also makes a strong impression on national TV. Just as powerful (see video below) was the ruthlessly silent shaming of weak UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi by a sea of students who drowned Katehi in their deafening silence as she slunk though them to her car after unsuccessfully begging for their understanding after the pepper-spraying attack. The UC Davis faculty and many others have called for her resignation.

The War on Drugs provided a pretext for militarization of police in low-income communities of color. The culture of police thuggery, having been honed in places like the Bronx and South Central Los Angeles, is now being brought to bear against a potential national anti-corporate movement that taps into popular grievances. We'll see how this plays out. My bet is that OWS and the evolving ideas and actions it has set into motion will give the rich a run for their money.

 

The latest "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" civil disobedience action in NYC took place

on Saturday with a march to the 103rd police precinct in Queens, near where the unarmed Sean Bell was shot to death on the eve of his wedding day by five NYPD officers who fired 50 bullets.

Saturday's SS&F action, one of a continuing series of protests that have involved Cornel West, Carl Dix, and community residents and members of Occupy Wall Street among others, was in part a memorial to Bell. 20 people were arrested and jailed. Reports here and here provide details.

More protests are planned against Stop and Frisk, an outright police state tactic by which NYC police stop, jack up, and feel up hundreds of thousands of citizens each year for no defined cause. The vast majority are black and Latino and nearly all of them are innocent of any crime; practically none are arrested. The obscene statistics are here. It's all about police using fear, trauma, and intimidation as weapons of power.

More and more people are stepping forward to insist that this unconstitutional police thuggery has to stop.

Welcome to the 2011 Days of Rage.

In the past day alone, mass Occupy Wall Street actions, as chronicled here and here, give us a hint, just a hint, of what can happen when a too-mad-to-be-denied constituency hugely outnumbers the blue-clad and helmeted enforcers who are paid to subdue them.

The most eloquent statement I have yet heard from the decentralized OWS movement came from one of its New York City leaders, who said on the radio that OWS actions, spectacular and dramatic though they are, serve as but a vehicle for a kind of colossal public education on the way the American and global capitalist economy really works -- and on the massive power that can be unleashed when popular awareness merges with popular rage.

It is worth repeating again and again: although most Americans are not part of OWS, most do agree with its stated positions against income inequality and the rule of the rich. When was the last time you saw those explicit and widespread public grievances forced onto the front pages and the anchor desks of the corporate media?

An interesting post by "Actor" on the connection between Occupy Wall Street and the Euro debt crisis

can be found here.

In short, American banks are fiscally threatened by the possible collapse of one or more European Union economies -- just at the time that the U.S's political cover for bailing out banks is being eroded by the popular message of OWS, which is targeting some banks for boycotts and civil disobedience actions.

It's worth a read.

If you don't think Occupy Wall Street is part of a serious movement,

then read this about the massive clashes underway this very minute in NYC, where police have at times been overwhelmed by huge crowds;

and this chronology of what has happened in NYC since early this morning, including the delay of the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange;

and this about how cities are braced for more.

I've said it before and I will keep saying it: the elites have no idea of the depth and breadth of the anger felt toward them in America.

So what does Tuesday's court ban of Occupy Wall Street camping in Zuccotti Park

really mean for OWS?

The short answer is that we don't know. The eviction could mean that occupiers will insistently return to Zuccotti with tents, and risk almost sure arrest to dramatize the repression of the occupation by the city and its monied sponsors (read: banks and others spooked by the newly unrestful peasantry). It could mean that the park will remain a site for (carefully police-controlled and -monitored) protest without further attempts at overnight stays. It could mean that former park occupiers will take residency in other public NYC spaces, or move cleverly and strategically from one site to another. It could mean that OWS in NYC will graduate to overtly political organizing that is not dependent on specific spaces. It could mean that the NYC occupation, already facing the question of what was to happen as winter descended, will be unintentionally strengthened and pushed to the next level of practical function by the city's forced eviction and the attention and outrage it has garnered. It could mean that OWS will accelerate toward a splintering into factions with differing agendas for what is wrong with American capitalism and what is to be done about it. Or it could mean any combination of these things, along with things not yet envisioned. OWS is a nationwide and international phenomenon, and the lessons of Oakland and Portland and many other cities, in addition to New York, are neither coalesced nor completed.

There is one clear thing, however, that the eviction does not mean. It does not mean the end of what OWS represents, which is a broad anger with the corruption and unfairness of the American (and global) economy and a fierce desire for remedies. That anger and hunger -- reflected not only in the shared actions and declarations of occupiers but in national opinion polls about taxes on millionaires and reining in the rule of the rich -- is still here because the conditions that create and sustain it are still here. So, like mercury in a maze, the anger will flow from one closed channel to the next open one. And the next. The richest of the rich, who like all ruling classes lack the ability to save themselves from themselves, will ensure through their reflexive greed and ironclad hubris that the anger and hunger of the rest of us is steadily nurtured via a regime of obscene unfairness and economic and ecological unsustainability. 

The funny thing about repression and injustice is that its inability to stop itself also makes for unstoppable and ever-shifting resistance.

Occupy Wall Street in NYC was raided and cleared by police in riot gear early this morning, but a court order

hours later told the city to allow protestors to return and camp out. As I write, a hearing is reportedly in progress regarding the court order.

You likely already know about all this. I learned of it at Agonist.org at 3:30 a.m. The violent eviction by police isn't a surprise. The court order, though, is a wild card. In any case, whether the encampment can legally resume or not, Mayor Bloomberg is fooling himself if he thinks this is going away.

More later.