eMgram: Peeling The Orange

This poem is not about anything else.
The globe you hold in your hands
is the only earth there is.

You may not begin until
you first imagine how the skin will feel
as it slides under half-moon nails.

Unfold the mercator projection.
Pull East from West, dig the Atlantic
with the ball of your thumb.

The tart contraction on your tongue
is an unknowable future
you must for now ignore.

Concentrate instead on the Himalayas.
This is a tectonic moment,
a necessary geography.

Let  Ptolemy be your tutor.
This is the epicenter,
history in your hands.

When you have seen the sphere naked,
felt the rind at your feet,
then, entertain the taste.

Note to Progressives: Why are there gay Republicans?

I have been asked this question innumerable times by friends who identify as left/liberal/ prog, whatever. It seems inconceivable to some that thoughtful, out, gay politicians and voters could identify themselves with a party that does not broadly support their own civil rights. I refer you to Log Cabin Republicans for a more thorough examination of their principles. When progressives say, in argument with anti-gay elements, that gay people are just like us, they are our neighbors, relatives, friends, and coworkers, they are of course correct. What is missing in the formulation when we say "just like us," is that "they" must somehow agree with our own limited political ideologies. If indeed "they" are just like "us," does that mean that "they" think for themselves, come to their own conclusions, and otherwise act "just like us?" This is the tip of the hand: if we cannot come to terms with an oppressed minority disagreeing with our ideology, then our ideology is assumed to be superior to the humanity of that minority. We have impressed our own ideas upon theirs, therefore becoming oppressors of a similar order, and just as self-righteous as the oppressors we decry. This is paternalism, orthodoxy, and condescension of the worst kind.

Off Grid.

Major hardware failure, back as I can.

Sidebar: The Hometown Paper

Off any particular point, except as it relates to the post below: The Stranger is an independent, unabashedly progressive, self-consciously ironic muckraker of a paper, which is just the sort of attitude in print journalism that I can appreciate, for good as well as ill. Creativity may take a back seat to orthodoxy here, but the outcome is often common sense. It isn't afraid to be audacious and honest, maintains a healthy skepticism, and does the only in-depth, in-person investigative journalism in the region. The dinosaurian Times and its defunct repetitor, the Post Intelligencer, run AP copy, have no substantial local reportage, and run continuous lifestyle and fluff pieces that only serve as companions to advertising--hence the heinous concoction, "advertorial.". Heavy on the Arts and the club scene, born of the raucous gay scene on Capitol Hill, and genuinely creative, this paper unequivocally rocks, unless you place the repetition of your ideology in echo chambers above your appreciation for expression. I highly recommend Mr. Charles Mudede's musings on anything at all. He is a poet of journalism and criticism and should not be missed, regardless of individual geography.

The Fizzle in the Drizzle: Occupy Seattle drains away

Here on the leftiest part of the left coast, where Occupy has wide-spread sympathy, devolution has begun. The early protest and encampment took advantage of an atypically glorious autumn. Every November, the jet stream shifts and begins funneling vortices from the Gulf of Alaska right down our throats about every other day. On the lull days it just rains, and rains. The indigenous Salish have a dozen names for rain. It falls from a uniform sheet of gray stratus that hovers ominously, oppressively. We spend our days in half-light, broken only by the wet winter darkness that greets us as we rise and says hello again as we leave work. We  take vitamin D and anti-depressants. We retreat to our burrows with our coffee and craft-distilled liquor, and we read books.

In my three visits to the encampment, I have observed an increasing solemnity, a kind of grim determination, along with deteriorating conditions and dwindling numbers. I've encountered idealists but not ideologues, various hangers-on, and a few fringe-types (the Larouche crowd simply left due to lack of any interest, and the three Nazi skinheads that showed up as provocateurs were summarily escorted off.) No drum circles or dancing in the downpours. No nudity (are you crazy, you want to freeze your ass off?) No public sex, discarded needles, or signs railing against Israel.

The initial camp at Westlake Center, a huge pedestrian concourse in the urban core, was abandoned in favor of a nearby community college campus, away from the financial and commercial centers. This was acheived without major conflict with the police. Tear gas and batons werre not required, just a request from the mayor, and receptive college administration. The move reduced visibility and curtailed any disruption of daily activities in the city. No traffic jams, no more barricaded banks. This is entirely consistent with the Seattle ethos--we are nothing if not unfailingly accommodating.

Shortly after the rains began, an insistence on "process purity," an intense fear of co-option, and outright incompetence led to the following scenarios, ably reported by The Stranger, our local alternative weekly.

No sooner had six panelists finished opening remarks last Saturday evening than a woman scampered onstage and yelled, "Mic check!" It was an orchestrated effort by several dozen Occupy Seattle activists to use the "People's Mic" to interrupt a forum at Town Hall—a forum in favor of Occupy Wall Street, featuring three wonks and three activists from Occupy Seattle. Their stunt replaced what was supposed to be an informed discussion with an uninformative shoutathon about process that consumed most of the evening. They booed opinions they disagreed with and drove supporters out of the building.
"I walked in supportive and left unsupportive," said 69-year-old Mary Ann, who declined to provide her last name. "I'm turned off by the negative shouts and repetition, and all I can think about is a cult."
She added: "And I believe in every one of their damn principles."

Across the country, police and mayors have been sweeping occupiers out of their camps; conversely, here in Seattle, protesters have become their own greatest public-relations liability. After a week of media­genic protests (largely civil disobedience aimed at Chase Bank), the debacle at Town Hall was one of several recent unflattering incidents. For another example, about 30 protesters associated with Occupy Seattle stormed a public meeting at the Horace Mann building in the Central District on November 11 to "reclaim the space for the community," according to a text from one of the protesters. Their efforts failed, and it turns out they crashed a mentorship program for high school dropouts.

Meanwhile, Seattle Central Community College (SCCC) officials have grown upset with declining sanitary conditions among campers occupying the campus. "They said they would get their own Dumpster, but they haven't yet—three weeks into it," says SCCC spokeswoman Judy Kitzman. Trash has been piling up or going into the college's trash receptacles, and "rats don't wait for their process," she continues. (read more.)

The Stranger has been an vociferous Occupy supporter from the beginning.

Occupy is not like the Civil Rights movement, not like the anti-war protests that shut down entire cities. It does not advocate a voting rights bill, nor oppose a specific policy like a foreign war. It instead opposes an entire system, the collusion of government and financial megaliths, without offering any coherent alternative. And with its utopian ideas of democracy, it offers no methodology to achieve the stated aims of fairness and equity. Occupy has achieved one concrete thing, however--it has garnered attention and sparked debate, making fairness and equity part of the conversation. That dialog, though, is often dependent on our own waning attention spans in the hypermedia news cycle, and it can be shunted into obscurity by that capricious beast.

I have an old girlfriend who once belonged to an anarcho-syndicalist commune. I asked her why she left the group. "We were tired, cold, and hungry," she said. "People left and we couldn't replace them. All of us had to work harder. We had conflicting ideas and personalities, and everyone finally stopped listening."

More rain is forecast.

American Verdict: Media and Spectacle

The crawl on all the cable news channels yesterday struck me as strange. The same headline appeared twice: once under the "Top Stories" banner, presumably the more important events of the day; and again under the "Entertainment" heading, along with this week's top-grossing movies. Herman Cain's troubles, rumblings about possible military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and census data reporting 49 million Americans now living in poverty were relegated to the electron-bombarded back pages.

For 30 minutes prior to the reading of the verdict, the networks cut away from other stories (CNN left a reporter in Afghanistan in mid-sentence to announce the "breaking news"), gathered legal experts and entertainment "reporters," and speculated  as to what the verdict might be. The crowd of thousands outside the courthouse pumped signs that included "Murray Burn in Hell." When the verdict was actually announced, a roar worthy of the Colosseum rose, punctuated by a cacophony of car horns. Ambulances arrived to assist stricken swooners in the crowd. And it continued, on into the night.

But this is not the usual screed about the banality of Big Media or even the old battle over who is biased and who is a counterbalance. We have been gawkers at the freak show for millennia.

Before Hypermedia, we had village gossip, attendance at public punishments, popular salacious scandal, and all manner of vicarious mob mentalities. We sold tidbits and trinkets, brought the kids, hissed the villains, and mourned the righteous. The progression arcs all the way through the famous spectacles we recall from our own cultural history: John Wilkes Booth, Oscar Wilde, Bruno Hauptmann, Fatty Arbuckle, OJ, Casey Anthony, ad infinitum. Although each is different in detail, they share three things: spectacle, celebrity, and our vicarious interest. The differences in media are ones of scale and speed: from word of mouth around the village hearth, to the speed of light around a global one.

We are all, of course, still tribal. That evidence, in politics, conflict, ethnicity, and sect, is irrefutable. Small wonder that we are drawn to community events, for humans seek to belong. The magnetism of spectacle is the sheer ecstatic grandeur of it. The neolithic priests at Stonehenge used resonant sound within that enclosure to induce rapt, trance-like states in the congregants. Spectacle is our collective cultural High Mass, our secular ritual.

We are now and ever have been consumers of spectacle through media. The question of whether media drives our appetites or vice-versa was answered presciently by McLuhan: when we use a tool, the tool uses us. Ever since our antecedent picked up a stick and used it as an implement, our tools have been acting on us, extending and refining our grasp, enlarging our environments. The tools we use today are brain-tools, and they act upon our brains in turn, changing how we think.

Is this a good or a bad thing? The responsibility for that outcome, lies, of course, with us. Are we passive consumers, responding to spectacle in a media-soaked trance? Are we casually dismissive of these mass events? Or do we critically examine them, noting what they have to say about who we are?

Deconstruct spectacles, and they become lenses, magnifiers of what is in us.

Cain Mutiny?

What amazes me most--wait, it really doesn't amaze me at all--is that the same group of folks that didn't believe Obama was born here are among the 54% of Republicans who are "unconcerned" about the latest sexual harassment accusations against Mr. Cain. At your next click, I will apologize for saying that.

Why Occupy Wall Street Won't Work

I’ve had my boots on the ground, listened to the arguments, made my choices, and examined my biases. Given: there is a clear, vast, accelerating disparity of wealth and of burden in the U. S. This is a statistical fact. Given: moneyed interests exert unparalleled control over the conversation in Congress. Given: OWS has accurately identified these two points.

The question is: will they succeed in changing this paradigm?

Flip the coin: I think it can be said with a fair degree of accuracy that the Tea Party has succeeded on the following fronts: they have become the propulsive force driving the conversation within the Republican Party; legislators favorable to them control the House and stall the Senate; and in addition to this legislative blockade, they are the kingmakers in the race for the Republican nomination. The only reasonable person other than (arguably) Mr. Romney is Mr. Huntsman, who is branded an evolution loving-climate change believing-former Obama employee-Mormon-tax-pledge rejecting irrelevancy—and his poll numbers indicate just that. All the rest have bowed to the TP, most in obsequious fashion.

The TP has (depending on nuance) either invaded and occupied the GOP, or they have been co-opted and absorbed by it. In either case, they have a legislative agenda, a slew of candidates, real political power, and, thanks to Dick Army and his funders, plenty of money. They also have at their disposal the organizational power of the party, of the evangelical wing (which is considerable, and another Big Picture topic), PACS, and anonymous sympathetic corporations behind super-PACS.

OWS has struck at the heart of what, broadly, most Americans believe: that Big Money and Big Politics run the show, and that most are left in the dust with no influence, no power, no voice, and no alternative. Americans in general feel captive to forces that they believe are beyond their control. OWS exemplifies this. This meets all the requirements of a popular/populist movement. They have accurately tapped into the zeitgeist.

Here’s the rub. This is essentially a utopian movement, susceptible to all the foibles of utopian movements past: big ideas, big idealism, noble motives, dedicated adherents, out with the old, wholesale, in with the new and innovative. They will become victims of their own aspirations, however admirable those might be. (The TP shares this aspect in a different iteration, the subject of another essay.)

The road to political change is twofold: incremental change through politics, or outright popular revolution that forces the issue. The former is the rule, the latter the exception. I used “paradigm” advisedly earlier. What OWS is proposing is a sea change in the way business is done. No nipping around the edges, no legislative fix, no candidate, no standard bearer, no (big) funding, no party, no co-option/invasion. It has exempted itself from the political narrative by proposing ideas that are just Too Big, no matter how resonant they are. It is creatively attractive anarchy (and I mean that in a good way) that is pragmatically untenable.

More revolutions are crushed than are successful. Those few successes are often co-opted and redirected. Ask me, I was a Trotskyite long ago. Utopia, and Justice, and Fairness, these are ideals to strive towards. These are part of our common aspirational humanity, and striving is in our nature. Without pragmatic methodology, OWS is an inert expression of cumulative and common angst. We do, as humans, dare to dream. But we also have to act in a waking world.