“Since then, I have not met an officer I can call by name.”

At UC Davis,

students are suing fifty-six university employees for violating their constitutional and statutory rights, but the list of defendants only has six names on it.

Why? Because only one of the dozens of police officers who participated in the attack on the protesters has been identified by the university.

It’s more than three months after the incident. Video of the day’s events has been shown over and over again throughout the planet. But UC Davis still won’t tell its students which of its campus police officers brutalized them.

In addition to the pepper-spraying, which was conducted by two officers, the lawsuit alleges that one student was thrown to the ground where his head struck a lawn sprinkler fixture. Another was pinned down after having been pepper sprayed. Another was dragged, handcuffed, to a police car. Another was “slammed to the ground,” kneed, and kneeled on, then denied medical assistance.

None of the officers who engaged in these acts, other than the two who were videotaped pepper-spraying students without cause, have been suspended. As far as is publicly known, all are still at UC Davis, working alongside the sixteen plaintiffs who are still students there.

Josephine Miles wrote this poem at UC Berkeley, years ago. “Officers”:

Mr. Hansen, the cop at the campus gate,
Put me through college.
While the dean of women
Advised against it, too complicated, the cop said,
You get enrolled some way, and I’ll let you in.
Every morning, four years. On commencement day
I showed him my diploma.
Later when radio news announced Clark Kerr
President, my first rejoicing
Was with Mr. Taylor
At the campus gate. He shook hands
Joyfully, as I went in to a Marianne Moore reading.
And we exchanged over many years
Varying views of the weather.
Then on a dark night a giant officer came up to the car
When we were going to a senate meeting, strikebound by pickets,
And smashed his billy club down on the elbow of my student driver.
Where do you think you’re going? I suddenly saw I knew him.
It’s you, Mr. Graham, I mean it’s us, going to the meeting. He walked away,
Turning short and small, which he was, a compact man
Of great neatness.
Later when I taught in the basement corridor,
The fuzz came through,
Running, loosing tear-gas bombs in the corridor
To rise and choke in offices and classrooms,
Too late for escape. Their gas masks distorted their appearance
But they were Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Swenson.
Since then, I have not met an officer
I can call by name.

Thanks to Sue Schweik for reading this poem to us, and telling us about her.

The Earnestness of Being Grantham

Everyone who writes about Downton Abbey accepts the premise that the show is a narrative of progress, the fin de siècle story of The Traditional that is about to be (and then is) buffeted by The Onrush of Modernity. This might be a function of opening sequence, whose fast-moving montage of moving cameras and busily buzzing activity cuts so quickly between so many disembodied movements that we find History suggested, a History that cannot be stayed… until, of course, the movement dead-ends on the immoveable object, stopped, hard, on this strangely immaterial landscape shot of the house itself.

It’s to the show’s credit that this is completely wrong. By that Edwardian moment, the Old World that the Granthams seek to maintain and preserve had already passed away a long time ago, something we would understand if we took seriously the simple fact that Grantham is able to be the kind of “traditional” Earl he is only because, and only to the extent that, he married American money.

Think of a novel like Mansfield Park, where the blood and labor of colonized bodies in the Caribbean provide the driving energy to keep it all moving, both the narrative and the household economy. Unlike this house, that house’s conspicuous consumption has an input, an exploited population and economic machine with a dynamism of its own. But this lord has no peasants: Grantham’s house is powered only by the one-time donation of an American woman who wanted to live in that house, with that title, and that illusion of permanence, and who still does. Which is one important reason why he never seriously considers trying to break the entail: his condition of possibility is the money that allows him to play house in the way that he does.

To put it as bluntly as possible: she bought him, along with his manor and name, and on some level, both he and the show understand this.

Carina Chocano, on the other hand, does not understand this, asking in the New York Times yesterday:

“Has a fictional aristocrat as upright and honorable, as tender of heart and noble of spirit, as humble, forbearing, magnanimous, solicitous and totally ludicrous as the Earl of Grantham ever graced the screen? Supermodels playing rocket scientists in Nicolas Cage movies put less strain on my credulity.”

Chocano’s column does little more than reflect on how the thing she does not understand are what make the show enjoyable to her, and she may even be right about that; after all, she knows better than anyone else why she likes the things she likes. But a supermodel gets hired to play rocket scientist in Nicholas Cage movies because she looks good in the part, and that’s why the Lady Grantham bought this particular Earl: he looks good playing the part of humble, forbearing, magnanimous, and solicitous lord. There is nothing surprising or unusual about models being hired to play parts – in movies – that are not – in real life – conventionally associated with extreme physical attractiveness; the moviemakers don’t care that much about reality, so they produce the pretty pictures that (they well know) their audiences will gladly accept. By the same token, there is nothing all that ludicrous about a “humble, forbearing, magnanimous, solicitous” man being allowed to play the part of “Earl of Grantham” in Downton Abbey’s play-within-a-play. His wife didn’t want a real aristocrat; she wanted a modern simulacrum.

After all, if this show were set in the early 1600’s, then yes, perhaps it would be a little strange for him to be such a great guy. But that’s probably because, in the early 17^th century, the perks of being an aristocrat were things like raping the servants’ daughters and taxing your indebted tenants until they went broke and you could throw them off the land to starve. Having conquered the country by the sword – literally and metaphorically – the aristocracy kept their position because they had access to real political and economic power, and they used that power to keep their position.

That’s what real class antagonism is, the relatonship between the powerful who use their power to benefit themselves and the weak whose subjection to it makes them objects of exploitation. In industrial capitalism, this antagonism is the exploitation of labor; in agricultural economies, it’s based around rents and debt peonage. But the principle is similar enough, and in both cases, the antagonism flows out of real – and violent, when necessary – relations of power. It is because the aristocracy needs its victims that it violates them into submission and consent, producing – in the mind of the master – the Hegelian master-slave dynamic by which the master is actually, apparently paradoxically, dependent on the slave for his position. But it isn’t a paradox; the industrialist needs the laborer, and the lord needs the peasant, and because they need them, they use force to keep them.

Sir Richard gives us the picture of what real aristocracy looks like in the show. He’s not a bad man, not really. But to get what he wants — to be what he wants to be, an aristocrat — he understands the kind of force it is necessary to employ, and does. Grantham is something very different. Rather than an aristocrat trying to cope with a modern world of industrial capitalism, he’s the author of a fantasy, using a wealth stream from America to recreate a “traditional” world that never really existed  “Downton Abbey” – the house – is a museum and a show-piece, a theme-park for a single American tourist, and Downton Abbey – the show – is a behind-the-scenes narrative about its maintenance.

[As a result, he has no reason to be anything but benevolent. Unlike a real landlord or capitalist – whose dependency on exploited labor necessitates violence or the threat of it – Grantham is dependent only on his wife’s money. And since he has that, he’s not dependent on much of anything at all; there is no Hegelian drama for him, here, no vexed relationship with the human beings he must dehumanize to maintain the hierarchy which positions him above them. He’s already got everything he needs; his only job is to enjoy it. It’s a measure of how thoroughly the right wing has mystified what class antagonism really is – making us think that existential conflicts of interest are nothing more than petty resentment and envy – that we don’t instantly understand this difference.

When Chocano writes, then, that Downton Abbey is “a fantasy in which an enlightened overclass and a grateful underclass look deeply into each other’s eyes and realize that they need each other, that there’s a way for them to live together in perfect, symbiotic harmony,” she’s actually not all that far off the mark, even if she doesn’t realize it. She’s simply misunderstood whose fantasy it is, and who’s selling it, and why. It’s precisely because Grantham doesn’t need his servants very much (or doesn’t need to exploit them) that he can treat them like human beings; having buttered his bread so completely, his wife has made it unnecessary to be an evil bastard, so why should he? There’s no percentage in it. So he can let people go whenever they want, or let them stay longer than they can afford it. In fact, since it is precisely his job to pretend to have the class relation that his wife wanted to marry into – but whose reality was as irrelevent as a whether a supermodel in a Michael Bay movie can really do astrophysics – he only needs them to prop up his image of the idealized lord, the only version she (or we) are interested in. His relationship with his servants and tenants is not mediated by the forceful extraction of labor and taxes – only by his need to be a Potemkin Village for the aristocracy that never was – so one of the benefits of the job is that also he gets to be a nice guy.

If we understand his essentially ornamental (and mystifying) purpose, then, we’ll have a better understanding of why Grantham spends two seasons threatening to do all sorts of things and then never actually doing anything. A real aristocrat would have known how to deal with an impertinent Irish chauffeur, for example, and he might have even, occasionally, made good on any of the other proposed actions he loudly proclaims himself about to mybe take and then doesn’t. But Grantham never does anything because that’s not what he’s for.

The closest thing he ever comes to an actual action, in fact, is the exception that proves the rule: having been deprived of his usual audience (his wife), he finds he has nothing to do, no one to perform for. The very essence of his personality and reason for being is gone; if an Earl reads his paper in the dining room with no one to see him, is he really an Earl? And so, when Jane comes along and gives him an audience to perform Granthemness, he leaps at the opportunity. But it isn’t sex or power he wants; he has never wanted that, particularly. He wants what he in fact, gets: a chance to perform his rendition of airbrushed aristocracy. And so, he does: having seen Major Bryant demonstrate to us what the upper class is really about – taking advantage of the housemaid, Ethel, and then abandoning her and her child – Grantham perfectly washes away that exploitation, taking responsibility for an out-of-wedlock child he won’t even stoop to sire.

Sunday Reading

• Political Movements in Bahrain, Past, Present, and Future
• What We Owe to Each Other: An Interview with David Graeber, Part 1 and Part 2.
• The Moscow Protests, part one, two, three, and four
• When Oakland Is Under Attack, What Do We Do?
• Barack Obama Can’t Stop Making Stupid Sexist Jokes About His Daughters’ Dating Lives
• I’m Every Woman: Whitney Houston, the Voice of the Post-Civil Rights Era
• The Scandal of Michigan’s Emergency Managers
• Geneologies of Neoliberalism
• New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion
• Unified (Gar)Field Theory
• From Greece: Declaration for the Defense of Society and Democracy
• Predictive analytics and information camouflage
• What is the Liquidity Trap?
• A Cold War Kafka: Orson Welles’ The Trial
• Dubai as it used to be.
• “We Have Chosen To Be Gay”
• America’s Gulag: The Money (in Politics) Behind Prison Privatization 
• Private Prison Corporation Offers Cash In Exchange For State Prisons
• Africa’s eternal spring

The Top 1% Must Stop Insisting They’re Not Rich Right This Instant:

“Sure, it’s an objectively large sum of money,” they say. “But it is far smaller after I spend it.”

No shit.

Money pays for the costs of life. That is what money does. You can’t fucking argue that, hey, your money doesn’t go that far after you’ve already spent it. You used it! Paying taxes and paying bills and paying the mortgage and putting money in a retirement fund and going out to dinner are the things that money gets you. You asshole. Just because you didn’t blow it all on jewelry, caviar, and cocaine doesn’t mean you didn’t get anything out of it. This argument is like a man eating a hearty meal, licking his plate clean, then turning to a starving person and saying, “Look, we’re in the same boat. My plate is empty too!”

Podcasts from UCLA’s Near Eastern Studies Department:

• Hazem Kandil: Egypt: Whither the Revolution?
• Joel Beinin, Stanford University: Egypt: Whither the Revolution? 

Inequality in Asia: The Local Effects of Global Capitalism:

• Prison Rape and the Government
• Twilight of the Lecture
• “Downton Abbey” anachronisms: beyond nitpickery
• Things Come Together: A Journey through Literary Lagos
• Can They Do That? Retaking Our Fundamental Rights in the Workplace
• America’s Failed Promise of Equal Opportunity
• Pity the Landlord

A lack of a culture war truce in one graph:

• 10 Thoughts About the House’s All-Male Panel Convened to Discuss My Vagina
• The Testimony Chairman Issa Doesn’t Want You to Hear
• Anonymous to shut down the net on March 31
• A.C.A.K.K.: All Cops Are Keystone Kops
• What Is the Question “What Are Women For?” For?
• Operation Virtual Shield (aka Persistent Video Surveillance Coming Soon)
• ‘Occupy Our Homes’ Looks To Save Fifth Detroit Resident From Foreclosure
• So what would your plan for Greece be?
• Passports for a Price
• Even kitchenmaids get the blues: compulsory heterosexuality on Downton Abbey

Telling the Story of the Congo, “on the partial and often inaccurate narrative about the conflict in eastern Congo which has gained currency among policymakers in the West”:

“One of the first speakers opened with a striking exercise: he pulled a map of the DRC up on the overhead and pointed to a variety of cities throughout the country, asking the audience how many people had visited each.  A healthy number had visited Kinshasa, and nearly as many had been to Goma or Bukavu, but very few had been to Lubumbashi or Kisangani, let alone Mbuji-Mayi or Mbandaka.  This is a very real result of the way in which our collective imagined geography of the DRC has shrunk to the extreme west (Kinshasa) and extreme east of the country, rendering the rest of the country not as no-man’s land, but as non-existent land.”

Ask someone who recently went to Iceland:

If you go to Iceland and someone asks you to bring them home a pack of Icelandic cigarettes, and you go into a store to ask what kind of “local Icelandic cigarettes” they have, and the very sweet young man working in the store explains, without a glint of cruelty, that there are no local Icelandic cigarettes, only imported ones, because Iceland doesn’t grow too tremendously much tobacco, it being Iceland and all, and you feel like an idiot, WELL let me spare you that experience, because that is what happens.

M.I.A. and the Impossibility of Selling Out:

[F]or anyone invested in M.I.A., even on just a superficial level, it’s hard to reconcile the new video with where she ended her week: onstage at the Super Bowl halftime show. She performed alongside Madonna, Nicki Minaj, and a cast of hundreds. Rarely has playing the Super Bowl seemed like a brazen, risky move, but there is no going back once you appear on network television’s highest-profile night, on a stage that’s been graced in recent years by a murderer’s row of people you weren’t sure were still alive. Is there a greater sign of having accepted one’s place in the mainstream? Her appearance, which was neither an invasion nor an occupation, neither radical nor chic, forces us to ask: Is it still possible to “sell out?”

Lin is not Tebow:

[I]t’s for reasons completely disconnected from statistics where the differences blare like a siren. Tim Tebow’s commercials and personal branding speak about how everyone has always doubted him, but in reality, he’s has every privilege and advantage. He was home schooled but was still allowed to play Florida high school sports. He was allowed to play in a college spread offense built around his rather unique skill-set. He was drafted in the 1st round even though many scouts saw him as a mid to high round project. He is treated like an All-American superstar even without the game to back it up. His clean cut, Evangelical whiteness has caused Republican politicians sportswriters and a whole sector of sportswriters to simply swoon…Tim Tebow had the benefit of the doubt. Jeremy Lin was just doubted.

Pinterest: Delightful, Addictive, Theft:

One of the problems with this innovative and cool approach by the Wall Street Journal to writing about Pinterest by writing about Pinterest on Pinterest (and it is!) is that there you can’t address that, more than early Napster, more than Megaupload, more than any government-seized hip-hop blog, Pinterest is entirely copyright-infringement. It’s just that, unlike with music and movies, there’s no dumb and hostile industry lobby that represents, say, “every photographer everywhere.” If there was ever a place on the Internet that made you think SOPA was a good idea, it’d be right here! But there is, in the Journal itself, a spiffy little paragraph that saysthat Pinterest has found that being a website based on publishing other people’s photographs hasn’t “been a significant issue so far.”

• The Trials of Greg Mortenson
• Make, DARPA and the line in the sand and Make, DARPA and the line in the sand, #2
• ‘Personal Time in Alternative and Time-Travel Narrative: The Cases of Groundhog Day, Twelve Monkeys and 2001: A Space Odyssey‘
• Highly Irregular
• ‘A level of racist violence I have never seen’: UCLA professor Robin D. G. Kelley on Palestine and the BDS movement

Jadaliyya Launches a Syria Page:

• Sowing the Seeds of Dissent: Economic Grievances and the Syrian Social Contract’s Unraveling
• Notes on the Syrian Uprisings (Part 1)
• Syria’s Cyber Operations
• Syria Media Roundup (February 16)
• Is It Time to Intervene in Syria? NPR Discussion with Bassam Haddad and Others

Austerity is enough to drive honest folks to Poetry

I. On Valentine’s day, I wrote this poem:

Valentine’s Day at the RSF
Fiat With Love
7:30 AM to 9:30 AM
Free Italian Coffee and Roses
Fiat
11:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Free Pepsi Products
Pizza and Roses
Brought to you by McKevitt Fiat
Pepsi
facebook.com/recsports

II. It was inspired by this:

III. Wednesday, I read it here.

IV. The motto of The University of California is “Fiat Lux,” which means “Let there be light.” It is exactly the point that I’m not sure whether McKevitt Fiat is aware of that, or if anyone is, or if it matters.

Composing Parts

Tomorrow at noon, a “we” that is composed of anyone who wants to be a part of it will read poetry in front of California Hall, at the University of California, Berkeley. This will be a small and modest action, lasting only as long as it lasts — last week it was about twenty minutes — and it will continue every Wednesday until it stops. I invite you to be a part of this “we.”

California Hall is where the administrators administrate the university we occupy, and — if you are a part of this “we” — we are doing this because we don’t much care for or approve of the ways they do so. Part of this is that they approve of beating students with clubs. And part of this is that they don’t seem to much care for or approve of the ways we occupy this university, partly because we do things like read poetry, and partly because we think about poetry as something you can do with bodies.

I’m going to read Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” copyright © 1991 by the Regents of the University of California.

Sunday Reading

• Global Copycats
• The Winners and Losers of the Jobs Report, Economic Theories of the Recession Edition
• The Ultras’ Politics of Fun Confront Tyranny
• Meeting Muscat
• Economists: Actively Evil Neoliberal Ideologues or Soulless Technocratic Hacks?
• How an Israeli Strike on Iran could radically weaken Israel
• Feel the Lin-sanity: Why Jeremy Lin is more than a cultural curio
• Ethiopia, Anti-Terrorism, and Human Rights
• The Arab Digital Vanguard: How a Decade of Blogging Contributed to a Year of Revolution
• JM Coetzee’s Cricketing Life
• ‘Little’ Protests, Big Erasures
• Hose streets? Our streets! Belgian firefighters soak police in protest
• Arab Talk Interview: Nikhil Pal Singh on Palestine
• Is [Toto's] “Africa” “Actually” African? – Mind. Blown.
• Your scholarship won’t pay their bills.

How to stop worrying about class:

Today’s New York Times contains a fine example of how ideology works at the high end: report information that might trouble the established order, but conclude on a tranquilizing note that allows the comfortable reader to turn the page (or click “close tab”) without changing his or her worldview. Both functions are important. Outlets like the Times do report tons of important stuff that one would be hard-pressed to learn otherwise. But, as Alexander Cockburn put it long ago, a primary function of the bourgeois press is reassurance.

Ryan Gosling, the selfless man:

Gosling’s presence in a film assures it will be taken as an important revelation of the American zeitgeist, which in turn reinforces his own cultural significance. His fame has reached the level of tautology: It has transcended causal logic altogether, acting as a feedback loop that amplifies the ideas and cultural assumptions that he transmits. Such resonance allows his films to serve as especially effective bearers of ideology. They target psychological spots that have already been softened, bypassing rational argument to establish the sort of beliefs that can perpetuate society on its current terms.

Consider the recent film Drive, a nouveau-noir thriller in which Gosling plays a stuntman and getaway driver who, in an effort to protect his neighbor and inamorata from the thugs who would do her harm, becomes entangled in a cycle of Mafia-related violence. If that premise sounds familiar, it is because the movie fits the tried-and-true formula of patriarchal fantasy wherein viewers are asked to accept that violent death at the hands of others is the primary existential threat and, consequently, that women need male protection to survive.

Under late capitalism, the true existential threat is deprivation. Far more will succumb to a lack of food, uncontaminated water, or medicine than will be murdered. Scarcity pervades our everyday lives and terrorizes us: Even our relative opulence cannot quite suppress the mantra of “work or starve” humming quietly in the background. Capitalist society trains us to cater to capital to escape this threat, placing great value on those who are able to suck up to bosses.

Patriarchal fantasies play against this. In their contrived worlds, social value accrues to brutes who can physically overpower would-be aggressors — which is to say that men are rendered heroes by default. Hence Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive.

• Writing American Empire
• Bishops and burkhas and buggies
• Why Planned Parenthood Had To Fight Back So Hard
• Internet of People and Social Flâneurism
• Interview with Alyssa Eisenberg
• Adverts from Playboy, November and December 1962
• Pakistani Women – Multiple Locations and Competing Narratives
• The Death of Cinema Redux: Martin Scorsese’s Hugo

Frank Zappa with his parents:

• Starship Troopers and Other Super Bowl Fantasies
• “From schools to prisons, outsourcing government’s works typically ends with cronyism, waste and unaccountability”
• Islam, Women and the West
• Saul Alinsky: The activist who terrifies the right
• Love in Fanon, Keguro’s GWU talk.
• Concerning the Violent Peace-Police: An Open Letter to Chris Hedges
• Video police deleted from journalist’s camera by police after Occupy Miami eviction, recovered.
• Santa Rita, I hate every inch of you

The Invisible War:

• Internet of People and Social Flâneurism
• Frank Pasquale collects opinions On the Servicing Settlement (they all hate it; we got screwed)
• Occupying the ‘Wall Street Journal’
• A Funny Thing on the Way to the Oakland Police Review Board Forum
• Hi Bill Keller. The New York Times admits it infringed on our copyright. Why can’t you?
• The Saturday interview: Stuart Hall

Noam Chomsky channels his inner Malcolm Harris:

My feeling is that student fees are instituted, basically as a technique of indoctrination and control. I don’t think there’s an economic basis for them. And it’s interesting that, you look at the timing — like when I went to college, I went to an Ivy League university, The University of Pennsylvania. Tuition was only $100 and you could easily get a scholarship.

Students today are over $1 trillion in debt. That’s more than credit card debt. A trillion dollars of debt? That’s a burden on people coming out of college. It’s got them trapped. It (tuition) is a technique of control, and it surely isn’t an economic necessity in the richest country in the world. All sorts of things started happening — the university architecture changed. Universities that were built, worldwide, in the post-’70s and on, are usually designed so that they don’t have meeting places, designed just to keep students separated and under control. Look at the ratio of administrators to faculty: it’s gone way up the last couple of decades … not for educational purposes, but for more techniques of control.

What you’re talking about, I think it should be opposed, because it’s a general form of indoctrination and control, which goes down to kindergarten. I mean, that’s what No Child Left Behind is about. It’s training for the Marine Corps. It’s a way to make sure that children aren’t free, independent or inquisitive, exploring.

Occupy Oakland stay-away order:

Joseph Briones, 30, was arrested along with 408 others at an Occupy Oakland protest Jan. 28. He is one of 12 who were apparently issued the restraining orders, and is therefore barred from being within 300 yards of Oakland City Hall, potentially for the next three years, according to Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Teresa Drenick.

But based on a Feb. 8 hearing, Briones and his lawyer understood that he did not have a stay-away order against him, said Occupy Oakland media committee member Omar Yassin. “That’s why he was at the plaza, carefree, on Wednesday,” said Yassin. That’s when Briones was arrested.

In a Feb. 9 press release, Officer Johnna Watson of Oakland Police media relations said that “Joseph Briones is one of four individuals charged with a violent felony offense stemming from the Jan. 28 protest.” But according to records at the District Attorney’s office, that’s incorrect; Briones is charged with three misdemeanors.

While everyone scrambles to get their story straight, Briones is still in jail. He has a hearing at 2 o’ clock today. If found to have violated a stay-away order, he could face six months in prison. So far, Briones is legally innocent of any crime; he has not been convicted of any of the charges leveled on him in connection with Jan. 28. None of the other 11 who are prohibited from going near City Hall have been convicted of anything either.

Besides all that, the stay-away orders may be entirely illegal…

• Random Searches on the New York Subways: Getting Used to the Stop-n-Frisk
• Don’t Spill That Semen!
• Brazilian Police Go on Strike and More on the Brazilian Police Strike
• On Technology and classless society and Quotations on Hidden Labor
• America at Midpassage?

Literary Composites (Humbert Humbert):

• The Madonna of the Sea
• Blogging as Outsider Art
• Syrian Dictator Seeking Work… on Craigslist?
• Shut Up, Jonathan Franzen
• The Tuareg Uprising in Northern Mali
• 1789, 1979, and all that…
• How to Date a Wall Street Man (Continued)
• Why Foreign Bestsellers Often Fail in Japan.
• Remaking the University: Have We Protected Poor Students from Debt?
• Mr Kristof, I Presume?
• On Massad: The Failure of the Anti-Imperialist Intellectuals
• On Syria
• How a seedpod led to $400,000 bail and 8 felony charges
• I Was Caught in Police Violence at Occupy DC
• Tucson Students Stage Walkouts, Teach-Ins Over Suspended Mexican American Studies Program

• Towards 1971 I: A Personal Journey
• Towards 1971 II: The Making of a Tragedy
• Towards 1971 III: A Few Good Pakistani Men
• Towards 1971 IV: The Enemy Within
• …tbc

Lindy watches The Phantom Menace:

If you’re like me, you probably haven’t watched Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace since its original release in 1999, because you’ve had literallyanything else to do. And you probably think, in your hazy hindsight, that it’s just “not that good” or “pretty bad” or some other relatively gentle descriptor that lets George Lucas off the hook for being an affably clumsy old billionaire man-frog. However, having recently rewatched Phantom Menace to prepare for its upcoming 3-D rerelease (do you like the Star Wars prequels but just wish you couldalso have a headache???), allow me to say this: HOOOOOO MY GOD FUCK US ALL BECAUSE THIS MOVIE GOT BIT BY A RADIOACTIVE GARBAGE AND IT IS A FUCKING MONSTERPIECE THEATER THAT TRANSCENDS BAD AND GOOD-BAD TO COME BACK AGAIN TO BAD AND REDEFINE COMEDY ITSELF. Seriously. Seriously. Drinking game: Take a shot every time something hella dumb happens and/or every time Jar Jar Binks makes you want to personally send tear-soaked reparations to 110 percent of the black people on earth. Oops, sorry about how you’re dead now (alcohol poiz).

New Inquiries

This blog started off as a letter to friends, and I hope it won’t stop being that. But starting today — with this behemoth of a review blog of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years  – I’ll also be blogging over at the New Inquiry. I’m not going to overthink this too much, and with the exception of that first post – which I’m going to make you click over to read — I’ll most likely post everything here that I post there, so if you don’t want to adjust your RSS feed or bookmarks or whatever, no worries.

That said, the New Inquiry is a fantastic journal, there are some really great writers and bloggers there, and I’m excited to be one of them. I’m looking forward both to joining that conversation and seeing where it takes us.

More than that, while this blog has always been a labor of love, and while I’ve gotten a few perks here and there from writing it (starting with the humbling generosity of the people who send me stuff from my amazon wishlist), the New Inquiry is threatening to actually pay me (modestly) for writing stuff on the internet. For details on that startling prospect, click this link.

But the gist is this:

All [The New Inquiry's] content will remain free on the site. And there will be a bunch more of it. But TNI’s contributors, editors, and staff have all developed an unfortunately expensive addiction to eating every day. Some of us have relatively severe coffee and/or cigarettes and/or alcohol habits. We like making TNI—but stores are insisting we pay for their food with money.

In our continued efforts to actually pay our staff and contributors, we present to you The New Inquiry Magazine: A monthly collection of new and past content organized around a common theme. We hope you will support our project by subscribing for $2/issue to receive each New Inquiry Magazine as a beautifully designed, e-reader-compatible PDF on the first Monday of every month.

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Sunday Reading

• Cairo, Hers Again: excerpt from Ahdaf Soueif’s book about Cairo and the Egyptian revolution.
• The Aesthetics of Authority
• On Laura Stephen, family ties, and madness
• Where They At: New Orleans Hip-Hop and Bounce in Words and Pictures.
• The Poor Storm: Ending mass Incarceration in America
• Tribalism in the Arabian Peninsula: It’s A Family Affair
• The ‘football riot’ in Egypt and Egypt Soccer Protests Challenge Military Regime
• “I’m afraid the masquerade is over and so is love, and so is love”
• Digesting East Kalimantan literature
• In Which Anonymous Infiltrates a Confidential Conference Call
• Six Arab Novelists on Why They Write
• Empire Bakuba – “Kwasa Kwasa”, Syllart Production
• Mother’s boys: conversations with the parents of Russia’s neo-Nazis
• Praying while Shi’a: the NYPD’s latest religious profiling scandal
• What Lies Beneath the “Violence” Discourse
• Radiation Posters, 1947
• No Israeli Citizenship for Palestinian Spouses
• Prison Printshop Guerrilla Tactics
• Girl, Napalm, and ?
• The Good Book
• A Short History of Modern Syria
• Things Jonathan Franzen Says Are Bad for Society
• Some Bad Ideas Can’t Be Shot Down
• Fighting For Scraps, Higher Ed Edition
• Yakuza labor structure formed base of nuclear industry
• This Militarized Empty Lot
• The Growing Iranian Military Behemoth
• Why Occupy Oakland Keeps Capturing Headlines
• The Myth of the Rational Insurgent
• Do You Like Online Privacy? You Might Be a Terrorist.

The Little Book of Terror:

Raise the Crime Rate:

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

• Checking Out
• Narrow Streets and NYC: The Problem, or the Solution?
• Interview as Train Wreck: Susan G. Komen Foundation meets Andrea Mitchell
• Third Chimurenga
• The necrotization of US culture
• No kidney transplant for dying East Bay dad who is illegal immigrant
• South Sudan’s Oil Cutoff
• Political Nonexistence
• Video: Occupy Chicago’s New Indoor HQ | Occupied Chicago Tribune
• Evolution of US Breakfast Cereals
• One State, Two States: Who Is the Subject of Palestinian Liberation?
• Castrating Review of Alexander Payne’s The Descendants
• No Police Order

• HAU and the opening of ethnographic theory
• Brokeback Himalayas: ”For the mango of their love never ripens: too focused on furniture and grammar, Pratap spends the rest of his stay in Delhi absorbed in his studies and leaves India with a full vocabulary but an empty heart.”
• Mega-UpYours
• An Education in Occupation
• SOPA is top story for young people
• White House’s Education Non-Policy
• African Zoolander

RACE FOR THE CURE TO BEING RELEVANT:

Wednesday’s decision has been described as motivated by pressure from pro-life groups, but in reality Komen^tmis (and always has been) run by right wingers and closely aligned with conservative politics. The organization’s current president, Karen Handel, ran for governor of Georgia in 2010 and lost in the Republican primary. Sarah Palin endorsed her. During her campaign she promised repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood. She took over Komen^tm a few months ago. You do the math. On a personal note, Karen, I hope you get cancer. I hope the doctors find it too late to do anything but treat your pain, and I hope they do a poor job of that. Cut and paste that at your leisure to prove how mean-spirited and Uncivil liberals are.

Komen’s founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, is a big money Republican with ties to the past three Republican administration who received a political appointment from George W. Bush as a reward for her fundraising largesse. She draws a salary of $459,000 annually, money well spent compared to the 39% of its budget the foundation spends on “public health education” (i.e., marketing itself). Not to mention that they also spend a million bucks per year in legal fees to threaten other non-profit groups who use the phrase For the Cure^tm, to which Komen^tm claims to have intellectual property rights.

That last part is important to the organization, of course, because every successful marketing campaign needs a good logo and a slogan. And that’s all Komen is – a consulting firm that helps large corporate clients sell more of their products through pinkwashing campaigns. By slathering everything from pasta to baseball bats to perfume to fast food with the Pink Imprimatur, consumers are led to believe that their purchases are making meaningful contributions to breast cancer research. Somewhere down the line a few cents per purchase may trickle into those bloated coffers, but the immediate and motivating effect of that pink packaging is to get you to buy things. In short, Komen^tm is a group of salespeople selling image. Whatever money benefits the sick, researchers, or recovering patients is ancillary. Getting those big, fat tax-exempt checks from their Partners for the Cure^tm is what drives their business model.

• Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere
• Call and Response 
• ‘Gasland’ Journalists Arrested At Hearing By Order Of House Republicans
• Precarity Everywhere
• The Gendered Politics of Precarious Labor
• Are Electronic Media Making us More or Less Literate
• We Will Not Lie Die Like Dogs
• Truck Drivers Shut Down Port of Seattle
• The Storytellers of Empire
• Death, Debt, and Climate Change
• The Privatized Mind
• Syria’s revolution, and imperialism
• The empty idea of private property
• On the Cowboy as the “New Indian”, 1876/7

What if Google Had a Blackout?:

[W]hat if the internet suffered a real blow? How would things change if Google and Bing went down for 24 hours, and there wasn’t a way around the block?

If your first thought is to do your online searches through Yahoo!, you will run into another roadblock. Since 2010, Yahoo! searches are powered by Bing. Can you name any other search engine sites off the top of your head? You’re in trouble if you can’t – remember, there’s no way to search for them.

Among the Majority:

[C]olleges promote themselves, especially to first-generation students, as a pathway to the middle class — but, increasingly, colleges do not pay middle-class wages to their own faculty members. The contradiction is deepest at the lowest tiers of the academic hierarchy, where, Rhoades said, underpaid adjunct faculty members are effectively “modeling what is acceptable as an employment practice.” It is no wonder that adjunct faculty members are so politically invisible: apparently no one wants to say to high school graduates, “Go to college, work hard, and someday you can get a job teaching college — at a salary of $20,000.” It casts a pall over the American dream.

Statue Porn:

From the Outside, Trying to Look In: Occupy Oakland’s #J28,

I spent Sunday outside Santa Rita County Jail, waiting with other Occupy Oakland people for the 400 people who were arrested the previous day to be released, to greet them with food, rides, hugs, and cheers. As of last night, the round the clock support team was still there; people were still, slowly, being released. It was a very strange day, but quite pleasant for those of us lucky enough to be free, bathing in the information vacuum, the company, and the California sun. Thousands of birds had occupied the nearby trees – set in the midst of vast grassy lawns whose grass was, according to signs posted, not to be walked upon – and the weird aharmonic chorus of their chirping was both almost as inhumanly robotic as the jail itself, and also quite peculiarly soothing.

For those we were waiting to greet, the situation was somewhat different. When my friend Michelle got out, her first words were a very understated “That place is really not a good place.” As another friend, “Repoliticize,” described her experience on twitter:

For those of you who haven’t had the, ahem, pleasure of paying a visit to the inner corridors of santa rita jail, a few words… this is a cold, concrete space, which will eventually defeat you into lying on surfaces you wouldn’t let children touch. If you stay there long enough to be served more than one “meal,” you realize there is only one meal that they serve in the holding cells, a sealed plastic bag with two thick, stomach-turning slices of bologna, two stale slices of white bread, two soggy cookies, an orange, and a packet of “bernard” orange powder for flavoring the oddly filmy water that comes out of the cell’s one faucet.

The toilet is next to the window, so that you’re forced to pee not only in front of your cellmates, but also passing guards and inmates you’re made to beg for more toilet paper, and there hasn’t been any soap in the cells on either of my visits to santa rita. There are no trash cans, so you sit and lie in your own filth: orange peels, plastic packaging, spilled “bernard” off-brand tang.previous inhabitants of the cells have written on the walls with mustard and the benches are thick and sticky with food and bodily discharge. There’s not thing to do but sleep (if you’re lucky) and ponder whether it’s worth it to eat the “food” or drink the “water”

I don’t want to be overly dramatic with this account — although everything is as disgusting or as bad as I say because this was a TERRIBLE experience — but let’s be real: I was detained for 24 hours. This is one of the LEAST bad experiences one could have in jail.

Now, why were they there? Why did 400 people from Occupy Oakland spend days in a county jail? Why was it necessary? What did this accomplish? And why are some still there?

The easy answer – the one you’d get from newspapers, who are careful to give you a (gradually rising) number of arrestees — is something like “Violence Erupted in Oakland.” And the police exist, as you and I know, to calm the violence, restore stability, preserve order, pacify the situation, etc. Sitting outside the jail, it was hard not to think about the ways those distinctions were being established spatially: inside, those who were arrested (CRIMINALS) were lying in filth; outside, we (CITIZENS) were bathing in the pacific beauty of pristine lawns, sky, sun.

I start by talking about this because I want to expand on the post I wrote on Sunday morning — and I apologize for the excessive length of this — but I’ve been unable to stop thinking about what was has been so viscerally physical for those 400 people who were arrested versus the way we, who are distant from their experience, are able to make sense of why they have gone through it (with perhaps a bit of uneasiness about having been spared it). And I can’t help but talk about where I was and what I saw, not because I’m a narcissistic blogger — that’s just bonus — but because where you are, and when, is what makes the story you are able to tell what it is.

As I wrote on Sunday morning, what was so striking the day after was how all the mainstream news stories seemed to have been composed the same way, starting with OPD’s press release (issued in the mid afternoon) as a rough outline, sprinkling in some quotes from non-OPD sources (often social media, no doubt collected from the comfort of their office chairs), and then (maybe) added on the additional information that between one and four hundred people were arrested in the evening, depending on how late in the day they filed their copy.

It goes beyond the shoddy plagiarism of their work, though. As a result of how poorly these stories were constructed, you got the sense that everything happened at more or less the same time: occupiers tried to occupy a building, threw stones, burned a flag (or some variation on these elements) and the police arrested them all. It all seemed to happen at once (or at least you had no sense of what the rhyme of reason of it all had been). There is some truth to this story – there almost always is – but we should observe both what a simplistic story it became and how overdetermined the shape of that story was by the situation of its writers: since the NYT and CNN lacked any deep information about what happened – having no reporters there, on the ground, to do fancy things like fact checking, interviewing, or getting background – they could only present their readers with SPECTACLE. A picture, a few quotes, a flashy fact like the number of arrestees; that’s all they had, so that’s all they could give. And maybe this is all they want to sell anyway: inform their readers that SPECTACLE happened in Oakland on Saturday (giving them this news immediately, before anything is really known about it), so that they could move on to even more newer news the next day, leaving this story behind, even before all (or even many) details about what actually happened were known.

The result is that, as more and more information trickles out – and as the story develops further, as people talk to each other, as video comes out, as new accounts emerge – the mainstream faucet of news about Oakland has already slowed to a trickle, if that; Saturday recedes deep into the past, and the news cycle churns on to the next thing.

All sorts of information asymmetries result from this sequencing: the stories written Saturday have details on every injury suffered by the handful of police who (supposedly) suffered injuries… because the police were in a position to supply the press with loving detail of every pinky scrape. It would not be until yesterday, by contrast, that the National Lawyers Guild – whose green-hatted observers were all over the place on the day of the march – would be able to write this account of and response to what happened:

“It is appalling that the OPD continues to violate the law and its own policies,” said Carlos Villarreal, NLGSF Executive Director. “The police instigated the confrontation by immediately attacking the march with chemical agents, flashbang bombs, and a volley of rifle or shotgun-fired projectiles.”

As of 11 a.m., Monday, January 30, the NLGSF can confirm that at least 284 people were arrested on Saturday during Occupy Oakland’s Move In Day. The NLGSF received many reports of assaults on protesters, including an incident in which police knocked one person’s teeth out with a baton strike to the face. Police reportedly threw others through a glass door, and down a flight of steps. A videographer was pushed to the ground and clubbed.

“OPD has shown itself incapable of handling crowd control in a legal, much less professional manner,” said NLGSF Attorney Rachel Lederman. “We would urge the appointed monitor to take action immediately to rein in this abusive conduct, which is leading to ever increasing liability for the City.”

Now, these are lawyers speaking, lawyers who had multiple trained observers on the ground, and two days after they event, they are speaking from this accumulated observation, now checked against other sources and carefully justified. Let us then note, however, that while theirs is clearly the most credible account of what happened – the most informed, the best sourced – theirs is precisely the story that will not be widely reported, if at all. The moment has passed for that; only new developments will be reported, and this is old news. The “record” has been set, while everything else will remain merely “anecdotal” and unprinted. It will remain a subjective impression that the police were using indiscriminate physical violence, the kind of subjective impression you get if you talk to a whole bunch of protesters as they leave jail, hearing an accumulated record of expereince over the course of hours.

This is one problem with chronology; another is that the narrative logic of a newspaper article has its own warped sense of time, a distinctly non-chronological version of reality: beginning with The Thing (Clashes! Tear Gas! Arrests!, etc) it then goes on to add context and quotes and commentary on The Thing, thereby re-establishing that it was a singular thing, an event, a lede, a story. But it isn’t really a story in the strict sense of a chronological narrative: instead of a series of events linked together by various causes, effects, complications, and ambiguities – leading out of causes in the past and pointing towards new events in an inchoate future – it will be a singular thing, which happened, which has been “Reported” and which we can all consume and move on from.

There are rare exceptions, of course, but they are rare for clear reasons; Susie Cagle has been covering Occupy Oakland since the very beginning, because she’s an Oakland based reporter and because she wanted to. As a result, she has the deepest and most complete and most contextually rich version of the event. But no one has paid her consistently to do this, and that’s exactly the point: because the NYT (and even the Oakland Tribune) can weave together a story from OPD press releases and quotes from twitter, why should they pay someone to, you know, actually be informed about what’s happened? When Susie wrote her story, she didn’t know if she’d have anyone to pay her for writing it (whereas all the paid journalists who would write stories about what happened were either absent or had their eyes closed).

This is all, perhaps, completely unsurprising: since newspapers are in the business of producing news product, each article is a little commodified piece of information, easily swallowed, easily understood, and easily forgotten (so you’ll be ready for the next one). But all of this means that, for example, the “paper of record” produces their final story on Saturday night’s mass arrests (going to print on Sunday) by opening with this quite misleading sentence:

About 400 people were arrested and three police officers were injured after a weekend protest by members of the Occupy movement in Oakland, Calif., turned into a violent confrontation with law enforcement officers that led to an assault on City Hall.

Certain categories leap out, of course, as they always do, in the passive voice: while one group of people “were arrested,” another group of people “were injured.” Protesters are not classifiable as “injured,” even though so many of them were; the 400 people arrested were behind the walls of Glen Dyer and Santa Rita prisons, so little of no information was to be had about their injuries (or even still). In a vicious irony, since they’ve become “bodies” (as incarcerated human beings come to be called by police), they become effectively uninjurable; it wouldn’t be until they had returned to the world that we could know about their sprained wrists, head wounds, etc.

But the larger issue is this: if you were there – or even if you simply experienced it in real-time, over the livestream (as I did), or twitter, or whatever – you know how misleading that one sentence is. It isn’t untrue, exactly; those things did happen – more or less – but the chronology is incredibly important, and that’s the thing that’s been removed (along with protester injuries), when you reduce a narrative into a lede, especially one which strongly implies – as this one does – that the arrest was a response to the “assault on City Hall.”

Parenthetically, City Hall loves this kind of language, where the protesters are waging a war against the city. Councilmember Larry Reid claimed that “It’s almost like we’re being held hostage,” a strange thing to say while protesters were still in jail. Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente said that Occupy protesters were engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Pictures like this one show us Jean Quan mourning the assault on her beloved city (this is a model of the county courthouse building):

And this, perhaps the most iconic image, is of protesters who took a flag out of City Hall, waved it around, then torched it:

I’m not going to defend things like burning of flags or vandalizing city hall; I wouldn’t have done it, I wish they hadn’t done it, and I think it was stupid to do it. I don’t think it accomplishes anything, and it feeds into the story that people like Reid and De La Fuente want to tell about Occupy Oakland, making it seem like Occupy are the violent ones.

That said, the “assault on City Hall” was virtually the last thing that happened on Saturday. It wasn’t the cause of the police reaction, as the National Lawyer’s Guild noted: it was a response to the actions taken by OPD and the city of Oakland. You can still think whatever you want about it; you can be appalled at the protesters who did it, if you like. But it wasn’t the cause of the days events; it was the coda to the night’s events, if that.

The story of what happened before that is there, though, if we gave it some room to breathe. Kevin Gosztola wrote a pretty strong account of what happened – relying mainly on livestreams and hard work –and Benjamin Phillips’ account at Occupy Oakland Media is quite accurate. If you want a deep and informed account of community (bad) relations with OPD, you will find Cami Graves’ story informative (also at OOM, starting with “The long, dark history of a troubled police department”).

The simplest version of the chronology that doesn’t complete obscure it would, I think, divide the day into two stages. Stage one was the confrontation at the Kaiser Convention Center, which happened in the early afternoon. This account describes what happened there, more or less as I experienced it; suffice it to say that the march took a long time to get to the Kaiser Center because the police were already there, and then the police used smoke bombs, tear gas, clubs, and bean-bag rounds[1] to drive the crowd away. It’s unclear what Occupy Oakland’s plan was, but whatever it was, it didn’t work. This photo (taken by Millicent) shows you the scene, but what you can’t see are the cops between the marchers and the Kaiser Center itself:

At that point, the march was stalled, and so they turned back along Oak Avenue, and came up against a line of police, briefly trying to stand up to them:

After that, the march turned away and began working its way back to Oscar Grant Plaza. They would eventually regroup there, but it seemed, from my perspective at the back, like a very near thing: the police were moving in military phalanxes, beating protesters who didn’t move fast enough, and obviously trying to kettle the march. It was scary. The fact that they were using physical force should surprise no one at this point, but what was new was the way they were using it: the police were on the offensive. Once the march got stalled at the Kaiser Center, they were moving us, at least until the marchers took back that momentum. I suspect that if they could have kettled the march there, they would have arrested everyone right then.

Once the march got back to OGP, there was a pause. And this, too, is important: it was some time later that a different march (with many of the same people but also many different people), started marching from Oscar Grant Plaza to try to take, apparently, the Travelers Aid building. That pause fooled me; I thought, from the demeanor of the crowd, that the day was over, and I went home. And, honestly, I was pretty bummed by what had happened, and not in the mood to march around the city chanting, which is what Occupy Oakland has been doing on Saturday nights for the last few weeks. I was tired, and I had stuff to do. And if it sounds like I’m re-thinking or trying to justify that decision, well, I obviously am: you cannot spend hours outside a jail, waiting, where your friends are imprisoned inside, without thinking really hard about why it was that they are in there and you are out here.

In any case, in the meantime, people had been discussing what had happened, rebuilding spirits, and deciding what to do next. And since it was widely circulated that the Kaiser Center had been Plan A, but that there was a plan B, the second march set forth. This would be the second stage, because the police were now in full effect. In the afternoon, they had been guarding the targets – like the Kaiser Center – and were not visibly following the march; in the evening marches, they were following and attempting to kettle the marchers, pretty clearly so that they could do what they eventually did: arrest every last one of them.

The unstoppable livestreamer Oakfosho was out for the entire time, and his videos show what happened along the march, seen from the ground  (at grueling length, but here’s an only 17 minute long edited and annotated version). But here, with footage take from a building above, you can see with great clarity what was happening at 19^th and Telegraph, when the police finally managed to block off all the exits from the square. It is a remarkable thing this video lets you see; you should read Millicent’s analysis of it, but mainly you should just watch it:

The important thing to take from this video is that the police were trying to trap the protesters so they could arrest them all – what they would later do – and they only failed because the protesters were able to push down a fence and and escape through it. Note that, at about 4:10 into that video above, the police fire flash grenades into the crowd – still trapped on all four sides inside the park – and at 4:20, you can see police rushing into the crowd and hitting people with their clubs. They push the crowd back, forcing them into a smaller and smaller area, until – at 5:20 – a group pushes down the fence and the whole crowd is able to escape.

As Millicent notes, while OPD is explicitly required not to treat an entire crowd as one thing (and to allow people who want to leave to leave), they do exactly what they are not supposed to do:

OPD manufactures the very condition it’s supposed to avoid: they are blocking people from leaving the scene. They are creating precisely the “position of heightened danger” they’re supposed to be trying to defuse.

After the escape through the fence, the march continued, with the cops following. But the police caught up with the marchers in front of the YMCA, and this time kettled them more successfully, blocking all the exits (by many accounts clubbing people to force them back and thereby packing them in like sardines) and then, after preventing them from escaping, arresting everybody (or, almost everybody) for failure to disperse (including, I was told, a guy who was just trying to get into his car and didn’t even know what the protest was about). They even brought a tank.

It was clear, at this point, that this is what they’d been trying to do all day, what they’d been planning to do earlier: arrest everybody and sort it out later. And it was only at this point that the “assault on City Hall” happened, maybe five blocks away. Once the 400 people who would be arrested that night had been informed that they were under arrest (which you could hear on the livestream as “Attention marchers: you have failed to disperse! You are now under arrest! Submit to the arrest” several minutes after the protesters had been chanting “Let us Disperse”), protesters who had escaped back to Oscar Grant Plaza “occupied” City Hall.

Think what you want about what happened after that. Think what you want about what happened the whole day, in fact. But I started with the mis-chronology of the NYT story – and the implication that the arrests were a reaction to the “assault on City Hall” – because it was only once police had arrested 400 people that some of the people they hadn’t arrested (and perhaps some other people) went to Oscar Grant Plaza, City Hall’s front lawn, and, angrily, in response to what had happened, did what they did. In other words, a group of occupiers angrily smashed stuff in City Hall and burned a flag after protesters were arrested for a failure to disperse when the police were preventing them from dispersing (and no official order to disperse was given the second time, a violation of their own rules).

At home, I could see what was happening over the livestream, could hear the crowd was chanting “let us disperse” and “this is a hostage situation.” I could read the tweets being sent out from inside the kettle, where protesters were describing what was happening to them. And the New York Times could have done that too, if they had wanted to. If they had, though, they would have to admit that the 400 people who were arrested were not, and could not have been, arrested for what was done in City Hall. They were arrested because Oakland Police Department had already made the decision to do a mass arrest, of everyone they could sweep up and the tie down. They are tired of Occupy Oakland. They want it to end. And so, they are now making decision not based on the law – which will be what causes the vast majority of these charges to be dropped, if the past is any indication, and most likely a class action lawsuit – but on the political desire of City Hall to get back to the business of making Oakland safe for business.

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[1] In violation of their crowd control policies, which specifically say “Direct Fired SIM may never be used indiscriminately against a crowd or group of persons even if some members of the crowd or group are violent or disruptive.”

Stenography Journalism, Oakland Edition

I want to start with this CNN article:

(CNN) – Occupy activists tossed pipes, bottles, burning flares and other objects Saturday at Oakland police, who responded by using tear gas and smoke grenades and arresting more than 100 demonstrators, city and police officials said.

Now, I have no difficulty believing that at least a few protesters threw things at the police, though we should also be extremely skeptical; they always say that, and it’s at least usually not true (or at least wildly exaggerated). But while I had an obstructed view of those events – and I know what I did and didn’t see – it’s very easy for you, when you read a news article like CNN’s, to not see the most important clause in the article, the last one, “city and officials said.” This indicates for you (or should) that CNN is essentially doing to OPD’s press release the same thing that desperate college students sometimes do with wikipedia articles: copy and paste, and then change just enough words so that it isn’t plagiarism. CNN was not there yesterday, so they only saw what the Oakland Police Department told them to see. OPD wrote this:

Officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices and burning flares.

And then CNN wrote down a garbled version of it. Similarly, they took this paragraph from the OPD press release:

By 12 pm, a crowd of approximately 250 had gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza for the Occupy rally. Just before 1:30 pm, the group started marching southbound on Broadway. As the group of approximately 450 marched, traffic disruptions occurred on downtown streets.

And (slightly) re-wrote it as:

The tension began Saturday around noon when about 250 activists gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza. They were joined later by another 200 people as they marched around the city.

They turned “12 pm” into “around noon” and they copied down OPD’s crowd estimates exactly (ABC7 guessed 2,000; I would have guessed about a thousand), and slightly altered the wording to cover their trail. After that, to their credit, they found the time to copy and paste text from the Occupy Oakland twitter feed and web site. And then they called it a day and went home, apparently; while real journalists were still being arrested while doing their jobs (Susie Cagle and Gavin Aronsen were both arrested, despite having press passes, then later “unarrested”), the good people at CNN were finished putting the imprimateur of “objective” journalism on OPD’s press release, and laughed all the way to the bank.

Pretty much exactly the same thing happened with the New York Times article, which has exactly the same architecture: liberal excerpts/paraphrasing from OPD press release, followed by copied text from activist social media. Even the Oakland Tribune managed to not only paraphrase the OPD press release  – and they’re a terrible newspaper, but still, they’re right there – but also to get the time of the weekly march wrong:

In what has become a weekly march, about 250 protesters gathered around noon at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza for a rally. At 1:30 p.m., the group began marching with a crowd of about 450 protesters. Forty-five minutes later, some of the marchers entered the campus of Laney College, city officials said. That was when police first fired tear gas, a witness said. At 2:50 p.m., marchers began tearing down perimeter fences around the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, city officials said. Police declared an unlawful assembly and fired more tear gas. Witnesses said police fired rubber bullets after protesters began hurling items at them.

That error (the weekly marches happen at night) is so pointless, and yet also such a rookie mistake that it gives the game away. To make that mistake, you have to know almost nothing about what’s going on in Oakland. And the repetition of the same numbers and times should start to feel like what it is, an activity utterly empty of anything like professional journalism. The fact that all of these “journalists” repeat the same ridiculous crowd number, march times, etc isn’t just an indication of their tendency to downplay activist mobilization; its an index of their basic and fundamental worthlessness as news sources. They’re just copying and pasting. Or take the line “some of the marchers entered the campus of Laney College,” another phrase lifted directly from the OPD press release: almost all of the marchers got to the Kaiser center by marching through Laney. It’s not important, but there’s no “some” about it; virtually all of us got to the Kaiser center by marching through Laney and anyone who was there would know this. It isn’t just that there are errors, or that these errors are small and pointless; it’s that the level of non-knowledge required to produce these texts is huge: these articles are what they are as a function of the total distance and disconnect from what actually happened and a total dependence on being told what happened by the Police press officer (and an inability to do anything more than write that down, and slightly change the word order to cover their tracks).

This is a small post; I will write more later. For now, this: I don’t know everything that happened yesterday; I know what I saw and what I didn’t see. But if you only read the NY Times, CNN, and the Oakland Tribune, you won’t even have the benefit of knowing what they don’t know. Which is a whole hell of a lot.