A couple weeks ago I wrote that the Occupy Wall Street protests would never go anywhere if it remained the province of a bunch of college kids. Now there's talk of several of the big New York labor unions showing up in solidarity. Other "Occupy" groups are forming in Chicago, Los Angeles, and places as far afield as Manchester, England. Events across the world are coordinated via a website called Occupy Together. An anonymous group started a twitter feed to occupy the Johannesburg stock exchange. A group in Florida wants to occupy several states in the city on November 5 with a Guy Fawkes Day protest. Radiohead is supposed to play Wall Street today. (update: no, they're not playing.)
Hacktivists are organizing people around social media, connecting disparate groups, creating new rules of interaction as they go. Nobody is quite sure what this movement stands for, but that's all right. An emotional energy is coalescing on new lines. There is no manifesto. It has a life of its own.
I don't know if the Occupy Movement will amount to any real change, or if it is just the flavor of the month for a frustrated people. Nobody does. But for the first time since this made the news, it seems newsworthy. Right now it's just a little beyond the "dog bites man" story of college kids protesting. It's still far from the critical mass that a mass movement must achieve, but there's something to it. Something coherent but still unknown, something timely and long overdue.
College kids: you have my attention now.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Moral Confusion
Last night, after endless appeals, delays, and last-minute please, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis. Mr. Davis was convicted of murdering Mark MacPhail, an off-duty Savannah police officer in 1989, with nine eyewitnesses attesting to his guilt. As time passed, seven of those nine recanted their testimony, many claiming coercion by the Savannah police into naming Mr. Davis.
Last night, after about a decade on Death Row, Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed for killing James Byrd, Jr. in 1998 by dragging the man behind his pickup truck with a 24-foot chain. Brewer was widely known as active in white supremacist groups, and DNA tests concluded that Mr. Byrd’s blood was present on Brewer’s clothes the following day.
Two executions, held on the same night, in many ways mirror images of one another, had me thinking as I lay in bed this morning. There was no way I could make sense of these tandem punishments, meted out so randomly, at the will of individual judges, juries, and witnesses. How can we be sure that someone deserves death? Why does either victim’s family need someone else to die in their name?
I am not pious enough about the sanctity of life to believe that death is too steep a punishment for some particularly evil people. But for something so ultimately binary, so utterly irreversible, I want the explanations for why it should happen to be equally unequivocal, and completely irrefutable. I do not think that human perception or human justice is really capable of doing this the right way every time. None of us are above our motives and urges.
We all think we know who is good and who is evil. We try earnestly to build wise institutions for formalizing this knowledge. But whether it is life, death, or parole, we fool ourselves into thinking that true justice can ever come from a court. No grieving family has the right to act out their callow need for vengeance through the state. Vindication for the innocent never comes from a judge’s gavel, but from the judgment of other living people, and the historians who later study dusty, faded accounts. Maybe it only comes from God.
Two executions on the same night. Two stories that couldn’t be more different. Four families, each walking away from the execution chamber with their own mixes of relief, anger, sadness, righteousness, indignation, pride, hope, and despair. Did anybody living this morning get what they wanted out of these executions? Maybe. But did they deserve what they got?
Last night, after about a decade on Death Row, Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed for killing James Byrd, Jr. in 1998 by dragging the man behind his pickup truck with a 24-foot chain. Brewer was widely known as active in white supremacist groups, and DNA tests concluded that Mr. Byrd’s blood was present on Brewer’s clothes the following day.
Two executions, held on the same night, in many ways mirror images of one another, had me thinking as I lay in bed this morning. There was no way I could make sense of these tandem punishments, meted out so randomly, at the will of individual judges, juries, and witnesses. How can we be sure that someone deserves death? Why does either victim’s family need someone else to die in their name?
I am not pious enough about the sanctity of life to believe that death is too steep a punishment for some particularly evil people. But for something so ultimately binary, so utterly irreversible, I want the explanations for why it should happen to be equally unequivocal, and completely irrefutable. I do not think that human perception or human justice is really capable of doing this the right way every time. None of us are above our motives and urges.
We all think we know who is good and who is evil. We try earnestly to build wise institutions for formalizing this knowledge. But whether it is life, death, or parole, we fool ourselves into thinking that true justice can ever come from a court. No grieving family has the right to act out their callow need for vengeance through the state. Vindication for the innocent never comes from a judge’s gavel, but from the judgment of other living people, and the historians who later study dusty, faded accounts. Maybe it only comes from God.
Two executions on the same night. Two stories that couldn’t be more different. Four families, each walking away from the execution chamber with their own mixes of relief, anger, sadness, righteousness, indignation, pride, hope, and despair. Did anybody living this morning get what they wanted out of these executions? Maybe. But did they deserve what they got?
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Call Me When the Proletariat Arrives
This week's non-story is about the hundreds of college kids who have decided to occupy Wall Street (or nearby) in homage to Tahrir square or Syria, or London, or whatever. Thoughtful quotes from freshmen at Hampton and Colgate permeate the two or three stories that made the latter pages of the world's news. Nobody was hurt. A lot of clever signs were raised. Nothing was broken. Drums were beaten on. A few people have been arrested for wearing masks.
But I want this to become a real story. Like perhaps most people, I want this to catch fire. I just don't know how.
As long as such civil disobedience is relegated to the liberal-arts set, I don't see it picking up much traction. And yet, for better or worse, college campuses have always been homes to revolutionary thinking. Nobody else has the time, freedom of thought, or stake in the future to challenge the way things are. Mass movements out of Teheran, Prague, Mexico City, Paris, Berkeley, and Cairo all provide good examples. But for each of those examples are countless other protests that fizzled into a whiny whimper. The 90s anti-globalization movement is a good example of something heady and abstract that never made sense to most people. The Battle in Seattle was a revolutionary moment for a few anarchists, and a pointless riot for everyone else.
But this isn't an intellectual debate like globalization. There are a set of basic issues that matter to the college kids as much as they matter to the working stiff. Kids are coming out of school with massive debt and no prospect of paying it off with a good-paying job. In a larger sense, we are all indentured servants to the banks who call Wall Street home. Fundamentally, people need to find ways to live well without the need to accumulate crushing liabilities. In other words, unless we are all right with our standard of living and economic opportunity averaging somewhere between Peru's and Albania's, we need to make America a better place to live and work. We need everyday people to to start profiting from economic growth, not just the handful of sharp-beaked, cold eagle-eyed investors perched in their plush leather nests high above the Street.
Where is the critical mass this time? The difference between a mass movement and a bunch of rich kids carrying signs is easy to describe in retrospect. Energy builds, a spark jumps a gap from campus to the cable guy, and everything changes almost overnight. But how? What's made the difference in the past? What might make the difference now?
The doctrine of socialism, with its appeal to class interest across borders and races, has helped the process along in certain instances. Other unifying forces, like religion, have contributed elsewhere. A galvanizing event, like war or economic collapse can unite people, but may also divide them. There's probably no easy pattern. Union Square is not Tahrir Square is not Tianenmen Square. Religion in some places is intensely divisive, many places have employed unimaginably brutal repression, while class is a non-starter here. In the end, every case is different. Every outcome varies with the players and their stakes in the game. Something might happen out of this, but I doubt it. But some unifying factor has to emerge.
Stuff is bad, and not just for college kids. It's bad for working families too. But somehow we don't see the problems in a mutually identifiable way. We are all keenly aware of something vaguely malevolent, something predatorial, hiding just out of site. The requisite level of energy has been building for some time; it's just that our complaints have remained largely parochial. Nobody has a truly national view of things. What is our unifying factor? How can we capture all our grievances in a sentence?
We're all struggling with debt while we watch our chances at a decent living go down the toilet. We're all bearing witness to our public assets' and our national pride's slow erosion. Everyone knows that a few predators lurk in the shadows of industry. But it's one thing to tell everyone on Facebook to show up in Lower Manhattan with a tent. It's another to really organize something. What is the message? What is the medium? This isn't Cairo. It's getting cold in New York, and besides, who has time to camp out?
I'd really like it if we all found some way of demanding that this economy starts working for all of us. Many people share that stultifying sense that mysterious forces circle high above our heads, taking what they wish, leaving the rest of us to scurry for shelter. Many, many of us, across the political and cultural spectrum feel these things. We should all be rooting for these kids, ridiculous as they may seem. It's these kids who can really start something.
For me, the moment the kids can get a decent turnout for high school-educated Wal-Mart cashiers, unemployed middle managers, returning vets, and maybe a few pensioners, they'll have a movement I can get behind. But until then, they have buried news story I'll ignore, just like everybody else.
But I want this to become a real story. Like perhaps most people, I want this to catch fire. I just don't know how.
As long as such civil disobedience is relegated to the liberal-arts set, I don't see it picking up much traction. And yet, for better or worse, college campuses have always been homes to revolutionary thinking. Nobody else has the time, freedom of thought, or stake in the future to challenge the way things are. Mass movements out of Teheran, Prague, Mexico City, Paris, Berkeley, and Cairo all provide good examples. But for each of those examples are countless other protests that fizzled into a whiny whimper. The 90s anti-globalization movement is a good example of something heady and abstract that never made sense to most people. The Battle in Seattle was a revolutionary moment for a few anarchists, and a pointless riot for everyone else.
But this isn't an intellectual debate like globalization. There are a set of basic issues that matter to the college kids as much as they matter to the working stiff. Kids are coming out of school with massive debt and no prospect of paying it off with a good-paying job. In a larger sense, we are all indentured servants to the banks who call Wall Street home. Fundamentally, people need to find ways to live well without the need to accumulate crushing liabilities. In other words, unless we are all right with our standard of living and economic opportunity averaging somewhere between Peru's and Albania's, we need to make America a better place to live and work. We need everyday people to to start profiting from economic growth, not just the handful of sharp-beaked, cold eagle-eyed investors perched in their plush leather nests high above the Street.
Where is the critical mass this time? The difference between a mass movement and a bunch of rich kids carrying signs is easy to describe in retrospect. Energy builds, a spark jumps a gap from campus to the cable guy, and everything changes almost overnight. But how? What's made the difference in the past? What might make the difference now?
The doctrine of socialism, with its appeal to class interest across borders and races, has helped the process along in certain instances. Other unifying forces, like religion, have contributed elsewhere. A galvanizing event, like war or economic collapse can unite people, but may also divide them. There's probably no easy pattern. Union Square is not Tahrir Square is not Tianenmen Square. Religion in some places is intensely divisive, many places have employed unimaginably brutal repression, while class is a non-starter here. In the end, every case is different. Every outcome varies with the players and their stakes in the game. Something might happen out of this, but I doubt it. But some unifying factor has to emerge.
Stuff is bad, and not just for college kids. It's bad for working families too. But somehow we don't see the problems in a mutually identifiable way. We are all keenly aware of something vaguely malevolent, something predatorial, hiding just out of site. The requisite level of energy has been building for some time; it's just that our complaints have remained largely parochial. Nobody has a truly national view of things. What is our unifying factor? How can we capture all our grievances in a sentence?
We're all struggling with debt while we watch our chances at a decent living go down the toilet. We're all bearing witness to our public assets' and our national pride's slow erosion. Everyone knows that a few predators lurk in the shadows of industry. But it's one thing to tell everyone on Facebook to show up in Lower Manhattan with a tent. It's another to really organize something. What is the message? What is the medium? This isn't Cairo. It's getting cold in New York, and besides, who has time to camp out?
I'd really like it if we all found some way of demanding that this economy starts working for all of us. Many people share that stultifying sense that mysterious forces circle high above our heads, taking what they wish, leaving the rest of us to scurry for shelter. Many, many of us, across the political and cultural spectrum feel these things. We should all be rooting for these kids, ridiculous as they may seem. It's these kids who can really start something.
For me, the moment the kids can get a decent turnout for high school-educated Wal-Mart cashiers, unemployed middle managers, returning vets, and maybe a few pensioners, they'll have a movement I can get behind. But until then, they have buried news story I'll ignore, just like everybody else.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
We Are All John Henry Now
I was a little kid when I first heard about John Henry, the steel-driving man from the Tennessee hills who defeated a steam-powered machine in a competition to lay track for a railroad through the Smoky Mountains. I knew I was supposed to root for John Henry, and it was easy. He was strong, unafraid, and above all, a person in competition with a cold machine.
But even as a kid, the futility of John Henry’s mission was obvious. He may have won that track laying race, scattering that machine’s parts over the hills in a steam cloud, but he died of exhaustion. And he was the strongest steel-driving man in those parts, going up against what was surely an early steam engine model. Imagine the second model the engineers came up with, or the tenth. Meanwhile, there is still no second model of men. We are all Homo Sapiens Version 1.0.
John Henry’s story is an allegory of noble defiance against the indifferent machinations of progress. The back story is that our inventive, dynamic species will one day become the victim of its own success, outmoded in the end by its own creation. As a kid, watching the Jetsons, hearing about robots that built cars, and thinking about the endless future ahead of me, a voice in my mind quietly wondered, “… then what are we going to do?”
The notion of machines ending our way of life isn’t unique to John Henry’s story. The Terminator, Star Trek’s Borg Collective, Battlestar Galactica, and several other lesser deities of the sci-fi pantheon have all captured the foreknowledge that surely, some day, machines will be able to do everything we do, and do it better. Each of those stories conjures up a superior species of our own making— plausible, but always just beyond our abilities, safely in the realm of the fantastic. When it comes to plausible myth, John Connor has nothing on John Henry. Only John Henry tells the story of our loss to amoral, rational economic productivity. Only John Henry dares to tell the story of loss as it really is. I see John Henry making the stand that we all might have to make one day.
To be sure, I am well aware of the advances in our standard of living we all enjoy from the process of productivity gains. There is no way my toaster would cost $40 if it were made by an apprenticed craftsman instead of an assembly line of semi-skilled workers. There is no way I could expect to live a long life in comfort if this were still an age of human and animal toil alone.
But McDonalds cashiers are being replaced with iPads. Computers can now take sports statistics and put together well-written news articles. Lawyers now use software to mine documents for evidence instead of employing armies of associates and paralegals in the task. What will they do?
Technology continues to advance at logarithmic rates, even as we lumber ahead the same as always, hoping our own jobs aren’t next. Short of pulling the plug, I don’t see any way we can win this game. The steam engine howls for us all. If you can’t beat ‘em, the only option is to join ‘em. But we'll be all right. Homo Sapiens Version 2.0, here we come.
The Legend of John Henry's Hammer,
Johnny Cash, live from Folsom Prison.
"John Henry said, I feed four little brothers,
And baby sister's walking on her knees.
Did the lord say that machines aughtta take the place of living?
And what's a substitute for bread and beans? (I ain’t seen it)
Do engines get rewarded for their steam?"
And baby sister's walking on her knees.
Did the lord say that machines aughtta take the place of living?
And what's a substitute for bread and beans? (I ain’t seen it)
Do engines get rewarded for their steam?"
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