OCCUPY

It's the word of the year, we're told, so I've been preoccupied with its various meanings & connotations: 
       There's the obvious -- occupy movements -- with their sense of occupying public space and the positive (at least for me) consequence of occupying the public debate about what a fair and well-functioning society owes its members. (My vote, to quote some civil liberties lawyer whose name I've long forgotten, is justice and groceries.)
       Then there's the much-awaited, can-you-believe-it-took-so-long end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, though it wasn't usually called that.  We seemed to prefer calling it a war, and someday someone will explain to me why that's a more positive spin on that debacle.
       We're getting a spate of news stories -- someone just noticed -- about the difficulty faced by soldiers returning from that war in finding productive ways to occupy themselves, sniper and truck convoy driver not being high of the list of occupations needed in civil society.
       And our preoccupation with terrorism, which has led to the Orwellian concept of "pre-crime" -- sussing out intention to commit a crime sometime in the future by cobbling together bits of on-the-face-of-it legal behavior and then arresting the purported terrorist-in-the-making.  These days, he's apt to be a young, well-educated Muslim living in a suburb near you.  (See the recent conviction of Tarek Mehanna in Boston.) This occupation of our minds allows us to tolerate a very frightening national security system, whose secrecy and reach I tried to explore for my story in In These Times (which will be available online in a couple of weeks) and over-reaching laws with very broad definitions of what constitutes aid to the enemy. so that juries seldom decide against the government in cases of "domestic terrorism," regardless of the strength of the evidence.  (Remind anyone else of the anti-Communist witch hunts?  Reminds me of the aphorism that a long memory is the most radical act in America today.)
       Of course, occupy being the word of the year, it shows up in ads and jokes and my emails about my office hours.  My journalism class agreed that it was the occupy semester, since the encampments coincided almost perfectly with our classes.  (They didn't walk out.  Not sure if I'm pleased or dismayed.) 
 
So, inevitably, my holiday wishes for us all: OCCUPY THE NEW YEAR -- in style and peace!

Why we're now occupied with occupations

I've been thinking a lot about how an impulse or dissatisfaction becomes a political movement, as the economic fairness encampments around the country might -- and when it doesn't -- as with the antiwar cause, which attracted hundreds of thousands before the invasion of Iraq and the agreement of the majority of Americans since 2007, but never really took off.  A major reason it didn't was that a tiny portion of Americans have anything to do with the people who have been fighting those wars -- the slogan could have been, "1% at war versus the 99% who get to ignore it" --  but the occupy everywheres don't represent 99% of Americans either.  At most, the 74% who are neither very poor, nor very rich.  Still, it's smart marketing to assume common cause among that three-quarters, despite the diversity of economic and political perspectives within, and I believe the protests are a genuine cri de coeur from younger people who are discovering that they've been screwed over by the system they're eager to be a part of.  What I've come to realize -- it's so obvious and it makes me sad -- is that Americans may take to the barricades over a principle, but they stay there in large numbers only when it's their own interest at stake.

OCCUPY BOSTON

NOT AFGHANISTAN* 

*or Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, etc.
(of course I have to have footnotes)


We're beginning to get discussion, however superficial, about what constitutes a political movement.  History profs weighing in that movements need identifiable spokespeople, old lefties noting ruefully that we've been here before, a pal laughing that the general assemblies (GA on the website -- I keep thinking they're talking about Georgia) sound like the crafts coop she used to be a part of --  on steroids.  Me, I quote Oscar Wilde that the trouble with socialism is that it would take too many evenings.

But for all that (and the (non)organizers do seem to be getting degrees in meetings and the signs aren't yet witty enough, or the rhythm section jazzy enough), I keep hoping that maybe they're on to something new -- where they don't have to give the press a star protester to fuck and then fuck over (anyone recall Camp Casey and Cindy Sheehan?), or give the politicians something to co-opt and water down to meaninglessness (examples too numerous to mention), or have to court money people to keep going (it's a real worry that some organization, such as MoveOn, will move in and tame the protest into a rally for the Dems), or end up replicating the liberation movements of my generation (for better and worse).  Seems to me the title of "movement" gets bestowed mostly in retrospect because real grassroots movements are  inchoate and evolving while they're happening and because we can't know what will change history until history is changed. So maybe the thing to embrace right now is a willingness to be surprised.