The Dark Knight Returns

When Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie comes out, I hope to take time to analyze his whole series of Batman films as a response to the odious ideas implicit in Frank Miller's watershed comic The Dark Knight Returns. But much as I hate what DKR stands for, it's a frikkin' masterpiece of the comics medium; A D Jameson at Big Other has a fascinating series describing why.

Government monopoly on force

Thanks to Ron Paul, I just had to explain to someone one of the reasons why libertarianism is stupid. So I'm sharing.

Libertarians will tell you that “behind every law is a man with a gun,” and I actually respect the hell out of the clear-eyed skepticism about violence which motivates this comment. But libertarians thus conclude that since violence is bad government is bad and we should eliminate it. Which is stupid.

I vigorously believe in the state's “monopoly on violence” ... provided the state in question is a liberal democracy.

The “liberal democracy” piece is key. That means not liberal in the sense of the liberal-conservative axis in American political discourse, I mean in the political science sense of Jefferson's “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, which hold their just powers by the consent of the governed”. A liberal democracy is a state constructed to protect the rights and liberties of its citizens and accountable to its citizens for its actions and institutions. Looking at our own government on those terms, it is easy to see that it is extraordinarily accountable and protective of individual rights if you compare it to most societies through the world and history, but is also well short of the ideal. I believe that it is possible to construct government institutions that deliver categorically better liberal democracy than we have now, and therefore it is more effective to work to build a better liberal democracy than to eliminate the state.

An accountable agent with a monopoly on violence is desirable for two reasons: some people are inclined to resort to violence, and some people are schmucks.

Because some people will resort to violence, you cannot eliminate the state. This is why those of us who dismiss libertarianism point to the Somalia example: in the absence of the state's public use of force, there is no check on personal use of force, which is a problem for all the familiar reasons.

Libertarians operate from the fantasy that we can wish that problem away. (And no, privately-employed security guards won't do the job as well as the state; the arguments why not should be familiar.)

Because some people are schmucks, you cannot eliminate the state. To have a functioning society, you have to make a million decisions about shared norms. Some of those norms are arbitrary: Either you drive on the left side of the street or the right. Some of them are about how you define property: Does someone own Harry Potter? Mickey Mouse? Sherlock Holmes? Hercules? Some of them are expressions of values: Do you allow advertisements to lie? How much pollution do you allow in a river?

Libertarians operate from the fantasy that it is most democratic to allow shared norms to emerge organically from a marketplace of individual actors. But in reality, schmucks can spoil the party by violating the norms that most people prefer: driving on the wrong side of the road to save a little time, publishing books they didn't write under their own byline, selling arsenic as penicillin, dumping toxic waste into that river. You need an agent of public will with the power to enforce norms, which requires the use of force.

It is right to find the use of force discomforting, but it is naïve to think we can wish it away. The solution is to make our agent of force institutionally limited and institutionally accountable to the populace: a liberal democratic government.

Do not parse HTML with regular expressions

Seriously, don't. The results are Lovecraftian.

Republicans for Revolution

On the train this morning, I read Mark Lilla's New York Review of Books piece Republicans for Revolution, on Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. As in most NYRB articles, it's really less a review than an article that uses the book as a point of departure.

Lilla is sharply critical of Robin for ignoring important distinctions between different strains of conservative thought. I can't speak for Robin's book — it's sitting on my shelf, thus far unread — but Lilla's description of Robin's thesis lines up with Phil Agre's masterful summation of conservatism, which suits me just fine. The result of this objection is useful, though: Lilla uses it as a springboard to provide a quick survey of different conservative schools of thinking and their history ... bringing us to our contemporary Republican party, with its “mainstreaming of political apocalypticism”. I like to think that I know a bit more about the history of conservative thought than a lot of lefties, but I don't know as much as I think I ought to, so I got a lot out of Lilla telling it from the perspective of a thoughtful person sympathetic to conservatism but profoundly unsympathetic to the turn that American conservatism has taken in recent years. Terrific stuff.

The ending of Lilla's essay, though, drives me bats. He has drawn a clear line from the history of conservatism to postwar American conservatism to the madness of contemporary Republicanism, and expressed a proper terror about that last. Then he concludes:

All this is new—and it has little to do with the principles of conservatism, or with the aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” which Corey Robin sees at the root of everything on the right. No, there is something darker and dystopic at work here. People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse. When I read the new reactionaries or hear them speak I’m reminded of Leo Naphta, the consumptive furloughed Jesuit in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who prowls the corridors of a Swiss sanatorium, raging against the modern Enlightenment and looking for disciples. What infuriates Naphta is that history cannot be reversed, so he dreams of revenge against it. He speaks of a coming apocalypse, a period of cruelty and cleansing, after which man’s original ignorance will return and new forms of authority will be established. Mann did not model Naphta on Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand or Bismarck or any other figure on the traditional European right. He modeled him on George Lukács, the Hungarian Communist philosopher and onetime commissar who loathed liberals and conservatives alike.

Cue Rick Perlstein:

I get the question all the time from smart liberal friends: what is conservatism, anyway? They're baffled. “As far as I can tell, anything someone on the right does is, by definition, ethical. It's not about the act, or even the motivation. It's about who's perpetrating it.” It has become the name for a movement that can scream from the rooftops that every Supreme Court nominee should have an expiditious up-or-down vote, then 15 seconds later demand tortuous proceduralism when that nominee is Harriet Miers. Flexibility is the first principle of politics.

I'm trying to make here an argument not about instances, but about a structure of thought. It is the structure of thought betrayed, I think, by Ahmed Chalabi, explaining his deliberate deception of U.S. intelligence: “We were heroes in error.”

Is Chalabi, or Jerry Falwell, a “principled conservative” or a “pragmatic conservative.” That's a question I'd like to pose to you all. My head hurts just thinking about it.

This part of my talk, I imagine, is long after the point a constitutive operation of conservative intellectual work has clicked on in your minds: the part where you argue that malefactor A or B or C, or transgression X or Y or Z, is not “really” conservative. In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed. One guy will get up, at a conference like this, and say conservatism, in its proper conception, is 33 1/3 percent this, 33 1/3 percent that, 33 1/3 percent the other thing. Another rises to declaim that the proper admixture is 50-25-25.

It is, among other things, a strategy of psychological innocence. If the first guy turns out to be someone you would not care to be associated with, you have an easy, Platonic, out: with his crazy 33-33-33 formula--well, maybe he's a Republican. Or a neocon, or a paleo. He's certainly not a conservative. The structure holds whether it's William Kristol calling out Pat Buchanan, or Pat Buchanan calling out William Kristol.

As the Internet's smartest liberal blogger, Digby, puts it, tongue only partially in cheek: “ ‘Conservative’ is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.”

Federal Reserve

For future reference: Political Research Associates debunks canards about the Federal Reserve.

Piracy

There are times when I think that the media companies have no one to blame but themselves.

Apple had to trick the music industry to save it, with their “easier than stealing, and almost as cheap” solution.

But the people who control video rights are still too dumb to take my money.

Update: The same idea, again referencing Game of Thrones, from The Oatmeal.

Update: Again with Thrones, making a joke that only fans will get.

Update: A wry commentary on why pirate DVDs are usually better than the ones you pay for.

Listen to Thomas Jefferson

Hollywood, geekkultur, and Moviebob

Bob “Moviebob” Chipman at The Escapist has a great little video series about the history of Hollywood. Nothing in it is news to a cinephile, but if you have an idle half-hour to spare and have a casual interest in movies, it's well worth your time.

Note that the page design at The Escapist is pretty bad, so you might miss the link to the next installment; you can find it a few lines below the video player.

Moviebob is a terrific Web raconteur, using his voice plus a few simple slides to tell his story with humor, wit, and no small measure of real insight. I think of him as an example of the intersection of web culture, pop culture, and geek culture at its best, and have watched most of the videos in both his Escape to the Movies review series and his The Big Picture series of ruminations on all manner of geeky pop culture topics. Though I'm tempted to say that his occasional exclamation that comics ... are ... weirrrrd is my favorite part of his schtick, he really shines in digging into some bit of pop culture obscura and coming away with surprising and interesting insight. The signal example of that is his piece The Collar, examining the real reason why Yogi Bear wears a necktie ... which opens the door to an examination of the relationship between cartoon storytelling and the economics of the animation business. Seriously, check that one out, and maybe you'll be hooked on MovieBob too.

Ron Paul is an evil crackpot

I know a few people who have been touched with Ron Paul Fever, and it seems like new examples crop up all the time. So it seems I cannot put off any longer making the case against Representative Paul.

I get the appeal. He vigorously opposes American military adventurism and the military-industrial complex. He has pointed out how the financial industry has perversely benefitted from the financial crisis they created. He speaks in defense of civil liberties and has fought against attacks on them like the PATRIOT Act. He calls the War On Some Drugs the madness that it is. And often he says this stuff well. When we cannot even reliably expect Democrats to step up on these subjects, Rep. Paul's rhetoric can be refreshing, even thrilling.

But if you dig into him, it becomes clear that Representative Ron Paul is an evil crackpot.

He stands against bad government policies because he wants to dismantle practically the entire Federal government, which makes him against just about any good government policies you can think of, too. Including, for example, the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And Social Security and Medicare. And the Environmental Protection Agency.

Many conclude from this that Rep. Paul comes from a radical libertarian political philosophy. You have probably met folks from this school before; because Heinlein made the libertarian utopia of the lunar colony in his novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress feel so plausible while you're reading it, they think that a stateless anarchist utopia actually is plausible, et cetera. I think that kind of libertarianism doesn't hold any water, but I can at least respect its radical grounding in personal liberty, and its bullheaded commitment to philosophical integrity is at least intellectually honest.

The argument goes that Rep. Paul's opposition to the Civil Rights Act reflects his libertarian conviction that, morally wrong as segregated lunch counters may be, they are the price we should accept for a government with a seamless commitment to the important rights of private property and free association. A government empowered to meddle in who a restaurant will serve has the capacity for all kinds of other mischief more destructive to our important liberties. Such libertarians will usually argue that the free market will naturally put an end to such a restaurant as the public, repelled by the odor of racism, will refuse to patronize it.

I find that school of libertarianism unpersuasive. It's wrongheaded in part because it ends up opposed to the obvious good of the Civil Rights Act.

That's bad, but supposed libertarianism doesn't quite give us Representative Paul as an evil crackpot. The thing is, it turns out that the reading of him as a libertarian is just plain wrong. Ron Paul will tell you that his devotion to sharply limited government comes of being a “strict constitutionalist”, and he frequently references Constitutional limits on Federal power. But this “strict” reading of the Constitution has a strange flavor. It contradicts constitutional scholarship and legal precedent, which upholds the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act, Social Security, et cetera. He sees no separation of church and state in the Constitution. And he does want the government doing more in one area: stopping abortion, in service of which he has introduced a bill defining legal personhood as beginning at conception and has run a bizarre anti-choice propaganda television commercial for his campaign in which he alludes to his “faith.” What kind of “strict constitutionalist” and “libertarian” is that?

Let's add some more ingredients. Representative Paul opposes the United Nations, because he's worried that it will produce a One World Government that will lead a atheist socialist revolution that will come take your guns. Ron Paul is a gold bug who wants to abolish both the Federal Reserve Bank and the Federal income tax, and return to the gold standard, a form of crackpot economics that should sound familiar.

If you know to recognize them, the signs are clear that Ron Paul is, at best, a John Bircher, the school of crackpot American conservatism which called Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent and William F. Buckley purged from the Republican party for being too reactionary even for him. I have video of Representative Paul addressing the John Birch Society as an honored guest a few years ago.

Which brings us to the evil crackpottery. James Kirchick at The New Republic has tracked down some of Ron Paul's old newsletters.

What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays.

I have a few samples from the newsletters; the flavor is unmistakable.

David Weigel at Slate's article Ron Paul And The Coming Race War offers us this example from a pitch for people to sign up for the newsletter:

I've laid bare the coming race war in our big cities. The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS (my training as a physician helps me see through this one.) The Bohemian Grove — perverted, pagan playground of the powerful. Skull & Bones: the demonic fraternity that includes George Bush and leftist Senator John Kerry, Congress's Mr. New Money. The Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica. And the Soviet-style “smart card” the Justice Department has in mind for you.

There's good reason to think that Paul didn't write these newsletters himself, but the Washington Post reports persuasively that Paul must have known what the newsletters contained. So while Paul may not be in his heart the kind of virulent bigot portrayed in his newsletters, he was clearly willing to let people think he was.

Case in point: here he is giving a speech in front of a Confederate Battle Flag, saying that the Confederacy was right:

Bircher, neo-Confederate, Tenther.

Evil crackpot.

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In the time since I originally created this post, I have accumulated a lot of links to resources on the web.

• Analysis
• News Items
• Libertarians against Paul
• Neo-Confederate

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Analysis

• James Kirchick's articles about Paul in The New Republic (especially the first of these) are heavily referenced by later articles, so they are essential reading
  • Angry White Man
  • A Collection of Ron Paul’s Most Incendiary Newsletters (inconveniently, TNR's archive of PDF image of the newsletters has linkrotted away)
  • More Selections From Ron Paul's Newsletters
  • Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?
  • Why Don’t Libertarians Care About Ron Paul’s Bigoted Newsletters?
  • What Are Ron Paul's Liberal Fans Thinking?
• Phenry has a four part Daily Kos diary hitting a range of highlights:
  • In His Own Words
  • The Radical Right's Man In Washington
  • Dude Is Wack
  • Ron Paul Hates You
• David “Orcinus” Neiwert, journalist who covers the far right
  • Ron Paul's Inner Far Right Extremist
  • An overview of Kirchick's New Republic article
  • An index of Paul's voting record in the House of Representatives
  • Paul's grounding in nutty rightwing conspiracy theories
  • Implications of Paul's obvious appeal to rightwing nuts
• “Former African Dictator Mobutu Sese Seko” offers:
  • Ron Paul Is A Racist Leprechaun
  • Yeah, Ron Paul Is A Racist After All
  • Scans of Paul's old newsletters (and a review of their contents)
  • Replies to common pro-Paul arguments
• Ta-Nehsi Coates:
  • Ron Paul's Shaggy Defense (of the newsletters)
  • No One Left To Lie To (on Paul's mercenary willingness to publish those newsletters)
  • Connecting Paul to the history of racism in American politics
  • Comparison between Paul and Louis Farrakhan (!)
• Mike at Aporetic connects Paul to racist neo-Confederates not only through the newsletters, but also through damning quotes from goldbug Austrian economist Murray Rothbard and the League of the South.
• Corey The Reactionary Mind Robin points to two problems with Ron Paul: his pseudolibertarian federalism and the fact that the left has failed to produce a visible spokesperson in opposition to the military-industrial complex.
• Fred Clark at Slacktivist responds to Corey Robin, makes a telling distinction between civil liberties and individual liberties, and offers a roundup of links to yet more commentary about Paul.
• A damning “defense” of Ron Paul from Eric Dondero, a former congressional staffer of his.
• Jonathan Chait
  • Racists Love Ron and Rand Paul For Some Reason
  • How Ron Paul's Libertarianism Supports Racism: Paul believes “that racism is not irrelevant to his ideology, but that his ideology absolves him of racism”
  • Ron Paul's racism
• Justin “Filthy Liberal Scum“ Rosario at Addicting Info lays out the racism angle in Is Ron Paul A White Supremacist? Absolutely!
• Charles P. Pierce at Esquire sketches how Paul wins the support of Americans of the Paranoid Style.
• Lefty Summer Ludwig at Addicting Info has a quick 10 Reasons Not To Vote For Ron Paul
• Respectful Insolence has a long post providing links to troubling information about Ron Paul, including a lot about his alliance with quack medicine.
• Alternet's Adele M. Stan has 5 Reasons Progressives Should Treat Ron Paul with Extreme Caution, including a close relationship with scary Christian theocrats.
• Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic writes at length about the newsletters, the reaction to them, and why Ron Paul should be held accountable for them.
• Harvey Gold at Addicting Info has a review of why Paul (and many libertarians' and pseudo-libertarians') plan to return to the gold standard is a stupid idea, though I'm looking for a better one.
• The Skeptical Libertarian examines Ron Paul branded homeschooling curriculum and discovers it is from Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist theocrat who wants the US governed by “Biblical law” including stoning to death children who curse their parents.
• P. David Hornick's piece Ten Worst US Purveyors of Antisemitism ^#5: Ron Paul isn't terribly good, but it's interesting that it appears on the movement conservative PJ Media website.
• Ron Paul Exposed and Ron (and Rand) Paul Supporters offer a mountain of resources and anti-Paul commentary, but I cannot vouch for the signal-to-noise ratio.

News items

• Salon has indexed coverage of Ron Paul and the implications of his ideas.
• In a speech, Paul asserted States' right to nullify Federal law, in direct contradiction to Article VI, Section 2 of the US Constitution.
• Apropos of un-libertarian views when it comes to reproductive rights, Paul supports the State of Texas raping women with sonogram probes. Really.
• Ron (and Rand) Paul's stand against net neutrality demonstrates that his “anti-government” stance is, in practice, not pro-freedom but pro-corporate.
• Video of Ron Paul making a clumsy, incoherent defense of his position on the Civil Rights Act. What, did he think he'd never get the question?
• The Examiner reports claims that Anonymous has documented direct links between Paul and neo-Nazis. (But I haven't found confirmation or details on this one.)
• Talking Points Memo has a story about Paul's Iowa campaign actively courting Christian theocrats who want “Biblical law” including the death penalty for homosexuals.
• Salon has a report on his plans to speak at a conference of radical theocrats, a number of whom are unmistakable antisemites.
• Kevin Carey at The New Republic reports that Paul wrote a book about how he's against school.
• Wonkette has a list of poorly-supported comments from Ron Paul about the Constitutionality of various topics.
• Elizabeth Flock at US News & World Report tells us that a 2012 report shows Paul to be one of the most corrupt congresspeople.
• The New York Times reports on how Ron Paul just shrugs about his creepier supporters.
• NewsOne has more links demonstrating that neo-Nazis regard him as one of their own.
• Ron Paul speaking at the Robert Taft Club in 2007, introduced by white nationalist Richard Spencer. Referencing Taft, who opposed US participation in WWII and the Nuremberg Trials, is a far right dogwhistle. The archive of the Taft website from the day of Paul's talk offers a recording of another talk about “Race And Conservatism” with white nationalists Jared American Renaissance Taylor and John Too Racist For The National Review Derbyshire.
• Ron Paul Tweets Anti-Semitic Cartoon and of course blames a staffer

Libertarians against Ron Paul

• Reason Magazine — who are real libertarians — has an investigation into how the newsletters came to be, and a damning timeline of Paul's comments about them.
• Over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, left-libertarians Steve Horwitz and Jacob T. Levy make a vigorous case that libertarians need to stand up and reject Ron Paul and the strain of “libertarianism” he and Rothbard and others represent.
• Will Wilkinson at The New Republic writes A Libertarian’s Lament: Why Ron Paul Is an Embarrassment to the Creed.

Neo-Confederate

• Corey Robin comments on the pervasive defenses of the Confederacy among libertarians. One might consider this blurring of the lines between libertarians, neo-Confederates, and Birchers a sort of defense of Ron Paul ... though one that damns the libertarian movement.
• Building a Better GOP offers a conservative's argument that Paul represents a Neo-Confederate conservatism disguised as libertarianism.
• Edward H. Sebesta at Anti Neo-Confederate unpacks Neo-Confederate BS in a 2007 interview with Paul.
• Sarah Posner at the UK Guardian has a review of the homeschooling curriculum Paul sponsors, noting the influence of Christian Reconstructionists and Neo-Confederates.
• Michelle Goldberg at the Daily Beast explores Paul's relationship with Christian Reconstructionism, illuminating why Paul's faux libertarianism is winning the support of many Christian theocrats.
• Newsone lists suggestive, but not quite conclusive, ties between Ron Paul and avowed White Supremacists.
• Anonymous has an archive of data from American Third Position, a fascist white nationalist organization, declaring that “we also found a disturbingly high amount of members who are also involved in campaigning for Ron Paul. According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors.”
• Adele M. Stan at AlterNet finds Ron Paul's creepy supporters and connects the dots from there to Paul's own Christian Reconstructionism.
• Chauncey DeVega looks at Paul and plumbs the meaning of neo-Confederate slavery apologetics.
• Representative Paul on his own House website supporting secessionism.
• Progressive blogger Digby
  • Video of Ron Paul speaking as an apologist for the Confederacy, repeating the canard that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, which just isn't true. (There's a fisking of the specifics of that video.)
  • “Antebellum Libertarianism”
  • Links to Christian Reconstructionist theocrats.
  • An examination of why Paul's antebellum “libertarianism” may sometimes make him a legislative ally, but not an ideological one for progressives
  • A follow-up underlining that Paul is not really a libertarian, just an opponent of the Federal government.

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When it was new, I discussed the original version of this post on LiveJournal. It has been linked on Reddit and a local BBS and other places.

Jefferson on taxes

I just stumbled across a fascinating web resource of quotations from Thomas Jefferson talking about taxation. It turns out that Jefferson clearly favored progressive taxation.

I approved from the first moment of... the power of taxation [in the new Constitution]. I thought at first that [it] might have been limited. A little reflection soon convinced me it ought not to be.

Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings

Interestingly, the quotations give us a Jefferson who supports tariffs as the primary source of government revenue because imports are luxury goods used by the rich. I didn't know that.

Since quasiliberarian conservatives like to claim Jefferson as the great minarchist of the Founders, I suspect that this will come in handy. (Apropos of which, if you haven't seen it, dig a quote I blogged a while back about John Locke supporting redistribution of wealth.)

Chili

A disconcerting article about what tomatoes are for:

Corn and potatoes became almost immediate staples the world over, but tomatoes took a surprisingly long road to popularity.
....
The reasons given for this lag have been several: tomatoes are a secondary crop and fell in the shadow of the other New World imports; they were misconstrued as ornamental fruits and used for display (thus the golden apples, the pomodoro, of Italy); they were quickly recognized as a relative of the poisonous belladonna by peasants who refused to grow them (they are a member of the “nightshade” or Solanaceae family, along with chile and bell peppers, potatoes and eggpant) — but I propose another, more curious reason.

What's the reason? I'll give you hint: Soylent Green presumably includes tomato flavoring ...

McRib

An unreasonably fascinating speculation about the economics of McDonald's McRib sandwich:

Fast food involves both hideously violent economies of scale and sad, sad end users who volunteer to be taken advantage of. What makes the McRib different from this everyday horror is that a) McDonald’s is huge to the point that it’s more useful to think of it as a company trading in commodities than it is to think of it as a chain of restaurants b) it is made of pork, which makes it a unique product in the QSR world and c) it is only available sometimes, but refuses to go away entirely.

If you can demonstrate that McDonald’s only introduces the sandwich when pork prices are lower than usual, then you’re but a couple logical steps from concluding that McDonald’s is essentially exploiting a market imbalance between what normal food producers are willing to pay for hog meat at certain times of the year, and what Americans are willing to pay for it once it is processed, molded into illogically anatomical shapes, and slathered in HFCS-rich BBQ sauce.

The McRib was, at least in part, born out of the brute force that McDonald’s is capable of exerting on commodities markets.

I am now sold on this theory.

Update: Ian Bogost offers a windy attempt at a psychoanalytic explanation of the sandwich's appeal:

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gives the name objet a to the thing that elicits desire. In French the phrase means “object other” (the a stands for autre). Think of it as a term for the thing that elicits desire. For Lacan, our behaviors themselves may be knowable, but the causes of those behaviors aren’t always so. Objet a is not the object of desire (the thing we desire), but the thing that causes the desire to come into being (the cause of a desire for that thing). The philosopher Slavoj Žižek sometimes calls objet a the stain or defect in the world that motivates a belief or action.
....
Yet, the McRib’s perversity is not a defect, but a feature. The purpose of the McRib is to make the McNugget seem normal.

My first hand account of the Black Bloc fiasco during Occupy Oakland strike, as well as the pro-violence flyer in circulation.

I didn't write this: I'm reprinting it here to help the link circulate, since the original is on Facebook, which is a lousy place to read and archive long posts.

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My first hand account of the Black Bloc fiasco during Occupy Oakland strike, as well as the pro-violence flyer in circulation.

by Kallisti Partridge

Before I give my account, I'd like to request that anyone commenting actually read the entire post first, and of course, please share this. I don't mind if you disagree with me; all that I ask is that my writing ONLY be shared in its entirety, so that my words are not taken out of context.

On Wednesday, November 2nd, I spent 13 hours in the streets of Oakland witnessing what was quite possibly the most stunning display human interaction and cooperation that I've ever seen. I can honestly say that, until recently, I never thought I'd live to see the day where the people of this nation would join together in a realization that we can take our power back  and avoid what has seemed like a downward spiral crash course that this planet has been on. When I saw news reports of the people in Egypt joining together to form road blocks in their own neighborhoods, I had no idea that I would soon find myself on the port in Oakland, doing the exact same thing with people in my bay area community. I could see this same sentiment in the eyes of everyone else there as well; the people, by golly, realized, some possibly for the first time, that we are not powerless. This awe inspiring observation served to counter balance what I'd seen earlier in the day, which was far more disturbing than simply a small group of hooligans breaking windows.

Right before the afternoon march, I noticed 2 men with military style haircuts displaying suspicious looking body language. Suspicious indeed, it turns out, as they very quickly proceeded to mask themselves, and proceeded towards a group of some others that had done the same. One of them affixed a black flag to what looked like a retractable baton. At this point, they mostly fit in with the others, aside from the slight difference that all of their gear appeared to be high end, and brand spanking new right off the corporate sales rack. Their shoes had NO wear whatsoever, unlike those in the group they approached.  I decided to follow them, because my "spidey senses", to say the least, were raising curiosity with an air of alarm. I followed them throughout the entire rampage.

The two men followed the rest of the black flag group, though only appeared to talk to each other, looking around nervously while seemingly conferencing on their strategies separate from the others. They all took to the front of the march as we approached the first bank. Immediately, the windows were smashed, as they were with the next bank, and the next, only skipping, from what I saw, the bank of the Orient in Chinatown, and stopping short of citibank at the end of the march. One of the two very suspicious men I noticed earlier was one of the main window smashers, and while I did see some of the others in the masked black flag group join in, most of that groups' vandalism actually consisted of paint and the throwing of objects that stood in our way. I didn't see the second man in question smash anything at all, but rather, he put his energy into yelling out things to instigate the crowd into escalating the vandalism ("Let's go! Smash that shit!" etc.), and encourage the crowd to cheer when it happened. Just in time for video and photo being presented to the rest of the world.

This is the point when the crowd started turning against each other. An older gentleman I overheard speaking of the unions earlier was brawling with one of the masked men, and everyone was screaming. The aforementioned instigator informed everyone within earshot that Whole Foods claimed they would fire anyone that took the strike day off (a claim some say now is actually false) and everyone started marching towards the store. By the time we got to whole foods, it was total pandemonium.

Chairs, tables, paint, everything was flying through the air as some people tried to protest Whole Foods while also shielding it from the chaos.  By the time we got to the University building, a brave man was blocking the door screaming "Peaceful Protest! This is my city, and I don't want to destroy it!" He cracked his knuckles, ready to take on an attack. Behind the doors were men in badges. After all of the police brutality, even unarmed men being murdered for the apparent crime of of class or skin color, I was now watching a black man shield cops from a protest. Insanity.

The black flag group began pointing out those attempting to stop them, chanting "The peace police must be stopped", and I was, personally, rather disgusted by the strategy of comparing peacefully pissed people to police which have acted out violently against peaceful protesters. By this time, we had come almost full circle back to where we started, to the Wells Fargo that I, along with other demonstrators, had shut down earlier without incident. An individual commenced to more smashing, and a man next to me burst into tears saying "This was supposed to be Non-Violent!" A female, unmasked and without a black flag, was following around the last of the vandals, and handed the upset man a flyer saying "But didn't you get this?", extending a sheet of paper. I looked down, and lo and behold, it was the same Pro-Violence pamphlet that people have been upset about all over interweb land. All of a sudden I realized I needed to be documenting what I was seeing with the camera I brought, something that hadn't crossed my mind in all the chaos. She was unmasked while handing these out, which says to me that she doesn't mind her face being associated with this flyer, so for now I can presume that it must be okay to display her photo here with my post. If she asks me to remove it, I most certainly will. The two men I was following had now vanished. It gets worse.

[Photo removed as requested; see comments]

Today I approached the internet nervous to see what the media would say about this. What do I see? Talk of the eeevil anarchists in our midst that are bringing down the movement, "not part of the 99%" some say, and my heartbreak deepens. I'd like to ask anyone reading this to get really honest with themselves about the labels they are throwing onto living, breathing people, and their own associations with what those words mean.

Now there is debate over whether property damage is "violence" or not, and I'd like to take a moment to say this with great conviction: The most important thing we need to do right now is examine these labels collectively before using them, and most of all, get clear, collectively, about the word "violence."

Our culture is rather violent, I think it's safe to say, as there is massive profit on human suffering all across the board. Men in uniforms with guns, threatening to kidnap (imprison) other humans while robbing them of their homes; That, I'd call violence. It's endless- we've allowed death and misery to those that cannot contribute to the wealth of a health care system which, it seems in many cases, hurts more than helps as a front for drug companies. It's sick (pun intended) from my perspective, as I've had several teeth pulled at homeless clinics, and even extracted one of my own wisdom teeth in lieu of proper care I couldn't get. My father worked in a factory in Compton for 35 years, so I've had a LOT of time to observe what's been happening to the bottom of the proverbial 99% barrel in this country. I remember people in my community shooting at choppers during the L.A. riots, so I've had a hell of a lot of time to think about violence too.  I don't think that smashing objects should be put into the same category. I've broken dishes that belonged to my loved ones out of anger, and I know that these things can be cleaned up and fixed, as the Clean Up Occupy Oakland party today has shown. To anyone freaking out or anguished over some broken windows, I'd like to ask that you calm yourself and please bear with me here, because I'm about to say something that might sound totally f&%$ing crazy. Wait for it...

It's common knowledge that the most dangerous animal you will ever meet is a mother protecting her young. If you don't understand that, try approaching a grizzly bear cub in the forest and see what happens. My own cat attacked me once as a child when I attempted to touch her newborn kittens. Cops shooting unarmed men, and a window breaking are given the same label: "Violent." That means that someone attempting to rape your sister, for instance, can be labeled the same as the person whom uses physical force to stop that same rapist, should they get hurt in the process. Self defense and brutal attacks getting the same label is a problem. That means that a peaceful protester that falls under a violent attack with chemical weapons can also be called violent when, in desperation with this struggle, they decide to simply toss an empty bottle in the direction of law enforcement (whom won't be hurt by that in their robo cop style riot gear) Language is magical like that. Spellbound= bound by spelling. Anyone old enough to remember the red scare, and all the societal insanity that revolved around calling someone a commie in those days, knows what a label can do to a real person. That said, are you ready for my crazy opinion? Here it is:

Much like the mother grizzly bear, I think it's incredibly likely that some misguided individuals did what they thought was just out of love for those whom they identify with: the 99%.  A patriotic soldier can feel something similar, and it's undeniable that America, and the entire planet, may be in the throes of a massive class war as I type this. Unfortunately, the end result of their actions might have "violent" consequences to the movement as a whole in the end, not only due to the negative press, and the resulting actions of law enforcement that needs these acts as an excuse to bring REAL violence like Scott Olson received, but also in the way that it instantly began to split the people up into those who are with the evil ooga booga anarchists, and those whom are not. Don't let anarchists become the new commie style scare. That's just stupid.

I don't identify with any political party specifically, as my personal philosophy is oh so simple. My personal position always comes down to my own eternal truth which is this: Love is The Law. I think our entire political system could potentially be corrupted beyond repair at this stage of the game, and could be scrapped for an entirely new way of conducting human society as a whole on this planet. I would like to see the rule, as we currently know it, to become obsolete so that The Law (as I've defined it here) can be returned. In fact, I think we most certainly *have* to do this if we don't want to go extinct, destroying the planet with ourselves. Some people say that makes me an anarchist, or an anarcho-primitivist. Black Bloc is not a group or political party. It's a tactic of using strategic protest methods in small organized groups within the whole. How this came to mean "smash everything", I'm not sure. I definitely understand the satisfaction that would result from smashing something belonging to the oppressor, but didn't take part because I can see how it cannot be productive in this situation. It's counter productive all across the board, most likely. A broken window doesn't hurt the racket that is wells fargo, just the movement that takes the blame. Now, you're not going to like this, but it gets worse. MUCH worse.

Copwatch participants have been working hard for a long time to expose harmful and illegal activity among those we pay to protect us. I don't believe that each individual working in law enforcement is to blame for grievances against their department in general; I think we also need to recognize that Oscar Grants' murderer, along with the others guilty of police brutality make them all look bad as they serve as slaves to a corrupt organization that is costing us a fortune. Why does the department demand that their employees have an IQ that is average or lower, but never above average? Copwatch recently released a video exposing two undercover infiltrators at Occupy Oakland that work for law enforcement. Other documentarians have exposed agent provocateurs at protests in Montebello (they admitted it!), and the most disturbing footage I've seen are in an excellent documentary called "Into the Fire", where these agents are seen causing a ruckus at the G20 summit in Toronto to serve the intentions of a militarized police force that acts ABOVE the law to squash voices of dissent exercising their right of freedom of speech. Unacceptable.

If such efforts are underway, let's turn the tables. If such plans exist to harm a peaceful message, why not refuse to be stupidly predictable in our handling of it, and instead, let it backfirein a way that benefits us all. It already started today as occupiers helped reverse some of yesterdays actions. I work for an environmental clean up crew called Playa Restoration, that makes sure there is NO TRACE LEFT BEHIND after a festival of 50,000 or so people, and we spend a month or more in a brutal desert in order to do so. As volunteers. We do it out of love for our community and the land. That said, I know it's possible for people to organize big action together. The police don't protect our safety oftentimes. Let's band together to do it ourselves. How many women in Oakland get attacked/raped every year? I don't know, but why not replace the endless anarchist argument with discussion about ways to band together and protect women from this which is DEFINITELY violence? In the face of schools being closed in favor of spending in ways we don't want, Occupiers are answering by attempting to create community libraries and education. A center for outreach for the homeless, foreclosed and vacant, has been reclaimed by occupiers for these means (while stating that they welcome the re-opening of the center for it's purpose.) I was there, at the reclaimed building last night. It was beautiful. Why not exert our energy in that direction? If the city chose to attack us in the name of "sanitation" rather than using our tax dollars to clean up the park, and if the money extorted from the public is going to be put into militarizing a police force against our will, then pardon my language, but I say fuck them. We can do it ourselves.

And, my final note: As nice as it is to discuss these things on the internet, the most important thing we can do is show up for the General Assemblies. When OPD attacked the small collection of people at Oakland Oscar Grant Plaza camp, the people responded by showing up in very large numbers to agree on a strike. Now the entire world is talking about this mass action. Typing is great- but first and foremost, we need to be out there, facing each other, and addressing more constructive efforts than finger pointing. If someone is willing to physically destroy a target and risk jail or worse for a cause they love that much, why not have a goddamn NON-violent discussion among everyone with the pretense of coming to a compromise that won't damage a movement? What if people within our community are being influenced by a force that serves to keep the people down with agent provocateur actions that have been documented- shouldn't we want to protect those people in our community?!? Last night, Oakland law enforcement, along with agents from departments across the state, were sent in fully armed in response the remaining crowd, some of which appeared to be random drunk people that happened across our celebration of what we'd accomplished. I don't know who broke into the coffee shop, but frankly it's hard to be concerned when armed agents are sent in by the state with their names and badge numbers CONCEALED. That is illegal, and in my humble opinion, an EMERGENCY topic that this entire nation needs to address IMMEDIATELY. Mainstream media reported some broken windows instead. If it's safe to assume that covert opposition are present, we surely have to agree that anything destructive to our goal, however well intentioned, must be kept seperate. Indeed, that puts us in the awkward position of struggling to protect the rights of agents in our midst that oppose us, but let's just suck it up and accept that job as ours. We need more jobs everyone keeps saying, so there you go. There is a LOT of work to be done in this country (for starters.) I've worked with a collective called Food Not Bombs in the past, which operates in an anarchist fashion despite a wide range of political views among its participants. I never witnessed violence— I witnessed mostly poverty stricken individuals working via cooperation rather than under a heirarchy to feed those even more poverty stricken than themselves. I think we need our own definitions for our words, so I haven't looked it up in a dictionary, but I'm pretty sure that's what an anarchist movement does: Work cooperatively, making the 1% obsolete.

Interview about the Occupy movement

Devin Hunter of Pagan Newswire Collective conducted in email interview of me for an article about Pagans and the Occupy Wall Street movement. As is the way of things, only some of my comments fit into the finished article, so here I have the full text of my comments.

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The Occupy Wall Street campaign has been launched to highlight the economic, health, and taxation variances between the ruling 1% of the American population and “the other 99%”. Do you feel that as a Bay Area citizen you have witnessed a distinct variation between the lower and middle class and the upper-class?

Living in San Francisco confronts one with juxtapositions of class in a way that one does not see as often in suburban America. In an ordinary day — or even an hour — walking around San Francisco one can rub shoulders with well-to-do professionals, hardworking poor immigrants, bohemians both rich and poor, dot-com millionaires, the impoverished underclass, service industry workers just scraping by, and even the stratospherically wealthy. For a while I was working in an office in the same building as Gump’s, a big store which sells beautiful, useless, inconceivably expensive tchotchkes to rich people, yet fifteen minutes’ walk could take me to the charity kitchen under Glide Memorial church in the Tenderloin. I suspect that a similar overlap between rich and poor in everyday life in New York City contributed to the Occupy Wall Street movement beginning there.

This all comes at a time when both the US and World economies are experiencing extreme fluctuations in stability, in your opinion how does this effect your own life as well as those within your immediate community?

I count myself lucky that I work as one of the skilled professionals relatively insulated from the recent shocks in the economy, but I still find these times frightening. Technocrats like me live on a shrinking ice floe, in danger of falling out of the charmed circle: you see it in our obsessions with our careers and our kids’ educations. In the Bay Area, I know a lot of left-leaning professionals who feel frustrated at our complicity in a machine we help to run but cannot seem to change because even we do not hold the real power.

In my greater community, the economic shift has had unmistakable effects. I know a lot of people facing very hard times with no end in sight. Solar Cross has had to set aside our financially ambitious community center project for now, and focus on more tactical projects, because the economy has made the necessary fund-raising impossible.

As a pagan community leader do you feel this is the beginning of the next “American Revolution?”

(I'm not sure I qualify as a “pagan community leader.” I think of myself as just an articulate guy who keeps heavy company.)

I feel the temptation to think of Occupy Wall Street in revolutionary terms, and believe that it has exciting implications if its momentum continues to build, but I hesitate to call it a harbinger of “revolution” just yet. If the Occupy movement proves as resilient as I hope, the next stage will take a form no one can predict. But we cannot yet say what, if any, lasting significance OWS will have. Significance on the scale of the original American Revolution remains a stretch, and much more than we can likely expect of this particular movement, but I hold out hope. The rhythm of American history includes a punctuating crisis once each human lifetime — the Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression/WWII era — and if the pattern holds, that time has come again, so perhaps Occupy Wall Street will prove to be a manifestation of great change brewing.

For the first week of protests media coverage of the events was slim to nonexistence. Reports of major media covering-up the protests by not providing them the appropriate coverage have been made. As a citizen how do you feel about the supposed media cover-up?

I would not call the early invisibility of Occupy Wall Street in news media a “cover-up,” exactly. Never attribute to malice what one can explain better with incompetence. The early hesitation by mainstream news institutions to cover OWS reflects an inability to fit it into the standard narratives they understand. As the growth of the movement has finally compelled attention, we see the media’s limited narratives in another form as they reach for their tropes of hippies and political demands and so forth and stumble trying to describe OWS on those terms. Mainstream American news media is, by definition, a mechanism of our social/political/economic order, which makes it unable to apprehend a movement like OWS which makes a radical critique of that order. The media’s inability to cover OWS properly is frustrating, but unsurprising; if they could tell the story of the fundamental systemic problems that we face, we wouldn’t have those problems the way we do in the first place, and wouldn’t need OWS.

On the first day of protests Comedian Roseanne Barr called for a combination of capitalism and socialism and a system not based on "bloated talk radio hosts and that goddamn Ayn Rand book.” In your own words do you feel that incorporating Socialistic policies into our Capitalistic government is a good thing or bad thing, please explain.

Market capitalism provides enormous benefits. It efficiently allocates resources, produces a cornucopia of goods, and fosters innovation. The abundance it produces sustains modern civilization. But market capitalism for all its undeniable strengths does a lousy job of other things that you want in society, like ensuring that the goods it produces get distributed to people fairly. If you regard prosperity for all as a goal of your society, as I do, then you cannot rely on market capitalism as the only organizing principle in the economy.

The term “socialism” gets overloaded and confused in the US, so I would rather talk about what Europeans call “social democracy”: a society which uses market capitalism to address the many problems it handles well but also uses government to mitigate its rough edges, ensuring that people get fair access to their share of society’s wealth. In the US, we have some elements of social democracy already, like public education and social security, but I believe that we can and should do much more.

To frame this in Pagan terms:

Hermes stands on top of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, cresting a sculpture entitled “The Glory of Commerce;” directly at his back lies the New York Stock Exchange, an institution whose history and spirit descends directly from the agora the Greeks held as sacred to Hermes. I honor Hermes and make an offering to him every day. But a wise Pagan knows that the gods’ purposes differ from our own, and you do not want to live a life of All Hermes All The Time any more that you want to live in Morrigan World or Skaldi World or any god’s domain exclusively. The Pagan sensibility, rightly, sees exclusive devotion to one god as neither desirable nor even truly possible, seeking balance in evoking each god in its time and directed to its proper purpose. So too with market capitalism, a force I respect but wish we had better balanced with its more egalitarian cousins.

The collective movement has proposed a list of four demands for the outcome of the protests which are— One, to protect the environment. Two, to care for the people. Three, to tax the rich. And four, to end the wars. How do you feel this relates to the ethical, spiritual, and economic values of pagans? How do you feel it relates to the Bay Area?

I believe that thinking in terms of conventional demands, even ones as broad as “protect the environment”, misrepresents the nature of the Occupy movement. At this stage at least, OWS offers a radical critique that comes prior to any specific policy solutions. In its rhetoric of “we are the 99%”, Occupy Wall Street says that we have developed a social and political order that does not serve 99% of us properly, that the wealthiest 1% control the system, that therefore that 1% have responsibility for the system, and that until we recognize and address this fundamental failure of equity and democracy we cannot meaningfully talk about more specific problems.

I believe that presuming Pagans to share a set of ethical, spiritual, and economic values which translate in to a specific kind of politics or political agenda misrepresents the diversity of the Pagan movement. Politically and culturally liberal Pagans like me tend to imagine that we represent the core of Pagan culture, but we do not, any more than politically and culturally conservative Christians can rightly claim to represent the core of Christianity. We must respect how Pagans span the full political spectrum, left, right, and otherwise.

Many argue that as Pagans universally call nature sacred, Pagans share a political commitment to environmentalism, but even that seemingly uncontroversial claim of Pagan unity casts our community too simply. Obviously many Pagans have deep ties to environmentalism, and I count myself among them, but that can mean very different things to different people. For example, many environmentalists, Pagan and otherwise, find nuclear power abhorrent, but I myself have come to favor nuclear power because the vital importance of reducing carbon emissions makes it worthwhile to get electricity by every emissions-free method possible. For example, I know a Pagan — not a suburbanite who casts circles in the backyard but someone living very close to nature, deeply committed to reducing his environmental impact — who is also one of the most vigorous global warming skeptics I know. Assuming that “Pagan” implies any particular politics misses the breadth of Pagan culture.

As a Practitioner of paganism, what do you feel as a culture pagans could be doing to support the effort — if at all? If you do not support the protests how could pagans help put an end to them?

I believe that Pagan diversity precludes a general Pagan political agenda, but I also believe that Pagan visibility is important. When Pagans speak and act either for or against the Occupy movement, if we identify ourselves as Pagans that will help to make Pagans visible as citizens.

That said, as both a vigorous supporter of the Occupy movement and a Pagan, I would urge Pagans, as I would urge anyone, to take a close look at the statements from Occupy Wall Street and seriously consider supporting both OWS and their local Occupy movement, as I hope and expect that many Pagans will share my enthusiasm.

On October 6th the ongoing movement moved to the streets of San Francisco which included a march from Mission to its base of encampment at 101 Market Street where is continues. Have you experienced the protests first hand? Do you intend to?

I have contributed supplies to both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy San Francisco, and have visited Occupy San Francisco a few times now, though I did not participate in the 6 October march. I expect to continue to vigorously support both, and I hope to spend significantly more time participating in discussions among Occupy San Francisco participants in the weeks to come.

Protesting and demonstration have been a large part of movements commonly associated with paganism such as Women's Rights, the Green and Environmental Movement, and Native rights. Do you feel that this movement is of spiritual significance to the pagan community and/or US population?

I believe that Occupy Wall Street, like many activist movements, reflects for many people a spiritual hunger that many Pagans would recognize. American bourgeois consumerism in itself leaves a vacuum of meaning and purpose in society and in individual life; at the level of society, the hunger to fill that void can bring people to social justice movements like OWS, while at the level of the personal that hunger brings people to spiritual practice, Pagan or otherwise.

Cornell West famously said, linking the spiritual and the political, “never forget that justice is what love looks like in public,” and I believe that a spiritual yearning ultimately motivates OWS.

How do you feel the political climate has changed since the beginning of these protests?

I confess that like many politically-aware people, I had fallen into a kind of despair in the last year; in the wake of the supposedly-transformative 2008 election, too little had changed, suggesting that the American political process could not admit, much less affect, the grip which the wealthiest 1% held over our society. The plutocrats had driven the country into a ditch, crashing the economy with terrible consequences for most of us, and yet they still prospered and had the instruments of government supporting and favoring them. It seemed that nothing could loose their grip or get us to even name what we see happening. I spoke dismissively of the possibility of a mass popular uprising confronting the situation, and I was wrong.

Occupy Wall Street has already done more to name and confront the systemic problems in our society than I had believed possible, so I cannot help but feel excited and optimistic about what comes next. I know that other people feel the same way, and I suspect that there are a lot of us.

What do you feel is the best possible outcome from these ongoing protests?

My greatest hope for Occupy Wall Street is that it permanently changes the way we think and talk about politics in America, that we routinely ask the fundamental question, “What is society for, if not to provide for the needs of all of our citizens? What can we do to accomplish that?” I hope that OWS unlocks the yearning for justice and equity which most Americans feel, turning it into effective action. If we can break the hold of wealth and power over our current politics, and make building a social and political order of justice and equity our new politics, the results would be truly revolutionary.

Declaration

Occupy Wall Street has issued their Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. The whole thing is worth reading, but I want to call attention to a segment of it.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power .... We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

That's followed by a list of specific grievances. Emphasis mine; I read that and thought bingo; if it sounds familiar to you, too, it should. The title of the statement is no accident. Here's the US Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Declaration of Independence, of course, follows with a list of grievances as well. Occupy Wall Street shows that they understand and respect American founding documents a whole lot better than the Tea Party does, for all their claims.

The conclusion of OWS's Declaration is interesting, too.

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

In other words: yes, this is connected to the Arab Spring, and if our leaders won't step up to encourage that global movement, then we will.

Nice work, Occupy Wall Street. Keep it up.

Why Steve Jobs

That’s a picture taken by Matt Harris of the spontaneous memorial to Steve Jobs in front of the Apple San Francisco store tonight.

I am moved by this. I am kin to the people who did this.

And yet earlier today, I invested hours and a big chunk of money into procuring and ferrying supplies for the Occupy San Francisco folks. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a protest of the unjust wealth — and more importantly, of the unjust power — of the wealthiest people in America. And make no mistake, Steve Jobs was one of those guys.

Let me underline that. I hesitated to say this today, not wanting to speak ill of the dead (and I did my little unalloyed appreciation in that spirit earlier), but it’s important to understand that an important but mostly-unhearalded part of Steve Jobs’ business mojo was his understanding of manufacturing. It was the main focus of his attentions during the last few years before he was forced out of Apple in the mid-80s, and his attention to manufacturing is integral to Apple’s current ability to field devices that deliver more for the money than competitors. So when it came out that conditions in Chinese iPhone factories were so horrific that workers were driven to suicide, there was no doubt in my mind that while he likely didn't know the specifics of the story before they came out in public, he did know fundamentally the kind of work situation at his suppliers. When the story came to light, Jobs didn't rush to change what Apple was doing but rather actively defended what Apple had done. I am very clear on that. I am very clear that though this may be the most horrifying skulduggery Apple has perpetrated at Jobs’ direction, it’s not the only example by a long shot.

How can I reconcile this with the urge to be among those building an altar to a fallen CEO?

Let me offer something I have said about Apple under Steve Jobs for years. Apple is a vast machine for making exactly the tools that Steve Jobs wants for himself, and in order to pay for the exorbitant cost of making them it sells copies of Steve's toys to all the rest of us.

People in the industry chuckle when I say that because it describes an important part of how Apple works, but I say it now in order to confess that there’s an important way in which my quip gets it exactly wrong. Just yesterday I pointed to an article by blind blogger Austin Seraphin saying that the iPhone is “the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever.” Apple has aggressively worked on accessibility for users who are blind or deaf or have other limitations, an effort that makes no “business sense” but surely makes human sense if you read that or any of the countless other articles about what a boon the iPhone has been to the blind. Today I see Susie Bright saying that her pioneering magazine of lesbian liberation, On Our Backs, was not just the first magazine created on the Mac. It was only possible to publish it because of the Mac. Both of these stories, and countless others that people are telling today, tell how Apple products empowered and delighted them in ways that are impossible to imagine without Steve Jobs. Speaking for myself, the profession which I practice and love could not exist in the form I enjoy today without the Macintosh and its success and the influence it has had, so in an important way I owe the life I love to Steve Jobs.

That is what Apple is for. Yes, Apple makes money, but that is instrumental to its true purpose. That was what Jobs’ life was about. Yes, Jobs made a mountain of money himself and had his legendary ego gratified, but those are byproducts of his mission of making beautiful things that deliver power and pleasure to people. There are more important things, yes, but that's pretty darned good. It's why people are laying flowers at the door to his store, and why I am with them in spirit.

Bringing it back to Occupy Wall Street, consider:

Is such a memorial to any other CEO even conceivable?

Is it all that hard to see why it isn’t?

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I’d leave it at that but there's just one more thing.

I dig this picture of the original Macintosh development team blogged in a fascinating remembrance by John Siracusa.

Notice that there are a lot of women in that picture? That it’s mostly White people, but not entirely? Both in an era when tech skewed even more White and male than it does now. And notice that there's a fella holding his baby right in front there?

This sure looks to me like a shaggy bunch of goddamned hippies who have cleaned up for Picture Day. Which is no surprise: Jobs himself was a goddamned hippie who once lived on an ashram and dropped acid and did his major corporate announcements dressed in a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers and referenced Gandhi and Bucky Fuller in advertisements and thought that finally adding the Beatles to iTunes was an announcement on a par with launching a whole new product line. Jobs was a hippie who built a hippie organization.

I submit that it’s no coïncidence that this hippie organization is now arguably the most successful company in the world. Because while we shouldn’t pretend that Apple isn’t ruthless, isn’t exploitive of its workers, isn’t deeply concerned with bean counting, and all that, just doing those things doesn’t explain Apple’s success, either in making money or in inspiring love. Making great products and services that serve people is what did it. And that, I submit, comes of taking a bunch of smart oddballs and giving them a mandate to do something great. That comes out of a culture, not just in the sense of “corporate culture” but in the sense of culture at large.

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Update: To honor the 10^th anniversary of us losing him, Apple made a lovely little propaganda film of him saying, basically, swing for the fences to make something worthwhile. Whatever ambivalences I still have about him, that is the right project for anyone, especially someone graced by Fortune to hold the resources he did.

Goodbye Steve

Steve Jobs
1955-2011
Titan of industry

Look at his face at 4:00:

He’s not smiling for the applause. He’s smiling because he got it done.

The loss of him would have been news if had he only created the personal computer industry. Or if he had only committed to turning the Xerox Star into the Macintosh, “the first computer good enough to be worth criticizing”. Or if he had only founded the first major computer animation film studio. Or if he had only rescued Apple from the brink of disintegration. Or if he had only led the Macintosh renaissance of OS X and the iMac et cetera. Or had only rescued the music industry from their own stupidity. Or had only captained the creation of either the iPhone or the iPad.

Having done all of those is hard to conceive, even knowing it to have happened. A life well lived.

Let’s memorialize him by making it unexceptional that a corporation should make beautiful products that empower people and bring them joy, shall we?

---

It turns out I had a lot more to say.

Marxist imagery

I've had an eye out for a thorough discussion of the history of the Marxist cartoon image of the gluttonous, well-dressed capitalist for a while, and haven't had any luck finding one. I know that it dates back at least to the 1920s. Here's a good example of the type from that era:

Here he turns up in the first Soviet animated film:

(There's a good description of both of these images over at Raymond Owen's film blog, where I found them.)

It's a surprisingly resilient image. In American popular culture it has become deracinated from its Marxist roots in figures like Scrooge McDuck, the Batman villain The Penguin, and The Monopoly Guy.

My hunger to get at the history of the image arises from seeing this country music video a few years back, Montgomery Gentry's “You Do Your Thing:”

It's basically a propaganda film for Republican talking points, and half of it is built out of old Marxist cartoon imagery. It's not only deracinated from its communist roots, in a bizarre reversal we are offered presumptively left-leaning cosmopolites as the gluttonous, well-dressed villains with contempt for the common people.

This comes to mind because at the Occupy Wall Street protest, there was an amazing life-imitates-propaganda moment as champagne-swilling Wall Street WASPs looked down over the protest.

Is there a chance that American lefties can reclaim this old image?

Update: The Gothamist has uncovered the Facebook event invite to the “Anti Hippy Protester Champagne Toast.” Only check it out if you'd like to feel a little rage.

Update: A friend finds John Hodgman in character as the Formally-Dressed Capitalist. We are, again, meant to immediately recognize the image.

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