David Byrne on the new sin of Hope

I went to an art show recently of Drawings by David Byrne and Dave Eggers. The show was crowded and overwhelming but the drawings of animals were clever and cute and so I stayed and walked around awhile. The first thing I picked up was this book, "The New Sins" by David Byrne. It lists and explains sins we commonly mistake for virtues. (According to Byrne's website, the book was "originally placed anonymously in hotel rooms during the 2001 Valencia Biennial" and then later placed in light boxes in bus kiosks in Syndey and Toronto.) When I read this passage on Hope, I knew I would have to stand in the twenty minute line of hipsters and journalists snapping up Dave Eggers' drawings, hoping to be seen as cool and ironic. I ignored the drawings and bought the book, which I quote here at length:

Hope

(....)

Hope allows us to deceive ourselves into thinking that life is parceled into discrete chunks -- that our lives are stories with beginnings, middles and ends. That there IS narrative, linearity, and not chaos, chance and luck.

Chaos is beautiful. Hope deceives us into thinking that it is something evil and unnecessary, something to be avoided at all costs. Hope is therefore a way of keeping people blinded, ignorant, and servile, ignorant of the true and mystical beauty of the universe, a universe which is meaningless and amoral. Hope and its handmaiden, Science, maintain that the universe is governed by Laws.

The laws of gravity, of thermodynamics, of motion, electromagnetism and mathematics have been proven time and time again to be only temporary frameworks and support structures. However, these laws, every one invented by men, are merely diabolical scenarios that need to be revised every century, sometimes more often than that. They reflect hopes and faiths that matter will indeed fall, cool, still and eventually disperse. But if we are continually dismayed, it is only because we have not come to love hopelessness. We have not accepted the Beauty of the Universe.

Oscar Grant Protests and the Spectacle

The media, the police, the crowd, everyone was waiting for a riot. Johannes Mehserle, an on-duty police officer had shot dead an unarmed young black man who was face down on the subway platform with another cop's knee on his neck and, more than sixteen months later, on July 8, 2010 at 4:00 p.m., the verdict had just been announced: involuntary manslaughter - criminal negligence with the use of a firearm.

Orange streaks of light stretched down 14th St. as the sun set on the horizon, forming silhouettes on the stage where a young man exhorted the crowd not to believe the narrative that those who had come to protest were outside agitators. They were, he said, citizens of Oakland tired of seeing unarmed black men murdered by the police. They were using their bodies to make seen the effects that police actions had on their lives.

As twilight ascended, a scuffle broke out on 11th St. and the people who had been listening to speakers on the stage wandered and then ran toward the commotion. Oakland police, gas masks dangling from their belts, formed lines on all sides of the intersection of 14th and Broadway and started moving in. Sensing the mood turn and the number of escape routes diminish, I left. Later, I got a text from a friend that "the people" had liberated shoes from Foot Locker. On the cover of the next morning's paper was a photograph of two young people in mid-air stomping through the windows of the Foot Locker in a kind of protest ballet ("Violence flares after Mehserle conviction" Demian Bulwa, San Francisco Chronicle, July 9, 2010).

(Lucy Atkins / San Francisco Chronicle, July 9, 2010 - photograph used here for educational/fair use purposes only)

What's striking about the picture is not the young men smashing windows, meant to represent police violence and structural racism or maybe just access to things they can't afford, but the four visible photographers and one visible camera-person also captured in the frame, not to mention the person who took this picture and all the other journalists not in the frame. This larger picture begs the question: Why did police and photographers just stand by and watch this happen? Is it because they had been not-so-secretly waiting for this? Is it because the police had decided to let young people break some windows and let off some steam? Is it because keeping the protests both contained and a little unruly would quell the frustrations of everyone else in Oakland and the Bay Area and nationwide that day and let them feel better for having stayed home and, dismayed and horrified by the verdict as they were, having expressed their disappointment in a more reasonable manner?

Coverage in the July 10, 2010, New York Times (written by Shoshana Walter and Richard Parks for the Bay Citizen) seems to suggest this. According to that article, "Sgt. Bautista said the [Oakland police] department’s strategy was to surround the site at 14th and Broadway to give people space to demonstrate without allowing the protests to spread. The police said they did not allow the crowd below 12th Street because of concerns the police department itself might be attacked." "Police Chief Anthony Batts said the police stayed back because there were not yet enough officers in that area. 'Our goal was to have overwhelming numbers,' Chief Batts said."

Another, more cynical explanation occurred to me on several days later, on July 14th, when the SF Chronicle reported that 80 Oakland police had been laid off due to budget cuts. Maybe the Oakland police wanted to show the public and local policymakers what would happen if there were fewer police on the streets to quell protests and violence, such as when Mehserle's sentencing is announced sometime this fall? Who knows?

But I suspect the case wouldn't have necessarily been prosecuted to the same extent had there not been raucous protests in the streets of Downtown Oakland after Oscar Grant was killed. That community response, and, as Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums said in a poignant speech, the video footage of Oscar Grant's death were what made this case different from so many other incidents of police violence and so impossible to ignore. The footage of the Oscar Grant's death motivated young people who said to themselves 'that could have been me' to protest, and the footage of those protests, and the property destruction that took place, created the spectacle that got this case international attention. So who is to say that property destruction in the context of nonviolent protest does more harm than good?

As anyone who has been part of a "peaceful" protest can attest, we often do not get media coverage unless there is a spectacle. Sometimes the spectacle is costumes (or, god forbid, puppets) but other times it is violence, or the threat of violence, that brings the news crews. But one thing is clear: if there is no spectacle, it doesn't get covered, and if it doesn't get covered, it (conceivably) never happened.

If it Bleeds it Ledes
When we were protesting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2003-2005, we could have thousands of protesters marching down Market St. and the mainstream media would bury the story on page 6 if they covered it at all. Or, better yet, they would focus on the three pro-war protesters at a rally and ignore the 10,000 antiwar protesters in the same place.

Our experience organizing a pro-war rally on April Fool's Day in San Francisco in 2003 illustrated this point: there were only 30-50 of us and we got on TV! When the camera crews arrived they realized the "prominent Republican leader" promised in our press release was me dressed up as John Ashcroft and chanting "War is Great! France is Stupid!." Luckily, they thought it was funny enough to put it on the evening news.

What wasn't so funny was Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) finding that major media outlets quoted pro-war sources 24 times more than they featured antiwar sources during the run-up to the Iraq war. Flash forward to 2010 and 3,000 tea partiers show up to Sacramento to protest Tax Day on April 15th and it gets covered in the New York Times. And a Tea Party rally and pro marriage equality rally happen on the same day in D.C. and FAIR finds again that the gay equality rally gets buried despite being larger in size. Why?

It may be because the media works so hard not to have a liberal bias that it gives extra coverage to the Right, which is admittedly pretty good at spectacle. But it's probably more because the Tea Party thing is new and controversial, and like dogs the media follow the ambulance flying by with blinking lights and a siren, rather than providing in-depth coverage of complex and seemingly intractable issues - like why are we in Afghanistan and what are we trying to achieve there, anyway? And why are so many people homeless in the U.S.? (Senator (!) Al Franken has a great analogy involving hummus in his book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right", but you'll have to read the book to figure it out.)

One thing the coverage of antiwar, tea party, and Oscar Grant protests all do have in common is a focus on the protests' most radical elements. The truth is that antiwar protesters compared Bush to Hitler (I never did) and broke windows of military recruiting offices (ditto) just as Tea Partiers compare Obama to Hitler and break the office windows of Senators who voted for health care reform and Oscar Grant protesters broke the windows at Foot Locker, the Far East National Bank buidling, and a pizza parlor. I don't agree with the most views of the tea partiers but I think it's bad journalism for the leftist media not to contextualize the tactics of the right by comparing them with those used on the left during the Bush years. Still, there are important differences: I never brought a gun to an antiwar protest, and I doubt that others did. If we had, we would likely have been beaten or charged with sedition. And I shudder to think what would have happened to any of the protesters arrested in Downtown Oakland, particularly if they were young black men, had they been carrying a gun.

The Spectacle
But all of this leads me back to this question of the spectacle. After the July 8, Mehserle verdict protest, I kept thinking of this word: spectacle. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord says, "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." Rather than participate in civic life or direct action, we watch it play out on the TV or computer screen and feel as if we are protesting by simply bearing witness to these events.

"The spectacle is not a collection of images," he writes, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." That picture of two young people, scarves flying, mid-flight toward shattering glass releases us from our burden of inactivity and fear, but it also frees us to participate in ways that seem moderate by comparison. It provides cover for the ACLU lawyers among us who pursue justice through the courts, however flawed the legal system may be. It provides cover for those of us who seek to build alternative ways of living that do not rely on the subjugation of people through domination and power, but rely instead on mutual cooperation and aid (how ironic that the Oakland police used the term mutual aid to call on the assistance of the National Guard!!!). And, it provides a glimpse of the lava teeming beneath the surface of these uncertain times, poised to destroy both Potemkin villages and create new and beautiful landscapes in which we all can live.