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.

Summer in NYC, 2010

NYC is replacing the old broken slats on the Coney Island boardwalk with new ones. The uneven boardwalk is such a big part of Coney Island's charms; I worried it would look too new but they've taken the trouble of having matching the old and the new and you almost can't see the difference - the new wood just has a more reddish hue and is even "sustainably harvested."

The Wonder Wheel is still there though, thank goddess. I've never actually ridden it, but I'm glad it's there, a testament to a time when toys were mechanical and had gears you could see physically do their work, not just computer chips whose machinations few of us understand.

Whilst in New York I had the chance to go to the Cloisters for the first time, which was incredible. It's a museum fashioned from an old European monastery and full of medieval art. Leading up to the museum is an incredible heather garden, which is full of all sorts of lavender.

and beautiful flowers:
The real highlight was seeing for the first time The Unicorn Tapestries in person. I'm not sure what it meant but it looked to me like a fable of the clash between paganism and Christianity... and probably was supposed to be about the sacrifice that Jesus made but I saw it as a commentary on the subjugation of paganism and with it that is beautiful and natural and free...
Another highlight was going to one of my favorite places in NYC: the American Folk Art Museum, which had a great exhibit on folk art only by women. One cool piece was a quilt by a woman who, before she had the right to vote, used her quilts to state which political party or candidate she supported. Apparently, the rooster was the symbol of her party at the time. What I liked about this, apart from its brilliant style - is that it shows the myriad ways that women throughout the ages have found to express their intelligence and political beliefs - to participate in a democracy that had yet to acknowledge the value of their contributions, and wouldn't do the same for black women for many years to come...

Close-up
And then there's just beautiful crewel embroidery...

And crazy tripped out geometry.
Close-up

And who says women aren't good at math?

from flowers to BP and back again

There is a bug in the machine.

According to A People's History of American Empire, by Howard Zinn, British Petroleum was established after the CIA and British government orchestrated a coup to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran in 1951 for nationalizing Iran's oil. In his statement, Mossadegh said, "My only crime is that I nationalized Iran's oil and removed the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth." Immediately following the coup, the Anglo-Iranian oil company was renamed British Petroleum. U.S. Oil got 40% cut.

Is this what civic participation looks like?

I've been thinking a lot about how, back in 2003 (and admittedly I was younger then), when there was something going on (WTO, the Iraq & Afghanistan wars beginning, Mumia's continued incarceration, globalization, evictions, Care Not Cash), me and my friends would sit down and think about what we could do to contribute to whatever protests were planned in a way that felt meaningful and relevant (and creative and fun). Mostly, it involved dressing up in costumes and coming up with stupid puns (think: Bunnies Against War Money), but still, it was a kind of civic participation, however limited in its effectiveness.

Fast forward 8-10 years and I slog away doing meaningful, political, and sometimes incredibly frustrating public health work within The System 12 hours a day (including the commute), 5 days a week. At the end of the day watch Rachel Maddow on her eponymous show and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to see what latest tragedy has struck this ridiculous, precious world. I then get severely depressed (the earthquake and its aftermath in Haiti, the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill) or agitated (the AZ racial profiling law) and then go to bed. As I lie thinking, I have some insight about what's missing from the discourse and think, I should blog about that. But by the time I can really think a matter through enough to have something worthwhile to say about it, the moment has passed and the new headline has taken my attention and that of everyone else.

It used to be, when I was 20 and wrote a zine, it would take me 6 months on average to take a piece of writing from its idea stage to fruition; sometimes it took longer - two years, five years. Now, if I let a few days or weeks pass while I formulate my ideas, the writing no longer feels fresh and I just let it go unposted. I know this comes up a lot in the incessant postmortems on journalism - how can you do a good job investigating a story when, in the twitter age, you're expected to break a story seconds before someone else? My similar question about civic engagement is, now that we get so much of our information online, is it enough that I come home and take the time to write down and share what I am thinking in this forum?

I thought about this the other day when one of my friends said she had spent the morning writing a rant about gentrification on Facebook. I didn't read it, but I can imagine what it probably said. It used to be we made stencils of our discontent and spray-painted them in restaurant doorways with messages like COLONIZER FOOD and YUCK. But now, even that feels hackneyed, as do all conversations about how quickly the [insert historically black/Latino] neighborhood (the Mission, Bed-Sty, Oakland, Hunter's Point) is changing, how it just isn't the same anymore since the yuppies came in, their entryway paved by us artists and queers.

In a weird way I feel like this complacency is as much a product of age as it is a combination of Bush winning a second election (I realize this was six years ago, but it was a breaking point after which I no longer had the energy to fight) and Obama's historic election. With a black man in office we are to believe that all is solved, or at least that we can breathe again -- and we can, to some degree. But it is not enough; voting is not enough. No amount of email petitions -- against the AZ law or any other issue du jour -- will replace actual civic engagement, where we get together and think about an issue and what we want to do about it. (Particularly since email petitions are more often a means of fundraising than they are a tool for affecting change. My experience has been that crying, white, soccer moms -- or anyone with a compelling personal story-- get more traction in a Congressional hearing than do a thousand signatures to a written or electronic petition.)

Since I no longer have the energy for protesting, maybe my role is to take care of my health and to take the six weeks or six months I need to think something through before I write about it here. Because if anything is important in this short-attention-span age, it is to learn our history (read: Howard Zinn's excellent illustrated comic book A People's History of American Empire) and dig deeply towards a place of better understanding our individual and collective truths.

Images of Spring

i am obsessed with this old man who walks with a mug of coffee in one hand and his princess of a chihuahua on a leash in the other each morning to the Glen Park BART station to get his morning paper. i had been wanting to take a picture of this flower for days and was lucky enough that the old man walked by just as i was taking the picture so you can see the little dog in the distance on the left. she raises her feet with each step and looks about nervously but is so devoted to him. it's beautiful. and he could get his paper delivered, but he doesn't. he takes her for a walk and gets his paper just to take in the morning scene, or so i imagine when i narrate his life as i walk behind him everyday.

this flower reminds me of this article by Nancy Kreiger called "Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider?". It talks about old conceptions of disease causation as lacking an agent - African-Americans have higher rates of blood pressure but, she says, quoting Charlotte's Web, "where's the spider?" - as in - who is creating the social conditions that create this higher blood pressure? who is invested in and benefits from the structural racism that causes this higher blood pressure? surely, it is not just a matter of what she calls biomedical individualism, of people making poor food choices. so she proposes a model that looks a lot like the shape of this flower as a way of thinking about how problems have root causes that branch out and cause other problems, until finally you can't see from where a thing once came. it struck a chord in me many years ago when i first read it (thanks to my friend and mentor Lisa Moore at SF State) and reinforced my commitment to the upstream orientation of public health: rather than pulling people out of the river, let's go upstream and see who is pushing them in...

Spring inspirations from the world of pop culture

Quote of the day from today's NYT: Eric Landan, president of Rick's Cabaret International, which runs 10 strip clubs: "Our clubs are set up with the same decorations and customer service as any major steakhouse." His point was that strip clubs are not a big deal (true) and that they're where businessmen have long done their business (also true). What strikes me is the implicit parallel between strip clubs and steakhouses. It's almost like a set up for a feminist joke about women being treated like pieces of meat a' la The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory, by Carol J. Adams. I confess to never having read the book. We had it lying around my vegan all-girl punk house many years ago but the book's title seemed to say it all. The title, and all those all-girl punk songs we sang along to by Team Dresch and Sleater Kinney and Spitboy back in the day.

Speaking of girl power, I've been meaning to show this clip from the musical Wicked, which my roommate and I went to see in February. The song is called Defying Gravity and it's kind of reminiscent of all those riot girl songs of yesteryear. Here is a snapshot of the lyrics:
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules
Of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes: and leap!
It's time to try
Defying gravity
I think I'll try
Defying gravity
And you can't pull me down!

Also oddly moving (and, alternatively, hilarious) is Alicia Keys singing "New York" with Stephen Colbert rapping about his asthma and life in the upper-middle class!:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Alicia Keys - Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down
www.colbertnation.com

Faves films of late: The Runaways (serious lez action with Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie and Kirsten Stewart as Joan Jett); The Hurt Locker (more serious fare - i don't often watch war movies but this one seemed to show the alienation and adrenaline rush that comes with living amongst so much danger and violence); Up in the Air (the moral: capitalist alienation-not love-will tear us apart unless we hold onto each other); The Princess and the Frog, (yes, it was refreshing seeing a working class, black princess in a Disney musical/cartoon/movie for once!!!)

Actual news (the passage of landmark health care reform! the web of disease causation! Tom Freiden's pyramid of public health interventions! the lifting of the federal ban on funding for syringe exchange! the U.S. finally, kind of standing up to Netanyahu on building in E. Jerusalem!) next time.