propositions press... 2.0

the persistence of (bookstores as more than) memory

The book publishing industry is going in a lot of different directions right now. Given the uneveness and increasing instability of the societies served by the long-form text, not only in terms of business climate but in areas of technology, consumer economics, and subcultural trends, it makes sense that the industry will stay in fractured flux for quite some time.

Against these conditions there appears this article about independent bookstores in Madison and Dane County from the Cap Times. It cheers greatly to read local media giving some love to our area’s small bookstores. But the author only scratched the surface. With each having a different story behind it, the article could have profiled other stores for a much longer article, easily. I do appreciate that the writer featured Arcadia Books (not to be confused with Arcadian Press). I had not known about this place and it looks terrific—judging from the website it strikes me as one of those semi-idyllic crapshoot businesses that are simply done well enough to make it. I am going to find an excuse to go to Spring Green.

Disappointingly, the author did not include any mention of Rainbow. Neither did he make note of the second-hand shops and discounters. Frugal Muse, Half-Price Books, and Stony Hill Antiques are all worth a browse. Board members suggested that we draft a letter in response, to have our say and, more importantly, help the article gain in scope. Pasted below is what we came up with.

Few are the cities of Madison’s size that can support so many bookstores. As the field of bookselling and distribution continues to shift, and as books themselves continue to diversify in form, I wonder which of our town's stores will ride the oncoming waves into a new golden age of books and if any will drown in the choices before them. 

 

Dear Cap Times:

We read Rob Thomas’s article about Madison’s independent bookstores with delight and optimism. Ten years ago, by which time the big box stores had crushed independents in nearly every retailing category, who would have predicted the demise of the chains? And again, only five years ago the e-book revolution promised another sharp turn towards a paperless world. But in towns with serious readers books and independent bookstores persist.

Books, it is true, we can buy straight from our screens to our mailboxes. But books are always better with their associated people. The friendships, debates, and hanging-out that come with finding the people that correspond to one’s books are what we at another of Madison’s independents, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, aim to provide—books that come attached to an open community of engaged citizens, adventurous thinkers, and committed activists. Our store hosts events and study groups once or twice a week, at least, thereby helping to cultivate the progressive and intellectual life of Madison.

When it comes to the bookselling business, the writing on the wall is never quite what it seems, except maybe in the reliably quirky space of your favorite independent bookstore. So please come out, not just to Rainbow, but to Frugal Muse, Room of One’s Own, Paul’s. Go to Driftless Books and Music in Viroqua and People’s in Milwaukee. And Woodland Pattern, and all the other independent booksellers we are lucky to have across southern Wisconsin. Browse the shelves and maybe buy a book, but either way, leave with something priceless: a community and a culture that belongs to where you live. 

Sincerely,

 

Dan S. Wang

Susannah Tahk

board members, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, Madison

tales of pain from a winter's amble

Nighttime is the right time, says the neighborhood Great Horned Owl with the hoo hoo hoo call. On still, cold nights its call travels quickly through the air, with a clarity only possible when the air is dense, the trees bare, and human traffic at its nightly ebb. The owl seems at once near and far. Distances collapse. Winter ether renders live sound an expansion of itself, an aesthetic of season, weather, and time of day. 

For me the most spook-inducing sounds are to be found on frozen Lake Mendota. On nights with no breeze to whistle, the energy of ice more than a foot thick bowing according to the push and pull of late winter temperatures fills the aural void. Echo-ey pops and deep groans traveling along fissures supply moonlit ice strolls an abstract soundscape, without meaning, except that you are walking on this ice that is momentarily contained in an unbelievable tension.

Tonight I’m not worried about that, ice creaks and all. This time my stroll is interrupted by an intruder from within. Specifically, a toenail grown just long enough to irritate. The sharp corner of the nail (always trim toenails straight across, I was told growing up) digs painfully into the soft side of its neighboring digit with each push off the right foot. Each step is a wince. We have high quality of life expectations here in Madison, so this is a real downer.

Then I thought about Andy Murray. I watched him a couple weeks earlier in the Australian Open final. The cameras caught him changing socks between sets. His toes were taped, having blistered in a five-set match against Roger Federer only about forty-eight hours earlier. Ouch. I thought about my daughter, whose first injury as a dancer was a hurt toe at camp last summer. I thought about my own foot rot episode from when I was younger, on a long canoe trip. Once it set in it consistently worsened, going in a few days from nusiance to a jaw-clenching torture.

But the end of that trip was in sight. What is more, I was at an age when the pain provided a focus, lifted clouds of teenage confusion, and actually felt good because that. Enjoying acute pain is a young person’s sport.

Then I thought about my grandmother. And then my other grandmother. And my great aunts. They knew about pain around the toes, and for them there was no end in sight. They had small feet, the kind that come from binding. They were members of the last generation of women, already elderly in my childhood, to experience the binding; their daughters were not put through it. When I read mention of the foot binding process, it is usually described as a breaking of the arch. But the toenails also were sometimes left to grow, curled into their own flesh, after horrible pain to be finally crushed as well, or for the lucky, to be simply pulled out. Imagining the actual experience generations of Chinese women went through, “bound feet” seems too cozy an expression. It is one of those terms that sounds better than what the practice is in fact. Kind of like “extraordinary rendition.”

I wonder, did my grandmothers, as the lively girls they must have been, at times relish the pain? Men serving hard prison time speak of going into endurance mode, taking episodes of dissociation for the sake of mental survival. Sentenced to an indefinite duration of pain and permanent hobbling, a prison of their bodies, their families and social values, girls with small feet must have mastered the whole spectrum of coping psychology, including the mentality of the young athlete or disciple who learns to put pain into a box. But then to live with the new reality of small feet, small steps, and an eternally unsteady walk—what extremes of feeling or better yet unfeeling are necessary to manage the daily realities of such a fate? I will never know.

What I am complaining about, again? That toenail, the clipping of which I can already envision, only minutes away.

The irritation now respectfully ranks strictly at the low end on the pain spectrum signs you see at the clinic. Corrected in my thinking, the sensation feels more like a prompt than a sting, a reminder to me of the willingly and unwillingly experienced pains of the past and present world, even from within my own family history. It is a reminder that those considerable smarts and unfathomable sorrows have essentially no association with what small troubles I contend with. A toenail tonight only highlights the fact that in this mild life I am living I am mostly brutalized with music and other external forms of beauty—as long as oneself keeps from getting too cocky over thin ice. 

Finally, I realize that this is no pain-free zone in the world of our local owl, either. On the contrary, if the owl gets its way tonight some creature will feel all the wrenching unpleasantness of a full assault, to its limit, beyond which lies only numbness and shock–the anaesthetic, those short moments of a living death. In Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey wrote about the dread of the rabbit, surrounded by the voice of its hunter. My beauty is some other creature's pain, just as my grandmothers' pain was somebody else's beauty.

 

it's messed up, and i'm feeling at home

After six years of living in Madison, more or less, I have taken a liking to this town. I found an excellent community of activist intellectuals, a cell of radical designers and picture-makers, a reliable and enjoyable network of neighbors. I live about 150 yards from Lake Mendota, where our street ends with a primitive landing at water’s edge. The lake is recreational hell in the summer, but on a chilly still fall night one can meditate on the rocks and catch a whiff of the North Woods. There are always bands on the calendar worth seeing. The produce, cheeses, and meats available around here are among the best the nation has to offer. The many bike paths ensure safe coasting.

Great quality of life stuff is what bothered me about living here. Thankfully, the easy living is dying, and not just because the restaurant scene is overhyped to the point of embarrassment. The days—and decades—of being clueless and content in Madison are over.

The beginning of the end was signaled by the attacks on the public sector in February of 2011, to which the massive Wisconsin Uprising was a response. Wisconsin labor had been a victim of a previous generation’s success. Current workers enjoy standards of living hard-won by earlier struggles, lifestyles that had allowed workers to nearly forget that they are labor. But since the Uprising things are different, and working families in Madison know that from now until the end of their working lives and probably beyond, it will be a fight against Wisconsin’s right wing wrecking crew, currently led by the inimitably rodent-like Scott Walker. Walker and his lieutenants won their battles in the legislative halls but in the process woke the population. Austerity will do that.

The final shattering of Madison’s paradisiacal illusions comes from a different direction. Rather than from the stroke of an elected leader’s pen but in some respects seemingly as rapid, this blow takes the form of a demographic tidal wave, brown and black, surging via the late Millenials generation. One does not see it at the farmers’ markets, nor in the Overture Center lobby, nor in the crowds at the Badger football games. The Establishment class and culture in this town remain largely white.

But this complex future already resides in the public schools of Madison. The four general high schools range from 1500 to 2100 students. Various alternative programs serve another 400 high school-age students. The city as a whole is 7% African American and 7% Latino while the high schools are in aggregate 19% African American and 15% Latino. Along with the 9% Asian Americans, 8% self-described as mixed race, and the 0.5% Native Americans, the high schools serve a population only about 48% white. It’s California in the tenth grade.

Socioeconomic diversity is beautiful in the abstract, a make-believe harmony invoked by those flakey coexist bumper stickers one sees around the white neighborhoods of Madison. But in the flesh, the mixing of races and ethnicities brings with it a complicated set of problems, particularly when racial and ethnic groupings correspond to lines of class stratification and spatial segregation, as they do here. Because the dysfunctions of poverty are racialized and there is a generation gap on top of that, Madison’s aging white liberal establishment class is about to face its biggest test. Coexist, or turn reactionary.

Where are all these children of color coming from? The Latino kids are mostly of Mexican origin, but beyond that, I do not know of any pattern—whether they predominently are from another US city and/or whether most of them can trace lineage back to a particular set of places in Mexico. There probably is a pattern, but I do not know if any data has been collected. The Asian American kids seem to fall into three groups: children of East Asian/Asian-American professionals, children of South Asian/Asian-American professionals, and children of Southeast Asian-Americans, generally a working-class segment. It would make geographical sense for the Native kids to be mostly of Wisconsin tribal origins, for example Menominee, Ho-Chunk, or Oneida, but I do not know of any statistics regarding tribal membership.

The African-American kids are the most contradictory in terms of collective identity. Apart from a handful with African immigrant parentage, most of them moved to Madison from Chicago. A smaller number relocated from Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Beloit.

Chicago, as a place of origin, is the contradiction because it is shared, but not. What I mean is, of the Chicago migrants, an individual student might have moved to Madison from the West Side, the South Side, Uptown, or one the inner ring suburbs such as Evanston, Maywood, Ford Heights, or Blue Island. Or from the pockets of poor and working-class African American residence that dot the suburbs, even the largely white western suburbs like Willowbrook or Lombard. Whatever “Chicago” means to an African American student relocated to Madison cannot be assumed as shared with another “Chicago” kid in its details because Chicago and its sprawling environs are themselves widely variable in terms of local character, even when narrowed to one socioeconomic class.

And yet, in relation to the other students, “Chicago” becomes a convenient group identity, threaded together through superficial commonalities. The condition of many African American youth, therefore, is one of being caught between the assigned identity of “Chicago” and a substantive meaninglessness of the same. What shared experience there is comes only after their relocation to Madison, primarily through the spatial segregation that results when the black folk without much money —and in Madison that is the vast majority—end up living in the parts of town offering the most affordable rents. Apart from the exceptional affordable rental building here or there, most African American residents of Madison end up in the concentrations of cheap rentals in segregated neighborhoods, parts of town where the streets don’t end at the lake. For example, the Owl Creek neighborhood of the far southeast, in the clusters of apartment complexes along Schroeder Road in the southwest, or the rentals around Allied Drive south of the Beltline. In a city built around four large and irregular lakes, being away from all of them may be the truest measure of isolation.

I do not know what Madison becomes as the town’s Sixties-descended liberal establishment runs its course as the dominant culture, but I am quite sure the city will look different than Madison of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. What kind of a progressive formation steps up to defend what the earlier generation built—civil, middle-class, rational—as the right wing assaults on the public sphere sharpen, and the dysfunctional social dynamics perfected in our neighboring big cities threaten to reproduce themselves here? More to the point, how do we of the older generations and the youth who embody this emerging society together build the necessary progressive formations? There are few models and no certain paths forward, but failing to try is not an option.

What I see is a town long accustomed to a comparatively equitable distribution of modest affluence becoming a city not unlike others around the Great Lakes, separated into first, second, and third classes of citizens, colliding segments that enjoy the healthiest, best educated, and most tasteful lifeways against those made up of families trying to get by in the least hopeful of times.

But I must say I prefer living in a place that bundles external but proximate anxieties instead of allowing the space for endless indulgences in self-absorbed neuroses, high-brow escapist distractions, or views to faraway countries for reasons to decry imperialist policies. Post-Uprising life in Madison serves up global problems on a local platter, and that is a specialty we would do well to appreciate. 

wi uprising lit review, part 1

In Madison, Wisconsin, fifteen months ago the pitiable American inhibition on public political expression dropped away on a mass scale. The result was, among other things, the collective performance of an insurgent spectacle, beginning with the demonstrations under the capitol rotunda. For once in my political lifetime we had more performers than cameramen and the stage was accordingly enlarged. The resultant images were and are fundamentally appealing. With everybody participating, the picture represented not merely a small group but rather a whole public, a whole society, a body in which many viewers would recognize themselves, and, most significantly, want to join.

The images of the Wisconsin Uprising were made enduring through thousands-fold repetition, most of them slightly different versions of the same picture, a proliferation of infinite protest details bound by a whole, generated over the many days of action. There is no doubt—the pictorial, video, and sound documentation of the movement is vast. But finally, the social movement actually lived up to the flood of documentation produced of it.

Writing is a peculiar form of documentation. Unlike photo and raw video, writing by the nature of its production takes on a variable temporal distance from the events being recorded. From on-the-spot tweets to daily or weekly blog postings, to articles or columns that undergo an editing process for webzines or newsmedia sites, to texts written for traditionally published and distributed books, writing provides space for reflection and descriptive processing. For that reason, in terms of understanding the hows and whys of what happened in Wisconsin, writing is the most important kind of documentation we have. And we have a lot of it.

There can be no hope of reviewing even a sliver of the ‘first order’ online reporting that took place as the Uprising unfolded. There is simply too much. For example, as of this posting I have well over 600 webpages bookmarked in my browser’s Wisconsin Uprising folder, each url representing a notable detail or moment in the struggle. As a whole my bookmarked sites preserve the feeling of daily and weekly turns of events, and how people were thinking in the moment. These are but an unknown fraction of all that was typed and posted. 

I have taken on the more doable task of reading through a selection of the ‘second order’ movement literature. These are the print media published works, ranging from proper books published under well-known left wing imprints to DIY zines produced by small groups or individuals. Though these works vary in their physicality, professionalism of editing, and ideological orientation, they all belong to the Uprising in the sense that they are addressed to a movement-identified readership. This literature grew to a considerable body of work less than a year after the uprising broke out, and the titles I review here are not the complete roster.

The question of time frame must be considered from the outset. The writings compiled in and through these publications represent the period January 2011, when Scott Walker was sworn in as governor, through December of that year, by which time the effort was underway to gather signatures to force a recall election. From where we stand now, at the end of June of 2012, after the June 5 election debacle in which Scott Walker engineered a decisive victory, that period can be considered the first and brightest phase of the Uprising—and, most importantly, a phase of the movement that is definitively over.

The writings of that period are optimistic in comparison to the post-June 5 spirit of the movement. Even the most critical pieces are informed by the memory and experience of the initial insurgency itself—the heady first week through which a movement of many tens of thousands unexpectedly materialized out of little but a suddenly recognized common precarity. After June 5, the point of reference is quite different and certainly more difficult. Perhaps more than even before June 5, then, we need to study our movement, our collective decisions, mistakes, hopes, and potentialities, as found in the literature of the Uprising, and do it with the sobriety of the defeated.

*

These are the four books I have read:

We Are Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Uprising in the Words of the Activists, Writers, and Everyday Wisconsinites Who Made It Happen, Erica Sagrans, editor. Minneapolis: Tasora Books, 300 pages.

It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest, Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, editors. Brooklyn: Verso, 181 pages.

Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, Michael D. Yates, editor. New York: Monthly Review Press, 304 pages.

Uprising: How Wisconsin renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, John Nichols. New York: Nation Books, 192 pages.

*

Out of the four books We Are Wisconsin has the distinction of having appeared earliest. Being a contributor, this is the one I know best. It was a project initiated by editor Erica Sagrans, a young refugee of Nancy Pelosi’s DC office who was inspired by the Wisconsin Uprising from a distance. The collection of texts she put together make for a remarkable pre-recall, pre-Occupy Wall Street document. Especially valuable are the reprinted tweets, complete with time and date stamps, grouped on pages interspersed between the essays. They convey the excitement, anxiety, determination, camraderie, and astonishment of the Uprising’s first days and the occupation of the capitol. Look no further than the tweets for evidence of the ‘now-time’ theorized by Benjamin, the messianic arrival of historical possibility.

Though none is longer than nine pages, the articles are formally diverse. A good number are first person, bridging the gap between the tweets and the analytical pieces. Nationally-known left wing luminaries like Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, and Van Jones supply familiar voices at best and a platitudinous superficiality at worst. Making the first of their appearances that run through two of the other books are words from Michael Moore and John Nichols. On balance, the lesser known and local writers offer the stronger contributions. For example, UW graduate student Alex Hanna’s critical take on the Madison-Cairo (dis-)connection is an informed and tempered analysis of two insurgencies that in some respects jumped a border, but also remained particular to their locations. More so than either Benjamin or Chomsky, both of whom also wrote about the Middle East/Midwest vector, Hanna parses out the parallels worth holding onto. He is in a position to do that given his membership in the TAA and the fact that his area of study is Egyptian social movements.

The best articles are those that expand the scope of the Uprising while retaining the urgency of the first phase. For example, in “What Next: Mobilizing or Organizing?” Milwaukee activist Monica Adams argues for revisiting the known frames of oppression—racism, sexism, and other forms of exclusionary supremacy—to interrogate the “we” of the Uprising slogan “we are Wisconsin.” As well, she takes the mobilization/organization dichotomy of her title from Kwame Ture’s differentiation between mass action against something (mobilization) and mass action for something (organization). One both scores she adds substance to a struggle represented mainly as a battle about collective bargaining rights. The text is an excerpt from a report she delivered to the Left Forum on March 20, only about five weeks after the Uprising began.

It Started in Wisconsin has the feel of a local production though it is the book with probably the widest reach because of its publisher, Verso. The cover image is a photo of the capitol dome and the endless blue sky above it, a pure Madison image. It is the only one of the four books to use a cover photo at all. The visual richness continues inside in the form of photographs at chapter breaks, several comic spreads, and a couple samples of graphic art. Though not a large selection, the visual voices range from a wonderful shot of Uprising nuptials taken on a snowy day in front of the capitol by wedding photographer Becca Dilley to the minimalist iconography of Lester Doré. Other distinguishing features of the book are the lists of recommended further readings at the end of selected chapters.

Editors Mari Jo and Paul Buhle have ties going back to Madison’s radical heydey during the Vietnam era. As the founding editors of the 1970s-80s New Left periodical Radical America, they helped to disseminate essential political ideas of from their generation’s struggle. The Buhle’s experience in an earlier era is evident in the comics spread titled “Solidarity 1970.” It tells the story of the TAA’s contract battle of that year, their first. The then-newborn union won most all of their demands through a spring semester strike that was respected by Teamsters Local 695, whose drivers refused to make deliveries across picket lines. The chain of solidarity running parallel to the narrative of escalation in 1970 rang true to the opening salvos of February, 2011, when the growth of the Uprising similarly corresponded to the escalation of resistance actions.

I remember the book for some spot-on texts, including Mari Jo’s “The Wisconsin Idea.” She could have gone for the boring straight treatment, but instead she plays off the familiar term to describe the complex and crucial sense of identity, belonging, and ownership that produced the movement and that in turn were produced by it. As she writes, “No idea figured quite so prominently throughout the course of events as that of the identity of Wisconsin….” The insurgent re-definition of Wisconsin and Wisconsinite (finally!) is an aspect of the Uprising that has not been remarked on in many places. Only after the expanded discussion about the Uprising’s claim on the state’s identity does Mari Jo return to The Wisconsin Idea as an historically specific policy orientation with links to the Progressive Party.

Another valuable contribution is Patrick Barrett’s interview with Madison organizer and Green Party activist Ben Manski. Manski and one of the organizations he helped to found, Wisconsin Wave, were protest stalwarts. They came into the Uprising with an anti-corporate, alter-global politics, and use as their banner motto the European anti-austerity slogan “we won’t pay for their crisis!” The Wisconsin Wave was significant because it offered the movement an organizing force and a political discourse that went beyond the special interest represented by the unions. As such, the Wave (as Manski calls it) helped to dilute the predominance of AFSCME in the movement. This was a great service even though the Wave itself was and is arguably unfocused in its organizing priorities.

Wisconsin Uprising is the most ideological of the books, though not pointlessly so (I will get to the pamphlets in a minute). The book frames the Uprising as a working class labor struggle, pretty much in those terms. Going beyond the Wisconsin-specific touchstone of La Follette’s Progressive reforms, the contributors to this volume variously analyze the Uprising in relation to earlier episodes of labor organizing from throughout labor history. Elly Leary goes back to the Knights of Labor, the Japanese Mexican Labor Association of the early twentieth century, and the IWW-led strike against the American Woolen Company in 1912. Michael Hurley and Sam Gindin consider the lessons from the Canadian hospital workers strikes of Ontario in the mid-1990s. Rand Wilson and Steve Early co-author a chapter on the experience of recent union organizing in such open shop states as Tennessee, Texas, and North Carolina—a discussion even more relevant after June 5.

These and other authors make a compelling case for a wealth of tactical creativity available in the broad history of militant labor struggle. What they do not address are the reasons for the Uprising’s failure in strategic orientation, that is, why exactly the constituencies that initiated the chain of militant escalation allowed for the strategic re-routing of their movement. The failure is recognized as such given that it was the teachers’ sick-out that raised the spectre of larger strike actions, and even gained the term general strike traction at the height of the Uprising across a grassroots segment of the movement. For example, both Dan La Botz and Frank Emspak describe the strike possibility in their chapters, but neither offers a good explanation for why the movement went in the direction of electoral politics, just that it did.

Lee Sustar comes closest in his article titled “Who Were the Leaders of the Wisconsin Uprising?” In it he tells who actively argued for a general strike (J. Eric Cobb, executive director of the Building Trades Council), who was friendly to the idea (Joe Conway, president of the Madison chapter of the firefighters’ union), and who was against it (the top leadership of AFSCME, WEAC, and the state AFL-CIO). If there is a take-home point in Sustar’s piece, it is that the big unions prioritized the preservation of their dues-collection apparatus over the defense of their membership’s standard of living. As we now know definitively, this is a losing strategy.

John Nichols’ resume reads like a long prologue to the role he played all through the Uprising, that of a Madison-based progressive journalist and commentator with national visibility. He has written books about media democracy, socialism in America, and a critical profile of Dick Cheney, and finds regular work as a Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. As one of the most consistently present pundits delivering the Uprising to a TV audience (being a frequent guest on MSNBC’s The Ed Show and other cable news programs), as well as occasionally himself taking the microphone in front of protestors, it was almost a foregone conclusion that his Uprising would be the first book-length treatment of the subject by a single author. 

 

Nichols opens with a foreword that spells out his claim to authenticity as a fifth-generation Wisconsinite, and points out that at one time in their respective careers, he and Scott Walker were actually on good terms. As a political reporter allowed the space to roam, Nichols brings in not only discussions of labor battles from the past but the more timeless questions of democracy itself. For example, in Chapter 2 “First Amendment Remedies,” he unpacks the problems of despotism and the faltering constitutional guards against tyranny exposed in the course of the Uprising. He interweaves into these expositions of political history brief profiles or testimonies of the ordinary Wisconsinites he discovered at the demonstrations. As the expert journalist, he always attaches a human being to the most abstract parts of the narrative and then name drops the heavy hitter (Michael Moore, Rev. Jesse Jackson, etc) to keep up the narrative of national attention. 

My main objection to Nichols’ book is really that of Nichols’ politics. He is basically a social democrat, which colors his perception of certain events. For example, when he writes “It was hard not to feel hopeful on March 12, the day that 180,000 Wisconsinites welcomed home fourteen Democratic state senators who had fled the state to deny Governor Walker and his Republican legislative allies the quorum required to pass their anti-labor legislation,” I question whether he attended the same event that I did. Hopeful? I and almost everyone I know remember it feeling like a wake. It was three days after Walker and the Republicans rammed their bill through in a surprise procedural move, and the labor leadership did nothing at all, even though thousands who gathered at the capitol on the night of March 9 chanted “general strike!” at the top of their lungs. By Saturday’s demonstration, the predominant vibe was, the protest phase is over and the movement suffered a significant defeat. Nichols’ experience of that day might have been too heavily informed by the cheers he heard from his position near the stage.

To wrap up my comments on the four books, I honestly recommend reading them all for the fullest understanding of the Uprising. As with any genuine popular movement, all the perspectives and even the major storylines cannot be told in a single volume. Outside of the broad outlines and a handful of recurrent voices, there is surprisingly little overlap between the four.

*

In the next post I will cover a selection of pamphlets and zines.

Oh, and if you need another take on Wisconsin Uprising and It Started in Wisconsin see Allen Ruff's review here.

 

recalling legitimacy

While the rest of the American left was out on May Day celebrating, trying to make something happen, or block business as usual, Occupy Madison marked the day by quietly closing down the encampment they’d held for months. The fact that this development meant practically nothing to the Wisconsin movement says volumes about the different political space traveled by the Wisconsin Uprising at this moment, compared to the national Occupy movement. It is not Occupy that is on the mind of Wisconsinites, but rather the upcoming Wisconsin recall election targeting governor Scott Walker and several others.

The election, set for June 5, 2012, only about six weeks from now, was forced by overwhelming petition. Before then, the Democratic and Republican candidates will be winnowed down to one nominee from each party by a primary election set for May 8, barely one week from now. May Day it is not. But unlike the May Day protests, actions, symbolism, and demonstrations—whose sound and fury, let’s face it, are pretty easily tuned out by the mainstream (and not just media, but actual people)—the consequences of this election will be felt concretely by everyone in Wisconsin, activist or not, and for way longer than the news cycle of a single day. Hundreds of thousands in Wisconsin—probably even millions—will feel the effects of this election directly in the measurable forms of a reduced paycheck, a lost job, a health problem that leads to financial ruin, an unmanageable classroom, and twenty other big things. Furthermore, the consequences will ripple out nationally, either to draw a line on austerity attacks or to green light the regressive austerity agenda.

It has been said by Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and countless radicals that if elections mattered, they would be made illegal. Well, through their various voter suppression efforts, the Wisconsin GOP has been trying to do exactly that—make voting difficult and legally restricted. This election matters and they know it. But the movement grassroots has not grasped yet the meaning of the election. We must discuss this, if the movement is to have any hope of effectively continuing beyond the advertised finality of the recall election. This is my attempt to think through how the movement needs to interpret the election if the Uprising is to remain relevant, powerful, and strategically ready on the morning of June 6, no matter who wins or loses.

*

Wisconsin has an open primary, meaning anybody of any party affiliation or non-affiliation can vote for any of the candidates. Conservatives can vote for a Democratic candidate and progressives can vote for a Republican. An open primary removes the exclusivity of an official party-identified electorate, which is good. At the same time, the open primary assures an element of cynicism through tactical voting and bad-faith candidacies. 

For example, right now the Republicans are running several candidates in Democratic primaries without a shred of pretense that they are anything other than electoral hurdles and tactical disruptions. In the case of some or maybe even all of the “fake” Democrats, there is hardly anything dishonest about them. For example, the Senate Majority Leader of the Wisconsin state senate is Scott Fitzgerald, and he is facing a recall election of his own (also June 5). In order to force the Democratic challenger, Lori Compas, into spending resources on a primary election, regressive Republican activist Gary Ellerman is running as a Democrat. If it weren’t for him, Compas would not have to compete in a primary at all. This helps Fitzgerald by taking the fight to the Democratic primary election, which, if enough Republicans vote in it, theoretically could be won by Ellerman. Then he simply runs a concessionary campaign for the recall election and hands a victory to his buddy Fitzgerald. So Compas must win the primary.

This tactic was used back in the summer of 2011 against some of the Democratic state senators facing recall. It has not been actually successful, not to the point of undermining a good-faith candidate. Not yet. But this time the Republicans are trying harder, and I heard some rumor about Tea Partiers pledging to vote in the Democratic primaries.

The tricky part comes with the rule that however one chooses to vote in the primary, a voter only gets one vote. So if conservatives spend their vote on a bad-faith Democrat, then they leave the Republican side open for progressive voters to do the same thing to them. Democrats, unsurprisingly, are not aggressively taking the opportunity to generate havoc for the Republicans by running bad-faith candidates, somehow being content to leave the Republican candidate unchallenged while they sort out their own. As usual we can chalk up the Democrats’ timidity to a cowardice masquerading as integrity—a lack of fighting spirit that essentially has become the national Democratic brand, from Obama on down.

But here again, an opportunity opens up. Arthur Kohl-Riggs, a young activist with no Democratic Party connection, recognized the gap and filled it by running in the Republican gubernatorial primary as—and get this—not a “fake” Republican, but as a good-faith Lincoln Republican, a LaFollette Republican, which is a posture that carries inescapably more than a whiff of irony, if not exactly bad-faith. Kohl-Riggs is recognized by many in the uprising circles as a regular at Capitol demonstrations and for his social media activism, so it is clear to all that he is certainly not of the contemporary Republicans. But he is playing it straight, pounding the argument that he is, in fact, the true conservative, that Scott Walker is a traitor to the grand Lincoln tradition of integrity, justice, and leadership, and that true conservatives will consider voting for him.

That Kohl-Riggs got himself on the primary ballot means that however secure Walker and the Republicans feel, a signal has been sent. The mantle of the LaFollette tradition—such a Wisconsin thing—could be picked up yet in the future by some enterprising and substantive candidate who speaks the language of Colbert irony, and who potentially could bring a measure of chaos into the Republican side, and do it without any Democratic Party involvement whatsoever.  Could there really be an insurgent force of ironic conservatism brewing somewhere that could invade the Wisconsin GOP? Not if the GOP can help it, of course. See how they’ve shut down the principled libertarian candidate, Ron Paul, for years. If Kohl-Riggs dedicates himself to his idea, I for one would not discount the possibility of some youth-driven movement to reclaim conservatism eventually gaining visibility. It might be marginal to the party mainstream, but again like Ron Paul, it would bring into play many new people. Kohl-Riggs is only 23. If he decides to become a politician (as opposed to the citizen-running-for-office that he is now), to perform that act, follow that career, and dedicate himself to the craft of becoming an image, then who is to say where will he be in fifteen years.

Let’s parse out the present situation.

Scott Walker, the incumbent Republican governor, faces a primary challenge from Arthur Kohl-Riggs.

Democrats Kathleen Falk, Kathleen Vinehout, Tom Barrett, and Doug LaFollette are running against each other in the primary. Gladys Huber, a known Republican, is running as a bad-faith Democratic candidate.

Voters get one vote, and it goes to only one of the above seven candidates—the vote will be spent on either a Democrat or a Republican, not both. Say a sizable bloc of progressives decide to vote for Kohl-Riggs. Maybe a previously non-voting bloc comes out of the woodwork, attracted by the Kohl-Riggs novelty. Whatever the case, the vote total for Kohl-Riggs is sure to be small. But in a tight Democratic primary, those votes (or rather, the consequent non-votes for the Democrats) will make a difference. Where might those non-votes leave Falk, given that, presumably, many of those people would have voted for her over Barrett? Then again, a prediction based on ideological correspondence perhaps would have many of Kohl-Riggs’ crossover voters going for the outsider-ish progressives,Vinehout or LaFollette.

Similarly, conservatives who might otherwise have voted for Huber just to mess with the Democrats might feel some pressure to spend their vote on the Republican side for Walker because of Kohl-Riggs. If he were to attract even a five-digit vote total, Kohl-Riggs, the future/throwback candidate, might garner more media attention embarassing to Walker, and therefore (though we know that Walker himself plays the unflappable zombie to inhuman perfection) further damage the Republican brand. I can imagine conservative activists thinking it more important to put on a display of overwhelming support for Walker than throw vote wrenches into the Democrats’ race by marking the arrow for Huber.

* 

As in an epic sporting contest in which the bad breaks, bad calls, and bad bounces on both sides cancel each other out, perhaps the tactical manuveurs will ricochet through all corners of the contest, leaving no perceptible effect. Or, maybe it is all even until the very end, leaving a final surprise to stand as the defining controversy that shifts a race this way or that. Of course, unlike in sports, political candidates feel no special obligation to respect the rules. They bend or challenge them all along the way. And that, of course, only guarantees the expansion of cynical tendencies in two directions—ie, that platoons of lawyers searching for technicalities end up deciding the contest for the parties while ordinary voters throw up their hands and wonder, why did we even bother doing this?

My armchair dissection may not clarify the elections themselves, and likely further confuses one’s predictions. But the very futility of sorting through the permutations and possible outcomes of tactical versus naïve voting makes apparent the larger but hardly abstract problem of legitimacy as it relates to elections in general, and to this election in particular. Because of the unavoidable cynicism and calculation inherent in voting, there can be no moral legitimacy gained or lost in an election victory, period. The Wisconsin movement must be very clear about this. No matter who wins or loses, we will not accept the victory as the final stamp of legitimacy—any outcome is in essence illegitimate on the level of values. An election is a non-violent contest for control over the state’s levers of coercion—and that is all it is. This is a crucial statement to broadcast because should he win, whether it be fairly or by theft, Scott Walker will wear the victory on his sleeve, using its aura of legitimacy as a bludgeon. Make no mistake, Walker and his GOP cabal have a second, more horrible act of legislative aggression at the ready, to be unveiled just as soon as he beats back the recall. To the good people of Wisconsin: be prepared to fight a governor unafraid to rule by emergency executive decree—and everyday forward, he will remind everyone that this is what the voters decided. Such will be the emboldened Scott Walker we will face after his victory. 

Thus, it goes without saying that we must defeat Walker in June. This is no small task given that Walker will have amassed a war chest that guarantees dominance of television and radio advertising, and has the support of any number of third party groups, flush with cash and a willingness to lie. 

But should this much-desired defeat come to pass, whoever the Democrat is will have earned no legitimacy on a values level. The movement grassroots must view and treat the new governor as distrustfully as any other ambitious, ego-driven careerist politician all too capable of selling out the public interest once in office (which is, of course, a specialty of the Democrats). The values of the movement will only be expressed by the elected leadership if the movement remains large, vital, visible, and beyond the reach of both union and Democratic Party control—or, in other words, dangerous, hydra-headed, and untamed. How to be that movement and yet engage in the most difficult and momentous electoral contest most of us will have ever seen is the paradox within which the Uprising now exists. Let us embrace it. 

*

My last thought concerns the mentality and commitment of a winning movement. The last and perhaps most meaningful victory gained in the Wisconsin movement was the successful blockage of new mining up north—a key item on GOP’s corporate agenda. (For those interested in the story, Rebecca Kemble’s reporting for the Progressive is a great place to start.) The victory was gained at the Capitol through a state senate vote, but was won over a translocal theater of activism and coalition-building, binding together numerous groups and constituencies across different parts of the state. Of complementary significance was the willingness and even resignation among coalition members regarding the likelihood of having to fight an eventual ground war up north, pitting our bodies against their machines. Without this coalition, led by the native peoples of the Bad River Band Chippewa, the victory could not have been won. Without the latent militancy, spiritual dedication, and specter of nihilism belonging to a people who recognize a battle for survival when they see it, the victory could not have been won. Without the ability to simultaneously: lobby legislators politely and agitate on the streets angrily; collect independent, scientifically-sound research and launch barbs of wit and ridicule at GOP targets; pack the assembly hearings in person and disseminate information through social media, the victory could not have been won.

The lesson is clear. Prepare for the worst. Work for the best. Make our appeals to the hearts and minds of the unconvinced while standing firm at a threshold of ultimate defense. And deal with whatever comes.

 

 

l.a. report

I am just returned from a very short trip to Los Angeles. The excuse for the trip was having the chance to present a paper about The Journey West at the College Art Association’s annual conference. In the weeks leading up to the trip I found myself in conversations with art friends that went one of two ways. Either they would say, “Are you going to CAA? Let’s get together.” Or else it would be something along the lines of “I can’t believe all these people go to CAA. It is so lame.”

I have never fully understood the gripes about CAA. It is true that CAA excludes participation because of its registration fees, and that the format is not very imaginative. But what do people expect? The conference for any professional organization costs a lot to stage, and CAA's registration fees are much more affordable than that of organizations in many other fields. And while colleges and universities range from semi-accessible to elite and exclusive, they are not exactly the same as corporations or government institutions. They are knowledge and education factories, and as such offer a space for protected intellectual activity on a limited but real and substantive basis. As a vehicle for serious discourse and the sharing of ideas, I find CAA much more palatable than, say, the add-on symposia or discussion events that seem to be attaching themselves to all the commercial art fairs.

I have been to CAA eight times. Some of my friends think that is a lot. I first started going because for about three years after I finished my degree program, I had no functional intellectual community. I would save for the trip and that would be my big travel expenditure for the year. From the beginning I always worked in visits to family and friends, too. The conference alone was never enough to fully justify a trip, especially without free couches to sleep on.

Then I found my community of artists and researchers. I stopped going to CAA for about five or six years, except for once when I had a chance to present for the first time (and visit a friend I had not seen in years). Then I attended again in 2011, playing the role of editor and coordinator of the annual newsletter of the Radical Art Caucus, for the first of two years. I have gotten something out of RAC and CAA. I figured it was time to give back, in a capacity appropriately minor to my life as an adjunct professor.

This year I was at the conference for only a couple of hours besides the time of our presentation, plus a little time for shopping at the conference book fair afterward. My Columbia College colleague Annika Marie gave a great lecture on Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons. Our session was organized incredibly well by fellow Madisonite Laurie Beth Clark, we received good feedback, and the whole presentation exercise was valuable in advancing our understanding of The Journey West. A highlight of the conference was seeing the work of my Madison brothers, Lewis Koch and Patrick JB Flynn on display. Lewis’s book marked down to a clearance price.
Yup, that is cheap. I left it for somebody else; I already have a copy. Patrick got the design gig for the new Baffler. Very sweet to see it being pushed.
I got the newsletter put together, this time with a poem by mrcc resident poet Matthias Regan as the featured art content. But I did not even have a chance to see the hard copies in action at the conference.

So that was CAA. 

More interesting was speaking about the Wisconsin Uprising on Friday night at the Public School in Chinatown. The attendance was almost as good as that for our CAA session (about eighteen), but in a much better space with a non-academic audience. As an autonomous educational entity, it was impressive–something we who are trying to keep the Madison Autonomous University alive can aspire to. As a social space, it was lovely. As a community, it was supportive and welcoming. I am a fan, and it was a privilege to have the floor there for an evening. And I must say, the interest in the Wisconsin political situation was enthusiastic.

I stayed with my friend Ava. She was one of the original Mess Hall keyholders. For the past year and half she has been working as a project manager of a large real estate development called Atwater Crossing, or ATX. The last time I was in LA was in October of 2010. Ava was just about to start on the job then, and drove me around the complex. There were only something like five or ten tenants then. Now there are something like forty. Nearly all of them are creative industry or arts-related concerns. She took me there again this time, to scope out the buzzing restaurant scene. It reminded me of large developments in China—creative industry and design-oriented businesses taking root in clusters, but here it was with more substance and breadth. The interactive media companies are there, but so are theater companies. Crafty artist’s studios are there, but so is Pomegranate Pictures, who make videos for System of a Down. You won’t find that in China. 

ATX is very impressive, all the more so for Ava having managed it all without hardly any staff until about a week ago.

Before heading out to catch my overnight return flight Ava and her boyfriend treated me to an excellent departure dinner at Lou, on Vine. The restaurant had an outline map of the US on one wall, with handwritten names and arrows pointing to their sources. They had probably twenty or twenty-five different suppliers named from across the country. Well, well, well. The state outside California with the most suppliers named was Wisconsin, with four. And that is where I was headed. Home, sweet cheesy home, where all the battles are currently raging. Including about Wisconsin farmers supplying not upscale wine bars in LA, but the neighbors of the farmers. In about six hours time, I landed in Milwaukee. Back in the midwest, home of the emerging locavore economy and KillerSpin (in airports).

 

 

wi uprising @ year one

It was one year ago that the outward ripples of the Tunisian uprising were felt across borders and through unlikely differences in context. One of those places that saw a righteous outrage directed at a local tyrant in early 2011 was Madison, Wisconsin. Beginning on the day Mubarak fell, Wisconsinites opened their Friday after work routine with the surprise announcement that Scott Walker's so-called budget repair bill, set for a vote early the next week, would end the collective bargaining rights of the state's public sector union. As citizens read the fine print, they found that the bill contained other controversial measures, as well, such as a provision to sell off some publicly owned energy facilities on a no-bid basis. A variety of constituencies found reason to mobilize.

Thanks to the grassroots info-activism of individual citizens from all quarters of the state, the rapid circulation of information through social media, and the prevailing global mood of ya basta (and in this sense, Madison has long been a very global town), within a matter of hours our governor crossed the all-important line of perception, going from harmless amateur to despotic, venal, and dangerous egomaniac. Then, as Walker dug in his heels, the movement to criticize, resist, and now to oust him, gained traction through months and months of renewed outrages committed by him and his Republican lieutenants. Right up to, literally, this very moment. As I type this post, the Republican-controlled Assembly are preparing to ram through yet another of their controversial, poorly-written bills. This one would effectively gut Wisconsin's regulatory apparatus that has successfully conserved wetlands across the state, giving in wholesale to the well-financed interests of irresponsible short term wealth-generating development. It would also have the effect of heaping additional unworkable duties on the DNR, setting that agency up for failure. This is a prime example of T.C. Frank's wrecking crew in action. 

So at the one-year mark, what does it look like going forward? The many subplots and numerous controversies of the last six months have recently been reduced to three main storylines, each with its own actors, antagonisms, and possible outcomes. Now fully developed as political narratives, how they play out from this point will shape the contours of the Wisconsin movement for at least the first half of 2012 and possibly the second. The three stories are 1) the massive grassroots recall effort and election, 2) the battle over new mining up north, and 3) the ongoing FBI John Doe investigation into illegal activities in Scott Walker’s office when he was Milwaukee County Executive and running for governor in 2010. 

The overwhelming enthusiasm of the petition-phase of the recall campaign shocked even the optimists. Gathering over a million signatures means that two of every five would have to be invalidated, an insanely unrealistic prospect, thereby crushing the Republicans' first defense. As well, in absolute numbers, the total comes very close to the 1.2 million votes that Walker received in 2010, indicating how widespread the disapproval really is. Most importantly, given the grassroots nature of the recall effort, this contest is being written as a David vs Goliath story, and therefore a possible turning point in electoral strategy beyond this one election. The David (the WI movement, leading the Democrats and not the other way around) and Goliath (Walker, Koch, ALEC, WMC, money, money, money) story, helped along by citizen reporting on the forces organizing behind Walker, has opened this struggle to a possible outcome in keeping with the idealism that has fueled the movement thus far. If the movement capitulates to the conservative tendencies that are already emanating from within the Democratic Party and union leadership, it will have been another opportunity lost.   

Up north, anticipating what would be in effect a ground invasion, the tribes and their allies are ready to defend their lands, through the courts, and physically if necessary, in the hills. There are successful treaty rights and environmental defense campaigns within the recent memory of a great many Wisconsin activists; organizers are confident in their abilities to form strong native/settler, urban/rural coalitions and use all tactics, from lobbying and media work to civil disobedience and direct action. The state’s strong environmental constituencies (remember, Wisconsin is the state of Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson) are already on the same page in opposing the proposed new mining, and the strict regulatory regime that ranks Wisconsin one of the states least friendly to mining is a legacy of the victorious grassroots-led anti-mining/land preservation struggles that happened fifteen years ago around the proposed Crandon mine. Are the Republicans really anxious to go to the ground in the face of people who are willing to sacrifice their own lives before seeing the ruin of their land and culture? Are they that foolish? Yes, they are. When the invasion begins and the struggle takes a turn toward the dramatic, if the movement articulates its moral, scientific, and economic positions wisely, the chances are good that in one way or another Scott Walker's image and reputation will take another lasting hit. With any luck it would be politically fatal, career-wise.

And, finally, the drip-drip-drip criminal investigation that has placed a chokehold around Walker's inner circle raises the possibility that the other dogs are willing to cut him loose to save their own future ambitions (remember, Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus have their own delusional plans). Walker has retained a legal team, now that the John Doe investigation has the feds breathing down his neck, and I'm sure even his corporate backers are beginning to formulate their own Plan B. As far as I can tell no arm of the WI movement has a contingency plan should Walker be indicted before a recall election is scheduled, even though at this point it seems like a real possibility. I am not even sure what happens. Is he removed from office? Does an indictment trigger any sort of impeachment process? Or will the state's Republican cabal of the Fitzgeralds, JB Van Hollen, and the David Prosser state supreme court work to protect him? Our theocratic lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch is also the target of the recall campaign, and will likely stand for early election along with Walker. But could there be a situation in which she assumes the office of governor and thereby invalidates her recall? Given the tangled plots and unprecedented nature of this whole thing, the legal minutiae yet to be wrangled over cannot be underestimated. How we, as the grassroots engine of the movement, write this narrative is the question. Above all, we must continue to find ways to keep the stories open enough–through both well-timed political offensives and the attendant shaping of the mediated narrative–for a possible outcome that definitively reduces the present and future power of the regressive forces. 

Though a wooden performer in public, we know that through it all Walker's been shaken. He has attempted to spin himself a softer image in recent weeks, miserably, baldly dishonestly, and unsuccessfully. (Playing the compassionate card is not his forte; neither is being honest). But the tone deaf narcissists our careerist political system produces–and Walker is precisely such a product–never really comprehend the message, even if they sense an external threat. Scott Walker is an embodied example of what Debord wrote more than a generation ago: the spectacle is incapable of thinking strategically. And we knew this as early on, when he made a calculated move to play the role of Dairyland Dictator on the very day that Egypt's Mubarak ended his career with a literal escape for his life. Can you say political blind spot?

Blundering his way through, with all the resources that large amounts of cash can buy him, but with none of the kind that don't come with a price tag, Scott Walker now faces a crisis every which way he turns, each one of his own making. Whether Walker realizes it or not, he can never go back. Apart from the hardcore ideologues, his support has evaporated, even as his people lamely manage his deteriorating image and reputation, as exemplified by this sorry effort at staging, and then spinning, a pro-Walker event. It is safe to say Walker's done. Only the ending has yet to be written.

The relevant sign you'll see in this video, shot earlier today at the tail end of the noontime rally (after most of the people left, and before the larger afternoon rally that happened later), is the one held up by the firefighter, first at 3:36 and then at 7:18 with interaction.

    

And one year ago? Let's remind ourselves of what the mood was. Anxiety, disbelief, and a vague hopefulness in a movement yet to fully blossom, tempered by the depressive expectations of a collective lifetime of cynicism. The video below is from noon on Tuesday, February 15, 2011: the occupation of the Capitol began about fourteen hours after it was recorded. Massive demonstrations went on for weeks afterward, generating a whole culture of activism, resistance, and grassroots leadership. John Nichols' review of notable actors and events is only the very tip of the iceberg.

The movement continues, with arrests of activists being tweeted from the Capitol as I compose this, and the disgraceful dead-of-night passage of the wetlands destruction bill as I edit. 

 

 

 

 

the getaway that left questions

Walking home from the hardware store, I was lost in my own thoughts when a rising gutteral roar turned my head. My eyes settled on a remarkable scene unfolding in comical slow motion across the street from me. The first thing I saw was a young pale-faced man in a name-patch uniform lumbering across the lot of a BP gas station, apparently at a full sprint, but weighed down and misbalanced by a beer gut so big that he might have rolled faster than he could run. Then I saw what he was running after. Super loud but super slow, a rust-eaten nineties mufflerless Caprice with a young black man about two-thirds reclined behind the wheel lurched out of the lot, accelerating at a rate just barely faster than the man on foot. For another two seconds it was a contest, but the car gained in momentum what the belly lost. The chase went into the street but after another moment it was all over except for the cursing.

I deduced what had happened easily enough, but the meaning of the event is not so simple to determine. To my mind the story of this one event can be interpreted in at least three ways.

1)    It was a routine drive-off from the pump, the kind of loss-leading nuisance that vexes small retailers daily, the costs of which are built into the price of purchase.

2)    It was a counterproductive assertion of entitlement, feeding the perception in the secure spaces of white America of a growing and increasingly dangerous black and brown criminal underclass.

3)    It was an act of everyday resistance, a concrete, elemental, but banalized fuck you of the kind for which even the anti-capitalist activists of Occupy Wall Street essentially lack the guts.

These interpretations do not hold mutually exclusive purchase. In fact, all of them make sense simultaneously because of the subject positions in play, not only across the spectrum of positions but within them. Consider the players. First there is the station attendant. Then the driver/perpetrator. There was a white man watching from one of the other pumps. And there was me, witnessing from across the street. The multiple interpretations move across the complexities of and between these subject positions.

My first assumption was that the paying customer at the pump would tend toward interpretation number (2), but who knows; there are ostensibly anti-racist white leftists around here among whose questionable ideological merits include the capacity to rationalize even the most anti-social of behaviors on the part of African American persons. There was part of me that hoped the driver himself harbored a feeling going in the direction of number (3), but it was probably more like a perpetrator’s perspective on number (1); he was likely already thinking about how to get his next tank of gas as he pulled into traffic. He already had to seek out a non-pre-pay station for a fast one, and how far could he get on a single tank of gas, in a guzzler? For the station attendant thinking about his job—how to explain the incident to his boss, maybe having to fill out a theft report—number (1) might be the go-to interpretation. But the driver was an African American man, with all the stereotypical indicators of an inner city migrant, quite out of place in Middleton, Wisconsin, a town less than 2% African American. With an outsized pride of place, some residents of Middleton (adjacent to where I live in Madison) actually believe that Middleton is one of the country’s “best places to live,” as trumpeted in mainstream media reports. Would these factors of race and social exclusivity figure into the station attendant assigning number (2) as a meaning? 

Finally, the station was a BP. After feeling the frustration of both last year’s impotent post-Deepwater Horizon boycott campaign against BP stations, demonstrating that consumers really do not have the power to meaningfully punish transnational corporations, and of the current inability of the Occupy movement to exercise a power beyond changing the national conversation (which I acknowledge is huge, gratefully), I tended to see the episode as an example of number (3). I was actually glad to witness an action that could be described an unapologetic fuck you—after all the devastation (which is still inconclusively known, but constantly upped in estimation) in the Gulf of Mexico and BP’s proven impunity—finally! Inarticulate or not, politically meaningful or not, counterproductive as it was, for one short moment, in my mind I quietly saluted the driver.

But then I felt terrible afterward, for the knowledge that the tendency toward racial profiling in an area where even I, a Chinese American, routinely get stared at had just been fed the equivalent of an energy drink by this young man's action. Also for what such an act of disobedience says about the conundrum facing the Occupy movement. That is to say, significant parts of the Occupy movement must show that they can make progress in creatively addressing the system it critiques, opposes, and abandons, as one that is fundamentally racist. But the all-important African American street element, having suffered thirty years of massive incarceration and everyday police repression, is basically neither politically present nor self-consciously politicized, made up of individuals existing in survival mode, same as the driver of the Caprice.

Finally and not least, I felt the negativity of the continued erosion of trust that goes along with another business perhaps deciding to safeguard against theft through pre-pay means. On the other hand, why should the self-satisfied town of Middleton expect a different standard of public trust than what millions of people live with in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and other places across the region? Another salute....

I witnessed a crime. Or was it an act of resistence?

These questions follow:

Is an interpretation informed by racism in any way a reasonable response?

If not, then how does one begin to address racism when those who racially profile their fellow citizens believe it reasonable?

What hope have we that the everyday daring of the most economically desperate become self-consciously politicized? 

How do those of us who are less daring than we need to be model ourselves on the driver and inflict a pain, no matter how small, measureable in units other than webpage hits?

 

psychedelic recall

“What’s going on in this country, it’s fascism, simple as that.”

The stranger who spoke those words to me had not attended and did not even know about the Saturday noontime rally on Capitol Square, at which there was an estimated crowd of 40,000 celebrating the recently launched campaign to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. On the square the spirits were high, and the consciousness evident. This was the massive and genuinely popular Wisconsin movement, again visibly churning to life. But the critical pronouncment above came neither from the rally stage nor from any of the scores of petition-gathering volunteers, nor from a protest sign. It came later that evening, from the mouth of the guy in his early 50s sitting next to me at the Furthur show.

“The people are distracted by this bullshit corporate media, which is all lies and pure bullshit. What’s that show, Three Men and a Half, or some shit. Fuckin’ bullshit. And in the meantime the rich are putting up a police state, and nobody fuckin’ notices. They’re defunding schools, keeping people stupid. It’s fascism!”

This man was pissed, possibly in despair, but clear-sighted. When I asked him what he did for a living, he admitted embarrassment and then proceeded to tell me all about the new gold rush of the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, where he has been working as a contractor for six months at a time. He was embarrassed because, as he put it, “It’s a goddam free for all out there, 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, maybe more, with no consideration for any kind of environmental responsibility. And it’s insulated. You don’t see any big oil company that you’d recognize. Only Halliburton, and a lot of companies like Halliburton that nobody’s every heard of. It’s fucked up. I hate it.”

And right then the band went into Throwing Stones.

Picture a bright blue ball, just spinning, spinnin free,
Dizzy with eternity.
Paint it with a skin of sky,
Brush in some clouds and sea,
Call it home for you and me.

This encounter did not happen at a political rally. Or did it? I spent $110 on two Furthur shows this weekend, outside Chicago and in Madison. Very un-critical art of me. Not radical.

It was great.

Not because the boys opened the party with a raging Sugar Magnolia and Chimenti wailed the keys on a tightly shuffling Stagger Lee in Friday’s first set, or because they hit the euphoric passages of The Eleven and St. Stephen with full, thunderous volume in the second set. And not because they offered up favorite cover Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues in Saturday night’s first set, or because the band pummeled Viola Lee Blues and Bobby crushed the vocals on Death Don’t Have No Mercy in the second set.

Those are some of the reasons the shows were excellent for Deadheads, something I most certainly am. But these nights were not merely about Dead fandom. They were about an old counterculture meeting a new moment of economic and cultural upheavel.

The thoughts that came to me during the shows had to do with if and how those nights connected with the times of the heterogenous psychedelic counterculture before “Deadhead” gained meaning as a defined subcultural identity, and which had emerged visibly already by the early and mid-70s. Having come into the scene in the age of the mega-Dead (from 1987 on—basically the years after Garcia’s diabetic coma), aesthetically speaking the ur-mythical early days had always felt rather remote, even with Captain Trips on stage. By then the concert experiences had become packaged and predictable, all the more so for having attained the status of a major concert draw. By the 90s, the band was falling apart in terms of internal communication and the concert experience ran on the fumes of cliches. I had tickets to two shows at The Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in 1992. The first show was so flat that my friend and I gave our tickets to the second show to some “miracle”-seeking fans, who looked extra-pathetic given the sorry performance they were dying to see.

By contrast, the Furthur shows of this past weekend were meaningful on an intellectual and aesthetic level I have never felt before. The shows were great because they gave me time, space, and stimulation to think—and feel—through the political sensations of our day. To really stop and wonder about this cultural moment in America, in so many ways seeming to be on the edge of a cliff—or, more promisingly, on the take-off edge of a growth spurt of a kind. That Furthur remains a direct link to some of the most important American cultural experiments of the Sixties—open-ended, bravely good humored, at once literati and working class, astonishingly amateur, and selectively provincial—figured importantly in the experience.

My musing began with the questions, what does it mean for a few thousand people to gather for an evening party, many of them wigged out on mushrooms, Ecstasy, or acid, plus copious amounts of grass, shaking to music supplied by a fresh-sounding and expertly performing outfit directly descended from the original house band for the Acid Tests of forty-six years ago? What does it mean for this event to be happening in a time of unrest, persistent economic crisis, and a general deep questioning of values? Can a form of hedonistic revelry borne out of a turbulent and revolutionary time from a generation and a half ago maintain purchase on a measure of meaning that goes beyond a consumer experience—and maybe even opens doors to new pleasures and, therefore, desires? What are the changed structural circumstances, from then to now, that might limit the reach of the experience, or re-inscribe fresh meanings?

The discontents and desires out there, products of a generalized injustice, so personally felt and expressed in the America of 2011, had me reaching for the poignancy of forty year-old lyrics, my ears pulling them out of the mix. See the romantic indignation of Hunter’s losers and wharf rats.

Half of my life
I spent doin’ time for
some other fucker’s crime…

Measured in pure pleasure, the Rosemont show was the better of the two. It was a happy crowd, ready for a high energy party. The first set put us on notice. The band was tight. The unusually coherent second set, full of high points and seamless transitions, took me to the recordings of the early Seventies, the mindfully groovey playing I never got to hear in the late Grateful Dead. I could only think, so this is what this music is supposed to feel like. Music sung to the hassled longhairs of 1969, newly resonant in the contested space that is brutalized Occupy America, 2011. A basic message we can all relate to, from Ron Paul supporters to the drummers of Zucotti, and everbody who has been hassled post 9/11—which is to say, everybody. Get off our backs. Let us be. Stop telling us what to do.

Ooo, Freedom!

 Ooo, Liberty!

Oh-wo, leave me alone

I want to find my own way home

I expected the Madison show to have some discernible political vibe, simply because of the setting—there were sure to be recall campaign volunteers out, fans with buttons and Wisconsin solidarity t-shirts on. Appropriately, the music was darker than the previous night’s jolly ride, more bluesy, sadder songs, and hard driving rock. Less ecstatic.

Saturday night’s message seemed to be that nowadays, we are losers, all of us. But we can wallow together if we are fortunate enough to escape the various wars (dodging the draft then, evading the creditors now), score a ticket and a ride. And for an evening at least, a diversion of mind and body that might be more than only a diversion, with the right dosage and preparation, can still be had.

It used to be said that the Grateful Dead weren’t the best at what they do, they were they only ones who do what they do. That is no longer true, and hasn’t been for quite some time. The second generation jam bands, not to mention the modern psychedelia of techno tribes and orchestral pop, reached maturity long ago. Now the kids have a lot of choices. Consequently, the Madison show wasn’t a sellout. Not even close. The upper sections were were sparsely attended, mostly with people who wanted lots of space to “white person wiggle,” as Jim DeRogatis would say. But the floor was another story. It was full, with many from the upper reaches having come down. And here again, as I scanned the floor party, I wondered, is this what those 70s Winterland shows felt like—intimate and non-glamorous, and decidedly not the hottest ticket in town?

Like my discontented new friend—whom I never would have met at an activist event, or at Mess Hall, or through a critical art project—people are back to speaking and working against the system, and most importantly, hating it while having to make do in it. 

We used to play for silver, now we play for life;
And one's for sport and one's for blood at the point of a knife.
And now the die is shaken, now the die must fall.
There ain't a winner in the game, he don't go home with all.
Not with all.

For me, the guy made the occasion more than a party. Maybe not a political rally, but even better, a politicized reenactment of Deadhead social memory once in danger of being permanently overtaken by stylized consumerism and now returned to the truth of an aesthetic experience, a pre-enactment of times to come. We are going “furthur” indeed, both forward and back.

*lyrics from Throwing Stones, Wharf Rat, Liberty, and Jack Straw.

 

another book event: madison

As I've mentioned before, I contributed a couple of texts to the book We Are Wisconsin–texts that originated here on this blog. One by me, and one co-written with Nicolas Lampert.

Editor/instigator Erica Sagrans has been pounding the pavement, getting the book out into the reading public. This weekend we'll have two events around the book, a discussion at Rainbow Bookstore on Saturday and then a panel at the UW Cinematheque on Sunday. The Sunday event is a part of the weekend's Wisconsin Book Festival. I'll be saying something at both events, along with some of the other writer/activists. Amazingly, this will be the first time that I will be in town for the festival since having moved to Madison after having missed it because of travel or whatever, for five consecutive years. 

These will be the first events for this book to take place in Wisconsin, and for that reason obviously they will produce a different and more meaningful atmosphere. Undoubtedly, these events will be high energy and participatory. Many if not all of those in attendance will have had some involvement in the Uprising and subsequent movement, including in the offshoot campaigns targeting politicians for recall, saving Badger Care, protecting the Penokee Hills, and so forth. In this sense, these events will likely include an organizing element and take on a social forum character.

See you there.

Here's a bit of the event copy from Erica: 

"We Are Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Uprising in the words of the activists, writers, and everyday Wisconsinites who made it happen" is a new collection that gives an up-close view of the Wisconsin struggle. This mix of essays, blog posts, and original writing looks at what happened, what it means, and what comes next—and includes the real-time, fast-paced story of the Capitol occupation as told through tweets from those who were on the inside.

In conjunction with the Wisconsin Book Festival, join us to celebrate the launch, talk about what's next for this movement, and hear from contributors including Andy Kroll from Mother Jones, Alex Hanna, Jenni Dye, Dan Wang, and editor Erica Sagrans. 

We'll also be showing short films on the protests produced by Shahin Izadi and Jason Nolen.

Sponsored by the Teaching Assistants' Association.

Books will be available for purchase.

http://www.wearewisconsinbook.com/
http://www.twitter.com/WeAreWIBook

Sunday, October 23 · 2:00pm - 4:00pm

UW-Madison Cinematheque 

4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave

Madison, WI