propositions press... 2.0

summertime, the political reflections are easy

Since reporting on the Wisconsin Uprising as it happened in 2011, I often get asked by friends from other states about the situation here. Now filed away as one of the countless social movements that erupted and then dissipated, it is right that people wonder. Moreover, in viewing the national scene it is impossible to ignore the role of RNC chair Reince Priebus and the outsized prominence of House Speaker Paul Ryan. Whatever is the matter with Wisconsin, it has become the entire country’s problem.

The Wisconsin Question is founded. A lot is going in here, most of it either pretty bad or straight up horrendous. To put it most simply, the all-out assault on the public sphere signaled by the passage of Act 10 five years ago has gone to new levels of implementation and therefore new levels of destruction. Moreover, at this point we can with certainty expect the Republicans to introduce new and even harsher initiatives affecting education, business, infrastructure, and conservation.

The particular targets of GOP attack are many, including the University of Wisconsin System, Wisconsin’s K-12 public schools, and the Government Accountability Board, the state’s long established neutral office of elections oversight. The state’s environmental protections have been rewritten or put under review, including those affecting water quality standards and regulation of CAFOs. Then there is the dismantling of Wisconsin’s state civil service examination and staffing process, along with the implementation of drug-testing of public assistance recipients, and various attacks on matters of reproductive freedom and gender equity.

The litany reviewed above is not an exhaustive account; what I write about here are only the most visible areas of the latest Republican offensive. Each of these assaults has sparked criticism and in some cases a backlash. Each deserves its own analysis and breaking down each front of struggle would require a whole book. Now I focus only on that nearest to me, the attack on the University of Wisconsin, as seen from campus and the city of Madison. Being a complicated collection of interests situated against a city in transition that happens also to be the state capital, the University situation makes for an excellent case study in layered politics and accompanying strategic misconnection.

The assault itself included at least four notable components. They can be grouped as pairs, two general assaults and two targeted attacks. The most concretely impactful of the general assaults is the massive budget cut advanced for the 2015-17 biennium, a draconian denial of public resources justified by a manufactured crisis. Originally proposed as a $300 million cut, Walker played himself off as a compromiser by dropping the figure to “only” $250 million, an 11 percent across the board reduction in state support. Felt by many if not all parts of the university (UW sports and the medical center might be separately managed, for example), the cuts bring austerity to a tangible level affecting thousands.

Also qualifying as an attack on the university as a whole, Walker attempted to rewrite the university’s mission statement. Barely caught by watchdog journalists, the revision would have dropped all reference to the Wisconsin Idea, a credo that constitutes the very heart of the UW’s guiding principle, and replaced it with boilerplate language about career preparedness. When called out on this stealth move—even the Republicans know such a revision would be highly unpopular among ordinary Wisconsinites—Walker backtracked and shrugged it off as a “drafting error,” an explanation recently confirmed as an outright lie by a court-ordered release of the governor’s emails.

Both of these attacks created political liabilities for the Republicans. They dropped the rewrite of the mission statement altogether. The budget passed, but the cut created plenty of bad feeling between the Republican-appointed members of the UW Board of Regents and the campus administrators who are trying to run their schools. Even a few Republican legislators expressed concerns for the effects on campuses in their districts. The lesson here is that broad attacks of the kind that affect a geographically distributed and cross-sectoral swath of the population entail high political risk. Even at the level of higher education—a magnet for Republican accusations of elitism—the University still benefits from the attachment and sense of ownership felt by average residents of the state. In both these cases, the Republicans pursued their agenda in ways that created weaknesses for themselves.

The targeted assaults, on the other hand, mostly strengthened their hand. One of these—a UW System wide tuition freeze slipped into the budget for the same biennium—was less of a frontal attack and more like a gambit, giving something in order to buy time, block an opponent’s move, or divide the opposition. Advertised as the governor’s college affordability plan, this was a straight pander to families of currently enrolled UW students. But imposed at the same time as the drastically reduced state funding, the tuition freeze handcuffs UW administrators from closing the budget chasm produced by the Republicans. The only conclusion is that the Republicans are deliberately choking the University of Wisconsin. And yet because of the short term benefit, the move effectively neutralizes the potential resistance of the students. Plus, nobody can directly advocate for tuition increases without being seen as insensitive to the already difficult debt burden faced by college students today. That some current student leaders have criticized the freeze is a testament to their awareness and foresight. But these have been individual voices expressing disapproval without the wave of a mobilized student constituency.

Finally and most controversially, Walker and the Republicans passed legislation weakening faculty tenure and increasing the power of campus administrators. A new System-wide tenure policy was adopted against prevailing faculty opinion, leaving individual campuses to bring their own rules into alignment with the new policy. Robin Vos and other GOP university-haters slammed faculty tenure as a jobs-for-life deal that the state simpy cannot afford. Walker made hay of unreasonably light faculty workloads and other bogus charges designed to paint faculty as elitist do-nothings. Administrators were again put in the middle. Some of them desire the flexibility to phase out specialized programs and academic departments that attract comparatively small numbers of students or that appear to be trending toward scholarly extinction. That means denying tenure lines and possibly terminating tenured positions. But the administrators are also responsible for maintaining an institution that attracts top research and teaching talent and the institution’s overall stature as encyclopaedic, and that means finding ways to support niche programs. In my opinion, it does mean working with a meaningful but modernized tenure system. Also, it must be said that the administrators, from the chancellors on down, have no job protections at all. This figures into their capacity to maneuver amidst the minefield of faculty discontent and state-imposed austerity.

The attack on tenure was their most masterful play. While provoking resistance expressed in the form of a System-wide wave of faculty senate no-confidence resolutions, the attack fanned the smoldering distrust between faculty and administration. Even more importantly, the move divided students from faculty in terms of respective prime concerns. The Republicans fractured what should be a campus unified as a single constituency. Now the students, faculty, and administration find themselves unable to act in concert. Compare this to the common outrage expressed regarding the attempted erasure of the Wisconsin Idea.

The lesson here is that not all political aggression is of equal value and effect. For the Republicans, launching attacks on targets concerning specific constituencies is better strategically than aiming for targets that provoke broad concern. These kinds of attacks effectively define any resistance as “special interest,” undeserving of broad support. The second pair of Republican attacks successfully foregrounded people’s political identities and priorities as students, as faculty, and as administration—unlike with the first pair, wherein the attacks offended the sense of universal Badgerdom shared by all three constituencies and millions of regular Wisconsinites besides, to the point of forcing the Republicans to back down on the rewriting of the UW mission.

The challenge for the opposition is to enhance identification with and as a broadly collective public while still defending against attacks that most directly affect only certain segments of that public. “An injury to one is an injury to all” is a slogan never more needed, and yet, compared to the heyday of the IWW, American society is vastly more complex in terms of the identity matrices in play. Our groupings, whether externally imposed or self-defined, seem to be unendingly divisible. Diversity has become the basic condition while unity is the elusive construction.

One matter of strategy seems to be clear: an enhanced collective identity will not happen without a rejuvenated vision of it. That is what the Wisconsin Idea was to begin with—a visionary articulation of social unity and mutual responsibility meant to guide the University and the state as they grew into a common future. While Walker’s attempted erasure of the Wisconsin Idea was a foolish miscalculation, the opposition has yet to exact maximum political cost. Perhaps for that to happen a new and expanded Wisconsin Idea needs to be advanced, and it has to come from those caught now in the special interest bind: UW faculty, students, and administrators: End the austerity and renew investment of public funds in public education; tenure for all, including adjunct faculty; free tuition for all Wisconsin students. Make Wisconsin smarter than business, smarter than markets, smarter than the University as it is.

justseeds in milwaukee, again

I walked the 100 block of State Street some weeks ago and something didn’t feel right. I stopped and looked the storefronts up and down. It was gone. Ian’s on State was gone. I guess the WI Uprising—the social movement that lived on Ian’s pizza—is really over.

Not it is not. Ian’s, that is. I didn’t know they had moved across the street. As for the movement, it is going into hibernation, if you can call sleeping on a hair trigger hibernation.

*

In spring of 2009 the print media artists’ cooperative Justseeds opened a large-scale graphic art installation in the Union Art Gallery of UWM. I noted back then that the installation Which Side Are You On? was one of the most effective uses I had seen of an exceptionally difficult exhibition space. A cavernous zone with an odd foot print, the suffocating concrete architecture of the Union Art Gallery normally washes over whatever feeling emanates from the work on display. In that takeover, Justseeds did not merely tame the space, they bent it to their will.

In March of 2013 Justseeds does it again, only better than the first time. Compared to the earlier project the new installation, Uprisings: Images of Labor, is edited and simplified, but not in any way compromised or lessened. Elements have been reduced, formats unified, and the stylistically diverse design work, typography, and handworked imagery allowed full visibility. This time around the group attacks the walls neither as aggressively nor as freely as they did four years ago, but instead grabs attention through an aerial hanging of numerous but repeating forty-inch screen prints.
The multi-point messaging effectively broadens our ideas of what qualifies or defines itself as a labor struggle. At floor level the installation is a village of Justseeds activity and production—tables for blocks and brayers, books for sale (including, I was happy to see, a short stack of Deep Routes), small prints and publications on display, pulp vats and floor tarps for a papermaking station, and other stuff I didn’t get around to scrutinizing.

What is interesting to me is taking the two shows as a measure of time in social movement terms. Picture a line beginning in March of 2009 and ending in March 2013, with March 2011 in the center. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and Arab Spring, the Wisconsin Uprising, the movement of indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and other insurgent flare-ups happened over the year halfway between the time of the two shows. In 2013, it makes some sense, in fact, to think of the current installation not as a “show” but an occupation. Not comparable to 2011’s actual social movement occupations of political space, obviously, I am speaking rather of a functional gesture and/or metaphorical act that extends the dream of those beautiful, frightening, and exhilarating occupations of 2011—events that currently sit on the two-years-later cusp of falling into the slow fade of memory. 

But Uprisings: Images of Labor is also more than a retrieval of the once-heady feeling of recent movements gone stale, particularly in Justseeds’ strategy of organizing a two-day free conference (shadowing the SGCI academic conference), of which I attended for a half day.
The programming created exactly that which our social movements need now, spaces in which partisans since dispersed by defeats and exhaustion can freshly connect, educate each other, exchange views, and be visible to one another.

Lane Hall and Lisa Moline's breakdown of OLB encounters with law enforcement set the afternoon tone of movement self-analysis.
By the time we had an intense twenty-minute audience discussion about feminist politics, feminist process, and feminist criticality following Meredith Stern’s afternoon presentation, a vibe of shared struggle and respectful inquiry settled into the room.
In other words, in an art event Justseeds created temporary conditions for what arose organically during the capitol rotunda occupation in Madison, the occupation of Zuccotti Park, and (on an incomparably huge scale) the occupation of Tahrir: a social forum. After 2011, the constituent elements of social movements are searching for space within which to locate themselves. Justseeds, with special effort by the Milwaukee-based members, has that space for a little while. In as potentially cold a gallery as the Union Art Gallery, this was a feat of social engineering equivalent in spirit to raccooning the birdfeeder.  

 

 

 

 

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.

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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.

 

 

cramming mrcc time

Between family commitments and work, I have less and less time to explore my world. These explorations—which sometimes involve doing nothing—were always a luxury, but one that, for artists, is practically a requirement of the work. Studio creations and new texts grow out of them. As departures from the routine, they fuel thought, feeling, vision. These days, if I have a rare opportunity to get out of the house for no particularly good reason, I grab it.

One of the best outings from my home in Madison is a one and half hour drive up US Highway 14, through Cross Plains, Spring Green, and Richland Center, to Viroqua. It makes for a terrific day trip, a car trip along a midwest radical culture corridor. But this time I had only a half day to spare. My friend Mike Koppa hosts a mid-morning radio show on the community radio station WDRT and he invited me to supply the records. I could make it for the show, a quick lunch and stroll, and then return to Madison before three. It was worth the drive, even through the dense morning fog of an abnormally warm mid-March Thursday.

Besides getting to enjoy the very impressive studios of WDRT, I caught up with Mike and all his goings on. New cabin under construction out at the Acres, new gig for his band, and with the spring coming, more stone lettering.

I also managed to get in a few minutes of browsing at Driftless Books. Luckily for me book hunter Eddy Nix recently hauled in an exceptionally deep collection of books on China, now filling a whole wall of cases in the front room, outside of the store proper. I took home two, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949 by Gail Hershatter, and The Making of a Hinterland by Kenneth Pomeranz. The Pomeranz book caught my attention for two reasons. One, it is a study of western Shandong, the province of my ancestors that I periodically visit. And two, he writes about a region that historically had no name, but that he somehow identifies as possessing a geographical and historical coherence, enough to write a book about. Being interested in the slipperiness of regional definition, I want to find out more about his methodology.

It was also fun to see the Compass production A Call to Farms out on a display table of titles by area authors, especially knowing that the book is now very hard to get.

 

Because it was only a half day, I spent most of this trip in my car. But that was okay, too, because this was my first time out to the Driftless Area since late last summer, before the Walker recall campaign got underway. I was heartened to see a good number of anti-Walker signs along the way, including these sturdy constructions, which gave me reason to pull over for some quick pics.

I am refreshed, with ideas. I’ll make it out there again this year, I promise. Maybe with the family, next time.

 

 

 

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. 

 

 

 

 

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

 

nyc: summit notes, before the event

I was conversing with an artist friend yesterday. At one point we talked about the Creative Time Summit 3 in New York, which I am on my way to now. He said that he’s been finding these kinds of gatherings less and less satisfying, ie conferences and symposia in which a bunch of socially engaged artists come together and discuss how and what “social engagement” means for art and artists. I understand where he’s coming from. When Daniel Tucker and Nato Thompson organized a one-day gathering in Chicago back in January of 2009, inviting what would be for any conference an impressive list of art activists, I skipped it. Maybe because I already knew a lot those folks, or it didn’t seem clear as to what the purpose of such a meeting would be. Many of the people already had working relationships with each other. And—now I’m remembering—at that time I just needed to stay home in Madison for a while and not travel. All in all, for me the event just felt kind of unnecessary.

I also recall people asking questions about the first Creative Time Summit, which took place in the fall of 2009. The presence of a few art star names in the program, while not exactly disappointing, did pose the question of what this event was aiming for, in terms of status, prestige, and constituency. That was my main question, understanding that those considerations can be quite practical. For others there was the hang-up about access, specifically the price and availability of tickets. This event charges more than a nominal fee for entry—some of the costs are definitely passed on to the audience. For a summit ostensibly about exactly those issues of democratic process, access, and structures, it did not seem out of line for art activists to wonder aloud. 

And when I heard about Open Engagement, I concluded that the deed had been done. Now we can say it. The collective force of artists, curators, teachers, writers, and others has successfully opened up a new genre, even though we haven’t made our society any more democratic or participatory. We have carved out a tiny niche in the resource-rich world of cultural production, a niche that seems to be going by the name of “social practice.” If, as Todd Gitlin likes to say, the Sixties generation took over the English departments but left the real power of legislating and governing to the Right, then we have achieved something, but haven’t even accumulated English-department levels of power. What we can do is organize periodic get-togethers, and even sponsor some of the travel.

Where is this all going? And what are these gatherings for? Based on how Summits 2 and 3 were designed, I can see that these questions have been considered by the Creative Time team. The presentations were streamed live for Summit 2 and archived—I don’t think they were streamed live the first time around. And the range of presenters for Summit 3 is noticeably wider, reaching out of the art school/art world and into social service and regionally identified people and projects. They also dropped the "Revolutions in Public Practice" tag that was used for years 1 and 2.

I certainly still have those questions. But here I am, participating in Summit 3. Why? 

Well, for one thing, it is hard to say no to Nato, the curator. His friendly force of personality—let’s call it that laid-back California soft persuasion I find irresistible—is perfect for the job of bringing lots of interesting people together, and making intense, urgent topics fun. Plus, not to be discounted, it's a mostly-paid for trip to New York. That could just be me, or an art thing; some people and groups who are farther from the art universe who were invited didn’t get on board. (That's another way of saying the spectrum of participants is not quite as wide as it was hoped to be.)

Beyond Nato and the personal pleasure of helping to realize his vision of what the Summit could be, there is the substantive reason I was invited: to say something about what happened in Wisconsin and especially Madison back in February and March, to a New York audience of artists, activists, and intellectuals. Yes, somebody has to do it—or more to the point, the Summit audience definitely needs to hear about it. And yes, bringing an account of the most important turn in American labor and left wing movement politics in the last three decades is a good reason for being here.

But then I’m back to the problem of these gatherings, on a structural level. There are about thirty presentations. Outside of the keynotes and performances, the slots are limited to eight minutes at the microphone. You can say a lot in eight minutes about one, precisely bounded thing. A single, titled art project, for example—which is what many of the presenters talk about. Try saying something compelling in eight minutes about an incredibly complex social and political movement, one that’s not finished and in fact continues to unfold even now, to an audience of people who might know a lot about it, or nothing at all. As is always the case with any kind of conference, the best conversations will happen outside of the program structure, in the socializing and informal encounters. But the presentation is the only time when the whole assemblage will get their ears stuffed with Wisconsin Uprising info. What am I or anybody speaking about the Wisconsin Uprising under such constraints supposed to say?

Even though I’ve rehearsed and have my talk pretty much down, I have no idea how it’ll come across. The points I make might be obvious or even stale to many, but completely baffling and without context for others. I guess all I can plead is, folks, go through my old blog posts on the Wisconsin Uprising and do some searches of your own. There is so much great reporting out there, tackling the million or so angles on our movment: John Nichols, Rebecca Kemble, Abe Sauer, Lane Hall/Lisa Moline, and others. And there you go—the last and best reason for being here: I’m at the Summit to get people intrigued, to open the doors of their curiosity about what the hell is happening in the Great Lakes states, and, hopefully, to direct people to the world of activism, movement analysis, and exemplary solidarity work that is our Wisconsin of the moment.

 

The Summit schedule is here.

I'm going on at around 12:30 PM or shortly thereafter. Catch it live here:

http://www.livestream.com/