Let's illiterate.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.’

—George Orwell, 1984

As an ESL teacher, an important part of my job is keeping a straight face when a student becomes unfortunately confused about the finer points of our language.  Over the years, I’ve encountered classic examples of this, such as when I taught a class the expression to beat someone up.  An innocent student then went to the administration and jokingly chirped about how she was going to beat them off.  I had to delicately explain to her the difference between beating someone up and beating someone off.  

So I recently girded myself for silent chuckling at what seemed to be a misunderstanding only to be horrified by corporate Newspeak.  I was brainstorming a list of holiday-related expressions with my students.  Our list had only gone as far as “Happy Holidays!” and “Merry Christmas!” when a caffeine-addicted student shouted out, “Let’s merry!”  Ahh, the pitfalls of the English language, I thought to myself.  I diagnosed it as merely a verb/adjective mix-up.  It would be simple enough to correct. 

“No,” I began, “‘merry’ is only an adjective.  We have to use a verb after ‘Let’s.’  ‘Let’s be merry’ would be fine, though not really something we would say.” 

“No!” my class cried out in unison.  “‘Let’s merry’ is a common English expression!”

Then my students showed me this:

and I involuntarily taught them a slew of rare English expressions until I was hoarse.  The class dutifully wrote down each one. 

As a writer, reader, teacher, native English speaker—and frankly as a human being with a cerebral cortex—this nonchalant raping of grammar for no apparent reason boils the very marrow in my bones. 

I would like to sit down for a cup of coffee with the advertising executive at Starbucks who came up with this.  After dumping the coffee on his head, I’d just want to ask him: Why?  Why did you omit the verb?  It’s not a play on words.  It’s not a pun.  It’s not funny, witty, catchy or clever.  It doesn’t evoke nostalgic holiday cheer or vogue slang.  Even the obnoxious Microsoft Word paperclip is begging me not to write it. 

Let’s merry.  Is just.  Bad grammar.  For no reason.  Whatsoever. 

How stupid do you think we are, Starbucks?  Are your customers drooling Neanderthals dragging a woman by her hair into a coffee shop?  Do we line up at your dollar-green counters and grunt “Me want coffee!”?  The whole shtick of Starbucks is supposed to be that we’re all a bunch of hip urbanites: the type of people padding down an ironic spiral staircase in a postmodern brick penthouse.  We hop in a cab for a mile ride downtown while tweeting our angst for the environment.  Then we sashay into Starbucks to tap on our iPad while cooing shipping orders into a blue-tooth.  A floppy notepad displays our sketches we wield while wooing a client.  We are the uncommoners sipping our venti lattes, designing and selling half a million units of cool in sleek little packages to the commoners. 

So why, Starbucks, did you pick this holiday season to start peddling idiocy to us?  Illiteracy is a serious problem affecting the lives of millions of poor, undereducated people in this country, and the economy itself.  There’s nothing noble about contributing to that problem. 

While I’m at it, train your cashiers to say something other than “Can I help who’s next?”  This is terrible grammar and doesn’t make any sense.  “Can I help?  Who’s next?” would be a huge improvement.  But really, what’s wrong with a pleasant “Next, please!”  The sizes, “tall,” “grande” and “venti” aren’t doing anything to inspire the zeitgeist either.  The English word “tall,” the Spanish word for “large” and the Italian word for “twenty” don’t mean anything together.  English has three perfectly good words: “small,” “medium” and “large.” 

In 1984, George Orwell described how the party of Big Brother would slowly whittle away at the language until nuance became impossible.  This would leave the populace literally incapable of saying or even thinking anything critical of the ruling regime.  Across society, words and their meanings are disappearing into a memory hole of vapid convenience.  Facebook’s baby-faced billionaire is rubbing the verb “befriend” from the dictionary, as well as what it means to be someone’s friend, as he encourages us to “friend” everyone we’ve ever met.  He then sells our every impulse to advertisers in lab coats training us, like mice, to press the lever again and again and again for consumer food pellets.  Our politics are disappearing into soundbytes shorter than a handful of syllables.  Popular discourse is flitting away into 140-character tweets texted from twits. 

And Starbucks takes a phrasal noun, an adjective, a period, and calls it a day.  This is reason enough to walk past Starbucks and say “Next please!” when searching for a coffee.   

 

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night. 

Pyongyang Porcelain

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.

—Confucius

The Dear Leader’s train pulled into his terminal station ahead of schedule.  Though dictators have been dropping like home values this year, the Koreans won’t be celebrating.  The peninsula and the region’s power brokers are entering a period of extraordinary uncertainty. 

In the 1590s, Japanese Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi struck out to conquer Korea.  The allied forces of China and Korea eventually repulsed the invasion after devastating years of war, but not before the Samurai made off with fortunes in loot.  One of the most valuable items they pilfered wholesale was Pyongyang porcelain.  They stole not only shiploads of pottery and kilns but also kidnapped tens of thousands of the artisans who made the pottery. Upon disembarking in chains, the potters faced a lifetime of forced labor, crafting their luxury for Japanese lords.  In doing so, they fundamentally altered the Japanese aesthetic.  Many of the most priceless Asian ceramics were spun by Korean artists of the period.  This is an origin of our sense of the beauty of the Far East: art, and the life it imitates, is mysterious, ferocious and fragile.  These same descriptions apply to the situation in Pyongyang. 

Like the elegant whorls on a ceramic jar, North Korea is mysterious.  To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld’s metaphysical poem about Iraq, there are “known knowns,” “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.”  We know that North Korea is the most isolated and opaque country on earth.  The military runs the country and staffs all the most important positions at every level of government.  The top generals form a sort of elderly House of Lords believed to be a political scorpion pit in which one misstep can spell ruin.  We know that an untested twenty-something-year-old Kim Jong-un is about to be dipped into this pit as de facto head of the country.  He hails from the dynasty established by Maoist-guerrilla-turned-Stalinist-dictator Kim Il-sung.  Jong-un’s grandfather and father derived power from the most thorough cult of personality possibly since the pharaohs built the pyramids. 

Aside from this basic information, there is little beyond questions.  The regime, realizing Kim Jong-il’s days were numbered, was in the middle of a rushed transition.  It is not known how much training Jong-un had, how much real political influence he has with the ruling elite, whether the elite will accept him and whether he is capable of taking the reins.  Given Jong-un’s tender age, he may serve as a sort of dauphin while regents actually rule the country behind the scenes.  Likely candidates for this role include his aunt and uncle.  Both of them are recent rising stars in the late dictator’s ruling clique.  They may be in the best position to instill stability.  It is not known, though, whether they were chosen in a grand succession bargain or whether they would step in by default.  Assuming that there is a plan for interim regency, there is no way to know whether Jong-un or the country’s ruling generals will go along with it once Jong-il is cold.    

The North Korean people could also become a wild card if the transition gets messy.  North Korea observers have always wondered whether the people are genuinely brainwashed or whether they role-play starry-eyed revolutionaries for fear of the consequences.  Many North Korean defectors have suggested that it’s more the latter.  But it’s possible that there is a bit of both.  If so, regional and socioeconomic animosities could become important if the regime fails to consolidate authority.  As in any country, and especially one as impoverished and hierarchical as North Korea, there are likely to be social divisions that could become inflamed during a turbulent transition.  Candidates for this type of schism include: the farmers vs. the military, a secondary city vs. the capital, one branch of the military vs. another. 

A test of Kim Jong-un’s ability to lead, or at least control, his people will come quickly.  Early next year, the DPRK will launch a series of festivals to mark the centennial of Kim Il-sung’s birth and to celebrate North Korea’s status as a “strong and prosperous nation.”  North Koreans are several inches shorter than their Southern cousins due to malnutrition.  So, this celebration of ‘prosperity’ will stress how much the people will tolerate a new regime’s barrage of baloney and how much the regime in its infancy can cram obvious propaganda down their throats.  The degree of the plebs’ cognitive dissonance may illuminate how closely a new big brother can watch them.     

We, the American and South Korean people, don’t know how much our governments know.  South Korean pundits are squawking that their government only learned about Jong-il’s death when North Korea announced it.  They are imploring their intelligence services to gain a fuller view of the situation in the North.  There are two possible explanations for this.  One is that they truly did not know.  The other is that they did know, but feigned ignorance to protect their spies.  Furthermore, if Seoul had announced the dictator’s demise before Pyongyang did, that could have triggered a high-level purge at precisely the wrong moment. 

We don’t know how much Uncle Sam knows.  All the space age electronic intelligence in the world won’t crack open a country just this side of feudal.  It is likely that the US only knows what South Korea decides to share with them.  Any spies would have to be DPRK defectors contacted by ROK handlers.  Infiltrating the hierarchy and gaining access to sensitive information could then take years.  It seems unlikely that the South could turn anyone already very high level.  Hollywood encourages us to believe that our government sees everything.  Yet, consider the fact that Hezbollah, a politically organized militia in a relatively open society, recently unraveled a CIA spy ring.  If such a second-rate rival can break up our intelligence, imagine the intensity of a cat and mouse game in a state founded upon paranoia.  It is entirely possible that we are blind in North Korea.  If so, there are probably key actors and dynamics at play that we are completely unaware of. 

Like a ceramic dragon rearing to strike, North Korea is ferocious.  There was a time when the North’s economy kept pace with and even threatened to surpass the South’s.  But the tides of the Cold War, terrible policy stemming from fanatical devotion to Maoism, American sanctions and snowballing isolation have utterly and irreversibly crushed the DPRK’s economy.   As a result, for the last twenty years, Jong-il has pursued a foreign policy of acting like a cornered snake, hissing and snapping.  The North is so devoid of resources and productivity that it begs and blackmails to get the food and fuel it needs to sustain the military (not the people).  When that doesn’t work, the world’s fifth largest (though significantly outdated) military lashes out, usually at the South, in the hopes that its neighbors and the US will pay it to be reasonable for a while.  The most recent examples of this are the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong island in disputed waters.  

These attacks seem to coincide with suspected domestic strife, when the regime is desperate for aid or is seeking the attention of Washington or Seoul.  Provocations like these would lead to conflict in most places, but are treated like bad weather in the South.  The danger is always present, though, that a tit-for-tat exchange could spiral catastrophically out of control.  If the new regime faces difficulty consolidating its authority, we can expect more attacks.  This is especially true if Jong-un senses the need to hold the generals at his side in the capital while sending their troops out into the field.  Keeping the military busy would be tempting for a beleaguered young dictator seeking to keep his friends close and his enemies closer.  Indeed, his first order as ruler was for all military personnel to return to their bases.  Apart from demonstrating control, this is also likely an effort to flush out any officers who don’t click their heels quickly enough. 

Though relations between the Koreas have never been great, they were less chilly in the 90s.  The reason for this was the Sunshine Policy, in which the South kept aid flowing to the North.  In return, the North was less bonkers.  Relative calm mostly prevailed on the peninsula.  South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, architect of the policy, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his brainchild.  Roh Moo-hyun continued this policy in the following administration.  Then came Lee Myung-bak.  President Lee was nicknamed “the steamroller” for the trail of bodies he left in his wake as he relentlessly leapt from office to higher office in business and government.  He is the South Korean equivalent of a neocon.  He scrapped Sunshine in favor of building up the military and confronting and containing the North.  The DPRK had grown to rely on ROK aid, so when Lee turned off the faucet and began confronting Pyongyang, this exacerbated the North’s poverty, which increased pressure on the regime, which caused it to lash out, which resulted in Lee confronting the North, and so on. 

American leadership has played an important role in this story as well.  During the 90s, the Clinton Administration acted in tandem with Sunshine, while playing the role of bad cop when necessary.  In 2002, Bush fired a shot across Kim’s bow in his ‘Axis of Evil’ speech.  Saddam’s fate was an object lesson to Jong-il (and Ayatollah Khameini) to seek weapons of mass destruction before Bush bombed him (further) into the Stone Age.  In Bush’s first term, his administration refused to speak to North Korea, which didn’t go over well in Pyongyang.  Bush officials justified this by crowing about not rewarding the North’s bad behavior.  There is some truth to this, but only up to a point.  The analogy to raising a child breaks down when you consider that children eventually grow up and become independent.  North Korea isn’t going anywhere, and it’s always going to depend on outside food aid no matter how high you build the fence around them.  It may be unpalatable but it is reality.  Tons of free wheat is a small price to pay if it keeps them from blowing things up. 

Early on, Obama seemed to have essentially ceded control of the agenda to Lee.  The military buildup and the ‘no rewards’ ethos has continued unabated.  Lately, though, he may be seeking to capitalize on the impending shift in the North and to demonstrate progress during his reelection campaign.  His administration has been laying the groundwork for aid and a return to six-party talks.  Jong-il’s abrupt death cast a media spotlight on a phone call regarding food aid that was probably supposed to be a secret. 

The most unsettling element of these dynamics is North Korea’s nuclear program.  If the transition fails for any reason, weapons of mass destruction could go missing.  This is the nightmare scenario for strategic planners throughout the world.  If the North began coming apart at the seams and the weapons were in jeopardy, the region’s power brokers, the US, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan, would have to make some extremely difficult decisions with precious little time to deliberate. 

A refugee crisis is the other threat that the North poses to the region.  China takes this potentiality very seriously.  Many observers believe this possibility drives China’s policy of sustaining the North.  If the DPRK were to collapse abruptly, upwards of ten million starving North Koreans would shamble into China and swim or boat around the DMZ into South Korea.  This would cause an immediate food shortage in Northeast Asia, one of the most crowded places on earth.  A rippling economic crisis would follow.  The whole world would have to pitch in.  For efforts to manage the situation to succeed, the US and China would have to be quarterbacking from the same playbook.  Even then, they’d be throwing a Hail Mary pass with the clock running out if they hoped to contain, direct and provide for a flow of millions of refugees.  Nonetheless, it’s not clear that there’s ever been any high-level huddle on this possibility. 

Like priceless pottery, North Korea is fragile.  Kim Jong-il shadowed his father as apprentice and sidekick for 15 to 20 years before taking the reins of power.  Even so, a 3-year transitional period followed which is believed to have been rocky.  After a severe stroke in 2008, Jong-il seems to have launched a sweeping purge of mid-level officials which included a spate of public executions.  He may have been paranoid about efforts to undermine his authority while he was debilitated.  Or he may have had valid reasons to be worried. 

In contrast, no one had ever heard of Jong-un two years ago.  He seems to have been elevated to the role of heir-apparent much more swiftly than he could have naturally filled those shoes.  The images of him at his father’s funeral surrounded by officials twice and thrice his age are striking.  He is in over his head and you can bet many of the people in that room are thinking, ‘that should be me.’  In this atmosphere, there are almost certain to be opportunists sitting on a personal power base, lurking in the shadows, waiting for any sign of weakness, preparing for a moment to strike. 

As we saw in Iraq, an authoritarian government can maintain order and stability for a long time even in a society that has completely collapsed.  A strong dictator’s regime forms a sort of lid on a squirming can of worms.  But when you remove the dictator and the regime, you rip the lid off, and you open the can of worms.  North Korea takes both socioeconomic collapse and authoritarian government to chilling extremes.  If the regime were to collapse, all kinds of unimaginable social, economic, political and military problems would wriggle out into the region.  Such a collapse would be the biggest since East Germans started whacking the Berlin Wall with sledge hammers.  But unlike the collapse of the Soviet Union, in North Korea there are no top level reformers ready to face the music and there is no underground political culture of democracy and liberalization (that we know of).  If young Jong-un were to fail to complete his ascent to the throne, if the regime were to wobble, North Korea’s problems would become the world’s problems. 

If the world were to suddenly inherit North Korea’s unfathomable frozen crises, it would come at a generational nadir of global malaise.  The United States is facing an ongoing economic crisis.  If history is any indication, after a decade of war, the US will have no stomach for open-ended foreign engagement for the next 20 years.  Japan’s trilogy of disasters this year topped almost a decade and a half of stagnation.  Given their checkered history, any Japanese intervention would be viewed with extreme suspicion on the Korean peninsula.  Russia is facing domestic strife, striving mightily to maintain momentum in European oil and gas markets and has not been a serious player in the Far East since the end of the Cold War.  China is in the strongest position to influence the DPRK, and Beijing is the only capital that barely tolerates Pyonyang’s shenanigans.  Some hard-line mandarins from the old guard have a sort of admiration for the DPRK’s single-minded devotion to Maoism.  But they are becoming fossils even in Beijing.  Any unilateral attempt by China to take charge of a precipitous situation in Korea would draw vehement American protest.  South Korea would be the most logical country to assume the North’s problems.  Fifty years ago, this was viewed as the South’s destiny.  Today, though, the few people left who remember the times before the Korean War are in their twilight years.  The population is steadily becoming anti-unification due to the costs.  The reunification of Korea may cost South Korea five times what the reunification of Germany cost West Germany.  South Korean intervention in the North would draw Beijing’s suspicions about Washington’s role in a unified Korea on its border.

The Korean people have taken the division of their peninsula in stride for nearly a lifetime.  But this moment of uncertainty is particularly acute.  Anyone who has scrambled up a Chungcheong ridge in the dark to watch the rising sun toast the mist off the valley rice paddies as it has for millennia understands why Korea is fondly referred to as the Land of the Morning Calm.  Let’s hope it stays that way. 

The Right to Remain Silent

“Democracy is the most difficult government to maintain, … everyone must have similar amounts of wealth, because economic inequality creates power differences that cannot exist in a democracy.”

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

           

By overreacting to the Occupation, Wall Street has revealed its hand.  It maintains its power over the will of the people through an expensive strategy of: Ridicule, Undermine and Intimidate.  The billionaires who bought our government are using the American people’s money to attack the American people.  They hoard their power while perpetuating the illusion of justice and equality by cultivating a legion of liars, manipulators and attackers to do their bidding.  This class of economic Uncle Toms consists of people who are tossed larger than average crumbs from the masters’ table.  In return, they aggressively defend the interests of the rich by insisting on a fervent devotion to the status quo and by feigning horror at anything resembling a new idea.        

In a scene in Lewis Carroll’s fable of disjointed reality, Alice in Wonderland, Alice flees with the Duchess from the Red Queen awfully fond of beheadings.  As they get away, the Duchess scolds Alice for thinking.  Alice protests, “I’ve a right to think,” to which the Duchess replies, “Just about as much right as pigs have to fly.”  The same absurdity pervades current American discourse.  The mega-rich have an absolute right to flood the public with their speech to behead any policy or the candidacy of any politician opposed to them.  Now, people seeking to publicly discuss our society’s economic direction are told the only right they have is to remain silent. 

Radical Ridicule

Once the 1% decided they couldn’t safely ignore the 99% movement, they primed their legion of media shills to sling any and all names they could at the people involved.  Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol fired the first shot by claiming in an ad that OWS was anti-Semitic, so to support Occupy was to support hate.  This serious charge is demonstrably false.  The New York Times observed that there have been lots of Jews openly celebrating Judaism under the tarps at Liberty Plaza.  OWS is intentionally decentralized, so it is inevitable that some fringe-minded people will show up to their protests.  But this video predating Kristol’s ad shows what happens when someone unfurls a sign reading “Zionists Control Wall Street.”  Other Occupiers surround him and chant “Nazi go home!  No Nazis here!”  Clearly the mainstream of OWS does not tolerate anti-Semitism in its ranks.  It is also important to point out that Zionism is not the same as Judaism.  Many devout Jews are opposed to Zionism.   

The Weekly Standard is allied with the Koch brothers, the same billionaires who funded WI governor Scott Walker’s campaign to destroy public unions.  Kristol’s attack serves the interests of politically active billionaires seeking to subvert American democracy and workers’ rights. 

Rush Limbaugh claimed that the Occupiers were threatening to bomb Macy’s.  This slander is disproved by OWS’ oft-repeated commitment to nonviolence and the fact that no one associated with the protests has been arrested for anything worse than trespassing.  Rush Limbaugh shills for a number of industry lobbies, and is particularly tied in with the food and beverage lobby. This lobby has become powerful enough to field its own candidate for president in the form of Herman Cain. 

In this rambling address, professional “paranoid” “delusional” Glenn Beck stands in front of an image of Barack Obama, Van Jones, George Soros, Michael Moore, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Vladimir Putin all rotating around a Nazi swastika and a communist flag while he asks a litany of zany rhetorical questions about OWS.  This image is only on screen in the background for 15 seconds, and he doesn’t comment on it, but he implies that an international Nazi/communist plot is fueling OWS.  During WWII, more people died in a shorter time in the fighting between the Nazis and the communists on the Eastern Front than in any other battle in history.  The suggestion they would be teaming up to protest Wall Street is remarkable stupidity. 

Beck insinuates that Van Jones founded the movement.  In the latest issue of The Occupied Washington Post, Occupiers wrote an article titled, “Van Jones and Democratic Party Operatives: You Do Not Represent the Occupy Movement/ Make Your Own Program; Don’t Try to Steal Ours.”  It’s possible that Glenn is right in that Van Jones wants to lead the movement.  But OWS has unequivocally rejected all attempts by institutional liberals to co-opt the movement.  Beck’s old lefty bogeyman falls flat in the face of a decentralized popular movement. 

In this video, Beck feverishly implies OWS is in cahoots with radical Islam.  He offers no facts to support this.  He says

“we have the Marxist revolutionaries yet again, along this time with the Palestinian movement and the radical Islam movement and now we have the big progressive movement and it’s all happening.  You would think somebody would see a pattern here, but apparently not.  Apparently not.” 

Apparently not, Glenn.  Clearly, a conspiracy of communists, Nazis and anarchists isn’t enough.  Why not throw ‘radical Islam’ into the mix too?  Does he think that al Qaeda has shifted tactics from suicide bombings to drum circles?  Or is he trying to prime his viewers for the argument that Americans who criticize Wall Street should be hauled off to Guantanamo? 

In 2007, Glenn Beck was the token conservative voice on CNN subsidiary Headline News.  He argued passionately for the US to launch a war with Iran while his show was funded by and hosted ads for Lockheed Martin, the largest military contractor in the United States.  When criticized about this by a guest, he called his critic “out of your mind” and attempted to silence him. 

Glenn Beck

On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly claims that OWS is a conspiracy of professional Democratic operatives.  In the very next sentence he says that they are all jobless because they don’t want to work.  As The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur aptly notes, O’Reilly’s two claims directly contradict each other.  O’Reilly says that with a college degree, unemployment is 4.5%.  This statistic is meaningless.  The national unemployment rate is around 9%, but if you include people who are underemployed and people not reporting unemployment because they’ve given up looking, the number may be 17% or higher.  The 2010 Census demonstrated how hard the recession has hit the 16-29 age group.  The most distressing fact facing job applicants, regardless of age, education or experience, is that there are 7 applicants for every 1 job opening in America.  

 In this segment on Fox and Friends entitled “From Mom to Mob,” Fox hosts blast a 38-year-old woman for “abandoning her family” to go to the OWS protests.  She left her teenage children with no one to look after them except for (the horror!) their father.  They smear her as a bad mother, imply that she’s cheating on her husband and tell her to take care of her kids.  This profoundly sexist diatribe against a private citizen is just one example of Fox’s brave trailblazing into new lows in commentary. 

In this video, Sean Hannity hosts Ann Coulter, who, while peddling her new book Demonic, says several times that the Occupiers are “demonic.”  Maybe no one told her that ‘demonizing’ your opponents is only a figure of speech?  She variously calls the protesters: “demonic loons,” “a demonic mob,” “brainless, brainwashed,” “losers,” “drug dealers,” “criminals,” “teenage runaways.”  She says they are not Ivy League, but are “coming from bush league schools,” and says “they don’t know why they’re there.”  Both Hannity and Coulter speculate that there is a strong potential for the protesters to become violent, again, in spite of their stated commitment to nonviolence.  Hannity says, “this is the face of the Democratic party.”  Like playground bullies, the two of them smugly call the protesters a litany of names and make no attempt to engage their arguments. 

In this video, Steve Doocy hosts Fox News ‘legal analyst’ Peter Johnson Jr.  Though you wouldn’t know it from watching the clip, Johnson is not just an ordinary corporate media shill, but also a Wall Street litigator.  His job is to help people who are very rich sue people who are not very rich.  Then he goes on cable TV to ridicule people who protest the very greed he helps make possible.  He is the epitome of the economic Uncle Tom class that enables Wall Street power.  Above a banner reading “Mayhem in Manhattan” Doocy says “the message is muddled.”  This consonance, or repetition of the “M” sound, is specifically designed to cognitively short-circuit a person’s normal skepticism toward new information.  Johnson says that OWS has “anarchist roots,” and “these folks are deluded in a lot of ways.”  He points out “they’re decrying the policies of president Obama with regard to job creation and foreclosures.”  Doocy then chimes in that it’s a “slap in the face of Obama.” 

So which is it, Fox, are the protesters demonic Democratic operatives, and the face of the party?  Or are they unemployed deluded losers, anarchists slapping Obama’s face?  Apparently they’re both, because “Fair and Balanced” doesn’t mean “True and Honest,” it means, ‘We slime our opponents with whatever mud we can find, even if it’s contradictory, doesn’t hold up to even a threadbare examination of the facts, and makes us sound schizophrenic.’  The segment ends with Doocy asking Johnson what it all means, and Johnson says, “I don’t know what it is.”  Albert Einstein once said, “The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

Fox News is a subsidiary of News Corporation, the second largest media corporation in the world.  News Corp. owns over 100 media assets in numerous countries, including websites, cable channels, TV stations, production companies, magazines and newspapers.  The company is embroiled in an ongoing scandal of appalling ethics violations, including hacking the phones of celebrities and terrorism victims.  The Murdoch dynasty, which owns the multinational corporation, initially argued that they didn’t know about the hacking.  Recently published emails disprove this argument.  Clearly News Corp. is an extremely powerful opinion-forming machine which does not flinch at violating laws or normal standards of decency to generate ratings. 

News Corp. is owned and run by a fascinating crew.  Australian Rupert Murdoch is the 117^th richest person in the world.  He is a media tycoon with a long track record of using his bully pulpit to support pro-business and anti-regulatory politicians and policies in numerous countries.  His media empire has lent support to invasions, resource imperialism, brutal dictatorships and the repression of democracy and human rights.  He has threatened to sue critics and has promoted nepotism within his own family and the families of powerful political allies.  When the British government outlawed media graft to tamp down on anti-competitive political/media relations, many lawmakers referred to the law as “The Murdoch Clause.”  Murdoch has promoted offshore tax havens, dodged corporate taxes and exploited tax loopholes.  His media have reported the outcomes of close elections before they were officially tallied in an effort to influence the outcome, including the 2000 US presidential election. 

Other owners and high-level managers of News Corp. include:

·         John L. Thornton: a former President and Co-COO of Goldman Sachs.

·         Natalie Bancroft: a member of the powerful Bancroft dynasty, which owned Dow Jones & Company for decades. 

·         Jose Maria Aznar: the former prime minister of Spain.  He launched his career as a propagandist for the Fascist Franco government. 

·         Viet Dinh: originally from Vietnam, Dinh is a Republican legal adviser and was the primary author of the USA Patriot Act.  

·         Rod Eddington: an Australian who was the CEO of British Airways. 

·         Andrew Knight: a British media entrepreneur and current Chairman of J. Rothschild Capital Management Limited.

·         Thomas James Perkins: a founder of premier investment capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

·         Roger Ailes: former media consultant for Presidents Nixon, Reagan and H. W. Bush and NYC Mayor Giuliani. 

·         Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal: a Saudi prince, the 26^th richest man in the world and the richest Saudi.  He founded and owns the Kingdom Holding Company which holds investments in industries including “banking, real estate, telecommunications, broadcasting and media, entertainment, hospitality, computers and electronics, agriculture, restaurants, upscale fashion, retailing, supermarkets, tourism, travel and automotive manufacturing.”  He is deeply invested in Wall Street, and owns stock in major firms including Citigroup.  Some economists have observed that his publicly acknowledged income does not add up and have speculated his company may be a front for arms dealers. 

This prince is Fair and Balanced™

This list of James Bond villains the most influential players at Fox is only the tip of the iceberg, yet their combined wealth is greater than most countries.  They are deeply invested in so many business interests and hail from so many countries, it is impossible to know what their principal motivations are.  But their claim that their main concern is to inform the American public is an assault on logic.  It is all but certain that their media corporation is a Trojan horse for all kinds of corruption and conflicts of interest.  They are closely allied to the biggest banks and deeply invested in the illicit trading that blew up the economy in 2008.  Their tentacles wiggle powerfully in almost every government institution and political office in America.    

These billionaires own a legion of lying puppets who dance on strings of gold at the pleasure of Wall Street and large corporations.  The media marionettes are rewarded with prizes like lucrative lobbying deals.  In return they shill for powerful interests while framing, spinning and lying to the American people.  They will say anything to ridicule, slime, smear and demonize anyone who criticizes the policies that are enriching the wealthy and impoverishing the rest.  Their commentary is not journalism, it is not an effort to analyze, understand and explain the facts.  It is an effort to throw any mud they can find until something sticks.  Americans are beginning to publicly question the direction of our economy.  Wall Street is making sure they do so in a cloud of poison floating around anyone who asks the salient questions. 

We are used to seeing the two parties do this to each other, which is largely why they can’t get anything done.  But now the corporations and their puppets are turning their rhetorical guns on the American people themselves.  This amounts to a siege on democracy.  As the American people have begun to challenge the broken system impoverishing them, the broken system has responded by declaring war on the notion that we can insist on progress.  In this climate, we have as much right to think as pigs have to fly.  We only have the right to remain silent.

In the end, their attacks will fail.  The American people will reject the Wall Street sliming of Main Street Americans exercising their rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.  We held our hands to our hearts every morning as we grew up and pledged allegiance to the Republic where Liberty and Justice are guaranteed for all.  We took that pledge seriously.  We have come to demand a return on that pledge. 

As our message spreads, don’t be a sucker.  Accept nothing at face value.  Demand greater context.  Investigate the source.  Follow the money.  Our political culture is drowning in propaganda.  Build a life raft in your mind. 

Speech Is Free But You Will Be Charged

It is dangerous to be right when the rulers are wrong. 

—Voltaire

                  While anti-tax activists wrapped themselves in the ethos of the Boston Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street is beginning to resemble the Boston Massacre.  Very early Tuesday, an army of hundreds of cops in riot gear blockaded Liberty Plaza.  They then barred reporters from covering the action.  Police pushed away or arrested reporters at barricades blocks away from the park.  NYPD helicopters refused to allow news helicopters from filming the raid from the air.  Once they had secured a media blackout, the NYPD stormed the camp.  As they did, the Occupiers reportedly chanted “This is what a police state looks like…”  You can’t really argue with them.  Their “crime” may have been a technical violation of sanitation codes.  By the city’s own logic, then, a massive SWAT team was deployed on a military scale to prevent littering.  This is self-evidently nonsense.  Their real crime was speaking. 

This escalation of the police intimidation campaign against OWS reveals that “free speech” may be an oxymoron in America.  As grainy cellphone videos attest, police gassed and viciously beat protesters without apparent provocation.

The raid makes Mayor Michael Bloomberg look like a cartoon villain.  Bloomberg is the 12^th richest man in America.  He made his billions with Bloomberg News, which reports on Wall Street for the super rich.  He changed term limit laws so that he could be mayor indefinitely.  After the raid, a judge ordered the city to allow the protesters to return and give them back their tents.  Bloomberg used the police to barricade the square for several hours while he shopped around for a different judge who would give him the ruling he wanted.  Bloomberg News hosted a parade of elitist shills on its programming, including this gem with Niall Ferguson who, lifting his nose at the common rabble and their horrid tents, thanked Bloomberg for restoring the rule of law.  This extraordinary concentration of financial, government and media power in the hands of one man epitomizes how broken our system is.  Over the last 30 years, powerful financial interests quietly tore down the walls that prevented corruption.  The person of Michael Bloomberg is the entire feedback loop of influence between corporations, government and the media which chills democratic participation. 

Speech is supposed to be free but has become extremely costly in two ways.  On one hand, speaking has become costly in the sense that if you voice the idea in public that government should work for the bottom 99% of wage earners a little more you stand a good chance of being pepper sprayed, beaten and violently arrested. 

On the other hand, it has become costly in the sense that it costs a lot of money.  To really have your voice heard, you have to own, manage or be in the good graces of large media corporations, hire an army of lobbyists or donate enormous sums to politicians in the form of newly legalized money laundering.  Either way you’re looking at writing a check with at least 6 or 7 zeros if you want to be taken seriously.  For the average citizen, coughing up millions to be heard by the government is inconceivable.  For the corporations, Wall Street and the billionaires, it’s pocket change.  For the 1%, speech is free except for a relatively nominal surcharge.  For the rest, it is becoming illegal. 

This dichotomy between speech for the rich and the rest is widening.  The Supreme Court cavalierly ruled that money is speech, so campaign donations cannot be limited.  This ruling took ‘speech’ which is rightfully ‘free’ and made it into a commodity that can be bought and sold like oil or gold.  This is the most radical reinterpretation of ‘free speech’ in history.  So it is ironic that speech is being interpreted in such a pedantic, technical way when it comes to protests, as a judge—clearly in Bloomberg’s pocket—ruled that speech does not extend to tents.  But someone spent money to buy those tents, and thus those tents are protected speech, right?  If we expand our definition of “speech” beyond “words” to “money,” why not expand it to “tents”?  Especially when those tents are essential to the peaceable assembly whereby words are formed? 

One of the greatest services that Occupy Wall Street has performed is to illuminate how sick our public sphere is.  They have flushed out the institutions that seek to ridicule, undermine and intimidate anti-corruption protesters into silence.  A vibrant public sphere is essential to a healthy democracy.  The Founders saw that the marketplace of ideas was the key to their early organization and ultimate success against the British crown.  In the years preceding the Declaration of Independence, the 13 colonies were abuzz with underground newspapers debating political ideas, publishing houses cranking out pamphlets, protests on public squares which evolved into boycotts, coffeehouses serving up hours of discussion.  These sparks of public debate lit the fire of Revolution on which our nation was founded. 

The Founders feared nothing more than tyranny and believed the antidote was an absolute right to free expression.  The First Amendment to the Constitution enshrines the right of the population to speak:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

No law.  It is impossible, impermissible, unconstitutional, for any legislature to make any law that would abridge the freedom of speech or of the right to assemble peaceably.  When Bloomberg says the protesters—who are peaceably assembled and exercising free speech—are making a mess, there is no law for him to refer to.  There is no law that the police can enforce.  There is no law on which a judge can slam her gavel.  The way the authorities in New York and around the country speak about the movement, you would think there’s a clause at the end of the First Amendment that says “unless the rabble shall be making a mess.”  Free Speech does not end when it becomes messy.  Democracy is messy.  Freedom is messy.  The Founding Fathers made a mess when they declared that government derives its power from the consent of the governed.  A capitalist oligarchy ensured by brute police force is clean.  Those who insist that citizen expression be neat and orderly are outing themselves as pro-plutocracy and anti-democracy.  The time has come to make a mess. 

                The raid violated the “freedom of speech” and the “right of the people peaceably to assemble” phrases of the Amendment.  It also significantly violated the “freedom…of the press” phrase.  NYPD roughed up journalists, arrested the ones who tried to pass them and created a media-free bubble on the ground and in the air around Liberty Plaza.  Again, there is no law that limits press access to a protest for them to enforce.  The First Amendment does not say “freedom of the press unless the rabble shall be making a mess whereupon constables beat them forthwith.”  Authorities arrest protesters and silence the media in dictatorships.  That does not happen in free, open, democratic societies.  If the mayor and the police genuinely have nothing to hide in their raid, then why hide it? 

                In a healthy democracy, the public sphere allows for all ideas to be voiced equally and considered on their merits under the bright light of reason.  Ideally all citizens have an equal chance to voice their thoughts on the issues that confront society.  In this way, ideas are weighed in the open, ensuring the population’s freedom and its active participation in the unending project of civilization.  The beauty of this free approach, in theory, is that good ideas gain steam and bad ideas fall to the wayside.  In a healthy democracy, bad ideas are not dangerous because they will inevitably self-destruct.  Thus, if the protesters in Liberty Plaza had bad ideas, everyone could safely ignore them.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to embargo the press and raid the Occupy Wall Street protest BECAUSE the protesters’ ideas have merit.  Their ideas that America is a democracy and that our economy should work for our society, not just the corporations are dangerous ideas BECAUSE they are good ideas.  They are simple and straightforward.  They cut right to the heart of the biggest problem facing our society: financial and corporate interests bought all three branches and both parties of our government.
                   America is barely capable of considering ideas on their merits anymore, because our public sphere has been privatized.  The 1% rely on their monopoly of speech to muffle the public sphere.  The protesters propose to re-create a public sphere by bringing the real issues into the streets.  This is a profound threat to the power structure that enriches the wealthy elite.  Bloomberg's raid announces that the billionaires who are really running our country will use all of their formidable power and influence to crush any notion of economic justice or government accountability.  But they are terrified.  They know that their position is morally untenable.  They know that if the populace awakens to the reality of the power dynamics in our institutions, they will fall.  We can no longer tiptoe around the issue of class war.  The 1% have openly declared total war on the middle class who are becoming poor and the poor who are becoming desperate. 

                A slow silent coup took place in America over the last 30 years.  Government of the money by the money for the money has swallowed our democratic way of life.  The real rulers will not give up their power and privilege without a fight.  They can break protesters’ bones but they cannot club an idea.  They can poison protesters’ lungs, but they cannot gas an idea.  They can raid a protest but they cannot evict the idea that American society could be freer and more just. 

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Thursday evening I marched beside half a dozen people holding aloft a 15-foot-tall mockup of the preamble to the Constitution.  Beneath “We The People,” scrawled in Jefferson’s iconic calligraphy, corporate labels like Exxon and Koch Industries plastered the old parchment like the paintjob on a Nascar.  The message was clear: We The People were sold out to corporate greed.  Indeed, one of the most popular chants that reverberated through the parade of 2-3000 people was the staccato accusation, “Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!” 

We marched past the White House crying “How to end the deficit?  End the wars!  Tax the rich!”  We shook our fists and inquired “Where are the jobs?!” at the ominous barred portcullis of the Chamber of Commerce. We then marched on K Street where we reminded the nation’s brigades of lobbyists that “This is what democracy looks like!” 

The protest was organized by Stop the Machine, an organization allied with Code Pink and Veterans for Peace, among others.  They camped out at Freedom Plaza where visitors could peruse moving displays such as rows of combat boots with dog tags of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It was planned weeks before anyone heard of Occupy Wall Street.  And it was just a coincidence that it happened at the same time, and a few blocks, from where Occupy DC began growing more spontaneously from the grass roots in McPherson Square.  The two quite likeminded movements joined forces for the march on the Chamber of Commerce to achieve the numbers they did. 

As the afternoon wound on, as police atop growling motorcycles herded us down DC streets, as people waiting at bus stops filmed us with iPhones and passing cars honked in solidarity, it became clear to me that there were some demands.  For a couple days, I accepted at face value the media’s trope that the protesters just need to settle on a list of demands.  But after returning yesterday and spending time talking to people camped out at McPherson Square, it became clear to me why there isn’t a list of demands. 

A Social Network of Protest

Occupy DC is only a fraction of the size of Occupy Wall Street, yet is a big tent intellectually.  Individuals’ major concerns run a gamut from traditional liberal causes such as the environment, corporate influence in politics and ending the wars to more vague or sweeping ideas like building a fairer society and teaching people to be more empathetic.  Some of them are passionately and overtly political while others are more countercultural or simply generally concerned about the direction of our society.  But the important reason why there is no list of demands is not because of the diversity of ideas, but because of how those ideas are shared. 

Their discussion process, “the people’s mic,” really drove home the point that no one is in charge.  There are some coordinators, but they seem to see themselves as facilitators or moderators of discussion rather than leaders.  General Assembly is held every day and proceeds on a set of rules akin to ‘Robert’s Rules of Order.’  This is a board meeting of hundreds of people.  Everyone who wants to has a say.  The person who has the floor will say “mic check” and then hundreds of voices will repeat “MIC CHECK.”  This way, everyone can hear the discussion at hand.  Agreement, neutrality and disagreement with the speaker can be expressed by rippling one’s fingers up, outward or down, respectively.  This way, the speaker can gauge the crowd’s reception without being interrupted.  The discussion proceeds slowly but methodically, and the bulk of it pertains to housekeeping for those staying long-term in the park.  Mic check.  MIC CHECK.  I think we need.  I THINK WE NEED.  To discuss.  TO DISCUSS.  The issue of.  THE ISSUE OF.  Comfort with.  COMFORT WITH.  Pets.  PETS.  A sea of fingers twinkles toward the sky, and the speaker presses on with encouragement.

Thus, it became clear to me that the Occupy project is not simply a protest, but it is also an experimental society.  It is a small community in which everyone is invested, everyone is equal, everyone can lead but no one is in charge.  In a sense, this is the protest of the Facebook generation.  The ideas and the process are fused into a social network of protestation.  There is a crucial difference between Occupy and Facebook, though.  People are coming together in the flesh to be a real, living, breathing community in each other’s presence.  Facebook and sites like it are illusions of socializing.  People are really alone, tapping away in front of a glowing screen.  At Occupy DC, people are living and discussing together.  Open dialogue is the magnet that is holding them all together, causing more people to join and more branches to open in different cities and now different countries. 

Shafted by the Great Recession

The media are trying to goad Occupy Wall Street into outing themselves as a group of radicals with a megaphone.  They want a list of demands—and in fact what they really want is sound bytes—so that institutional conservatives can condemn them as unwashed hippies too lazy to work while institutional liberals can tweet ‘we told you so’ from the backs of limousines.  Then the media can say “Look!  Conflict!  Fire up the presses!” 

As long as the Occupy movement sticks to its process of leaderless open dialogue, it literally cannot be co-opted, and cannot be pigeonholed.  It defies definition.  But there’s something kind of funny about a community in which every person is equal, all voices are heard and considered on their merits, and governance proceeds through open dialogue.  The funny thing about it is: THAT IS WHAT DEMOCRACY IS SUPPOSED TO BE!

The very existence of Occupy is a slap across the smug faces of the businessmen, politicians and media folks who are trying to ignore, denounce, define, co-opt, pigeonhole, embrace or pepper spray the movement.  The inherent message to the powers that be is, effectively: you have screwed up so badly that we are now completely ignoring you.  We no longer consider you to be in charge of anything or to be running this country.  We are creating a safe place to open dialogue on how best to proceed.  This dialogue itself will become the model whereby you will be replaced.  But we’re not going to bother telling you that because what you think is irrelevant.  You are now obsolete.  Goodbye. 

The relationship between the Occupy movement and the actual ‘leaders’ of this country is like the relationship between grown children and their parents who are going through a divorce.  In this analogy, the divorce is so messy that both sides are trying to take everything and can no longer speak to each other.  The children have to step in to calmly, rationally and fairly mediate the split.  The Occupy movement is essentially stepping in to rationally mediate the dysfunctional marriage between America’s government and business institutions. 

It’s important to point out that they’re not all kids.  It’s true that most of them are the ones who were tossing their graduate caps into the air on college greens across the country just as Lehman Brothers was collapsing.  They see no job prospects but are shackled to 5- or 6-figure student loan debts.  Indeed, one popular theme of the protests is “End Sallie Mae Slavery!”  Yet, there is significant diversity among the Occupiers.  There are veterans of past countercultural movements and veterans of wars.  There are older people who were laid off at an age when they have no real hope of being hired again for a decent job.  There are many Black folks protesting the fact that the recession wiped out half a century of economic growth in their community.  There are political independents and libertarians as well as people who once considered themselves conservatives.  They share a common experience of having been shafted in a real, tangible way by the Great Recession.  Some of them traveled for hours or days to be there.  One young man with a rich Tennessee twang spoke emotionally about how his father’s small business was possessed by a national bank on trumped up charges.  They tried to sue the bank, but the government refused to prosecute.  Now they are selling their house and he can’t afford to finish college.  

Let Them Eat Cake

Their vision of what our society has become and what it should be is what binds the protesters together.  To use another analogy, there is a sense that our society is like a birthday party for ten kids.  One very greedy boy (Wall St./corporations) shows up to the party with his mother (the government).  His mother proceeds to cut the cake into ten slices and then gives nine of them to her son.  The other nine kids (the Occupiers as they see themselves) are left to split the one slice of cake between them.  The mother pats her son on the head while he stuffs his face with cake.  The other kids say, “wait, that’s not fair.”  And she ignores them while her son gobbles more cake.  The nine kids become agitated, and cry out “hey, you can’t do that!”  She purrs to her son, “good boy, just ignore them.”  The other nine indignantly shout, “stop that, now!”  The boy, his voice muffled with cake, looks to his mother and whines, “I want to eat all the cake!”  His mother replies, “Of course you eat all the cake.”  She then slaps the last slice on a plate, hands it to the nine kids and barks, “Look, I’m letting you eat cake.”  The kids look at the slice, look at each other and shake their heads, “No.  We won’t fight each other over this slice of cake.”  The mother then screams, “WHAT?!  You are all filthy, communist socialists!  You are lazy, greedy, worthless children!”  The nine children then reach for the cake the greedy boy hasn’t eaten yet.  His mother reaches into her purse, pulls out pepper spray and sprays all the children in the face.  But, for some reason, this doesn’t make them want to fight each other for that last slice of cake.  It makes them more determined to stop the greedy boy and his mother.  

Gandhi’s observation that “First they ignore you.  Then they ridicule you.  Then they fight you.  Then you win,” provides an eerily accurate description of the responses thus far by the entrenched powers in our society.  The media are only beginning to take the movement seriously after ignoring it for weeks.  Politicians have begun calling them names and trying to label them.  Eric Cantor called them a “mob.”  Mitt Romney called them “dangerous.”  NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg accused them of “trying to destroy…jobs” (seriously?).  Now the (corporate-sponsored) NYPD is pepper spraying them, beating them with clubs, arresting them for resisting arrest—a brilliantly Orwellian Catch-22.  Yet, their numbers are growing.  

After taking part in the protests and observing the branch of their community here in DC, my message to Wall Street, K Street, the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, the corporations, the politicians and the media is: begin implementing real reforms to break the corporate/government nexus.  A good place to start would be to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which erected a wall between investment and commercial banking; and to legislate against the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional misinterpretation of the Citizens United vs. FEC case which allowed unlimited secret corporate campaign donations.  These two gestures would be real and would go a long way toward reining in destructive corporate greed and restoring government of the people by the people for the people in this country.  But they would only be a beginning.  In the end, we will need a new New Deal for a new age of economic suffering and a radical reassessment of our priorities as a society.  Submit to real reforms now before our resistance to your misrule and mismanagement intensifies. 

We know you hear those drums outside your towers and blast-proof walls.  We know that you know that those drums are for you.  “Show me what democracy looks like!”