Occupy the Open Mic

So there I was standing in a sea of about 2,000 Occupiers from around the country literally in the shadow of Congress.  I was all pumped up to give the speech I had spent a weekend preparing to lambaste Congress loudly and closely enough that they might actually hear it.  I found the open-mic coordinator and told her I was here for my time slot.  Our conversation went like this:

Me: I’m here for the 6:30 time slot.

Her: What’s your name?
Me: Marc Belisle.

Her: You’re not on the list.

Me: I signed up a week ago.  I double checked the wiki today and I was still on it.  
Her: Okay, no problem.  We have a free time slot coming up anyway. 

Me: Okay, good. 

Her: So do you have an instrument or something?
Me: No, I’m giving a speech.

Her: Oh, that’s why you’re not on the list.  We had to move speeches off the mic. 

Me: What?
Her: Yeah, when we opened up the mic, we had politicians signing up to speak.  The organizers didn’t want that and we decided it wouldn’t be fair if we had to pick who could speak and who couldn’t, so we just decided to cancel speeches in general.  We sent out an email about that to everyone.  Didn’t you get the email?

Me: No.  No, I didn’t.  I did not get that email. 

Her: Oh, sorry. 

And that is the story of how I didn’t give a speech at Occupy Congress. 

I’m convinced that closing the mic to speeches is a major tactical error and a missed opportunity.  Honestly, I’m not saying this to gripe.  Obviously I’m disappointed but I’m not mad at anyone.  I’m saying it because I really want the Occupation to succeed.  I also don’t believe that my speech is so important or anyone else’s would have been.  But I do believe that speech itself is important.  It would have been a very powerful symbol to open a platform for open political discourse virtually on the steps of Congress. 

Instead, you had people playing music and reading slam poetry.  Granted, I was only there for an hour, and your event went on all day, so I can’t comment in general.  But from what I saw, it seemed that most presenters had either taken the sound-byte chants of Occupy marches and set them to folk guitar or rehashed them into snappy little couplets.  Or both.  That’s all cool, but you’re not inviting anyone into the movement when you’re just using the mic to reiterate the lingo that you use with each other. 

I’m trying to understand what exactly it was the organizers were afraid of.  I know that Occupy has been sensitive about being co-opted by professional liberals.  But allowing someone to speak is not the same as endorsing their speech.  Besides, let’s say someone like Marion Barry came to Occupy Congress and sneakily used your lingo to his own ends.  So what?  That’s not co-opting the movement.  As long as he’s not giving you money, he doesn’t have any say in how the movement is run.  Or let’s imagine the opposite.  Say Eric Cantor walked out of the Capitol, down the steps, hopped up onto your stage, grabbed the mic and called you all a bunch of filthy communists and intoned about the wonders of capitalism for fifteen minutes.  First of all, you wouldn’t even be able to hear him over all the booing.  But again, so what?  Would it not have been an opportunity to allow one of your detractors enough rope to hang himself?  Or to find some common ground with someone of a different philosophy, and thereby—to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln—destroy an enemy by turning him into a friend? 

I think it’s important to always keep in mind who the real enemies are.  The real enemies are the purveyors of very big money who use that money to corrupt our political system for their own ends.  Everyone else is a potential friend.  And in the battle of winning hearts and minds, apart from nonviolent demonstration, well-crafted open discourse is the most potent weapon we have.  I realize that there is this all-consuming ethos of ‘the movement is the message.’  But in the fight to stay in the parks, you’re losing to municipal authorities and the weather.  Camping out needed to be phase one.  If nothing else, you should have at least opened the mic for a dialogue along the lines of: what should phase two be?  You obviously can’t beat Wall Street on ability to fund and organize.  So you have to argue more convincingly than they do.  Occupy needs to be about ideas, not about clinging to a few square acres of real estate.  The decision to close off discourse is a self-inflicted wound. 

Walking around the West lawn of the Capitol, every single person I saw seemed to be a hardened veteran of Occupations.  I didn’t notice any DC residents poking around the event out of curiosity.  The first weekend that Stop the Machine set up shop here in DC, at any given time there were about 2 locals to every 1 Occupier, because they had prepared interactive demonstrations, and they even had an outreach tent.  They seemed to be getting people to think and to feel strong outrage, what with the boots and dogtags of fallen soldiers. 

I’m not saying you had to go to that extent.  What I’m saying is that there seemed to be this bright red line between them and us.  And ‘them’ seemed to be anyone who hadn’t been camping in a park for the last few months.  I wore a tie for my speech, and as I was walking around, I received several snide or suspicious comments about my dress.  I am not The Man.  I was not judging you.  I did feel a little judged myself though.  I wore the tie to create the symbolism that an average American supports you.  Maybe you don’t want average Americans to support you?  If so, I believe that’s a potentially fatal mistake.  Occupy risks irrelevancy if you allow a herd mentality to begin defining the movement. 

For what it’s worth, this is the speech I had prepared.