Is Occupy Wall Street All About the Signs?

Apparently not. I didn't know it,

But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics--its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making--are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.

Yes, really. But you knew that. If you didn't, then go read Dan Barrett in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the intellectual roots of the Wall Street protest.

Barrett writes:

It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber, one of the movement's early organizers, who has been called one of its main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and of slaves, for his 2007 book, Lost People.

Betafo was "a place where the state picked up stakes and left," says Mr. Graeber, an ethnographer, anarchist, and reader in anthropology at the University of London's Goldsmiths campus.

In Betafo he observed what he called "consensus decision-making," where residents made choices in a direct, decentralized way, not through the apparatus of the state. "Basically, people were managing their own affairs autonomously," he says.

The process is what scholars of anarchism call "direct action." ... He transplanted the lessons he learned in Madagascar to the globalism protests in the late 1990s in which he participated, and which some scholars say are the clearest antecedent, in spirit, to Occupy Wall Street.

I'm not sure I believe that. But then I'm not an academic.

In any case, I went downtown to Zuccotti Park to see if it really is the equivalent of Madagascar. My staff of thousands shamed me into it. If intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek, Cornel West, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stigliz, Frances Fox Piven, and Lawrence Lessig, could show their support for the protest, then the least a yahoo like me could do is put in an appearance and take a few snapshots.

The site certainly looked like an exercise in "democracy without a government." It was busy, crawling with participants, as well as onlookers like me. Everybody was up to something, or so it seemed, and none of the anarchists looked outraged or angry -- not even the sign-carrier whose sign said "I'm union / I vote / I'm pissed / So I'm here" (is he a secret "Follies" fan?) or the guy I saw reading the Constitution out loud, word for word, like a well-mannered street corner preacher.

What I didn't see there were the 1 percenters, the ones that the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and professor at Columbia University, has described in Vanity Fair, of all places, as "the upper 1 percent of Americans [who] are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation's income every year."

It's possible some were strolling around incognito on their lunch hour. But nobody was carrying issues of Vanity Fair, and I didn't see any copies of the magazine at the library stand. If 1 percenters were at Zuccotti Park, they definitely were not carrying signs and they certainly weren't wearing t-shirts like these. I didn't see the officer behind the skinny tie, either.

I did see a lot of excellent hand-drawn opinions, including a stylish flower-power throwback. Have a look at some more snapshots I took that give the flavor of Manhattan's Madagascar.

1-zuccotti park 10-17-11 copy.jpg

3-zuccotti park 10-17-11 copy.jpg

6-zuccotti park 10-17-11 copy.jpg

And here's a video of Harvard prof Lawrence Lessig that Barrett includes at the end of his article:

Postscript: Oct. 21 -- Paul Krugman blogs that he visited Zuccotti Park yesterday:

Overall, what struck me was how non-threatening the thing is: a modest-sized, good-natured crowd, mostly young (it was a cold and windy evening) but with plenty of middle-aged people there, not all that scruffy. Hardly the sort of thing that one would expect to shake up the whole national debate. Yet it has -- which can only mean one thing: the emperor was naked, and all it took was one honest voice to point it out. ... Thank you, OWS.

By the way, here's the layout of the OWS encampment. Thank you, NYT.

October 19, 2011 9:47 AM | | Comments (0)

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
more picks

Sites to See

Abstract City
AmericaBlog
American Leftist
Andante
Antiwar.com
ArkivMusic.com
Articulate
Arts & Letters Daily

Blogcritics
Booknotes
Bright Lights Film Journal
Buck Fush

C-SPAN
Center for Cooperative Research
Noam Chomsky
Consortium News

Cost of War in Iraq
Council on Foreign Relations
Crooks and Liars
Cultural Weekly
TheCuttingFloor

The Daily Howler
David E's Fablog
Dark Roasted Blend
Democracy Now!
Devil Ducky

Editor's Cut
Ehrensteinland
Tim Ellis: Comedy
Eschaton

Film Threat
Robert Fisk
Fluxlist Europe

Glenn Greenwald
Good Reads

The Guardian (London)
GUERNICA: A Magazine of Art & Politics

Herman (Literary) Archive, Northwestern Univ. Library
The Huffington Post

Inter Press Service News Agency
International Relations Center
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Doug Ireland

Jacketmagazine
Clive James

Henry Kisor
Krugman's Blog:
Conscience of a Liberal

Lannan Foundation
Life During Wartime
Los Angeles Times
Low Culture

Metacritic
Mimeo Mimeo
Museum of Television & Radio

Nat. Arts Journalism Program
National Security Archive
The New York Times
NO!art

Onion Radio News
Open City
Open Library
Osborne & Conant

The Overgrown Path

Greg Palast
Political Irony

Postclassic Radio

Poynter/Romenesko:
Media People

Rain Taxi
The Raw Story
RealityStudio.org
Bill Reed
The Reeler
Rhizome
Rwanda Project

Salon
Seeing Black
Senses of Cinema
Seven Stories Press
Slate
Studs Terkel

TalkLeft
The Theater Times (Cris Gross)
The 3rd Page
ThugLit: Writing About Wrongs
Times Square Cam
The Tin Man
Truthdig
t r u t h o u t

Ubu Web
Underneath Their Robes

Wading in the Velvet Sea
Walking Man
The Wall Street Journal
Wikigate
Wikipedia

The Washington Post
James Wolcott
World O'Crap Man

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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on October 19, 2011 9:47 AM.

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