Category Archive

Dear Wil,

Yesterday you tweeted what would become the day’s most-retweeted #OccupyWallStreet tweet, linking to a Reddit post that goes pretty much like this:

“Tomorrow, wear a polo and khakis

“Seriously. polos and khakis. Every time you guys DO finally get some fucking press, it’s a scrawny dude with dreads in a ratty t-shirt. You’re going big here, dress it. Tomorrow, Polo shirt and Khakis.

“Why? Because you need to get the right-leaning equivalent of me on your side.”

Now, this isn’t entirely bad advice. It’s not particularly good advice, but it’s not the worst advice ever offered.

As a Twitter intervention into Occupy Wall Street, though, it really really sucks.

I’ve been down to OWS three times. What I saw there was a mix of people, from a mix of backgrounds, wearing a mix of ensembles. There are professionals in suits there, and union workers in jeans and tee shirts and boots. Grandmothers. Hippies. Punks. Secretaries. Dorks.

So if you think it’s important that the nation move beyond the stereotype that OWS is just a bunch of dirty hippies…

Don’t blast your 1.8 million followers with a tweet that stereotypes OWS as a bunch of dirty hippies.

That tweet wasn’t helpful. It was the opposite of helpful. You know what would be helpful? Helpful would be declaring solidarity with the protest without being “helpful.” Helpful would be encouraging your followers to identify with OWS, instead of encouraging them to stand on the sidelines tut-tutting.

That Reddit post uses the word “you” twenty-three times in fourteen short paragraphs. “We”? None. None times. The Reddit guy claims he’s on the side of OWS, claims he wants middle America to see OWS as part of its “us,” but he’s not willing to be a part of that transformation himself.

He’s not willing to show up and put his polo-clad shoulder to the wheel.

And that act, that act of solidarity, is exactly what’s needed right now.

You want to help? Don’t tell a bunch of hippies to go buy polos and khakis. Tell your hundreds of thousands of polo-and-khaki garbed Twitter followers to put on their work clothes and head over to Liberty Plaza. That’s what’s needed, and that’s what’s possible.

Because you and I both know that it’s a hell of a lot easier to get an IT dork to go to a con than it is to convince a trustafarian to shave off his dreads.

Much love,

Angus

So last night I wandered down to Occupy Wall Street for the second time. I’d visited the night before, and been impressed — impressed by the richness of the space, impressed by the process and enthusiasm of the general assembly. I wasn’t (and I’m still not) sure what it all adds up to, but I found it invigorating and compelling. So I went back.

I spent some time strolling around, talking to people and checking out what was happening. I ate some free food. I sat in on a workshop on building democratic structures in progressive organizations. I compared notes with a couple of friends who were there.

And then the general assembly got started. The evening GA is a decision-making meeting, but it’s also a place where lots of announcements get made — OWS has a lot of working groups on issues ranging from first aid to legal support to action planning, and the GA is where they all check in. I’d sat through all those announcements the previous night, and been mostly fascinated, but it was less compelling the second time through and the pavement was cold and hard, so after a while I figured I’d stretch my legs a bit and circle back in time for the meat of the meeting.

So I took a stroll through the neighborhood, and wound up at a deli that was open and had comfortable seating in the front. I bought a beer for a couple of bucks and sat down to check my email and read a few pages of the book I’d brought.

There was a young woman at the register, paying for a soda and chatting with the counter guy about the Occupy Wall Street protests — she worked in the neighborhood and was on her way to check them out for the first time. I didn’t catch much of what she said, but when the counter guy made a comment about Eisenhower, I listened … and tweeted:

@studentactivism: Counterman at a deli 3 blocks from #OccupyWallStreet just quoted Ike’s warning on the military industrial complex.

“And Eisenhower was a general.” I remember the guy saying. “A general.”

A few minutes later I tweeted this:

@studentactivism: “The government has become the puppet of the big corporations.” -The same deli guy. #OccupyWallStreet

And this:

@studentactivism: #OccupyWallStreet. It’s not just for dirty hippies anymore.

And this:

@studentactivism: “Ordinary folks are getting dicked.” -Same deli guy #OccupyWallStreet

I was tweeting all this, by the way, not because it struck me as strange, but because it struck me as so ordinary — while at the same time so at odds with dominant narratives of the Occupy Wall Street protests. (And not just those in the big media, those in the look-down-your-nose left, too.) New York City is a left-liberal city. It’s a city that went for Obama over McCain by an 85-15 margin. It’s a city whose majority white districts went for Obama 2-to-1. It’s a city where what passes for reactionary is Staten Island, where Obama took 47% of the vote. To hear this middle-aged white guy saying this stuff didn’t surprise me at all.

But I kept listening.

@studentactivism: “I buy you a beer today, you buy me a beer tomorrow. That’s the only way it’s gonna work.” -The OTHER deli guy #OccupyWallStreet

The other guy behind the counter was younger, and black. The woman who’d started the conversation had long since moved on, but a couple of regulars had taken up positions with their own beers at a table in front and the discussion was rolling on.

@studentactivism: Now the black deli guy is holding forth on the need for cross-racial class solidarity. #OccupyWallStreet #NotJoking

I wish I’d transcribed more of this, but by the time I thought to try to write down what I hadn’t tweeted, most of it was gone. I do remember him saying “some guys are all ‘The niggers! The spics!’ But niggers contribute to the economy too. Faggots too.”

He repeated the bit about faggots for emphasis, looking around, kind of hoping that someone would say something he could correct. But by now the four of them were all enthusiastically agreeing to everything, egging each other on.

@studentactivism: Black deli guy: “Everybody said ‘Obama’s gonna get shot.’ Nah. He plays the game.” #OccupyWallStreet

This was, I think, in response to the white deli guy saying that no American president in half a century had ever taken the interests of ordinary people seriously.

I’d bought a second beer at some point along the way, but by now it was kicked. As I was about to head out, I piped up for the first time. “You guys are killing me,” I said. The white counter guy grinned. ” I thought the meeting was up there,” I said, pointing in the vague direction of the plaza.

@studentactivism: Me: “I thought the meeting was up there.” Deli guy: “We’ve been saying this for 30 years.” #OccupyWallStreet

We talked for a few minutes more. None of the four of them had been up to the protest, it sounded like, at least not to do more than walk by and check it out on the fly, so I shared some of my impressions. We did the enthusiastically-agreeing-with-each-other bonding thing for a few minutes. We all agreed that the protest was a lovely development. Then one of the guys sitting at the front table said “But what’s their plan?”

I said I’d gotten the impression that people there had a lot of different ideas about what needed to be done, and that I wasn’t sure they were all going to agree on an agenda for change anytime soon. Then I said that I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing.

I said it seemed like pretty much everyone there basically agreed on certain basic principles — that something was seriously broken in the American economy, that something was seriously broken in American politics, and that an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority was at the root of most of of that brokenness. People differed on how to address that problem, I said, but they all pretty much agreed about what the problem was, that it needed to be tackled, and that it wasn’t really being tackled now.

I was struck by the “what’s their plan” question in a few ways. First because it was the first even vaguely critical comment about OWS I’d heard in the whole discussion — for half an hour these guys had been been talking about and around the protests, and everything they’d said was emphatically positive. Second because it wasn’t asked in a spirit of attack but a spirit of curiosity, and maybe gentle prodding — a central premise of the conversation I’d snooped on was that there’s no obvious fix for what’s gone wrong. For many on the chattering left “what’s their plan” is the rhetorical leadup to a dismissal, as if it’s the job of five hundred strangers in a park to come up with a concrete step-by-step proposal for reforming (or overthrowing) global capitalism. But here it wasn’t that. Here it was a real question: “What can be done?”

If Occupy Wall Street is as marginal as its liberal-left critics assume, then no answer to the guy at the table’s question would make any sense at all. Five hundred strangers in a park will never themselves be the engines of any profound societal transformation. But if what I saw last night is real, if OWS is offering a critique that resonates in content — if not necessarily in form — with a broader and more eclectic swath of the country, then maybe those five hundred strangers are pounding on a door that’s a bit less well-armored than it looks.

Maybe what they have to offer isn’t a plan so much as an opportunity to have a bigger conversation, or even just an invitation to continue and expand a conversation that’s been going on in small ways in small places for a long time.

And that’s a conversation I’m really eager to see continue.

Sunday night I tweeted, as Jon Stewart won his I’m-not-even-making-this-up ninth consecutive Emmy for Best Variety Show or whatever, that “Jon Stewart is like 63% of the way to being the guy he started out mocking. Maybe 64%.” And then today I stumbled across this, a Tom Junod profile of Stewart from next month’s Esquire that makes the case far better than I possibly could.

The thing is full of great lines, including the one I quoted this morning, and the one about how

even when Stewart’s a dick, he is never the dick. It is Stewart’s unique talent for coming across as decent and well-meaning when he’s bullying and hectoring and self-righteous. And this is because his talent is not just for comedy and not just for media criticism or truth-telling; it’s for being — for remaining — likable.

The bit about why nobody ever does a Jon Stewart impression is right on the money too. Read the whole piece, but the takeaway is this: Jon Stewart’s public persona is profoundly disingenuous, and ultimately toxic to American political discourse.

But there’s one part of the piece that I’d quibble with, and it’s the passage on Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, held in DC on the weekend before the 2010 midterm elections:

Three days before a crucial election, Jon Stewart had stood in America’s most symbolic public space and given a speech to two hundred thousand people. The speech wasn’t about his need to be a player or his need for power or his need for influence. It wasn’t about getting out the vote or telling people to vote in a certain way. It was about Jon Stewart — about his need for another kind of out. For years, his out had been his comedy. Now it was his sincerity — his evenhandedness, his ability to rise above politics, his goodness. And three days later, when the side he didn’t even say was his side was routed in the midterms, he pretty much proved his point. He was no player. He had no political power. He’d proven he was beyond all that by presiding over the biggest celebration of political powerlessness in American history.

There’s nothing incorrect here, but there’s one pair of dots that Junod doesn’t quite connect, and it’s this:

By holding that rally on that day, Stewart took two hundred thousand of his most political fans out of the game on electoral fieldwork’s biggest weekend. The kind of folks who would show up to a Jon Stewart rally are pretty much exactly the kind of folks who would knock on doors for local candidates in the run-up to an off-year election. And what did Stewart do? He gave them a reason not to.

If you believe in the political process, if you believe in civic engagement, if you believe in local communities, if you believe in reforming America from the ground up, the last thing you do is hold a huge fake rally for politics dorks in Washington DC on the weekend before the midterms. I mean, come on.

I used to love Jon Stewart. But that’s when he really lost me.