A Crusade to Destroy a Conversation

The Occupy Wall Street People's Library prior to
the November 15th midnight raid.

Last week Mayor Bloomberg sent hundreds of police officers in the dead of night to Zuccotti Park to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters as they slept peaceful in their tents. The sleepy protesters were ordered to leave immediately or face arrest. Many were, of course, arrested. Others gathered whatever possessions they could and left with what they could carry. Protesters who returned to gather more of their belongings were barred from re-entering the park.

All of this happened under the cloak of darkness, both literal and figurative. Press were barred from covering the police action. Public transportation to the site was halted as subway service to the nearby stations was suspended. People in neighboring buildings were also barred from leaving their lobbies as the raid unfolded. One cannot help but assume that the Mayor did not want any lingering images of this stealth attack, whether those images were captured by the press or by concerned citizens.

The morning after Mayor Bloomberg evicted the protesters, he held a press conference to defend his administration's actions. He concluded those remarks by saying that the protesters had already had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. "Now," he said, "they will have to occupy the park with the power of their arguments."

Mayor Bloomberg's position seems to suggest that ideas and arguments can somehow be crafted without the minds and bodies that generate them. Somehow, in the world that the mayor occupies, ideas spring fully-formed from the foreheads of men who never want for any corporeal need. Their bodies, so well-fed, and exercised, and groomed, and scented, so well-rested, and warm, and safe, fall into the background, allowing them the fantasy that their minds are somehow independent of their bodies and the vast labor that supports and sustains them. Nestled in the comfortable cocoon that is economic privilege, their bodies become the sites of various pleasures and perhaps the occasional discomforts of the diseases that medical science has yet to ameliorate. But seldom are their bodies the sites of desperation, hunger, pain, and need. Were it not for the utter insensibility that such privilege fosters, the mayor's remarks might seem not just disingenuous, but utterly cynical.

The notion that citizenship should only be the legal right of the propertied has its roots in this sort of fantasy about ideas: reason, it is argued, is only possible when one is free from the drudgery of laboring for a living. (See Hannah Arendt's analysis of these ideas.) The frustration, anger, and rage that emerge from economic inequality, and that animate mass movements, are deemed irrational. Protesters are characterized as crazy or criminal. Their status as citizens is impugned. They are cast as a mob, as unruly and unreasonable. Often they are described as malodorous, ill-kempt, and unclean.

That is one reason that the Occupy Wall Street People's Library was such a threat. The library, along with the non-violent civil disobedience of the movement, suggests that the occupation is guided by ideas and ideals. The image of a movement that had assembled a 4,500+ volume library in just two months was starkly at odds with the media fantasies of irrational, marauding hooligans or filthy, unkempt hippies. A 4,500+ volume library that was organized, cataloged and circulating, suggests that reason, reflection, and dialog are at the heart of the occupation. A collection that included volumes inscribed by renowned authors supporting the movement suggests an alarming level of cultural resonance. Beyond that, such a distinguished and significant collection might some day be archived for historians to consider as the story of the occupation is written. But instead of continuing to circulate amongst library users, instead of being preserved for the archives of the future, much of the occupation library was crushed in the trash compactors of twenty-eight Department of Sanitation trucks that carted away the property of the occupying protesters.

OWS librarian Stephen Boyer displays a damaged copy of
Philip Levine's What Work Is that the poet had inscribed for the library.

Yesterday I attended the press conference where the librarians of the People's Library displayed the books that they had recovered from the midnight raid. Of the 4,500+ books confiscated by the NYPD and the Department of Sanitation, only about 1,300 have been returned to the librarians. And of those, a third are damaged beyond repair.  Books destroyed ranged from copies of the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita to popular potboilers and children's books. Milton Friedman and Karl Marx shared shelf space (and the protection of waterproof plastic bins) under the trees at Zuccotti Park. No book was rejected because its ideology might be at odds with that of the occupation: Andrew Carnegie's The Empire of Business was not far from Mayor Bloomberg's own memoir Bloomberg on Bloomberg.

The mayor and his administration may have been aware that the destruction of a library represented a potential PR problem.  Perhaps that's why they released a photograph via Twitter the day of the raid, suggesting that the library had been well-cared for by its temporary custodians at the Department of Sanitation.

Images from yesterday's press conference suggest otherwise. 

At a time when budget cuts have shortened public library hours and bookstores are filing for bankruptcy protection, the image of a press conference table covered with crushed and moldy volumes was more than simply disturbing. The remnants of the sacked library were a sobering reminder that, as OWS librarian Danny Norton observed, "this is a crusade to destroy a conversation." 

On this Thanksgiving Day, at tables across the country — and in newspapers, and blogs, and twitterfeeds — I'm grateful that the conversations (and occupations) will surely continue unabated.

OWS Espanol

I wanted to share an article that appeared in the Observer (10/31/11) by a student, Emmanuel Pardilla, in my Introduction to Anthropology class about his activity with OWS Espanol:

I volunteer within the overall movement of Occupy Wall Street. But I am more focused on "Occupy Wall Street en Espanol." Some of our members along with the translation working group help translate the "Occupy Wall Street Journal Newspaper" in spanish. We have a table in the park where we have people answering questions pertaining to the movement to our spanish speaking, hermanas y hermanos. The reason why I joined the group is b/c it is a given fact that the Latino community and the African American community, here in the United States are some of the most oppressed communities. I am from the Bronx, and the Bronx is one of the most oppressed and poorest communities here in all of the United States. From the hardships of an Immigrant; sacrificing so much to simply live another day. To the racial profiling experiences that our high school students face on their way to school by the NYPD. Mothers losing the seeds they planted here on the concrete jungle b/c of police brutality . Many do not understand these hardships and it is difficult to expect others to relate to those kinds of injustices. These are the injustices that most, if not all, Latinos and African Americans face here in America. We are here to represent them, so that they can relate to this struggle against a system that has oppressed the 99%. We just like the everyone else there are putting the issues that mostly effects us on the table. Occupy Wall Street is a movement but it is also a platform.

The Media portrays the movement as a predominantly white male movement, hence how most of the interviewees or the random snapshots of OccupyWall Street depicts white males in the fore front. The movement isn't being represented candidly by the media. There are women , African Americans and Latinos like myself out there like myself. There's even Indigenous people out there, and Asians that want to get involved in setting up there very own occupation in their communities. But what I am doing in all essence is trying to get people from my community (Latino and African Americans) out there. I want to be out there, I want to be on the cameras, I want them to see that they do have representation here!

The Town hall meeting was great even though I wasn't able to stay there for the bulk of it. I'm glad to see organization from students. However, I feel like this must be organic. We must look at how the CUNY students organize b/c CUNY students have been organizing against their tuition hikes, even before Occupy Wall Street, yet that type of organization is non-existent here in Fordham University, at least to my knowledge. Students are students everywhere, I feel like we as students can identify with what the CUNY students are doing. All in all, I feel like this can possibly be the beginning of something here at Fordham University.

I hope this article helps inspire the students and staff here at Fordham.

By the way, 11.11.11 Occupy Central Park

In Solidarity,

Emmanuel Pardilla

It’s Time to Start “ 99 Percent Clubs” at Your School or in Your Neighborhood to Support the Occupations

If you are part of the large and growing number of Americans who support the Occupy movement, but may or may not be able to “Occupy” yourself, you might want to form a 99 Percent Club at your school, your workplace or in your neighborhood, to organize financial, legal and political support for the Occupy movement and educate people in your community about what it stands for.

The idea for these 99 Percent Clubs came from renowned educator Ira Shor and they are modeled on the “Friends of SNCC” organization that mobilized support for the non violent Southern civil rights movement in the early 1960’s. Given that the Occupy movement is under assault from elected officials and university presidents around the country, and that people in this movement, like their counterparts in the southern civil rights movement, face arrest and beatings, along with more modern police weaponry such as pepper spray and rubber bullets, it is definitely time to create a support group to raise funds and educate the public about these brave activists

A 99 Percent Club is one vehicle that can do just that. We have called for a first meeting of such a club at Fordham and the response, from students, alumni, and staff has been overwhelming. Our Fordham group does not have a program- just a commitment to support the Occupations. So far, nearly 30 people are committed to attend

Occupy Wall Street and its counterparts around the nation have put the questions of economic inequality on the nation’s agenda for the first time since the 1960’s. And the response from policy makers has been ferocious as that of southern segregationists confronting a challenge to their way of life

It’s time for Americans who support the goals of the Occupy Movement,even if they don’t feel they can participate in it directly, to mobilize in support of popular democracy and economic justice. Forming 99 Percent Clubs is one way to do so.

If you would like to start a 99 Percent Club in your area, please email Ira Shor at irashor@comcast.net with a cc to me at Naison@fordham.edu

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

November 17th Day of action

OWS is calling for a national day of direct action and celebration to mark two months since the start of the Occupy movement. It began this morning with a march at Wall St. at 7am, and is continuing with "Occupy the Subways" actions at 3pm--including the Fordham Road station in the Bronx and several in Manhattan. For those interested in knowing what's planned, here's a link. 

On a more straightforwardly analytic and scholarly note: the movement, however leaderless and de-centered, has produced some striking images. Below, for instance, is the poster for today's actions.  Some of the signs and images in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere have also been notable. I'm wondering if anyone has started working on a visual analysis of the movement, or has come across any good such work online or elsewhere. 

Berkeley and Penn State

I've been trying to come up with a good way of articulating my intuition that there's something significant about the fact that the police violence against Occupy Cal (on the UC Berkeley campus) and the pro-Paterno riots (on the Penn State campus) happened on the same day...but I haven't really found a way of doing so that doesn't come across as stunned outrage. My best draft of a posting started with the sentence: "I wonder what those Penn State students will think about themselves years from now when they realize that--whatever their intentions--what they really did was riot in defense of child-rapists and the people who protected them." But it was hard to figure out where to go from there.

Fortunately, Dave Zirin just posted a piece in The Nation that says pretty much what I wanted to say, and more eloquently than I ever could have. I hope readers of this blog--especially students--will go and read the whole piece, but to give you a small sampling, here's how it concludes:

November 9 was a generational wake-up call to every student on every campus in this country. Which side are you on? Do you defend the ugliest manifestations of unchecked power or do you fight for a better world with an altogether different set of values? Do you stand with the Thugs of Penn State or do you stand with Occupiers of Berkeley? It’s fear vs. hope, and the stakes are a hell of a lot higher than a BCS bowl.

New York City Students in Support of Occupy Wall Street

There is a sizeable group of New York City students who are organizing in support of Occupy Wall Street.  I recently received this information from a colleague at another institution in the city:

The NYC all-student assembly meets on Saturdays in Washington Square Park at noon and is composed of students (high school, college, and postgraduate) from NYC and universities in NJ, PA, CT, VT, etc. This group has called for a student strike on 11/17 in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street (on its 2-month anniversary). There will be rallies, marches, and other actions across the city organized by trade unions, students, and activists. More info: http://studentweekofaction.wordpress.com/

I wanted to share this information to keep our Fordham students in the loop on the activities of their peers across the city.

Fordham and the Bronx

Why is it that there is only ONE student from the Bronx among the 45 students in my Rock and Roll to Hip Hop class?

Shouldn't Fordham be working harder to recruit students from the working class and immigrant neighborhoods outside the gates of it's Bronx campus?

Should Fordham adopt Roosevelt High School and the 5 academies inside it and do intensive programs with its students to assure that at least 50 students each year end up going to Fordham?

What do you think?