After Yesterday

I've been in a bleak enraged mood all day, my thoughts are racing completely incoherently. I still haven't gotten over the tears of a couple of students of mine who came in late to class yesterday and were among the Occupiers in Oakland who got caught up in an early wave of the violence of the Oakland police against protestors there. Any reader of this blog will surely already know that this police violence only grew more intense and more outrageous as the day and night wore on, and that there have been comparable incidents of misconduct on the part of authorities in some of the other Occupations, notably Atlanta's.

I live in Oakland, heck I live on Broadway in Oakland, and I moved here from Atlanta. Whatever my worries about how Democratic party politics in a key election year would interact with the radical democratic politics of Occupy Wall Street, I have always been thrilled by the fact of the protests themselves, by the obvious righteousness of their cause, by their many accomplishments.

I can't say that I have any great insights to offer about all of this, but I do want to say that there is something absolutely wrongheaded about descriptions of the shift and escalation of police violence against the protests over the last couple of days as if this represents some kind of shift or "turning point" toward violence in the protests themselves. The protest is as it ever was, it is the desperation and misconduct of various city authorities that has changed.

There is something deeply wrong about armed police attacking peaceful assemblies with tear gas and rubber bullets in the name of "public safety." The paradox is obvious of course, and it does not play out to the benefit of authorities on YouTube or Establishment News whatever the spin -- a guy does two tours in Iraq and then comes home to get shot in the face for protesting an injustice pretty much everybody agrees with him about, yeah, go ahead, spin away -- but this nonsense about police forces engaging in violence against public citizens exercising Constitutional rights in the name "public safety" is all the more nonsensical when you realize that the whole point of the protests is to expose and denounce how wealth concentration and corrupt corporate governance and unequal access to law render the public profoundly unsafe, insecure, precarious in the deepest most abiding sense.

There is also something wrong with those "concerned critics" who are expressing worry that the Occupiers may get distracted over the question of their right to "The Park" rather than "the real issues" -- even though these Occupations have been indispensably about claiming spaces as public in public by the public themselves from the start as a visceral rebuke to the catastrophic privatization that has resulted in the profound dysfunction and injustice which I presume are "the real issues" these critics are worrying the Occupiers might lose sight of. The occupation of these public space is the performance through which "the real issues" and their solution are being expressed in the protests.

There is also something terribly wrong about Oakland Mayor Jean Quan (who I voted for goddammit) airily declaring all the protestors are "anti-government" on my tee vee despite the fact that in our democracy government is of by and for the people and these protestors are the people protesting government corruption and malfeasance and misconduct considered such by majorities of the people whether they are explicit Occupiers or not all in order to make that government accountable and therefore better. What could be more patriotic?

There is of course also something crazy about Republicans like doll-eyed dolt Randroid Ryan claiming that President Obama's efforts to pass a flabbergastingly necessary Jobs Bill and pointing to obvious facts that everybody already knows about wealth disparity is somehow "sowing seeds of class resentment" as if anybody who isn't a goddamn clueless millionaire doesn't know the score already and feel plenty resentful about the endless coddling of the rich and endless pain meted out on everybody else. But Republican crazytown is more than familiar by now, just as increasing police violence against Constitutionally protected assemblies and protests is getting all too familiar these days as well.

And yet last night hit me differently somehow anyway. I don't know what else to say. Police are part of the 99% too -- the protests are here to stay and the politics have far to travel.