Bob Dylan’s iconic words carry several meanings. To those of us who decided (with the luxury of a middle class background) to live as leanly as possible, the meaning is literal: if you’re not part of the system, with a mortgage and credit card debt, when the system collapses you haven’t lost much. The other meaning, that when you’re poor and struggling and the system offers you nothing in the way of rising out of that poverty, you’re already lost.
Some of the folks who started Occupy Wall Street offer a third meaning. Many of them appear to be from recently achieved middle class homes—upward mobility from working class or minority assimilation—and aspire to professional work and home ownership—a piece of the American pie—albeit with a more sophisticated understanding of how that lifestyle is supported both economically and politically. Then they find out there aren’t any jobs doing what they’ve been trained to do, they can’t afford mortgage loans (and no one is building anything affordable anyway) because they’re deeply in debt from college loans. So what better way to spend the day than in the street with their cohort.
They are joined by an interesting array of other protestors, from all walks of life, including the working poor, college professors, union organizers, activists, and retirees. But the core group of folks, even with their different spin on “you got nothing to lose”, are the direct descendents of the protestors who were in the streets during the Vietnam war: people young enough and unencumbered enough to stay out there in the park day and night while a movement is created. Those of us who were in Washington D.C., Kent State, and every other city across the U.S. in the late sixties and early seventies keep saying to ourselves, “I wish I could be in Liberty Park, too.” But there’s the mother who requires 24-hour care, the house that needs to be ready for winter, the woodpile that needs to be split, and the animals that need to be fed and cared for.
The anti-war movement addressed all things that sustain a war of occupation: the imperialism of the war mongers, the military industrial complex, and the race and class distinctions that sent a disproportionate number of young men and women of color and low economic status to be killed. These power structures are still with us, and I suspect there’s plenty of conversation about them among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. But the overriding focus on the growing economic inequality illuminates Wall Street’s free market fetishism, which eludes the control of even the weakest regulatory oversight and defines an even more insidious hegemony than the war mongering political and corporate establishment we’ve been fighting forever.
I mentioned in a previous blog posting the conversation I had with a young friend who didn’t want to hear about what went on in the sixties, that the social network has supplanted the need for organizing in the streets. I’m sure all this twittering and tweeting is a lot less cumbersome than printing fliers on ditto machines, but there’s nothing like meeting your compadres face to face in a public space with a common sense of purpose. Maybe this time around, with their general assemblies, their consensus building skills, and the message on the wall “It’s the system, stupid,” they’ll avoid some of the internecine struggles that tore the New Left apart. Maybe not. But I’ve heard so many of the people interviewed in various Occupies around the country say, “I’ve been waiting for years for this to happen.” It’s impossible to keep cynicism at bay, without being part of an uprising of consciousness and spirit and action. (Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—Antonio Gramsci.) I may not be there physically, but I’m there, one way or another.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: Mark and Steve
As the entire blogosphere knows, Steve Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer this past week. Although he lived for almost six years with a rare, “treatable” form of the cancer, it got him in the end. While the doc in the emergency room who treated Mark used Jobs as an example of everything that’s wrong with a medical system that provides every option for the rich and bankruptcy for the poor, not even a liver transplant and the best care money can buy could save him (see Diary of a Bad Year, February 13, 2011).
His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.
I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.
Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.
My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.
His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.
I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.
Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.
My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.
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