Occupy Wall Street Music + Events

Worship the Tent. Love the Tent.

Last night, Occupy LA got raided. And if you sailed in here looking for hi-def videos of police abuse, iconic shots of defiant protesters making iconic stands against The Man or impassioned diatribes against the eviction… well, I guess you’re gonna have to move on to BlogDiva or some other pandering retweeter/OWS cheerleader. Last night was a real turning point for me, one where I feel my hopes for Occupy and the direction those in the local encampment have chosen have truly diverged. So much for Solidarity, right?

The raid took place about a mile away from me, so there’s no reason that I couldn’t have shown up. But over the past few weeks, seeing the direction of the local encampment and the stagnation and paralysis that had set in as GAs failed to move swiftly on vital issues of public safety and overall purpose, I could not force myself to defend an encampment that quite frankly needed to end. To the best of my knowledge, most, if not all, of the local movement’s biggest successes – the #N17 protests at Bank Of America Plaza, Bank Transfer Day – came from other sources (that’s right, Bank Transfer Day did not stem from Occupy, but from LA activist Kristen Christian, a woman who in a rather telling interview with Democracy NOW! refused to align herself with Occupy.) or were organized in large part with the help of big labor. Too many times, OLA refused to take the initiative in forging their own unique path, instead waiting to see if New York would figure it out for them. It took Villaraigosa pulling the plug to get national media to finally pay attention in any meaningful way to them.

Keep this in mind about LA – this is a HUGE city, the poster child for decentralized urban sprawl, right? A truly effective grassroots movement should work with this. Yet most of the attempts to create encampments in other neighborhoods have fizzled, while at City Hall, one of the only things that people could agree on wholeheartedly was that the occupation should continue THERE, for as long as we wanted, without any sorts of benchmarks for progress or effectiveness to justify it for the rest of the world. After all, we’re the 99%. We represent the hope of America, and we don’t need no stinkin’ permits.

I suppose I should have seen this coming. Most people who showed up later in the game don’t remember the early days of this encampment, when people willingly, if not happily, moved their tents onto the sidewalk in response to a 10 p.m. curfew at the park, and moved shop to the North Lawn to accommodate a film shoot at City Hall’s request. (Sean Penn, who starred in this film, for whatever reason didn’t bother to say hi to us, fwiw. Oh, well.) One early GA focused on the issue of smoking, since it’s illegal in all city and state parks here in California. People insisted they didn’t want to comply with even a smoking area, since this is where they were LIVING now, after all. And with enough hard blocks put up, the proposal to ban smoking (as if somehow our will trumps state law) was withdrawn.

Flash forward a few weeks later, and then you have people suggesting we take the office space, farmland and SRO housing Villaraigosa offered AND stick to the encampment. This floored some commenters online, and played directly into what they considered delusions of grandeur and entitlement. (This came up again for me watching the livestream of OLACivEngagement, the only stream which filmed the police action within the park until the bitter end. Next to her was Action Committee coordinator/former b-movie actress Elise Whitaker, who in reading the California Civic code Section 52 over a bullhorn, seethed when reaching the part about extracting “twenty-five THOUSAND dollars!!” from the flesh of the cops for violating their civil rights. Yup, Elise, they’ve declared you numerous times an unlawful assembly, and you’re going to sue them. Spoken like a true American.) To be fair, outreach with students and communities of color have been ongoing, but they have all taken a back seat to the encampment’s survival for the time being, when the social and economic justice issues uniting them all have, too, when they should be front and center.

Right now, I know OLA Media has been scouring the ‘net for any sort of footage on police violence. One blog post on their website mentions some which occurred as protesters were leaving the encampment. This I expected – LA LOVES to riot, and I’m sure the LAPD fully anticipated the biggest threat to come not from the occupiers, but from pissed-off bystanders looking to get even immediately after the eviction went down. And I can’t help but feel that deep down inside, OLA desperately hoped for police violence. They need this boost to swell their ranks, to garner sympathy, to gain the fawning support of the left-wing media that has staked all of its credibility upon their shoulders.

At this point, I am convinced that OLA’s main goal at this point, like any political group, is to perpetuate itself, to retain some semblance of cohesion however it can, and with a movement as diffuse and willfully undefined as theirs is, the only way it can for now is by maintaining the encampment. The one shot, pictured above, of the Occupiers huddled around the tent, says it all to me, of how deeply fetishized the encampment has become amongst the true believers. I wonder aloud if this is what it’s come to – frightened, paranoid souls clinging desperately to the one good (if not original – Tahrir Square called, and it wants its flyleaf back) idea it had. I’m surprised they didn’t sacrifice a baby lamb to the tent or something.

Time will tell where this may head. I feel, especially with the support given amongst Occupiers for Naomi Wolf’s conspiracy rant in The Guardian, that it could head towards a very paranoid, backwards isolationism and further irrelevance. Hell, it could even lead to something as horrific as a sort of Oklahoma City for the left, if it goes too overboard. Sure, Occupy insists on nonviolence, but after having seen enough fistfights break out at OLA in its waning days, I simply can’t believe all of them were started by Wells Fargo-funded provocateurs. Despite what glib New Age Pollyanna types like Charles Eisenstein would have us believe, this isn’t some New Age lovefest ringing in the evolutionary ascension of humanity, just in time for 2012. There’s hard feelings and real rage at the heart of Occupy, and I’ve seen enough GAs go off the rails to know that OLA cannot always fully control its own worst impulses when they come to the surface. The only way we’re going to prevent them from taking over is if we’re honest with each other about why we truly lost the encampments.

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