Nonviolence Is Creative
Consumerism is violent. The apologists for ads and products, life styles and brought-to-you-by media are disastrously wrong. The thousands of marketing confrontations that a person must get through daily are not persuasive, clever, or normal. The 50 foot-tall actor wearing a watch and grinning at me - is not my new best buddy, Amen? This is atmospheric assholishness…
The mono-culture of Consumer Society - this corporate economy - can only be created by threatening us with loss of our good looks, status, youth and power. They want us to quietly believe that without their products we will suffer the annihilation of our personal identity.
And what does this psychic aggression have to do with the police I found surrounding Zuccotti Square this afternoon? A longing for a very recent pleasure of freedom from corporate bullying swept through us as we stared at the empty square. When we lived in that little plot of granite, there were no corporations. There were no threats. We had a gift economy. We were being of service to one another. It was a civil revolution. What am I saying? It still is.
What was it that made journalists froth at the mouth and cops come running with their pepper spray on September 17th? At least part of it was - we were starting a new economy. Their products were not inside the square to supervise our desires. And - once Consumerism is established as the dominant economy, it is far easier to militarize police and physically attack those who resist the allegiance to corporations. Yes it is surprising that the shift from psychic to physical violence is that automatic. But sure enough - once Consumerism was banned from a small patch of ground - especially public space in the shadow of Wall Street - that armed police were terrorized and the logos on the sides of the surrounding buildings seemed to angrily glow.
The police are paid directly by big corporations. So they are both city cops and rent-a-cops. They are still spending the 4.5 million given them by JP Morgan Chase shortly after the takeover of the square on September 17th. Was that extraordinary pay-out really a gift to the city to restore order in the face of anarchists? No, of course not. The institution sitting on the top of the present economy saw a clear threat to their scam. The gift economy aspect of Occupy Wall Street was immediately vilified in the commercial press as hippy-esque, bongo-ridden and noble-but-naive. We didn't listen to those people, watching their anger alongside that of the cops. And that was before two thousand Occupy sites erected their tents around the world. We were learning to start a democracy from scratch, and found it fascinating, and still do, and so do more and more people.
How far will police and law enforcement agencies go in attacking those who enter public space and stay there together, these islands of no Consumerism? At what point does a policeman admit that the refusal to cooperate with consumerism is not grounds for violence? If they are violent, then they have made their choice. But we will continue to say (without violence but full of conviction!) that you police are part of the 99% and - we welcome you!
Consumerism is violent. The apologists for ads and products, life styles and brought-to-you-by media are disastrously wrong. The thousands of marketing confrontations that a person must get through daily are not persuasive, clever, or normal. The 50 foot-tall actor wearing a watch and grinning at me - is not my new best buddy, Amen? This is atmospheric assholishness…
The mono-culture of Consumer Society - this corporate economy - can only be created by threatening us with loss of our good looks, status, youth and power. They want us to quietly believe that without their products we will suffer the annihilation of our personal identity.
And what does this psychic aggression have to do with the police I found surrounding Zuccotti Square this afternoon? A longing for a very recent pleasure of freedom from corporate bullying swept through us as we stared at the empty square. When we lived in that little plot of granite, there were no corporations. There were no threats. We had a gift economy. We were being of service to one another. It was a civil revolution. What am I saying? It still is.
What was it that made journalists froth at the mouth and cops come running with their pepper spray on September 17th? At least part of it was - we were starting a new economy. Their products were not inside the square to supervise our desires. And - once Consumerism is established as the dominant economy, it is far easier to militarize police and physically attack those who resist the allegiance to corporations. Yes it is surprising that the shift from psychic to physical violence is that automatic. But sure enough - once Consumerism was banned from a small patch of ground - especially public space in the shadow of Wall Street - that armed police were terrorized and the logos on the sides of the surrounding buildings seemed to angrily glow.
The police are paid directly by big corporations. So they are both city cops and rent-a-cops. They are still spending the 4.5 million given them by JP Morgan Chase shortly after the takeover of the square on September 17th. Was that extraordinary pay-out really a gift to the city to restore order in the face of anarchists? No, of course not. The institution sitting on the top of the present economy saw a clear threat to their scam. The gift economy aspect of Occupy Wall Street was immediately vilified in the commercial press as hippy-esque, bongo-ridden and noble-but-naive. We didn't listen to those people, watching their anger alongside that of the cops. And that was before two thousand Occupy sites erected their tents around the world. We were learning to start a democracy from scratch, and found it fascinating, and still do, and so do more and more people.
How far will police and law enforcement agencies go in attacking those who enter public space and stay there together, these islands of no Consumerism? At what point does a policeman admit that the refusal to cooperate with consumerism is not grounds for violence? If they are violent, then they have made their choice. But we will continue to say (without violence but full of conviction!) that you police are part of the 99% and - we welcome you!
Mickey Mouse Pleads with the Wisconsin Children: Don't Revolt! Watch TV! Go Shopping!
There is a new sales campaign the Disney Company recently announced. Wall Street analysts talk excitedly about the “newborn market.” Disney representatives enter hospitals’ birth rooms with sales kits, trying to sell onesies with Mickey logos to the enthralled or scared parents soon after the baby cries for breath. Yes - the invasion by products at rites of passage, at birth, the 1st day of school, sexual initiation, the wedding day -- such steps in a young life are besieged by marketing departments and their hyperventilating Mad Men.
These are precisely the points in a wiser culture where the seeds of imagination are planted – just the opposite of the controlling imagery of Disney. That company’s cute-faced rats and dogs and princesses have the assignment of leaving their young audiences gurgling in a state of amazed consumption. Hopefully for the corporations, a life of shopping has begun. Make that: the shopping that is mistaken for freedom.
When will we make the connection between official American violence and the free-for-all of our products? The cause and effect is hidden under labored arguments of freedom of choice, and the legal personhood of corporations. It is uprisings in northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula (and in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana) that lead us to believe that the absurd primacy of products can be stopped.
We ought to keep Disney out of the baby nursery, of course, and keep Nike out of the high school locker-rooms. Don’t allow sexed-up war-game videos to hypnotize kids, some of whom then go on to get killed in the U. S. Army sequel to their childhood games. So many young people are in the pipeline of products-to-war, pixels-to-bullets – with the corporations making money on both ends of that tragic journey.
We are rewarded with our American Dream of convenience and entertainment – but the violence of our market will turn on us as it did on Mubarak and Qaddafi. The imitation of democracy is the same as the imitation of national heroism – see photos and statues of generals on horse-back so common to these semi-comic dictators. Both imitating systems fall when their citizens remember the sensation of freedom. And freedom is hard to forget.
As Hilary Clinton pontificates about the “Free West,” she must feel a certain uneasiness. She served on the Wal-mart board, and takes Wall Street cash for campaigns. She must fear that we recall actual freedom, that risky, original feeling. We don’t have to Google it. As we grow up, we don’t need a corporate force making our choices. We are alone with the mystery of life and we are members of a human community experiencing the same amazing journey. We have the DNA of freedom in our souls.
(The Church of Earthalujah! This Sunday, 7:30 EST, Theatre 80, New York City)
There is a new sales campaign the Disney Company recently announced. Wall Street analysts talk excitedly about the “newborn market.” Disney representatives enter hospitals’ birth rooms with sales kits, trying to sell onesies with Mickey logos to the enthralled or scared parents soon after the baby cries for breath. Yes - the invasion by products at rites of passage, at birth, the 1st day of school, sexual initiation, the wedding day -- such steps in a young life are besieged by marketing departments and their hyperventilating Mad Men.
These are precisely the points in a wiser culture where the seeds of imagination are planted – just the opposite of the controlling imagery of Disney. That company’s cute-faced rats and dogs and princesses have the assignment of leaving their young audiences gurgling in a state of amazed consumption. Hopefully for the corporations, a life of shopping has begun. Make that: the shopping that is mistaken for freedom.
When will we make the connection between official American violence and the free-for-all of our products? The cause and effect is hidden under labored arguments of freedom of choice, and the legal personhood of corporations. It is uprisings in northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula (and in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana) that lead us to believe that the absurd primacy of products can be stopped.
We ought to keep Disney out of the baby nursery, of course, and keep Nike out of the high school locker-rooms. Don’t allow sexed-up war-game videos to hypnotize kids, some of whom then go on to get killed in the U. S. Army sequel to their childhood games. So many young people are in the pipeline of products-to-war, pixels-to-bullets – with the corporations making money on both ends of that tragic journey.
We are rewarded with our American Dream of convenience and entertainment – but the violence of our market will turn on us as it did on Mubarak and Qaddafi. The imitation of democracy is the same as the imitation of national heroism – see photos and statues of generals on horse-back so common to these semi-comic dictators. Both imitating systems fall when their citizens remember the sensation of freedom. And freedom is hard to forget.
As Hilary Clinton pontificates about the “Free West,” she must feel a certain uneasiness. She served on the Wal-mart board, and takes Wall Street cash for campaigns. She must fear that we recall actual freedom, that risky, original feeling. We don’t have to Google it. As we grow up, we don’t need a corporate force making our choices. We are alone with the mystery of life and we are members of a human community experiencing the same amazing journey. We have the DNA of freedom in our souls.
(The Church of Earthalujah! This Sunday, 7:30 EST, Theatre 80, New York City)
The one question I return to: From the center of our vast population can we human beings reach out to the thing that created us? The industrial inebriation of traffic-life, computer-life, and military-life - is so complete. We as the top dog species isolate ourselves from the Earth – just as the Earth makes the effort to talk to us. And oh – it’s trying to get our attention! It freezes us out, bakes us, drowns us spectacularly. But we treat each natural disaster as a stand-alone event and nature as a mystifying criminal. Can we reach creation when it is routinely defined this way every day? As far as I can tell, the first thing that is required of us, to survive, is to notice - our creation is speaking to us within the weather and geologic upheavals that are now tabloidized by the "news."
I live more or less in the center of 20 million people, here with Savi and Lena. The world around us has turned into a self-repeating suburb, and sometimes we have the tragic, final feeling that the Earth is out of reach. Last November a narrow storm came through Brooklyn like a rifle shot, 100 miles an hour winds, trees born in the 19th century flying across the street and smashing into the edifices of revered monuments. The Earth can reach us.
What are we doing? We are staring at a screen. We're crossing the room. We stand in our front door and look out across a man-made horizon with little pocket parks surrounded by trash. We stand here in the doorway and realize that we will have to turn to the wilderness within. Can we be nomads in our own bodies? We look down at our bodies. We are mostly water and mostly wilderness with a personality guiding the unruly raw material. Our bodies are largely bacteria that we carry with us, invisible to the eye, wilderness that we give our own name. If the Earth's horizon has disappeared, well, we have a lot of funky life right here.
Like my 20 million neighbors, I long to cross a bridge back to "deep time." I need animism everywhere. I need spirits rising from the furniture, from the computer, from the baby's crib... like steam full of intelligence. Can I walk on that bridge back to deep time by walking in Coney Island? Or the Green-wood Cemetery? I live in a city that imitates itself, manufactures replicas of itself. New York was the capital of world culture decades ago. We try to reach from the center of these 20 million people, reach creation from an ingrown spiral of self-congratulation. The Greatest City in the World.
The Earth is in Prospect Park, is in the Inwood forest, is in the swirling mouth of the East River. The Earth rises up and enters New York like an aggressive immigrant who will change the world. The thing that created us confronts us and suddenly we know: the Earth is totally hip.
I live more or less in the center of 20 million people, here with Savi and Lena. The world around us has turned into a self-repeating suburb, and sometimes we have the tragic, final feeling that the Earth is out of reach. Last November a narrow storm came through Brooklyn like a rifle shot, 100 miles an hour winds, trees born in the 19th century flying across the street and smashing into the edifices of revered monuments. The Earth can reach us.
What are we doing? We are staring at a screen. We're crossing the room. We stand in our front door and look out across a man-made horizon with little pocket parks surrounded by trash. We stand here in the doorway and realize that we will have to turn to the wilderness within. Can we be nomads in our own bodies? We look down at our bodies. We are mostly water and mostly wilderness with a personality guiding the unruly raw material. Our bodies are largely bacteria that we carry with us, invisible to the eye, wilderness that we give our own name. If the Earth's horizon has disappeared, well, we have a lot of funky life right here.
Like my 20 million neighbors, I long to cross a bridge back to "deep time." I need animism everywhere. I need spirits rising from the furniture, from the computer, from the baby's crib... like steam full of intelligence. Can I walk on that bridge back to deep time by walking in Coney Island? Or the Green-wood Cemetery? I live in a city that imitates itself, manufactures replicas of itself. New York was the capital of world culture decades ago. We try to reach from the center of these 20 million people, reach creation from an ingrown spiral of self-congratulation. The Greatest City in the World.
The Earth is in Prospect Park, is in the Inwood forest, is in the swirling mouth of the East River. The Earth rises up and enters New York like an aggressive immigrant who will change the world. The thing that created us confronts us and suddenly we know: the Earth is totally hip.
Killing To Shop
It’s official: Consumerism and Militarism are the same thing.
Watching the Jets football game last Sunday, I witnessed three entertainments. First, there was a commercial for a new video game, Black Ops, in which ordinary over-weight accountants, peppy secretaries, i.e. “ordinary Americans” --- sport enormous guns. In this 30 second ad, they proceed to blow up entire buildings, billowing flames skyward, with just the flick of a trigger and a smirk on their face.
Then the television returns to the Jets game, set, hup and it’s a running play. So my second entertainment is the armored crushing sound of the tackle, the pile-up, and a man remains on the ground as the others return to the huddle. He’s unconscious. The producers are ready with his college photo, which resembles a mug shot. He lies there, attended to by short white medics. They are trying to talk into his helmet, trying to engage the runner, taking his pulse. It’s becoming embarrassing. Cut to another commercial message, and this time it is the United States Army.
Again – the screen fills with people who look like they are from my own neighborhood but they are surrounding a house, a copter hovering over-head. A young man who looks like the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts kicks in a front door. He shouts and rolls into the opening, spraying the interior of the house with gunfire. The house is a generic earthen structure, like we see in the Iraq or Afghanistan news segments. No family members who might be living there, attacked by this ferocious American taxpayer, are pictured in the commercial.
The thing is – the Black Ops and the Be All You Can Be commercials of last Sunday are virtually interchangeable in my memory. They have only the unconscious athlete dividing them. Both ads had the theme of people on the sidewalks of everyday America – turned into killing machines. One commercial urges a purchase of a gift for Christmas, while the other recruits the football fans to participate in actual war. They both suggest that ordinary working stiffs standing on the curb waiting for the bus, say, can suddenly lunge through a crack in reality and command outlandish firepower.
Shopping and killing are now the same gesture. Consumerism and Militarism – the two fundamentalist systems that rule American life, are wrapped into one monstrous faith. So the corporate marketers are hoping that we will imitate the images they have readied for us. We are supposed to jump into those pixilated constructions of our bodies, offer our real flesh, and assume that same nonchalant, even comic, response to killing.
And so, it is Christmas. I don’t believe that this big play for our hearts and minds is working. As much as our ordinary lives are considered under-exploited markets, we’re not buying, and this Christmas will prove it. More and more of us have a sense of the violence of the corporate Christmas, whether the collateral damage is in the sweatshop or in the defenseless home with parents and grandparents and children inside.
When we refuse to shop, we stop killing.
The Earth Is A Public Figure
I always read the papers with a yearning. The headlines, photos and lead paragraphs flicker on the screen under my stare, and I’m looking for something not there. I find myself looking at the table, the sun on the wall, then out the window into the trees.
The media streets with media bodies, media living rooms with media politicians doing media interviews smiling media smiles – how does the life of the Earth enter the picture? The news is a glowing liquid landscape. How does the material reality that these living rooms and flesh are made of, rise up and make its statement that this is a deadly fantasy?
As the Earth’s freak storms multiply and keep getting closer, we still kick the Earth out off the news cycles as fast as possible, bleach it from public figures, delete it out of their stories. Even Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri are demoted. We burst into their closets with our paparazzi hoping to find something salacious. This is Earth-avoidance. The Himalayan glaciers melt as we corner Al and Raj and give them lie-detector tests. Meanwhile, where is the Earth? Making weird cameos …gussied up as a glowing ball that bounces into deep space or re-appearing as a wet blue marble graphic that lends a space race patina to a cell-phone made to look like a space-capsule… what?
The Earth is not regarded as up to date, can’t be trusted with trending, with futures, with where to risk your money. When earth-life loses patience and demands our attention in floods, fires, mudslides, earthquakes, tsunamis; when it pushes Lady Gaga out of the spotlight, and she must wait in the wings with Brad and Angelina and Barack and Michelle for the tragedy to subside; then we have a moment of opportunity, to listen to the being at the center of our greatest natural events. Sometimes the Earth makes a surprise entrance into our everyday life.
Our Everyday lives are a smoldering revolutions. A writer named Michel de Certeau wrote about how we check the advance of a billboard or an intercom voice. We shield ourselves from the news, we duck and feint, protecting our own intimate moment with a lover, or with our child. Or we try to be alone for a moment with ourselves. We take a book into the john, the ads follow us there too. On the F Train we close our eyes to behold a daydream while the Budweiser horses clamor over our heads.
We can find a way, even in 2010, to share an unmediated thought with the Earth. If the life of the Earth could get through to us human beings, out here where we are stranded in our consuming lives, that’s it. That’s it. When that happens then another world is possible. That moment must be the beginning of radical change.
I always read the papers with a yearning. The headlines, photos and lead paragraphs flicker on the screen under my stare, and I’m looking for something not there. I find myself looking at the table, the sun on the wall, then out the window into the trees.
The media streets with media bodies, media living rooms with media politicians doing media interviews smiling media smiles – how does the life of the Earth enter the picture? The news is a glowing liquid landscape. How does the material reality that these living rooms and flesh are made of, rise up and make its statement that this is a deadly fantasy?
As the Earth’s freak storms multiply and keep getting closer, we still kick the Earth out off the news cycles as fast as possible, bleach it from public figures, delete it out of their stories. Even Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri are demoted. We burst into their closets with our paparazzi hoping to find something salacious. This is Earth-avoidance. The Himalayan glaciers melt as we corner Al and Raj and give them lie-detector tests. Meanwhile, where is the Earth? Making weird cameos …gussied up as a glowing ball that bounces into deep space or re-appearing as a wet blue marble graphic that lends a space race patina to a cell-phone made to look like a space-capsule… what?
The Earth is not regarded as up to date, can’t be trusted with trending, with futures, with where to risk your money. When earth-life loses patience and demands our attention in floods, fires, mudslides, earthquakes, tsunamis; when it pushes Lady Gaga out of the spotlight, and she must wait in the wings with Brad and Angelina and Barack and Michelle for the tragedy to subside; then we have a moment of opportunity, to listen to the being at the center of our greatest natural events. Sometimes the Earth makes a surprise entrance into our everyday life.
Our Everyday lives are a smoldering revolutions. A writer named Michel de Certeau wrote about how we check the advance of a billboard or an intercom voice. We shield ourselves from the news, we duck and feint, protecting our own intimate moment with a lover, or with our child. Or we try to be alone for a moment with ourselves. We take a book into the john, the ads follow us there too. On the F Train we close our eyes to behold a daydream while the Budweiser horses clamor over our heads.
We can find a way, even in 2010, to share an unmediated thought with the Earth. If the life of the Earth could get through to us human beings, out here where we are stranded in our consuming lives, that’s it. That’s it. When that happens then another world is possible. That moment must be the beginning of radical change.
9/11 vs. The Earth
A remarkable letter was sent out in the last 48 hours, from the heads of Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and Bill McKibben of 350.0rg. The letter asked for new activist ideas in this time of earth emergency, and asked for a world-wide “work party” on 10/10/10. (We are joining that party, as part of our worship-show that Sunday at the Highline Ballroom in NYC.)
This letter: intriguing. They say it straighter than NGO-people usually do: “We’re not going to beat the corporations by acting nicely.” They see paralysis. The letter paints a picture of a species unable to cope with its own dysfunction, on a global and apocalyptic scale. Of course they cite the bible-like disasters, Chinese mudslides, Russian fires and Pakistani floods. I got a bone-chilling feeling from “The U. S. Senate decided to keep intact its 20-year bipartisan record of doing nothing about global warming.”
And the letter concludes by - surprise! - not being a fundraising appeal. It asks for… creativity. Creativity? These leaders want new ideas for Earth defense. So the major emotions of this communication go from anger, to a rousing call to work, to a request that we find the courage and art of a new radical act.
My first thought this morning is that September 11th needs to be dealt with in an honest way. There is something about the mass self-hypnosis by this bombing at the heart of Wall Street that hurts our ability to create. Our official American response, you remember, was: 1) Go shopping and 2) Go to war. By avoiding the question of whether Wall Street might have brought this crime on itself by its aggressions across the world – oh can’t even ask THAT question – we congealed into sentimental patriotism. Wall Street ended up victimizing millions of us, and in our recession of money, of emotion, and of creativity, we’re unable to act - while the Earth feverishly DOES act. Oh, the Earth is being VERY creative. Earth-a-lujah!
Thinking that a whole system is wrong has been beyond America’s creativity for a long time, but it is not beyond the Earth’s. To actually oppose corporate capitalism we would have to find in ourselves the kind of radical American character that founded this country in the first place, when we faced the awe-inspiring British Empire.
People who love the Earth and want to save it have been maneuvered into a box since 9/11. We haven’t stopped shopping and warring, so it’s “ethical shopping,” and a “draw-down” of troops. We need to attack corporate gradualism and its holy of holies – never-ending expansion. This absurd idea has morphed into the average American’s idea of Democracy and Freedom, and this claim pounds into our senses in thousands of marketing events every day.
The Earth is our leader. Can we be the cultural equivalent of the flood and the fire? The Life After Shopping Church will concentrate its worship in the lobbies of banks that finance mountaintop removal, the UBS Bank from Switzerland, and PNC from Pennsylvania.
A remarkable letter was sent out in the last 48 hours, from the heads of Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and Bill McKibben of 350.0rg. The letter asked for new activist ideas in this time of earth emergency, and asked for a world-wide “work party” on 10/10/10. (We are joining that party, as part of our worship-show that Sunday at the Highline Ballroom in NYC.)
This letter: intriguing. They say it straighter than NGO-people usually do: “We’re not going to beat the corporations by acting nicely.” They see paralysis. The letter paints a picture of a species unable to cope with its own dysfunction, on a global and apocalyptic scale. Of course they cite the bible-like disasters, Chinese mudslides, Russian fires and Pakistani floods. I got a bone-chilling feeling from “The U. S. Senate decided to keep intact its 20-year bipartisan record of doing nothing about global warming.”
And the letter concludes by - surprise! - not being a fundraising appeal. It asks for… creativity. Creativity? These leaders want new ideas for Earth defense. So the major emotions of this communication go from anger, to a rousing call to work, to a request that we find the courage and art of a new radical act.
My first thought this morning is that September 11th needs to be dealt with in an honest way. There is something about the mass self-hypnosis by this bombing at the heart of Wall Street that hurts our ability to create. Our official American response, you remember, was: 1) Go shopping and 2) Go to war. By avoiding the question of whether Wall Street might have brought this crime on itself by its aggressions across the world – oh can’t even ask THAT question – we congealed into sentimental patriotism. Wall Street ended up victimizing millions of us, and in our recession of money, of emotion, and of creativity, we’re unable to act - while the Earth feverishly DOES act. Oh, the Earth is being VERY creative. Earth-a-lujah!
Thinking that a whole system is wrong has been beyond America’s creativity for a long time, but it is not beyond the Earth’s. To actually oppose corporate capitalism we would have to find in ourselves the kind of radical American character that founded this country in the first place, when we faced the awe-inspiring British Empire.
People who love the Earth and want to save it have been maneuvered into a box since 9/11. We haven’t stopped shopping and warring, so it’s “ethical shopping,” and a “draw-down” of troops. We need to attack corporate gradualism and its holy of holies – never-ending expansion. This absurd idea has morphed into the average American’s idea of Democracy and Freedom, and this claim pounds into our senses in thousands of marketing events every day.
The Earth is our leader. Can we be the cultural equivalent of the flood and the fire? The Life After Shopping Church will concentrate its worship in the lobbies of banks that finance mountaintop removal, the UBS Bank from Switzerland, and PNC from Pennsylvania.
What I Learned in Detroit
At the United States Social Forum in Detroit I concentrated on three areas: reclaiming the commons, organic farms and the end of mountaintop removal. My idea was that this trinity of issues make a revolutionary combination.
Reclaiming the commons - taking back into public ownership the air, water, parks, schools and much of government from the privatizing take-over begun by Ronald Reagan, is already underway. Commons-defense is often couched in liberal NPR-like soft-focus rhetoric, but can be an effective bullwork against corporate capitalism. The expansion by Wall Street each quarter mandates a broad attack on the natural world (often commonly owned only in theory, like “the sky”). The one-way extraction can be from the ocean beyond the national 200 mile limit or deep in the interior of our individual psyches. From first nations people to government financial regulators – we are now resisting. With new limits, corporate capitalism can no longer expand. It must change or die.
Organic farming is on the upswing in the United States. For the first time in 40 years we have more farms now than we had a year ago. Small farms begun by young couples or groups of friends, often without farming as an inherited skill is making the difference. The economy that results is the non-corporate and locally sensitive culture of food. The farmer’s market and roadside trading undermines chain stores like Whole Foods. Of course, the sheer health that this personally-raised minimally-shipped food allows in its customers – results in radical clear thinking!
Removing mountaintop removal would end a domestic terror-war and the political corruption that has kept this violence going for decades. It would bring democracy to Appalachia, corrupted so thoroughly by big coal. For the West Virginians and Kentuckians in our choir, the end of the bombing of old peaks means breaking the siege on their loved one’s communities, the end of asthma in children and all the cancers from selenium, magnesium, chromium, arsenic, etc. released by the bombs. For The Church of Life After Shopping, this breakthrough must come at least partly from America’s consuming of power: We must make visible the light, heat and air conditioning of our invisible consumption. This would be a great (and very difficult) step forward for our longtime anti-consumption project…
The commons, the food and the energy. This trinity of issues interacts to set a course that is driven by a fierce common sense. Americans know that corporations will not look out for their families or communities. And we know that corporations do not cause prosperity if they are allowed to devour alternative cultures. And we have learned the hard way that profit motives do not necessarily serve our self-interest. But the public commons allows the play and mix of people in the way that a healthy eco-system fills up with life. The farmers will tell you that life on earth responds to our seeding and tending with its intimate power.
And the mountains are a good place to take a long walk after my workshops in Detroit. Much thanks to the many people who worked on the US Social Forum this year.
At the United States Social Forum in Detroit I concentrated on three areas: reclaiming the commons, organic farms and the end of mountaintop removal. My idea was that this trinity of issues make a revolutionary combination.
Reclaiming the commons - taking back into public ownership the air, water, parks, schools and much of government from the privatizing take-over begun by Ronald Reagan, is already underway. Commons-defense is often couched in liberal NPR-like soft-focus rhetoric, but can be an effective bullwork against corporate capitalism. The expansion by Wall Street each quarter mandates a broad attack on the natural world (often commonly owned only in theory, like “the sky”). The one-way extraction can be from the ocean beyond the national 200 mile limit or deep in the interior of our individual psyches. From first nations people to government financial regulators – we are now resisting. With new limits, corporate capitalism can no longer expand. It must change or die.
Organic farming is on the upswing in the United States. For the first time in 40 years we have more farms now than we had a year ago. Small farms begun by young couples or groups of friends, often without farming as an inherited skill is making the difference. The economy that results is the non-corporate and locally sensitive culture of food. The farmer’s market and roadside trading undermines chain stores like Whole Foods. Of course, the sheer health that this personally-raised minimally-shipped food allows in its customers – results in radical clear thinking!
Removing mountaintop removal would end a domestic terror-war and the political corruption that has kept this violence going for decades. It would bring democracy to Appalachia, corrupted so thoroughly by big coal. For the West Virginians and Kentuckians in our choir, the end of the bombing of old peaks means breaking the siege on their loved one’s communities, the end of asthma in children and all the cancers from selenium, magnesium, chromium, arsenic, etc. released by the bombs. For The Church of Life After Shopping, this breakthrough must come at least partly from America’s consuming of power: We must make visible the light, heat and air conditioning of our invisible consumption. This would be a great (and very difficult) step forward for our longtime anti-consumption project…
The commons, the food and the energy. This trinity of issues interacts to set a course that is driven by a fierce common sense. Americans know that corporations will not look out for their families or communities. And we know that corporations do not cause prosperity if they are allowed to devour alternative cultures. And we have learned the hard way that profit motives do not necessarily serve our self-interest. But the public commons allows the play and mix of people in the way that a healthy eco-system fills up with life. The farmers will tell you that life on earth responds to our seeding and tending with its intimate power.
And the mountains are a good place to take a long walk after my workshops in Detroit. Much thanks to the many people who worked on the US Social Forum this year.
Oil Spills and Real Change
It’s good that strip-mining, tar sands, hydro-fracking, oil spilling – this flood of nightmares is scaring us silly. We’re getting that energy extraction has consequences on this earth. What could be more important than that? But our public discussion doesn’t go to the inevitable political change that is on the horizon.
The elephant in the middle of the room is: slowing down our consuming will surely change our relationship to corporations. Earth-friendly economies are local, without sweatshops, fewer ships and trucks and packaging, and a lot less Wall Street. That is the big riddle facing capitalists. Their annual reports are full of SUSTAINABILITY! SUSTAINABILITY! -- but their fundamentalist devotion to expansion every quarter cannot possibly be sustainable. So each of us physically absorbs thousands of marketing messages that say, essentially, “We can shop our way out of this.”
We walk around with our stunned brains and it doesn’t quite register that the oil spill in the gulf is now carrying advertising. The spill has become commercial programming. There’s that quarterly report again! The nightmare of energy is becoming just another reality show with high ratings, another product to consume that is made of the byproducts of that same oil. We haven’t sorted out the message from the messenger.
We must not let these crimes congeal into just more excitement over a well-cast villain. Our Puritan culture loves to hate the bad guy. We forget that the bad guys manipulate our Puritan impulse, and have for generations. They are doing that now, with the tragic pelicans, while simultaneously dousing us with green-washing rhetoric and advertisements full of smiles and sunlight.
Follow the money. The corporations are studying us. They need to gauge the popular uprising after the spill. They see how much of our response is flowing through blackberries and iPhones, blogs and email. But, children - THE REVOLUTION WON’T BE TWEETED. Our plethora of connective devices are not a Commons in the center of town. We can smart mob our way toward each other, meet in the farmer’s market or at the peace rally or a swap-o-rama or the fist-waving crowd at the palace gate.
Let’s get the sensual part of communicating going again. (And not just a Live Nation supervised rock show.) The Commons must be re-claimed with our bodies beyond surveillance, outside of demo pens. We must be a crowd of citizens more powerful than the governments and corporations that jealously surround us.Most major change in history saw the Commons physically filled up first. We must battle back against that quarterly bottom line, which needs to physically separate us and has for many years. Ultimately change is physical. It means not consuming with our body. It’s meeting each other in public, then shouting and singing in a great movement. Consuming less means touching more. STOP SHOPPING, START LOVING!
It’s good that strip-mining, tar sands, hydro-fracking, oil spilling – this flood of nightmares is scaring us silly. We’re getting that energy extraction has consequences on this earth. What could be more important than that? But our public discussion doesn’t go to the inevitable political change that is on the horizon.
The elephant in the middle of the room is: slowing down our consuming will surely change our relationship to corporations. Earth-friendly economies are local, without sweatshops, fewer ships and trucks and packaging, and a lot less Wall Street. That is the big riddle facing capitalists. Their annual reports are full of SUSTAINABILITY! SUSTAINABILITY! -- but their fundamentalist devotion to expansion every quarter cannot possibly be sustainable. So each of us physically absorbs thousands of marketing messages that say, essentially, “We can shop our way out of this.”
We walk around with our stunned brains and it doesn’t quite register that the oil spill in the gulf is now carrying advertising. The spill has become commercial programming. There’s that quarterly report again! The nightmare of energy is becoming just another reality show with high ratings, another product to consume that is made of the byproducts of that same oil. We haven’t sorted out the message from the messenger.
We must not let these crimes congeal into just more excitement over a well-cast villain. Our Puritan culture loves to hate the bad guy. We forget that the bad guys manipulate our Puritan impulse, and have for generations. They are doing that now, with the tragic pelicans, while simultaneously dousing us with green-washing rhetoric and advertisements full of smiles and sunlight.
Follow the money. The corporations are studying us. They need to gauge the popular uprising after the spill. They see how much of our response is flowing through blackberries and iPhones, blogs and email. But, children - THE REVOLUTION WON’T BE TWEETED. Our plethora of connective devices are not a Commons in the center of town. We can smart mob our way toward each other, meet in the farmer’s market or at the peace rally or a swap-o-rama or the fist-waving crowd at the palace gate.
Let’s get the sensual part of communicating going again. (And not just a Live Nation supervised rock show.) The Commons must be re-claimed with our bodies beyond surveillance, outside of demo pens. We must be a crowd of citizens more powerful than the governments and corporations that jealously surround us.Most major change in history saw the Commons physically filled up first. We must battle back against that quarterly bottom line, which needs to physically separate us and has for many years. Ultimately change is physical. It means not consuming with our body. It’s meeting each other in public, then shouting and singing in a great movement. Consuming less means touching more. STOP SHOPPING, START LOVING!
THE UPRISING
It’s the worst of times and the best of times. We now face the power of the ultimate destroyer. Major institutions re-ignite their consumer democracy, showering detractors with greenwashing rhetoric as CO-2 emissions rise every month. There is commitment by leaders to a deadly gradualism. On the other hand, we don’t have a social movement. Have we ever needed one more? There’s no uprising.
Everybody wonders if we’re running out of time. No-one knows what a social movement would look like. We’re texting each other madly. We’re gathering at borders and shouting at surveillance cameras. We always feel just a bit too far away, around the bend, ten feet or a hundred feet off. The point of power is elusive.
There is a sense that corporations and governments know an invisible terrain. Say we are talking to a citizen at the ATM, “We have evidence your bank is involved in strip-mining.” Quickly, I’m in jail. I realize I was using the most ordinary notion of democracy, a conversation about power, but got too close to the real vote.
They take my belt and shoe-laces. They take my note-book and pen. I sit on on the bench covered with initials carved into the paint. It occurs to me that I’m not supposed to remember why I’m here. They want me overwhelmed with a vague remorse, a kind of amnesia. I can’t have a sharp object and carve a symbol of my identity in the wall.
I struggle to remember what happened. We completed our Holy Hex of the ATM, glowing before us with the sky-blue swastika of JP Morgan Chase. We intercepted customers at the bank’s cash machine, with our plate of mountain soil and our statistics. The police appeared in the doorway, the lead officer with a black film camera.
Now we’re in Chase’s cameras and NYPD’s cameras simultaneously. They see that we are here remembering ourselves. We are introducing our real names to the student “Tiffany” who wanted her Fast Cash and the retiree Ezekial who shuffled in with his pension check. They look at our sculpted little mountain and smile and wonder. Now is when we cannot be protesters or environmentalists. The experience must replace the labels.
We cannot be texting or pixelating. We scramble their expectations to get personal. What’s this preacher and choir doing in a bank? We are hoping to have a simple conversation in the window of time that we are given by the police, because they’re calling downtown to pull our files.
This is our window, remembering our own names and offering them, exchanging confidences and straightforward opinions. The choir is singing a song with the word “Mountaintop Removal.” This is our window. “We have evidence that your bank…” The police return.
I sit in jail and I remember those few minutes together. That was the uprising. A billion people would have to have that talk. Well, we touched it. We were there. Now we can go back to the mountain and await further instructions.
It’s the worst of times and the best of times. We now face the power of the ultimate destroyer. Major institutions re-ignite their consumer democracy, showering detractors with greenwashing rhetoric as CO-2 emissions rise every month. There is commitment by leaders to a deadly gradualism. On the other hand, we don’t have a social movement. Have we ever needed one more? There’s no uprising.
Everybody wonders if we’re running out of time. No-one knows what a social movement would look like. We’re texting each other madly. We’re gathering at borders and shouting at surveillance cameras. We always feel just a bit too far away, around the bend, ten feet or a hundred feet off. The point of power is elusive.
There is a sense that corporations and governments know an invisible terrain. Say we are talking to a citizen at the ATM, “We have evidence your bank is involved in strip-mining.” Quickly, I’m in jail. I realize I was using the most ordinary notion of democracy, a conversation about power, but got too close to the real vote.
They take my belt and shoe-laces. They take my note-book and pen. I sit on on the bench covered with initials carved into the paint. It occurs to me that I’m not supposed to remember why I’m here. They want me overwhelmed with a vague remorse, a kind of amnesia. I can’t have a sharp object and carve a symbol of my identity in the wall.
I struggle to remember what happened. We completed our Holy Hex of the ATM, glowing before us with the sky-blue swastika of JP Morgan Chase. We intercepted customers at the bank’s cash machine, with our plate of mountain soil and our statistics. The police appeared in the doorway, the lead officer with a black film camera.
Now we’re in Chase’s cameras and NYPD’s cameras simultaneously. They see that we are here remembering ourselves. We are introducing our real names to the student “Tiffany” who wanted her Fast Cash and the retiree Ezekial who shuffled in with his pension check. They look at our sculpted little mountain and smile and wonder. Now is when we cannot be protesters or environmentalists. The experience must replace the labels.
We cannot be texting or pixelating. We scramble their expectations to get personal. What’s this preacher and choir doing in a bank? We are hoping to have a simple conversation in the window of time that we are given by the police, because they’re calling downtown to pull our files.
This is our window, remembering our own names and offering them, exchanging confidences and straightforward opinions. The choir is singing a song with the word “Mountaintop Removal.” This is our window. “We have evidence that your bank…” The police return.
I sit in jail and I remember those few minutes together. That was the uprising. A billion people would have to have that talk. Well, we touched it. We were there. Now we can go back to the mountain and await further instructions.
RUNNING IN GREAT CITIES
Today I jogged through Amsterdam from the Royal Palace on Dam Square to the mouth of the river. Like many European city centers, Amsterdam has evolved into a super mall, an old surface covered with the images of models posing with products, often in gigantic proportions. There is a spell cast on me, regardless of how much outright disgust I have for corporate marketing. By the end of the run, I’ve had thousands of these mannequin-humans stare into my eyes…
The expressions in the models’ faces are the whole range of human experience, from giddy to aghast. Whatever the emotion, they are intense. They make an emotional zone on the sidewalks or plaza before them. We are in the “view shed” of the eyes of these actors, who seem to see something unspeakably mesmerizing, shocking, threatening…
This is now the basic psychological rhythm of our great capitals. Public space is spotted with the reverse gravity of these emotional traps. And there is one look that is most common in 2010, these models are coached to make the same general “acting beat.” They are told to convey a look of primal surprise, like the first news of death, the startled moment of seduction, the leading edge of something unthinkable.
These dramatic eyes hit me again and again during my run. Then it becomes clear that the drama that emblazons each set of eyes, eyes in the surf with a watch, eyes at the opera with a car – these eyes stare out from the same stage. They share the same laws and symbols, the same millions of barrels of liquefied fossils, the same international speculative money systems – now crashing. It is as if there is a single city inhabited by these smooth-skinned staring young people - behind all the great cities of the world. And they are all see a single horrifying thing out here where we’re running in our small-scale everyday lives. The earth is warping us into the sky, killing the little pedestrians they depend on for their sales. The models see it. A slow motion earthquake, like a great shoulder lifting, is burying us.
A few decades ago advertising actors were smiling and relaxed, and there were far fewer of them. That was when Vienna was Vienna and Barcelona was Barcelona. Now these cultures are consumerizing themselves, de-volving from history into identical shopping experiences. The young smooth-skinned movers of products tower over sculpted heroes and goddesses, but their beauty is startled by real horror. The earth is facing them down, the horizons buckling, the tides rising and rising, the wind whirling into killing shapes.
As I run out of breath, I appreciate that there are these lonely paths through public space by which we wind our way between these beautiful, stranded giants and the earth they have affronted. The scale of these two opponents – and the earth must and will win – is so massive. Can we save ourselves by how we live? When I stop running, I am tempted to shop.
Today I jogged through Amsterdam from the Royal Palace on Dam Square to the mouth of the river. Like many European city centers, Amsterdam has evolved into a super mall, an old surface covered with the images of models posing with products, often in gigantic proportions. There is a spell cast on me, regardless of how much outright disgust I have for corporate marketing. By the end of the run, I’ve had thousands of these mannequin-humans stare into my eyes…
The expressions in the models’ faces are the whole range of human experience, from giddy to aghast. Whatever the emotion, they are intense. They make an emotional zone on the sidewalks or plaza before them. We are in the “view shed” of the eyes of these actors, who seem to see something unspeakably mesmerizing, shocking, threatening…
This is now the basic psychological rhythm of our great capitals. Public space is spotted with the reverse gravity of these emotional traps. And there is one look that is most common in 2010, these models are coached to make the same general “acting beat.” They are told to convey a look of primal surprise, like the first news of death, the startled moment of seduction, the leading edge of something unthinkable.
These dramatic eyes hit me again and again during my run. Then it becomes clear that the drama that emblazons each set of eyes, eyes in the surf with a watch, eyes at the opera with a car – these eyes stare out from the same stage. They share the same laws and symbols, the same millions of barrels of liquefied fossils, the same international speculative money systems – now crashing. It is as if there is a single city inhabited by these smooth-skinned staring young people - behind all the great cities of the world. And they are all see a single horrifying thing out here where we’re running in our small-scale everyday lives. The earth is warping us into the sky, killing the little pedestrians they depend on for their sales. The models see it. A slow motion earthquake, like a great shoulder lifting, is burying us.
A few decades ago advertising actors were smiling and relaxed, and there were far fewer of them. That was when Vienna was Vienna and Barcelona was Barcelona. Now these cultures are consumerizing themselves, de-volving from history into identical shopping experiences. The young smooth-skinned movers of products tower over sculpted heroes and goddesses, but their beauty is startled by real horror. The earth is facing them down, the horizons buckling, the tides rising and rising, the wind whirling into killing shapes.
As I run out of breath, I appreciate that there are these lonely paths through public space by which we wind our way between these beautiful, stranded giants and the earth they have affronted. The scale of these two opponents – and the earth must and will win – is so massive. Can we save ourselves by how we live? When I stop running, I am tempted to shop.
FEBRUARY 2012
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JANUARY 2012
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DECEMBER 2011
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NOVEMBER 2011