Once again, the gripes about Occupy Wall Street are mounting: people keep saying that they have to come up with some coherent demands, or it’s all a waste. It’s time for all of us to step up and stop telling them what they have to say. It’s time for all of us to speak.
So here’s my response to the naysayers.
Occupy Wall Street has served a crucial function as a placeholder on two levels – and by placeholder, I mean something very, very important. A placeholder is someone who holds a space open, in order to make it possible for something to happen in that space.
On the material level, the people of OWS have held the space of Zuccotti Park open: they have created a physical space that encourages new thinking and new behavior, debate, consensus, and education. (It deeply disturbs me to call that place Zuccotti Park, as if the “owners” who named it after the chairman of Brookfield Properties, or as some accounts say after a family member who was on the City Council -- could rewrite the history of the space: from now on, I’ll refer to it as Liberty Plaza Park, its real name.)
Many people have complained dismissively that the people camping in Liberty Park are a “ragtag bunch of anarchists, drug addicts, and homeless people.” Those terms are an attempt to characterize the OWS occupiers as marginalized, less worthy of consideration than “respectable” people. It’s an attempt not to take them seriously – when every indication is that the occupiers have created a cultural space in which serious, reasoned argument is not only welcomed but encouraged. Of course it makes sense that those who can occupy Liberty Park consistently are those who don’t have demanding jobs, or high rent to pay – those who have chosen or been forced to live on the economic margins, or at least have more flexibility. All I can say is that I’m grateful to those people: they have taken the risk to be physical placeholders – to keep the park for the occupation, to run the risks of discomfort and police brutality, and thus to enable others to take part whenever they can. So I thank those whose sacrifice made that possible.
The exercise of democracy is exhilarating – and there’s something incredibly special and empowering about being in the public arena to do this. On the Tuesday morning after Bloomberg had cleared Liberty Park, I went down to show support. A judge had ruled that the park had to be reopened, but Bloomberg had refused to obey this ruling: he did not feel that his police officers needed to obey the rule of law. I walked around the park, reciting the first amendment to police officers, reading from the judge’s court order, and trying to engage people in conversation. It felt amazing. Standing in front of a phalanx of cops in riot gear who were defying a judge’s order clarified everything for me: I understood on a visceral level how wrong the city’s response has been. I understood how corrosive it is when a city’s law officers do not obey the law, when they feel empowered to beat peaceful protesters, and mace them, and mistreat them in prison. It was a moment of pure clarity. I could feel the money and greed and corruption that keeps this system in place, and sics the cops on protesters to maintain its power. And my moment of illumination could happen because the placeholders – the committed OWS occupiers – had kept Liberty Park open for the public. Public debate has to happen in pubic space.
On the level of discourse, OWS has held open the space where a reasoned argument about U.S. society needs to happen. The huge outpouring of support for OWS -- people showing up for Thursday’s day of action, those who’ve donated money, or those who tell pollsters they support the movement, and those across the country and the world who’ve taken their own space in solidarity – this wave of popular support indicates that vast numbers of Americans feel their own concerns have been excluded from public debate. In fact, the concerns of regular people – the 99% -- have often not even been acknowledged, let alone taken seriously. On the level of discourse, then, OWS has forced open a space of debate. No politician can now safely ignore the concerns of such a huge number of people.
The OWS placeholders have held open a space for us all. It’s not necessarily their job now to fashion a list of demands – it’s up to all of us who have been empowered by them to move forward and articulate our demands.
So here’s my demand:
Over the past 30 years, starting with Reagan and continuing through every president, Democratic and Republican, the financial system in this country has been tinkered with in order to make it more and more favorable to banks and businesses and those who make money from them, and less favorable to working people who live on salaries rather than on assets. The tinkering is deliberate and incremental: there is a network of laws and regulations – or rather, a process of deregulation – that allows banks and traders and corporations to pull huge profits out of the system, with no regard for the consequences. Banks can package toxic mortgage assets and sell them, making a profit; then, when the assets go bad, the banks can be bailed out with taxpayer money and still reward their executives with huge bonuses. They can do this because Congress has allowed them to do so. The banks have bought and paid for this system that favors them so highly – they pay millions into the campaigns of politicians who support them. This system is not an accident; it’s not a free market; it’s not a level playing field – and it’s not democracy.
Thus, I demand that Congress appoint an independent commission to review the banking regulation system. I demand that Congress put Elizabeth Warren in charge, because she has proven through her work with the Consumer Protection Bureau that she understands the system, can explain it clearly, and will fight for the rights of regular working people. I demand that this commission make specific recommendations for an overhaul of the regulations. I demand that Congress accept a new system. And I demand that those who have been seen to bend the old rules be brought to justice and held publicly accountable.
I am sending my demand to my state senator, my state governor, my U.S. senator, and to the White House. I invite you all to do the same thing. OWS has empowered me: now it’s time for me to do my job. Join me!
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Engine of Plot Churns Through a Sea of (Muted) Grief
Watching John Kelly’s Find My Way Home, and the talkback afterwards, led me to musing once again about the structure of Kelly’s performances. As he was talking to the audience about the multi-layered, multi-genre elements of his works, I found myself using a term from literary criticism: the engine of plot. In a novel, the engine of plot is an emotional momentum that creates and maintains a plot line, a coherence, an arc or trajectory through the text. Find My Way Home – and some of Kelly’s other pieces – has an emotional narrative thread that’s utterly clear, powered by deep feeling. The engine of this plot is like a lifeline for the audience, stretching and pulling us through the performance, leading to the climax. If you know the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, then you know what will happen: that Orpheus, having found love, will lose his beloved through death; his attempt to cheat death and get her back will fail. He ends, like all of us, alone. On the level of plot structure, then, there’s no suspense: we know what will happen, and we’re free to ponder the immutable sadness of mortality, and the futility of our efforts to outwit it. The engine of plot moves us through, like Ariadne’s thread in the Minotaur’s labyrinth: it’s charged with emotional coherence – it’s a story strong enough to bear the weight of the audience’s expectations. Since this thread takes care of our need for a logical story-line, it also leaves us free to relax, and to allow ourselves to free-fall into the other layers of meaning. The anxiety that many avant-garde performances deliberately provoke through their rejection of conventional logic is missing – the challenge lies not there but in our willingness to play with genre, to let Kelly shower us with image and sound.
Kelly says that this piece is about his response to AIDS – to losing friends and lovers, to watching an entire generation of artists die without fulfilling their promise. Loss and grief, both personal and cultural. As he pointed out, if those promising artists who died in the eighties and nineties had survived, the current art scene would be unrecognizable. This piece, with its soaring, beautiful Gluck score, opens us to melancholia, as we meditate on what we have lost. And as with all Kelly pieces, there are multiple cultural references to draw us viscerally into grief: videos, music, dance, amazing images such as the vision of the underworld where the dead are forced to dance with dummies in some parody of a dime-a-dance competition – dance to the point of exhaustion, till they collapse. Some of those references, of course, work in ways Kelly can’t predict: when he uses the Noel Coward song “I’ll See You Again,” he couldn’t know that my mother singing that as she bustled around the house is one of my few enduring memories of her, since she died when I was young. I sometimes find myself singing it and thinking of her – so Kelly’s meditation on death and loss mingled with my own, deep in my heart.
And since he first performed this piece in 1988 with collaborators who later died themselves, the piece has mutated now into a new meditation – on how grief changes as time passes. The pain of loss is not so sharp, not so urgent. And the audience is different: a new generation didn’t experience the devastation of the AIDS years first hand: what might it mean to them?
Still moved by Kelly’s performance, I went the next day to a completely different venue: a conference about the catholic church and LGBT people. The connection between this and Kelly’s grief and loss may not be clear to everyone, but listening to the iconic Sister Jeannine Gramick and a powerful response by Jamie Manson re-opened an old wound that any queer who was raised catholic must at least recognize. The violence of the Vatican’s response to LGBT people has barely been acknowledged, let alone assuaged: I was moved to tears to hear it spoken of honestly, compassionately, thoughtfully, analytically, by outraged people who have begun to find language to describe the damage. The violence continues, whether one has left the church or tries to stay and fight from the inside (it continues to puzzle me why I should still feel this violence when I rationally do not feel an affinity for catholicism: is it that past damage can never be healed unless it is communally acknowledged?). The difference is that now there is a growing group of people whose work and language clearly tells what has been done – to women, and to queers. They tell us why it matters and what has been lost because of this violence; they tell us why it is wrong, why the Vatican is wrong, and how we could reclaim ourselves. To sit in a room full of people who are finally willing to acknowledge truth – to affirm our reality – is an experience so powerful as to shake me to the core. I began to dream of rituals that could possibly take this affirmation and embody it within a community – to create a witnessing that might heal, so that then one could move on.
So it turns out that there is more in common than one would think between John Kelly and people who want to talk about queer catholics: there is trauma, and grief, there is a lack of acknowledgment, and a violent fracturing of community when people are thrown out. When I think of the effects of AIDS, I think about people who died, but I also think about their families: for every wonderful mother who marched in a vigil with a candle for her dead child, there were too many of the other families – the ones who showed up after the death and threw their child’s partner out of the house, who took everything and claimed that their blood rights trumped any gay relationship. Those families are like the church, violating their own code of ethics, supposedly based on love. They deliberately break community by marking queers as non-people, people who don’t deserve even to belong. To be cast out of one’s family, one’s spiritual community -– that is traumatic.
Thinking of families and churches leads me to consider those whose grief is considered legitimate. Every year on 9/11, the families of those who died in the World Trade Center have their grief publicly validated -- in fact, their grief seems to allow them to claim special rights over everything related to their loss: on whether a mosque should be allowed near the WTC, on whether a hideous memorial should be built in Liberty State Park, on how much money they should get. Their grief, they say, is special, and no one dares challenge them, because the lost ones have been marked as innocent. Their innocence is doubled: not only were they merely working there, but the attackers were outsiders for whom Americans claim no responsibility (in contrast to the Oklahoma City bombing, which is not nationally commemorated every year, since its origins are more problematic). The WTC families insist on – and repeatedly receive -- the public acknowledgment of their loss -- yet no public, national acknowledgment has ever been made about the devastation of AIDS. People who die of AIDS are somehow not innocent; their deaths cannot be mourned. Kelly’s comment about the enduring loss to the arts community of all those who died, and everything they would have brought to fruition, reminded me of how no one ever publicly says this; no one even says what a terrible loss all those deaths were and are, just on a personal level. The death of gay people and people of color (the ones most affected by AIDS) still does not register as a real loss in the public consciousness, the way the deaths of the people in the WTC does. In the same way, the violence done to women and queers in the catholic church does not register as a problem in the public consciousness.
The families of the 9/11 lost ones feel good about how they behaved: they don’t look back and see themselves behaving badly – they feel they were patriotic and brave; the families who threw their AIDS children away don’t want to think about how they behaved – another reason for not wanting to commemorate AIDS deaths.
What mutes grief? Acknowledgment, community, ritual. And time. But first of all, acknowledgment. So I am deeply moved by those who have the courage to insist that what is done to queer catholics is wrong, just as I was moved twenty years ago by those who insisted that HIV/AIDS did not strip one of personhood.
Kelly says that this piece is about his response to AIDS – to losing friends and lovers, to watching an entire generation of artists die without fulfilling their promise. Loss and grief, both personal and cultural. As he pointed out, if those promising artists who died in the eighties and nineties had survived, the current art scene would be unrecognizable. This piece, with its soaring, beautiful Gluck score, opens us to melancholia, as we meditate on what we have lost. And as with all Kelly pieces, there are multiple cultural references to draw us viscerally into grief: videos, music, dance, amazing images such as the vision of the underworld where the dead are forced to dance with dummies in some parody of a dime-a-dance competition – dance to the point of exhaustion, till they collapse. Some of those references, of course, work in ways Kelly can’t predict: when he uses the Noel Coward song “I’ll See You Again,” he couldn’t know that my mother singing that as she bustled around the house is one of my few enduring memories of her, since she died when I was young. I sometimes find myself singing it and thinking of her – so Kelly’s meditation on death and loss mingled with my own, deep in my heart.
And since he first performed this piece in 1988 with collaborators who later died themselves, the piece has mutated now into a new meditation – on how grief changes as time passes. The pain of loss is not so sharp, not so urgent. And the audience is different: a new generation didn’t experience the devastation of the AIDS years first hand: what might it mean to them?
Still moved by Kelly’s performance, I went the next day to a completely different venue: a conference about the catholic church and LGBT people. The connection between this and Kelly’s grief and loss may not be clear to everyone, but listening to the iconic Sister Jeannine Gramick and a powerful response by Jamie Manson re-opened an old wound that any queer who was raised catholic must at least recognize. The violence of the Vatican’s response to LGBT people has barely been acknowledged, let alone assuaged: I was moved to tears to hear it spoken of honestly, compassionately, thoughtfully, analytically, by outraged people who have begun to find language to describe the damage. The violence continues, whether one has left the church or tries to stay and fight from the inside (it continues to puzzle me why I should still feel this violence when I rationally do not feel an affinity for catholicism: is it that past damage can never be healed unless it is communally acknowledged?). The difference is that now there is a growing group of people whose work and language clearly tells what has been done – to women, and to queers. They tell us why it matters and what has been lost because of this violence; they tell us why it is wrong, why the Vatican is wrong, and how we could reclaim ourselves. To sit in a room full of people who are finally willing to acknowledge truth – to affirm our reality – is an experience so powerful as to shake me to the core. I began to dream of rituals that could possibly take this affirmation and embody it within a community – to create a witnessing that might heal, so that then one could move on.
So it turns out that there is more in common than one would think between John Kelly and people who want to talk about queer catholics: there is trauma, and grief, there is a lack of acknowledgment, and a violent fracturing of community when people are thrown out. When I think of the effects of AIDS, I think about people who died, but I also think about their families: for every wonderful mother who marched in a vigil with a candle for her dead child, there were too many of the other families – the ones who showed up after the death and threw their child’s partner out of the house, who took everything and claimed that their blood rights trumped any gay relationship. Those families are like the church, violating their own code of ethics, supposedly based on love. They deliberately break community by marking queers as non-people, people who don’t deserve even to belong. To be cast out of one’s family, one’s spiritual community -– that is traumatic.
Thinking of families and churches leads me to consider those whose grief is considered legitimate. Every year on 9/11, the families of those who died in the World Trade Center have their grief publicly validated -- in fact, their grief seems to allow them to claim special rights over everything related to their loss: on whether a mosque should be allowed near the WTC, on whether a hideous memorial should be built in Liberty State Park, on how much money they should get. Their grief, they say, is special, and no one dares challenge them, because the lost ones have been marked as innocent. Their innocence is doubled: not only were they merely working there, but the attackers were outsiders for whom Americans claim no responsibility (in contrast to the Oklahoma City bombing, which is not nationally commemorated every year, since its origins are more problematic). The WTC families insist on – and repeatedly receive -- the public acknowledgment of their loss -- yet no public, national acknowledgment has ever been made about the devastation of AIDS. People who die of AIDS are somehow not innocent; their deaths cannot be mourned. Kelly’s comment about the enduring loss to the arts community of all those who died, and everything they would have brought to fruition, reminded me of how no one ever publicly says this; no one even says what a terrible loss all those deaths were and are, just on a personal level. The death of gay people and people of color (the ones most affected by AIDS) still does not register as a real loss in the public consciousness, the way the deaths of the people in the WTC does. In the same way, the violence done to women and queers in the catholic church does not register as a problem in the public consciousness.
The families of the 9/11 lost ones feel good about how they behaved: they don’t look back and see themselves behaving badly – they feel they were patriotic and brave; the families who threw their AIDS children away don’t want to think about how they behaved – another reason for not wanting to commemorate AIDS deaths.
What mutes grief? Acknowledgment, community, ritual. And time. But first of all, acknowledgment. So I am deeply moved by those who have the courage to insist that what is done to queer catholics is wrong, just as I was moved twenty years ago by those who insisted that HIV/AIDS did not strip one of personhood.
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