A Class Act

As a surpassingly ideological woman, Margaret Thatcher would probably recoil at how the new film The Iron Lady depicts her in distinctly personal terms as an aging, widowed, out-of-power politician struggling with dementia. But in at least one way the film reflects a political sea change that Thatcher helped set in motion: the decline of the idea that class is a relationship that structures both inequality and solidarity.

In The Iron Lady, class is a form of social distinction, a kind of snobbery that Thatcher overcomes in her own Conservative Party (along with sexism) to become prime minister. In this view, her rise is a triumph for pluck and meritocracy. The Labor Party politicians that she battles and the demonstrators arrayed against her are cardboard figures, either simpletons or hooligans.

Thatcher triumphed as a politician, the film suggests, because she remained true to herself in the face of all opposition. The content of her policies, and their impact, receive comparatively little attention. Yet this is the woman who did as much as anyone to popularize the neoliberal world we live in today, where society is a fiction, greed and gain are the engines of progress, and the most modest forms of social democracy are decried as nothing more than socialist dictatorship.

Some of this is unavoidable in a feature film organized around one central character. But I can't shake the feeling that some viewers will come away from The Iron Lady seeing Thatcher's career as a triumph for diversity (grocer's daughter overcomes the snobs) while never thinking that her vision of politics and government, which denied inequalities of class and exalted individualism at the expense of solidarity, brought us to the atomized, insecure, and massively unequal world that we inhabit today.

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Hitch

Everybody’s writing about Christopher Hitchens, so I thought I would add my two cents. I never met him, never exchanged apercus over aperitifs, and was never the recipient of his kindnesses or intellectual benefactions. Like other readers of the Nation over the past three decades, I just read him regularly, agreed with him sometimes, disagreed with him other times. Of course, he wrote brilliantly and facilely on any topic of his choosing, and generally asked the big questions, those worth asking. But he was basically a provocateur, a distiller of outrage, generally (except in his marvelous literary essays),a disdainer and avoider of nuance.

His politics were basically limited to foreign policy.(In this he is unlike his great model, George Orwell, most of whose best work was on the class structure in England.) His basic instincts were always right, insisting on the importance of asking about God’s existence, of the need to maximize human freedom, for eliminating the barriers against liberty. But figuring out to achieve this in an unfree world, with plenty of bad guys, and no unalloyed good guys, is always the rub.

I basically agreed with him on Serbia and Bosnia, which I think was his great turning point in his world-view, with his acquiescence in the use of western power to liberate peoples from tyrannical dictatorship. And I understand, and sympathized with his anger at Clinton in not doing enough in the Balkans, and doing what he did tardily and clumsily to advance this goal.

But I simply don’t understand how he went from blasting Clinton for his bombing of a purported munitions factory in 1998,to, three years later, starring in the Amen corner of cheerleaders for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. It seems so unnecessary— there were plenty of leftists and liberals who managed to combine a detestation for Saddam Hussein with opposition to the war, but he was defeated by his basic inability to see nuance in any situation, and this was a war, with horrible people on both sides, that needed nuance slavered into every crevice. And when the war became a fiasco, he had ample opportunity to admit that he had been wrong, but I guess his vaunted courage deserted him.

Anyway his legacy is obscure. His politics for the last decade of his life, a hodge-podge of ultraleftist remnants and his newfound conservative human rights realpolitik, simply did not make much sense. He left no useful political legacy except as a cautionary reminder if how difficult it is to make one’s way through the mine field of our post-post Cold War world.

If he resembles anyone, its a funnier hipper less sententious version of Whittaker Chambers for our time (with Sidney Blumenthal a stand-in for Alger Hiss.) . He will be remembered, and pardoned by many, for writing extraordinarily well. I don’t think he would have thought that was enough.

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Journalists Under Arrest

According to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and spokesmen for the Bloomberg administration, the reporters arrested at the breakup of Occupied Wall Street and ensuing protests in lower Manhattan were arrested for their own safety. Or because they were trespassing on private property. Or because they had no right to be at the scene of an ongoing police operation. Hogwash. Reporters have been visiting crime scenes and accompanying police officers on dangerous and not so dangerous operations since the nineteenth century. The only conclusion I can come to is that the NYPD preferred to do its work in the dark, without independent observers. And that speaks badly for the NYPD.

The press passes that reporters carry--which are issued by the police department--clearly state that they permit the bearer to cross police lines in pursuit of a story. The idea behind the practice dates to 1836, when the newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was admitted to a downtown brothel that was the scene of the murder of one Helen Jewett. As Bennett was admitted to the premises while others were kept outside, the story goes, a guard explained, "He is an editor--he is on public duty."

The notion of journalists as the eyes and ears of the public is thus an old one in New York City. It's an ideal worth taking seriously because police officers, like elected officials, act in the name of the public. If we don't have a chance to observe them in action through the eyes of reporters, then we are blinded to what is being done in the name of our city. And a blind democracy is not a healthy democracy.

Zuccotti Park may be spic and span, but something smells when the NYPD insists on arresting journalists who want to watch cops make arrests.

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Order Reigns on Wall Street

I arrived at Zuccotti Park today around 1 pm, too late to have seen the eviction in the early morning hours. I did, however, see plenty of examples of how NYPD policing strategies raise tension and curb dissent. I also got a chance to think about how the Occupy movement can grow from this latest turn of events.


Along Broadway at the eastern edge of the park, around 1 pm today, the police had demonstrators and pedestrians squeezed between metal police barriers on the park side and a double line of police officers on the Broadway side. On the sidewalk, that made passing by the park crowded and at times tense.

For me, it was one more example of a problem that dates back to the Giuliani years: the practice of treating public assembly as a problem to be controlled. In the end, that makes for demonstrations hemmed into holding pens patrolled by lines of grim looking cops. On both the police and demonstrators' sides, this was not a situation conceived to cool down hotheads.

I also want to note that the Times reported that reporters were barred from the park when the evictions took place. As was noted in "Police Clear Zuccotti Park..."

Reporters in the park were forced to leave. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said it was for their safety. But many journalists said that they had been prevented from seeing the police take action in the park, and that they had been roughly handled by officers. Mr. Browne said television camera trucks on Church Street, along the park’s western border, were able to capture images.

That's more proof, if you need any, that the fate of honest and independent journalism is inextricably linked to other freedoms like the right to protest. The First Amendment, as my late friend Jim Carey liked to point out, is more than a guarantee of freedom for journalists: it is an exhortation to gather and speak freely in a democratic way of life.

In the long run, I've always thought that the Occupy movement should value a continued presence in the park over holding turf for 24 hours around the clock. Equally important, it has to make some demands or make itself the street protest division of a movement that raises coherent demands of its own to get us out of this economic crisis.

In the long run, OWS lost to the cops last night and the right to demonstrate took another beating. In the long run, however, this can become a chance to regroup and come back fighting for a more just future.

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Paddling the Bronx River

The wealth of outdoor adventures to be found within the borders of New York City always astounds me, from bouldering in Central Park to mountain biking in Highbridge Park to beach combing at Jamaica Bay. But nothing matches the autumn canoe trip that I took last week under sunny skies and luminous fall foliage on the Bronx River.

To dedicate the Thain Family Forest, a rare old-growth forest that has been given new pathways and environmentally educational signage, the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx held a festival with walks, poetry, music and more.

For me and my wife, the best part of the festival was a short canoe trip on the Bronx River run by the Bronx River Alliance. The Alliance has done great work to clean up the river and make it a setting for hikes, canoe trips, and communing with nature. Last Sunday, they brought canoes to the river and we had a great time paddling New York City's only true freshwater river. (The Hudson is a salt water estuary and the East River is a tidal strait.)

Afloat on the Bronx River, all we could see were forests, the shoreline and sun-dappled waters. The distant hum of traffic and stray soda cans occasionally reminded us of the city around us, but most of the trip was a great escape from concrete and traffic.

Thanks to the good work of the Bronx River Alliance, there are all sorts of ways to enjoy the river. We'll be back.

The festival continues for the weekend of November 12-13. If you want to paddle, get there early. On the day of our visit, there were lots of eager canoeists waiting to get out on the water.

Photo by Clara Hemphill.
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Occupied Wall Street Journal

Last night I visited Occupied Wall Street on my way home from work. I strolled around the encampment, took in the sights, and came home with the best example I have yet found of the depth, complexity and reach of this movement: a copy of the encampment's newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

The front-page stories by Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges were nothing that you couldn't read in The Nation (not that there's anything wrong with that fine publication.) But the inside pages, with pieces on the "The Progress of Revolutions" and an international timeline on this year in dissent, and back pages featuring union endorsements of the occupation, and articles on the principles and practices of the occupation, give a sense of the movement's range and principles.

My Spanish-language edition of Occupied contained the most interesting thing I've seen on the encampment: a map of the site. As it shows, walking from the northeast corner of Zuccotti Park to the southwest you'll go from the library to the general assembly to the info desk to the kitchen to the sleeping area to the medical service.

There are plenty of flaky types participating in the occupation, but the people I met running the kitchen, library and information desk were all smart, hard-working, welcoming and organized. Their organizational capacities, which seem to hold the whole operation together, are the embodiment of new forms of politics and participation.

As Alexander Hamilton might have told you when he founded the New York Post to support the Federalist Party, newspapers are a great way to build and maintain a movement. Even in the age of Web, the local and global dimensions of The Occupied Wall Street Journal give the occupation a kind of gravity that should be taken seriously.

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Lost in the Headlines

In the Daily News and the New York Post, the peaceful nature of last night's protest at Zuccotti Park, which brought 10-20,000 people to downtown Manhattan, was lost in headlines that emphasized a confrontation between police and maybe 200 of the protesters that took place late in the evening.

The front page of the News trumpeted "Brawl St.," complete with a cop blasting pepper spray at a protester. Inside, a news story provided a much more accurate depiction of the evening's events and stressed how clashes broke out only after nightfall. And a column by Jimmy Breslin grasped the importance of the rally and its union presence.

The Post gave over its front page to the death of Steve Jobs and ran "It's Brawl Street" on page 7. The Post acknowledged that the protest was peaceful before it turned violent late in the evening but emphasized the confrontation, thus allowing the last act in the drama to define the story about the rest of it.

The New York Times ran "Seeking Energy, Unions Join Wall Street Protest" on the front page above the fold beneath a four-column photograph of the demonstrators. This piece, clearly the product of lots of reporting on the unions and the occupy Wall Street movement, relegated the post-demonstration violence to one paragraph. But what the piece ignored in breaking news was compensated for with strong analysis and a great map of Zuccotti Park that helps explain the organizational depth of the protesters who set up camp in the park.

As we saw in the Sixties, a peaceful protest was defined by disproportionate coverage of a trouble-seeking minority of protesters. As is so often the case, it was the photos and headlines that were most misleading. Photographs are great for capturing action and anger, but they just can't carry the nuances best conveyed by words.

Journalists can and should do better. At the same time, the protesters who ended the night by looking for a confrontation on Wall Street, which was beyond the site of the rally, made their own mistake. Their actions made it easier for headline writers and photographers to misrepresent their movement. At the next protest, we need to see wiser heads prevail.

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Marching on Wall Street

A few days ago, I walked through Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to check out the occupation of Wall Street and found a ragtag mix of earnest protesters, young people, and homeless-looking folk. Tonight, I returned with thousands of marchers who trekked down Broadway to protest the our country's unjust and inadequate responses to the economic crisis. I marched with union members, teachers, musicians, white collar workers, peace activists, and environmentalists. This is a real movement for economic justice and the Democrats ignore it at their peril

The breadth, spirit and order of tonight's march were impressive. These were the left end of the people who elected President Obama--from radicals to liberal Democrats--and they are the foundation for any consequential movement for progressive change in the United States. They are also people who understandably feel ignored by the current administration.

Old faces from other protests, union members from Local 100 of the Transport Workers' Union and the Communications Workers, and smiling onlookers brought a great sense of energy, steadiness and purpose to the procession. The best piece of sloganeering I saw was a sticker that many people wore on their lapel, simply reading "99%." It was a great reminder that the marchers were part of the majority in the country and that the economy ought to serve us and not the other way around.

Up to now, reporting on the Wall Street occupation has depicted the protesters as everything form Sixties holdovers to nut cases. Gina Bellafante's piece in the Times was an example of this kind of journalism, managing to be snide and shallow at the same time. She focused on the weirdest people in the park, dismissed the rest of them as unrealistic, and then left. Tonight's demonstration is an answer to her. So was the occupants' committees organized to deal with cleanup, security, and arts and cultures. Some of those folks may be anarchists, but that doesn't mean that they don't know how to govern themselves.

After months and years of being kicked around by the Great Recession, tonight thousands of New Yorkers kicked back. It felt great.

If we find a just way out of this crisis, it will be because people in power--starting with the White House--hear the voices in Zuccotti Park.

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Searching for VJ Day

On my way to work this morning, I passed the World Trade Center site. There were lots of camera crews, lots of commuters and lots of cops. Everybody seemed to be taking pictures, but there was no obvious focal point to the scene--no waving flag, no inspiring orator, no sailor giving a nurse a passionate kiss as in Times Square at the end of World War II. I was glad that Osama bin Laden met his just end, but I couldn't shake the feeling that this was not a clear-cut ending, the way VJ Day was for World War II. I rode to work anticipating revenge attacks and an interminable war in Afghanistan. Then Peter, in one of our many conversations conducted by cell phone as I stride through Newark, gave me a new way of looking at the situation.

With bin Laden dead, the US can begin redefining its fight against Al Qaeda and its allies. That means enduring vigilance, but hopefully a giant step away from the wars like Iraq and Afghanistan that have done so much to tarnish our democracy and stain our reputation in the Muslim world.

John Kerry got it right in 2004: the United States' war against Al Qaeda and its allies should be conducted with the long-term goal of reducing it to something like our national fight against organized crime: something we do with complete seriousness, but not something that eternally defines us and our nation.

Kerry knows something about war, unlike George Bush and Dick Cheney, but that didn't stop the GOP from ridiculing him as an ineffectual, defeatist Democrat. Hardly.

For some time, we've needed a win in the fight against Al Qaeda that would restore our sense of strength, reduce our fears, and give us the confidence to wage this struggle in ways that are consistent with our best selves.

When US forces killed Osama bin Laden, they gave us a just and useful victory. Let the president make the most of it, even if it isn't the equivalent of VJ Day.

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Mission Accomplished; New Mission Starting

The death of Osama bin Laden is a moment for genuine national pride, a rough but necessary form of justice meted out to an evil, evil man, who was responsible for the death of thousands of innocent people. President Obama and all those involved in the operation deserve the gratitude of the nation. But the real question is, where do we go from here? Since 9/11 the hunt for Osama bin Laden has been seen by most Americans in an intensely personal way. Now that we have accomplished this, there is no better time to examine the two wars we have waging, with the ostensive purpose of destroying al-Queda, in Iraq and Afghanistan, though both wars long ago sprawled away from any such simple objective. It is time to, accurately this time, declare mission accomplished, and end American involvement in the wars. And while we’re at it, we can reexamine the security and surveillance state that has burgeoned since 9/11. There’s no restoring the World Trade Center, or the thousands of lives that were lost in its destruction, or going back to a pre-9/11 world, but perhaps now we can move forward, beyond the world 9/11 created. For the first time since September 11, 2001, a president of the United States has the moral and political standing to really explore how this country has changed, since 9/11, often in ways not for the better. I was reading the other day how by 1944, literally hundreds and books and studies had been produced on the questions raised by the "post-war world." It is time Americans started thinking a little about what the world would be like when the war on terror, or whatever the Obama administration calls it, is over. It is time to start contemplating a new post war world. I hope that President Obama makes the most of this unique opportunity to reorient America, and make it, and the world it so crucially shapes, better places to live, with brighter futures.

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