Slide Mountain in Winter

The hike to the top of Slide Mountain in the Catskills from the trailhead near Winisook often gets knocked as a boring slog through the woods with limited views from the summit. That's debatable at best and untrue in winter. As I learned on 3 January 2013, the summit of Slide, at 4,180’, is a great destination for winter camping in a surreal landscape shrouded in snow.  

My son Max and I loaded up our overnight gear, strapped on our snowshoes, and set off in the late afternoon from the parking lot on Slide Mountain Road.  We followed the yellow-blazed Phoenicia-East Branch Trail to the red-blazed Wittenberg-Cornell-Slide Trail to the summit. While there were a few short and steep sections at the start, most of the ascent was long, gradual climb of about two miles with great views of the late afternoon sun on the forests. 

We started later than I wanted, around 3:30, but by sunset--around 5 pm--we were well into the balsam forest that covers the top part of the mountain. To preserve the ecosystem, overnight camping on Slide is prohibited above 3,500’ from March 22 to December 29. We were happy to take advantage of the winter interlude to sleep on the summit.

The well-packed trail was easy to follow, so we snowshoed until we found a good campsite: off the trail and surrounded by trees to break the wind, but not so wooded that we feared for snow-laden trees dropping their burdens on us in the middle of the night. 

We dropped our packs, gulped some water, and munched granola bars to restore our energy. (The need to eat regularly to maintain body warmth and energy makes winter backpacking a moveable feast.) Then we pitched our tent, a sturdy MSR design pictured here, at our mountaintop campsite. To keep us secure in any winds, we tied our guy lines to snowshoes and ski poles buried in the snow.  For all our precautions, it was a quiet night.

We cooked supper on a butane stove by the light of our headlamps, their beams glistening off sparkling snowflakes and cutting through the steam that rose from our cooking pot. The cold weather made our butane stove predictably slow to boil water, but all worked out fine.    Warmed by a meal of macaroni and cheese, mixed vegetables, and double strength hot chocolate, we soon felt warm and refreshed.

For our evening's entertainment we walked few hundred yards down the trail to the actual summit. The deep snows muffled our every sound.  The trees around us were so covered in snow that their shapes were fantastic—by turns round, bulging and pointy.

From the top of Slide we took in wintry views of the Catskills, then returned to our snug tent and warm sleeping bags for more chocolate.  With zero degree bags and double foam pads, we were comfortable.  

We slept late and ate a breakfast of oatmeal and hot chocolate. As we packed our tent, a passing snowshoer arriving on the summit told us that overnight the temperature had gone down to 0. 

We descended without incident and drove down the mountain. Our only dispute was a generational disagreement on the proper musical accompaniment for our triumphant trip home. We eventually settled on the Grateful Dead and went home happily. 

Slide in the winter is a serious trip. We took the easy route up (compared to the ascent over Wittenberg) and brought good winter gear, including insulated boots, mittens, warm hats, and lots of layers of clothing. Don’t attempt a winter campout on Slide unless you have appropriate gear and a solid knowledge of winter camping. But if you have all of these, it’s a great trip.

Photo by Max Snyder.

After the Storm

Along the East River at  78 Street last night, at abut 8:30 pm, water had crested over the riverside walkways.

 I returned about noon  today to find a much quieter scene. 

On the upper east  and west sides of Manhattan today, there was the amiable, outgoing atmosphere that I associate with a day after a snowstorm in New York City. People step out of their apartments, put on their friendliest faces, and enthusiastically become part of a scene that is much larger then themselves. Downtown and in New Jersey, things are much worse.

Fifty blocks south of me, my friend has no power. Classes at Rutgers-Newark, where I teach, have been cancelled through Friday. Power is out in Newark; one of my students there cut short an e-mail because she wanted to preserve the juice that remained on her computer.

It will be days sorting out this disaster and much longer learning its lessons. But here are two of then.

One, government makes a difference. Comparisons between hurricanes Sandy and Katrina are bound to be inexact, but here in New York we were blessed with effective municipal and state government and a more than competent president. The same cannot be said for the poor people of New Orleans. This is one more proof,  if any was needed, that we cannot leave health, safety and our collective welfare to the free market. Just and effective government is a necessity.

Two, we are in an era when global warming causes violent weather patterns that put us all at risk. In the recent past, natural disasters, activism and independent journalism pushed this issue to the top of the political agenda. Since then, it has all but vanished. Neither the Obama nor the Romney campaigns has had much to say about it. We need to get back to it.

Global warming is not something to be ignored because it is politically inconvenient. Look no further than downtown Manhattan if you want to see its consequences.

Hard TImes

The 1863 Draft Riots, an explosion of protest, race riot and street warfare, are the ugliest upheaval in the history of New York City. Explanations of the episode have changed over time, shifting from economics (Irish workers rioted because they feared competition for jobs from African Americans) to a greater emphasis on white racism. It is the genius of Hard Times, a musical about the riots written by Larry Kirwan, that it grasps both of these explanations in ways that illuminate the hardships suffered by African and Irish Americans in Civil War New York.

The play takes shape in the story of a group of New Yorkers--Protestant and Catholic, Irish and native born, black and white--who seek refuge from the Draft Riots by hiding out in a bar owned by an African American woman, the widow of an Irishman, in the Five Points. The intersections of their lives, rivalries, loves, and animosities illuminate both the characters' individuality and the wrenching conflicts of their time.

Kirwan, whose music with Black 47 has used traditional Irish music, rock and rap to convey the Irish past and present, uses dramatic scenes and the music of Stephen Foster and minstrel shows to tell his story. The choice of Foster, who appears as a character in the play, and the related theme of blackface minstrelsy, are inspired. Foster's story illuminates the blend of vigor and sentimentality that defined American popular music in the mid-nineteenth centry, while minstrelsy helps Kirwan address both the racism and nativism of the time. Kirwan also depicts Foster as tormented by a love affair with a man who turns up in the bar, but this sub theme does more to suggest a reason for Foster's melancholy that it helps to explain his times.

Over the course of Hard Times, Kirwan explores the hardships that scarred both Irish and African Americans----neighbors, rivals and lovers, trapped in a hellish situation. At the same time, he shows how the Irish and African American meeting in song and dance--in the Five Points--produced great American art forms such as tap dance and ragtime. The result is an ending that is sobering yet rousing.

Hard Times was performed at The Cell on 23rd Street in Manhattan as part of the 1stIrish theater festival. Its run is over, but Hard Times surely deserves a revival at another theater soon.

Woodie at 100

Concert for Woodie Guthrie at Brooklyn College

Gatherings to celebrate heroes of folk music and the old left sometimes feel like events for senior citizens.  Last night's concert at Brooklyn  College to celebrate the centennial of Woodie Guthrie's birth was an exception. Despite the abundance of gray hair,  there were enough young people and enough inspired renderings of Woodie's lyrics that the future of folk music and fights for social justice felt secure for another 100 years.

The key to this is the Woodie Guthrie Archive, run by Woodie's daughter Nora. In the archive, along with artwork and more, are almost 3,000 lyrics that Woodie wrote. Over the years, Nora has encouraged musicians to put them to new uses.

Two of the best products of this splendid idea could be heard last night.

Billy Bragg, a great interpreter of Woodie's songs, performed "God Down to the Water," which draws on Woodie's years as a merchant  seaman in World War II. The lyrics, which Bragg set to the haunting tune for he Irish song "She Moved Through the Fair," are a beautiful mediation on love, distance, and the danger of loss.

Equally beautiful, and very different, was the Klezmatics' version of "Mermaid Avenue," Woodie's splendid tribute to that thoroughfare in Brooklyn.  The opening verse alone makes it one of the greatest New York City songs:

Mermaid Avenue that’s the street
Where the lox and bagels meet,
Where the sour meets the sweet;
Where the beer flows to the ocean
Where the wine runs to the sea;
Why they call it Mermaid Avenue
That’s more than I can see.

To get the sound of "Mermaid Avenue," check out this Klezmatics version on YouTube, recorded at the Tarrytown Music Hall.

Woodie's centennial will culminate soon in a concert in Washington, DC. But as far as I'm concerned, his spirit  lives in raised voices, honest struggles, and the sounds of Mermaid Avenue.

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Along the Bronx River

The restoration of the Bronx River is one the great victories of New York environmentalism. Earlier this summer, I got a close look at all the good work the Bronx River Alliance has done to help this waterway when I paddled a 2-person kayak with my friend Jason Barr from Shoelace Park, at 219th Street, to the handsome Hunts Point Riverside Park. If you care at all about environmental justice and beautiful park design, or even if you just hanker to visit places that most people ignore, you owe it to yourself to make this trip. 

River levels were low but passable when we pushed off and we only ran aground a few times. (If you make this trip, bring a boat that can take some scratches.) There were a few falls and rapids that were too dangerous to run, but the portages for these are clearly marked (in English and Spanish) and we never lost our way.

The range of landscapes that you pass through varies from forests in the upper reaches of the river to industrial zones near its mouth. We saw plenty of birds, including egrets and herons. The river runs right through the Wild Asia exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, and I thought I notices some kind of Asian antelope behind the discrete fencing of the zoo.


We stopped for lunch by this falls, which is in the vicinity of the Bronx Zoo. Gazing at the tumbling water, I thought I might have been in the Adirondacks. For folks who live in the Bronx, it's a great gift to have a landscape like this right in their backyard.


To learn more about the restoration of Bronx River, check out a recent piece in the New York Times by Michael Kimmelman, who as architecture critic does a great job of linking design, the urban ecosystem, and social justice.


To learn more about the good work of the Bronx River Alliance, and pick up some tips on paddling this splendid river, visit the homepage of the Alliance.

"Inventing Our Life"

In my youthful travels in the 1970s and 1980s, I encountered three institutions that deeply impressed me as visions of a good and just way of life: the kibbutz, the British National Health Service, and the BBC. All of these have fallen on difficult times in recent decades, but it is the kibbutz that is the subject of an interesting documentary by Toby Perl Frelich, "Inventing our Lives," now playing at the Quad in Greenwich Village. "Inventing Our Lives" explores the history and current crisis of the kibbutz movement, which has fallen victim to a turn away from socialist ideals in Israel, the movement's own internal fights, the rightward turn in Israeli politics, and the passing of the generation that led kibbutzim from their founding into the 1960s.


The film is a friendly look at the kibbutz, but it doesn't ignore the kibbutz movement's contradictions. Communal child-rearing practices sometimes stifled "normal" family life but left women with the jobs of running childcare for everyone. One kibbutz that she looks at was built, to the distress of its American-born kibbutzniks, on abandoned Palestinian homes. And for all the movement's professed egalitarianism, it could be quite elitist in its own way. In the old Israel, kibbutzniks considered themselves part of the vanguard of Israeli society. One consequence of this was that they never embraced the Middle Eastern Jews who immigrated after 1948, thereby cutting themselves off from what would become a large and growing sector in of Israel's population. This failure, "Inventing Our Lives" notes, was one of many factors that undermined the kibbutzim in the long run.


For all the problems that have befallen the movement, and for all the agonizing that accompanies efforts to either revive or privatize the kibbutzim, Frelich's interviews with founders, their children and their grandchildren convey what was best and most compelling about kibbutz life: the freedom that children enjoyed on the kibbutz grounds, the strong sense of solidarity that could turn a campfire singalong into a a swelling chorus that strengthened the voice of the weakest singer, and the beauty of a life that was lived close to nature and close to the artistic and intellectual heritage that kibbutzniks drew from European humanism.


I encountered all of these at Kibbutz Gvat in the Jezreel Valley in the 1980s, where I was a guest and worked briefly in a small workshop making parts for irrigation systems. I remember how a print of a classical painting hung outside one workroom. The painting, along with the shaded walkways between houses, the cultivated fields around, and the lives my friends there enjoyed as singers and musicians,  seemed to me like the perfect blend of the outdoors life, hard work, culture and learning.


Since the 1980s,  Gvat--like the kibbutzim portrayed in "Inventing Our Lives"--has gone through changes that I'm not in a good position to explain or understand. Whether the kibbutzim disappear or reinvent themselves is an open question left hanging at the end of "Inventing Our Lives." Something similar could be said for the BBC and the National Health Service in Britain. The social democratic ideals that animated all of these, and brought out some of the best in the 20th century, are beleaguered but still relevant. Here's hoping that the kibbutz movement  reinvents itself in a way that creates a more just and democratic Israel.

Hiking in Harriman

The hiking paths of Harriman State Park crisscross rocky ridges, military routes of the Revolutionary War, and forty years of my own memories as a backpacker. I shared all of these on a recent three-day trip with my daughter Allison.

She's in the background of this photo, making camp at the William Brien Memorial Shelter. We camped here on a route that scribed a great if lopsided circle, from the Bear Mountain Inn to West Mountain Shelter to the Brien shelter and back to the Inn. Over three days I visited some places I haven't seen in decades and checked out some new ones as well.  

The view from West Mountain Shelter looking down the Hudson Valley to New York City remains one of my favorites. It's a great destination for a first-time backpacker: the route to the shelter on the Suffern-Bear Mountain Trail climbs enough to make things challenging without making things so hard that a novice will get discouraged.

Even more impressive, though, was the view from the summit of Black Mountain ascended from the east on the Appalachian Trail. I had never walked this stretch before, and it involved a sprint where the Appalachian Trail crosses the Palisades Interstate Parkway. Once you cross the Parkway, the path climbs gradually and then steeply to a beautifully contoured stretch of trail that runs along the summit of Black Mountain. The view towards Bear Mountain to the east, and the great ridges of Harriman State Park to the west, is spectacular. If you stay on the Appalachian Trail from this point, you can then walk to the Brien shelter and camp for the night. 

From the Brien shelter, we returned to the Bear Mountain Inn via  Popolopen Gorge, a route that I can't recommend at this time because all sorts of earth moving efforts turn your walk into something like a hike through a construction site. Nevertheless, we eventually came back to Hessian Lake and the Bear Mountain Inn, which marked handsome end to our journey.
 
It was great to share old memories with Allison, a skilled backpacker in her own right, who at the age of 16 already has stories of outdoor adventures to pass on. Doubtless she will accumulate more.

In our crowded metropolitan region, Harriman remains an invaluable resource that makes the pleasures of the outdoors available to everyone. To learn more about the park, and hiking in our region, check out the NY/NJ Trail Conference. Their good work makes possible the great hiking opportunities of Greater New York.

Bonticou Crag

My lifelong love of mountaintop vistas has one complication: I have an ambivalent relationship to heights. For years, I put off an ascent of Bonticou Crag (left) in the Shawangunks because it has a reputation of requiring a head for altitude. So it was with special joy that I climbed it and stood on its summit yesterday with my son Max.

We got up early, drove to Mohonk Preserve, and hiked an easy route of carriage roads and paths to the start of the ascent. Like other scrambles in the Shawangunks, Bonticou Crag is basically a succession of moves: scramble over big boulders, walk along a ledge, squirm up a rock slab, and repeat. 

The difference with Bonticou Crag is that the handholds are trickier, the footholds aren't obvious, and everything is steeper. Twice I recited to myself the joking motto of an American expedition to the base of Mount Everest in the 1950s, which adopted a phrase posted in a school in a Himalayan village: "Gather courage, don't be a chicken-hearted fellow." (For more on this, read the fascinating, insightful and well-written Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver.)

Finally, with a few grunts, gasps and narrow squeezes, we stood atop Bonticou Crag. The view was spectacular, and the classic Shawangunk combination of barren rock and gnarled trees made us feel that we were in an alpine environment. We took a long and pleasantly winding route back to our car, then drove back to New Paltz with Bob Dylan blasting on our CD player.

I have been hiking and cross-country skiing in the Shawangunks for forty years. Going there yesterday with my teenage son Max (and his Bob Dylan CDs) was a great way to combine past and present, along with future prospects for more good hikes.

Of course, for real mountaineers Bonticou would be an easy scramble. For me, it was a strong challenge but an enjoyable one. That's the great thing about hiking: we can all find our Everests according to our abilities. (There is also an easy route up Bonticou that requires no scrambling.) 

And wherever you walk, if you find yourself in a tough ascent, remember the motto: "Gather courage, don't be a chicken-hearted fellow." You'll reach your summit in good time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Black Watch in Brooklyn

The war in Iraq, and military life in general, are so far from the experiences of most Americans that it takes a determined effort to understand them from the inside out. But if you seek to understand them, you should definitely see Black Watch, a brilliant play at Saint Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn about soldiers in the famed Scottish regiment deployed to Iraq.

Grounded in interviews with Black Watch veterans, the play takes the form of encounters between a writer and soldiers in a Scottish poolroom that flash back and forth between the deep past, the present, and the war in Iraq. The play has already won many awards in Britain, and has returned to Brooklyn after an enthusiastic reception at Saint Anne's in 2007. Better than anything I have seen, it captures the complex mix of pride, courage, cynicism, anger, obscenity and solidarity that sustain soldiers in combat.

If you're looking for a critique of the history of the Black Watch in the British Empire, or an examination of British soldiers' relations with Iraqis, you'll have to keep looking. Neither gets much time in the play.

Where Black Watch excels, however, is in its exploration of the ideas, actions and emotions of soldiers. With monologues and dialogues, exquisitely choreographed scenes of combat and barracks brawls, pipe band music and Scottish folk songs, Black Watch takes viewers to a world that few of them will know first-hand. The final scene of the play, which blends an assault and close order drill, conveys the suffering and solidarity of the soldier's life in ways that are extremely moving.

Gregory Burke, author of the play, suggests in a program note that the sense of unity in the Black Watch can be traced to "the male psyche's yearning for a strong identity." He adds that "The army does not recruit well in London or any other big city; fighting units tend to be more at home with homogeneity than with metropolitanism or multiculturalism."

He's on to something, but his play does better than his writer's note at explaining the complex mix of motives and feelings that sustain soldiers. What carries the men in the Black Watch, despite all the pain and contradictions that surround them, is the knowledge that every one of them would risk his life for the other. As a university professor who can find it hard to get people to attend a meeting at 10 am, I know how that sense of solidarity is a rarity in the modern working world. And working class lads aren't the only people looking for a strong identity: the Princeton alumni who gather annually to sing the praises of Old Nassau are perhaps more besotted with their alma mater than these soldiers are with their regiment.

In the end, the veterans of the Black Watch are buoyed by stories: the stories of their predecessors on far-off battlefields and their own stories of Iraq. They guard them closely, but we are fortunate to have them shared with us in this play. If you have any curiosity about these lives and their world, don't miss Black Watch.