The 2012 presidential election has already become a media circus. The Republicans have debated each other roughly once a day for the past seven years, and the actual voting doesn’t take place for another eleven months. The frontrunner seems to change every time someone opens his or her mouth long enough to embarrass him or herself and fall out of the lead. The public is fascinated with the personalities and the drama of the race far more than the actual political implications. It is almost like a reality show, which is why I propose we do away with the façade of dignity and start producing America’s Next Top President.

The cast of characters is in place. We’ve got the handsome guy (Mitt Romney), the somewhat attractive but high-strung lady (Michele Bachmann), the racist (Rick Perry), the black guy (Herman Cain, gone from the race but still in our hearts), and the wildcard (Ron Paul). Plus there’s an effeminate dude (Marcus Bachmann), his natural foil/ love interest (Rick Santorum) and a generic guy who will get eliminated in the first round (Jon Huntsman).

On Bravo’s America’s Next Top President, the candidates will complete a series of challenges with the goal of obtaining the Republican Party’s nomination and squaring off against defending Top President, Barack Obama. There will be alliances, immunities, betrayals, scandals, feuds, and all the other mainstays of reality programming. Even in spite of the public’s general apathy towards the political system, the show is sure to be a hit.

It seems as if magic always happens when these candidates get in front of a camera. So let’s get them on video 24/7, Real World style. Put them all in a house. Even better, put them all in the White House. One by one, contestidates (pretty great word, right?) get “impeached,” and have to return to their home states until only America’s Next Top President remains. What better way to get the public invested in politics than to remove all the boring “issues” and replace them with far more interesting “obstacle courses” and “tribal councils”? The ratings are sure to be through the roof.

There are, I confess, a few impediments to this plan. First of all, a lot of these candidates are pretty old. Every one of them, unfortunately, is over 40, which will make it difficult to capture that coveted 18-35 year-old demographic. Never fear, sponsors! I have a few quick remedies. For all of the challenges (making a runway dress out of an American flag, spotting illegal immigrants in Arizona, defending corporate personhood), each candidate would have a celebrity guest mentor. For example, during the national anthem singing contest in Week 1, Bruno Mars would give Ron Paul some tips on vocal technique while Ke$ha would serve as Mitt Romney’s “swag coach,” giving him advice on loosening up and really working it onstage. But wait, there’s more! Guest Judges Tim Gunn and Simon Cowell! Who wouldn’t tune in for that?

And picture this:

Week 8, the competition is heating up. The contestidates are facing possibly the greatest challenge of all. Not the recession. Not the safe withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Not addressing the demands of the Occupy movement. A pie-eating contest. Apple, obviously. Right in front of the Liberty Bell. What’s more American than that? Overeating while ignoring larger problems, I mean.

Romney taps out early after a dollop of whipped cream penetrates his otherwise-perfect hair, but he had gained immunity the week before, so it’s no big deal. It’s down to Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. Santorum eats his way to an early lead, but Michele stages a comeback. Her husband Marcus sits by her side wearing a leather vest with no shirt underneath and helps her “pray away the pie.” Michele comes within one bite of victory, but she knows that if she eats it, the seams of her pants will burst. She has a tough decision to make. Santorum, however, demands that she forfeit, on the grounds that he doesn’t support a woman’s right to choose. Bachmann, defeated, lays her fork across the table.

All of a sudden, Tom Petty’s “American Girl” begins to blare over the loudspeakers. Wolf Blitzer, the announcer for the event, freaks out.

“But that’s… Sarah Palin’s music!”

It is! Sarah Palin drops out of the sky on an American Flag parachute. She picks up the final forkful of pie and crams it down Bachmann’s throat.

“Mama Grizzlies stick together,” Palin says. “You’re finished, Santorum. Go back to Pennsylvania.”

“Actually, Mrs. Palin, this is Pennsylvania,” Blitzer interjects.

“Can it, Blitzer. Michele and I can’t be stopped. We crushed Santorum, and next week we’re coming for you, Romney. You’re next, President Obama. Steel cage match on the Senate floor.”
She fires a shotgun into the air. Wolf Blitzer cowers beneath a table.

Ratings would be bonkers. Sponsors would trample each other trying to buy advertising. The public would finally show some interest in politics. The only foreseeable side effects are the total lack of respect that America would command on the global stage and the likeliness of provoking some sort of nuclear or environmental doomsday scenario.

But all’s fair in love, war, and reality TV.

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Dear Doug,

What I find immediately interesting reading your three letters is this: there is enjoyment here. It is at once the reader’s enjoyment, the writer’s enjoyment, and the enjoyment of the texts themselves.

Of course, this “themselves” is an amalgamation of others things, a network of traces and allusions from Lacan and Zizek to Woody Allen and Doctor Who. What binds these diverse elements? What holds this network together? Your writing: your essays are little engines that assemble and stitch sense together.

Why do I find this interesting?  Well, we are discussing the possibility of enjoyment in this here life of ours, what we might call late stage capitalism but in any case can definitely call 21^st Century America.

As you suggest, we live in overwhelming times, a time of anxiety, without a collective narrative to orient us. We search for a semblance of certainty in the nostalgia of Instagram, something to protect us from the “bewildering strangeness of this improbable world.” You conclude: “We don’t need to enjoy ourselves or to make sure that our predetermined projects come off just right, but rather we need to get a sense of how our world is uncanny and unreal. We need to find or manufacture a new kind of space, a new gaze, a new normative principle, that will allow us to live with our anxiety.”

I want to suggest, however, that it is indeed enjoyment we need. Enjoyment is not the same as pleasure. To enjoy something is to live through an event whether it’s good or bad — it is a thorough way of moving through time. Pleasure is an effect; enjoyment is an action. And this is the task at hand: to live through this life without being subsumed by the spectacle or overwhelmed by the vertigo of it all.

So how do I find enjoyment in your writing? Your writing is — as all good writing is — a movement through disparate spaces — I might say “improbable” spaces — that makes sense as it goes. Your writing is a living through the network as you make connections here and there, across time and media and culture, across a network that by definition is not linear and hence is not strictly speaking historical: everything is all at once, a seething simultaneity. Where you find in Instagram a craving for nostalgia to help ground anxiety, I find a liberating vertigo in which the real of yesterday becomes an effect of today, another gesture in the endless proliferation of affects and effects that defines our lives.

The orienting narratives have indeed collapsed and given way to the delirium of the network. The way through the network, the way of the network, is the operation of writing and the proliferation of new kinds of sense. To write the network is to enjoy this life.

This remains cryptic. I will expand in my next letter.

L’chaim,

Daniel

____

Part 5: Politics From the Inside Out

Dear Doug,

Politics, at some point, necessarily entails a “we”: What is it we are to do? And how shall we go about this?

This “we” leads to a certain abstraction as the individual falls away, slips out of the equation. But “we” is always a group of individuals; “we” is not one but is many. And yet the tendency of this “we,” as with any categorical abstraction, is to erase the many, ignore the differences.

So much of what we think of as the political is premised on such abstractions — what is justice, what is the right economic system, what are the collective narratives, how will we rid our fossil fuel dependency.

My fear of such a tendency stems from two related effects. One is that any thinking that erases the individual tends toward violence, toward erasure of the difference that is you or I. The “I” has a difficult time fitting in the “we” and the “we” can be downright nasty in its response. I think of the Seinfeld episode (not to mention the Chinese Cultural Revolution) in which Kramer, marching in the AIDS walk, refuses to wear a ribbon and is pummeled.

And, two, thinking of the political as abstraction makes people believe that politics is elsewhere instead of right here in what he or she does and thinks day in and day out. And this is what matters — not what we do but what you and I and he and she do and think.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the self is a life unto itself, that it’s not created by the collective, by culture (whatever that is). Of course it is: the limits of my thought are defined by a collective discourse. So I am not suggesting that we just focus on the individual and ignore the structural and discursive issues. But I am suggesting that rather than beginning with the abstraction, beginning with “we,” we begin with I. I’m suggesting a kind of inductive politics.

Let’s think about it this way. There is a great mobilization around oil and the exhaustion of the world’s resources — all these people spending money and personal energy trying to rid our dependence on fossil fuels, looking for alternative sources, etc.

Meanwhile, the fuel of human existence is being extinguished right before our very eyes.  Americans are dying — or, better, they’re dead: we are zombies. We work 70-hour weeks and barely make enough to pay the debt on their house, car, 98-inch TV. We are, literally, an impotent society — we need a pill to f-ck.

But still some moron from Greenpeace wants me to give money to save some seal — which will mean I have to work more, further draining the resource that is me.

Our deductive politics keep us at the corporate level, thinking about things in these abstract, dehumanizing ways. But inductive politics, politics that begin with me, what I do every day, what I can do every day, the limits and possibilities of my time, my freedom to think and act and f-ck, then we get the seeds of a truly radical, transformative politics.

Capitalism demands so much of our time — all our time, in fact. We have become indentured servants to the Citis and Chases and Googles of the world.  And none of that will change as long as people think politics is over there, in Iraq or Washington or Wall Street.

If each person considers his or her life, what they are obliged to do just to survive day in and day out, then the shape and functioning of our political structures will emerge. They’ll begin to see what McLuhan calls the environment, the invisible conditions of life.

Being political is not knowing the issues and voting for some creep. Being political is demanding the time to lead a healthy, beautiful life. Being political is demanding basic dignity and civility. Being political is demanding the right, and the time, to enjoy this life.

This is politics from the inside out.

L’chaim,

Daniel

 ____

Part 6: A Politics of Experience, or Cassavetes vs. Ron Howard

Hello Doug,

I wrote to you last time about an inductive politics, a politics from the inside out.  I’d like to flesh that out, as it were, by talking about this very strange thing I will call “experience.” (I’ve been rereading Georges Bataille recently and in particular, “Inner Experience.”)

What’s so strange about experience is that, in many ways, it’s invisible. It’s what an individual lives through. It’s not what happens to someone because the same thing, more or less, can happen to different people. For instance, all of our parents die eventually. But to say that we all experience the death of our parents doesn’t say enough in that that experience will necessarily be different for each of us.

There is this radical particularity to experience: is that how this distinct body happens in the world. It is irreducible and at the same time multiple: I experience many things all at once but it is this particular configuration of multiplicity.

I want to say experience is interior but I don’t want that to mean it is “deep.” And if I say it’s private, I don’t want that privacy juxtaposed with what’s public. Which is to say, I don’t want to create a public/ private or inside/ outside dichotomy. What I do want is to reserve this special space, this special category, for what an individual lives through.

Experience ruptures. It tears at categories and cliché. It will never fit neatly into a bucket and it can never be known beforehand. The problem with Hollywood films is that they present experience as a common event — as a cliché. This is why I come back to Cassevetes again and again. In his films, people experience things in absolutely distinct, unique, and strange ways. This is as true of his viewers as it is of his characters.

Cassavetes doesn’t unite us in a common wave of good feeling or nostalgia the way Ron Howard does. Cassavetes gives us a vision, and an experience, of difference: we don’t walk out feeling elated and sharing a common experience. We walk out of the theater feeling as we feel, each of us distinct.

And here, in Cassavetes and Ron Howard, I see a fundamentally different politics. On the one hand, there’s Howard’s desire to create a grand American narrative: We all lived through the hopes, fears, and dreams of Apollo 11!  On the other, is Cassevetes, who honors experience over collective narrative, difference over sameness.

I see Cassavetes as a great politician, trying to change the way Americans live and interact with each other. And it’s not by isolating us through experience — because experience, while happening alone, does not isolate per se: it merely happens. No, Cassavetes gives us a different kind of politics: a common viewing of difference. It’s not every man for himself. Rather, it’s: every experience is valuable. Live through it!

I suppose my point is this: By focusing on enjoyment, I want to create such a politics of experience.

L’chaim,

Daniel

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Thank you and good evening. It is morning in America. No, not literally as those of us with watches can plainly tell. However, we’ve got to believe that it is the morning, or we will be left in the dark. Most people think a good speech tries to say as much as possible with the fewest amount of words. Well, I disagree. I’m a plainspoken man, so I’m going to do the opposite and use a lot of words to tell you just one thing. Tonight, I am here tonight to tell you all that: no matter what time it is, or what the sky looks like, or what my opponents say: it is morning in America.

Almost a year ago, I announced that I was embarking on this unlikely journey to change America. I was not born with a desire to run for office. But I was born with two arms, two legs, one head, and several fingers. Now that might not be good enough for some folks, but those are the people who can’t understand that it is morning in America. It’s morning, we shouldn’t be telling each other what we can and cannot do. Do you call your husband up at 4 a.m. to tell him he can’t build a boat out of ice cream? No, of course not; it’s just too early in the day.

For a long time now, we’ve been told, and increasingly so, that we have to choose between a morning or a night. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a morning or a night. There’s only morning all day long. The morning is when we look to the future, when anything seems possible — like morning, even throughout the night.

We’ve been on a dangerous path for far too long. There have been too many ups and downs, twists and turns, and bumps along the way. It’s time that path came to a dead end. Luckily for us it has — so now we will forge ahead without a path, because paths are clearly far too dangerous. It is better to simply wander off a well-trod course into the forest. It is safer to burn the map, which thankfully I lost hours ago at the second trailhead.

Those of you out there are well aware that I am not speaking figuratively. I was as disappointed as you were when our campaign bus broke down earlier today on that beautiful, abandoned stretch of I-73, next to the seemingly limitless Oshougada State Park in the middle of a real America. Looking around at this rich, green, thick woodland, I do not see a single cell phone tower — not even way off in the distance — and that is what makes this part of our country truly great. And by great, I mean extremely large and, apparently, sparsely populated.

But to move back to my main point, it is morning in America. It’s not that I want to end the night. No, I want to end the mind-set that gets us into the night — because it is the night time when the wolves come out. This is the crux of my seventeen-point plan to avoid the wolves: we just never allow it to become night. The rest of my plan is available on my website — for donors.

Believe me, it is a rock-solid plan. I formulated it after I spent a lot of time researching it with my trusted advisors and a lot of time talking to folks like Marsha Alavarez, of Costa Mesa California. Marsha has three kids and is working two jobs to afford health coverage after her husband Danny lost his job in May. I’m not saying the wolves had anything to do with any of that, but I’m also not saying they didn’t.

What I want everyone here to remember — long after this day is over and we are discovered by park rangers possibly, probably, months from now is not to give in to the cynicism of my opponents. I hope it is clear to you that when I say “opponents” now; I am exclusively speaking about the w-o-l-v-e-s because I think they can hear us. I am going to get down off of this stump, which I thought at the beginning of my speech was a good idea, but now I realize has certainly attracted the wolves attention and allowed them to pinpoint our location. Finally, as we prepare to run — both for office and for our lives — please ladies and gentlemen, keep my words with you: it is morning in America! Let us pray they don’t have watches.

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The history of The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, formally Zaire) is as complex and violent as the deep forest that envelops most of the country. Originally colonized by the Belgians, the mineral rich nation has been in a perpetual state of upheaval since its independence in 1960, culminating in two civil wars and the ouster or assassination of every African prime minister that has tried to lead the second largest country on the dark continent. Eastern Congo is commonly referred to as “the rape capital of the world” and the nation is home to countless, armed militias (the CNDP, the FNI, the FAPC, the PRD, and the Mai-Mai, etc.) that prey on the sparse roads in the country. The final words of Joseph Conrad’s Congolese epic, The Heart Of Darkness, might have said it best, “The horror! The horror!”

When I reach the border of Rwanda and Congo it is already nightfall, something I have tried to plan against but the logistics of which could not be avoided. It is less than 48 hours until the Congolese elections take place and the nation is fearful of what might transpire. Because, let’s be clear here, it is not a debate but a certainty — there will be death. It is just a matter of where and how much.

I watch as armorless Rwandan APCs funnel troops across to the neighboring Congolese city of Goma. A mist off of Lake Kivu, the deepest lake in Africa, lightly spills into the checkpoint, making an opaque and dark cloud around the soldiers’ torsos and Kalashnikovs. At that moment I cannot help but think “fog of war,” a shot fired in the night, a dead American dragged off into the bush, one more missing person in the trackless jungle. But nothing left to do now but cross. Nothing left to do but see it, full force.

The Rwandan border personnel waves me through without headache but, in the interstitial area between the two countries, I’m stopped almost immediately by the Congolese military. It seems pretty obvious that I am a sore thumb in these parts: solo, white American in a barrel of ethnic Hutus and Tutsis.

In a guidebook I skimmed earlier in the week, it said that Goma could be accessed by purchasing a $35 visa at the border. So I state my claim, but the military is not having any of it. They ask me, in very basic English, if I have a guide (the clear answer to which is “no”), they ask me if I’m a journalist, to which, even though I have East African press credentials I have learned, from experience, it is always better to say “no, I’m a student.” Regardless, this is central Africa and the credentials wouldn’t mean anything here anyway. They ask me how much money I have. I say “thirty-five dollars.” He looks at me quizzically and calls over two other men, one armed, the other not, and they speak in a thick Afro-French that is hard to decrypt with my elementary knowledge of the language. But I think they say “he is a journalist,” an immediate roadblock in the eyes of a government that is trying to suppress the international focus on violence that will be incurred in the coming days. I stand in the strange and cloudy interzone between Congo and Rwanda for roughly fifteen minutes while the men mull over the situation.

I’m waiting patiently, wondering if I should just turn back now and try again in the daylight, then perhaps the guards will have changed, when I am pleasantly surprised by the unarmed man’s nuanced English. He shows me his UN ID card and says that I cannot cross tonight but tomorrow may be a different story, if I’m willing to pay a “tax.” He says his name is Gerard and he lives just down the road in Gisenyi, the adjacent Rwandan town. He says I can spend the night there but ends with “do you have five dollars for this guy’s airtime?” He points to the Congolese holding the Kalashnikov whom I first talked with. The soldier is grinning because he knows he will get the money. So I give it to him.

We walk back along the paved Rwandan roads until we get Gerard’s well-furnished abode, where I meet his roommate Hubert — another UN logistics officer. We have a brief conversation about Congo and the US but this is interrupted by both men’s vigor to fire-up their Playstation 2. I have no reservations, what-so-ever, about this and we play NBA Live 2007 and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. Between games, we eat fried crickets and the men tell me about their time spent fighting in the Congolese Wars. At age 15, Gerard was kidnapped by Laurent-Desire Kabila’s rebel movement (whose son, Joseph, is now the incumbent running for reelection in Congo) and forced into the front lines. “I was always good at math and physics” he says still clutching the PS2 controller tightly, “So they taught me how to use artillery: mortars, cannons, whatever.” It is now becoming clear why we are playing games of a relative light nature and not Call of Duty or Red Faction. Both men tell me they have killed many people. Later, they go into their respective rooms and I fall asleep on the couch, my dreams filled with nightmares of guerrilla atrocities — dreams I’m sure the others in the house have had bouts with, at one time or another.

Eight AM the next morning and I am jostled to consciousness. Gerard tells me he has to cross now and that I should come with him, “the border guard is waiting,” he says. The election is tomorrow and I’m assuming the border will be heavily traveled today so, I pack up my things and we walk down the road we traversed the night before. The guard is there and quickly comes over to us once we are admitted through the Rwandan gate. He is wearing sunglasses today and a Prussian-blue shirt with epaulettes, looking less ominous in the daylight and new uniform. They speak in French, again in the interzone, and finally Gerard tells me that it will be $200 US to cross for the next two days, but he stipulates that I must cross back by noon on the day of the elections. I’m shocked. This will deplete most of my “reserve funds” and even if I could afford it, there are very few ATMs in Africa, especially in remote places like Congo, that accept Mastercard. On top of that, in 2003, the Congolese started counterfeiting money by the boatload, making all US currency printed before 2006 now void in these parts.

But I have no other choice. The man will not budge on his offer.

Luckily, Gerard knows that the RAW BANK in Goma accepts Mastercard so I can cash-up there. The guard takes my passport and tells me I will get it back when I cross with the money. Handing over your passport to a shady border officer in a conflict zone, who is trying to extort a bribe from you, might champion the list of travel no-nos. But again, what choice do I have? Hesitantly, I give over my passport and watch, with terror, as it disappears into the guard’s pocket and we enter the town.

In 2002, Goma, Congo was rocked when Mount Nyiragongo erupted, completely leveling the town in hot lava. Since then the city has slowly been rebuilt by UN and aid forces, but the majority is still a dead-zone of black volcanic boulders.

Walking along the only paved road in the city, (completed just last week), Gerard shows me his tattoo, “a souvenir from the UK” he says cheerfully and explains that he wants a tattoo gun here because he could make “serious money.” This prospect of an untrained man wielding an unsterilized tattoo gun in Congo seems like a bad idea, not to mention the whole AIDS thing. But I agree that, when I get back to US, I will do what I can.

Down the road and outside of the RAW BANK, children hold fat bundles of Congolese Francs to change, the black market ForEx Bureau of sorts and strangely when I use the ATM, it only spits out crisp new dollars. I have never seen this before, a nation basically abandoning it’s currency for the dollar — so much so, that even their banks only distribute foreign bills.

Turning around, I find Gerard in a white Toyota Landcruiser with the “UN” crest painted in black, a colossal radio antenna on the bumper and extra wide, off road tires down below. Two more Landcruiser Prados are behind it  (exhaust pipes going vertically up the titanium gunwales of these canoes) and Gerard ushers me in. We burn through the Congolese magma fields in the UN motorcade, spitting ash and volcanic rock from the wide tires and bumping out of our seats from the gnarled earth. There are very few cars on the road and Gerard and the man in the other car, Alpha, race — dodging peddlers and traders selling wares from outside their homes. There are no specific shops here, only “things people have to sell.” If you don’t find milk at the first house, you try the next and then the next until something happens. The Kenyan slum rapper Octopizzo is full on the sound system when we rip through this blasted land.

The next few hours are wasted at a local bar where the UN men talk about the Champions League, in French, while drinking Primus Biere and chain smoking Intore cigarettes. Hubert joins us and tells us he just swam 2 km out into Lake Kivu. The kicker to the story? Is that he can’t swim. He doggy paddled the entire way, there and back.

I spend the rest of the time trying to decipher if the woman with the café-au-lait skin sitting next to me is of Tutsi descent. In the Rwandan genocide close to 1 million of the thin-nosed, light-skinned Tutsis were killed by the darker Hutus for having been favored by Westerners for their Ethiopian features.

Later, we go to a nightclub called The Coco Jambo that acts as a respite for the peacekeepers and expats to get loose. The UN guys have this gait like they are invincible and I’m starting to understand that everyone crosses over to Goma to feel invincible, because, here, you are. Rwanda, with it’s clean tap water and it’s helmet-mandatory motorbike laws is the safe haven to return to when things get too heavy. But Congo, Congo is the playground, the place to lose inhibitions and push off to another planet.

One of the men from the UN motorcade leans his face into the bar and comes up with faint traces of white on his nose, unrolling a $100 bill — post 2006, no doubt — and shoves it in his pocket ardently. He’s then taking a serious call, in French, and, after a few minutes, announces that a number of voting stations in western Goma, Himbi area, have been attacked by a group of armed, stick-up men. We are silent for five Mississippis and then, because it does not challenge our immediate wellbeing, we return to our regular affairs. The man does another line.

That night I sleep in an extra room at a UN compound in Goma, next to the War Child NGO base and protected by Delta, private security, soldiers; the kind that shoot first. No nightmares this time.

In the coming election hours, there are, as predicted, ubiquitous complaints of voter fraud and subsequent clashes around Congo. More armed gunman attack voting stations in Lubumbashi and Kinshasa. In Goma, there is short supply of the indelible ink, used by the illiterate population, to make thumb prints for their cast ballots. Gerard even says that when he went to the polls, he was informed he had already voted for the candidate he reviles: Joseph Kabila. It is clear that the political temperature in Congo is rising as many once incumbent-backing soldiers shed their fatigues for militia-turned-political party uniforms in an act of dissent. Vital Kamerhe, a strong candidate for prime minister, calls for the annulment of the election because of widespread fraudulent behavior and many voters in Goma are vocal about Kabila teetering on his final leg. More than 12 people have been killed before the afternoon arrives.

Reluctantly, I head back to the Congolese border as not to miss my midday appointment, feeling generally unsatisfied that I can no longer observe the least developed country in the world (as classified by the UN) roll for change. As I crunch the midnight-colored, lunar rocks beneath me, I can only think about December 6th — the day when the results are announced and I may, once again, cross over into this eerily special and hyperbolic world. I give the Congolese border patrol two $100 bills (both from 2008) and I have my passport back. He has doctored the Congolese stamp from November 28, 2010 to look like 2011 and the Rwandan border police don’t take notice.

I’m safe on the other side, with the corrupt Congolese’s number stored. In a week, we‘ll be in touch.

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1. Eat heavy foods

Full disclosure: My tummy is a temperamental diva. I’m not one of those people that can douse things in hot sauce, drown myself in curry and then be like, “Wanna roll around in the hay?” to someone. It doesn’t work like that. I need to lay down and have a heart-to-heart with my stomach to see where it’s at emotionally, physically, and spiritually after ingesting a big meal. I mean, it’s still recovering from Thanksgiving— a day in which Chris Brown was the turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie and my delicate feather of a stomach was poor Rihanna. In short, the food pummeled me. So if I ever plan on getting jiggy with it later, I have to remember to not get jiggly with it before. I have to eat inoffensive foods like salads, soups, or like a cucumber sandwich. Eating anything more intense than that means I run the risk of my stomach not being DTF later. The curry will have come between us.

2. Smoke weed

In college it wasn’t uncommon to cap off a great date by going back to someone’s house to smoke weed afterwards. Back then, having someone be like, “Hey. You wanna come back to my house and get stoned and maybe a watch movie?” was the highest honor you could receive. It was basically like saying, “Gosh, I really like you and I think there’s a good chance we could date. Since I’m too weird of a person to be honest with my feelings, I’m going to just smoke you out for free so you know that my crush is for real.” At first, getting stoned with your crush would feel like a fun bonding experience but it could quickly take a #dark turn if you ever found yourself getting too stoned. Then, instead of hooking up in a blissed out stoner fantasy, you just become ultra-paranoid and think of ways you can leave their apartment without it coming off as a rejection. In the future, you should always just save smoking weed for the second date. Your stoned face isn’t ready to make a debut so early.

3. Talk about your ex

Don’t talk about your ex on the first. I mean, duh, but NOT DUH, because apparently everyone does it. With gay men, I think it’s actually more of a bragging thing like, “Just so you know, I’m someone who’s been in a long-term-relationship. I’m the treasurer of the elite Gays Who Know How To Spell Monogamy club.” With other people, however, mentioning the ex is the fastest way you can kill someone’s boner. “Oh, you like anchovies on your pizza? Gross! My ex did too. Not like I’m comparing you two. It’s just something interesting to think about…” Yes, have fun thinking about it when you’re alone in bed later because I ain’t trying to go home with someone who’s still associating anchovies with their ex.

4. Get too drunk. Like, way too drunk.

I’m no stranger to the wasted first date. You wake up the next morning (sometimes with them in your bed) thinking, “Wait, do I actually like this person? Or did my glass of wine just hit it off with them?” I’ve gone home drunk from a first date being like, “Well, that’s it! I found the one, you guys!” And then on our sober second date, I discover that The One is actually a humorless weirdo best enjoyed with six glasses of wine. Unlike the other things I’ve mentioned, getting too drunk will actually make hooking up with someone easier. However, you shouldn’t really do it if you even get the slightest bit of weirdo vibes from them. I used to have a rule: Every time my date does something strange, just take two big sips of whatever I’m drinking. But I’ve realized that rule has only hurt me rather than helped me so I’m throwing it out!

5. Talk about religion and/or politics

I’m sure we have similar political and religious beliefs but on the off chance that we don’t, let’s just save the Occupy: Wall Street discussion for our sixth month of marriage, okay?

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Times are tough. Things are changing. Entire socioeconomic classes are evaporating. People need to be taking to the streets, taking to their City Halls, and — most importantly — taking to their Facebooks. We need to make our statuses inflammatory, untrue remarks about President Obama. We need to dedicate entire pages of text to quoting a Glenn Greenwald article. We need to be listing incoherent reasons why Ron Paul is going to save our country. And, most of all, we need to be using capslock.

I’ll admit, I’ve been slacking myself. Once or twice I’ve engaged that unsung hero who is constantly posting conspiracy political theory videos on his wall in a lively debate — but that is not enough. He, and others like him, are left doing all the legwork of providing half-baked ideas and derogatory remarks about the other side of the aisle. We all must be participating, we all must be doing our part. To only deign to yell back and forth with someone about the debt ceiling a few times before giving up with a resigned sigh is to only superficially participate in what makes this country so great. We must dig in our heels, square our jaws, and get ready to fight the good fight.

And even when it looks as though this comment section will go on forever, when no one is relenting or even acknowledging that an opposing point has been made, we must not give up. In fact, that is the very moment in which to unleash your treasure trove of relevant media. The debate is not lost, it is simply stalling. Imagine a healthy Facebook political debate as a car, and terribly made YouTube propaganda videos as its essential fuel. Every dozen posts or so, you’re going to need to fill ‘er up.

Just remember, when things get heavy and feelings are clearly getting hurt, we must continue in the name of Facebook political progress. We must make insinuations about the fellow commenter’s military service, education level, and socioeconomic background. He went to middle school with your acquaintance, he’s clearly an idiot anyway. And if he for a second doubts your position, there is no piece of information that Wikipedia can’t provide.

So get out there, get your keyboards warmed up, and get your circular arguments nice and round. Our economy’s got a fever, and the only cure is more Facebook political debates.

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It is a surreal moment. One of many. The crowd rushes through us, out from Zuccotti Park. I ask, what and someone says riot cops. Screams behind us. A mass of twenty or so protestors are ejected from the narrow corridor of the Fulton Street subway station, splayed on the stone barricades by forearms and batons, riot shields and blue muscle moving en masse. A teenage girl, stocky and fierce, is thrown to the ground. Her hands bound to her back. The crowd yells shame! shame! shame! and rushes to bend its form around her, but the batons shoot up, the shields push out. She’s screaming something to someone in the crowd. Her arms are marked up with various phone numbers: emergency contacts, maybe; the Lawyers’ Guild.

A twenty-something man a few meters down the sidewalk shouts something anti-police and throws a traffic cone, and almost immediately he finds himself swarmed by protestors. Non-violent! they say. “I’ve been here since day one!” he says. non-violent! non-violent! non-violent! “I’ve been here from—get away from me!” non-violent! non-violent! The man is furious but the mob is relentless with their chanting, with getting into his face and raising palms, with a thousand conciliatory gestures and requests to yo, yo, calm down. He’s red in the face, furious, but when he storms off he passes three more traffic cones – all left unmolested.

The crowd grows. Vans of armored police arrive and unload, stand with wide stances along the edge of the curb, forcing everyone shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalks. Each block is corralled like this: the roads no-walk zones guarded by tight, professional police formations. At my height, I can see over most the heads, to Zuccotti just a block or two away, but it’s all lights. Lights and heads. The police line begins to walk forward.

A white shirt officer says into a megaphone that all who refuse to leave this area will be placed under arrest.

For what, standing on a sidewalk?

A white shirt officer says into a megaphone that all who refuse to leave this area will be placed under arrest. A formation of new police arrivals step quickly behind him and start pushing into the crowd, shoulders forcing shoulders into an inch-by-inch retreat.

A young man in a suit yells, I just want to go to my apartment! That’s my apartment! He points to a building between us and Zuccotti. Someone suggests it might be time for him to occupy a hotel.

MIC CHECK. (MIC CHECK.)

MIC CHECK. (MIC CHECK.)

As block after block of protestors are slowly crammed into each other and onto sidewalks further from Zuccotti, a discussion about maybe going mobile arises; consensus is reached quite quickly, actually, owing to the sudden appearance of squad cars in the group’s sole remaining mode of egress. Someone yells City Hall! and the mob of protestors, now easily 500 strong, takes to the middle of the street, winding its way around stunned taxis and garbage trucks headed for the park. The first police helicopter arrives; for a moment, its glaring searchlight is positioned directly on me. I squint.

Off of the sidewalk and into the street!

WHO’S STREET? (OUR STREET)

My friend lights a cigarette. He nods his head behind me, to three lanky men clad in black with black bandanas already pulled over their face. Most of the protestors are comfortable enough disrupting traffic, but these three are clearly looking for something more; they walk with a spring in their step, and one of the Zuccotti medics has already become suspicious. Non-violent! he chants, and it echoes a few rounds, but the crowd is growing tense. The helicopter blades force people to raise their voice. We can see and hear the squad cars and vans speeding down the parallel streets.

Already, rumors are coming in from Zuccotti: people bike-chained themselves to the trees, so the cops cut the trees down; riot cops clad in black destroyed the thousands of books in the park’s library; news helicopters have been banished from following the march to City Hall, banned from the airspace in a grievous violation of freedom of the press – people are shouting this to each other, shouting our street! and offa the sidewalk! and we are the 99%! and join us! and shouting, shouting constantly as we near City Hall, the crowd very high-energy.

Anarchists in black start tossing the garden of traffic barricades spread out on the streets around City Hall. Garbage cans get tipped. And each time the same cycle:

1. Black-masked protestor tips something over.
2. Peaceful protestor runs and gets it, returns it to its rightful position.
3. Black-masked protestor gets in peaceful protestor’s face.
4. Mob surrounds masked protestor, chants non-violent!
5. Black-masked protestor continues walking onward.
6. Go to: 1)

Only once does the cycle lead to a confrontation, and again the ratio of peaceful protestors relative to the troublemakers is so skewed that any antisocial behavior is again quickly curbed. Which is good, because as the group approaches City Hall, it’s discovered that several rows of non-riot police officers are casually following behind the protestors, maybe a quarter-mile back. Other than the scramble outside Fulton station (and maybe the initial physical corralling of the protestors congregating on the sidewalk), the NYPD has appeared to take a laissez-faire approach – flanking the march but not intercepting it – yet all that could disappear on account of one particularly violent anarchist. Self-policing is high.

For many New Yorkers, the first snow of this year brought a special dread, not only because it came in October, but also because it seemed like a dark sign for the courageous and desperate people sleeping in Zuccotti Park in the cold. I hadn’t been to the park since the morning of the victory over Bloomberg’s “clean up” attempt, so a couple of nights after the big storm I decided to drop off some coats and see how the protesters were holding up. It was a nice night — the briskness was pure fall, not winter — and people were in good spirits. Kindness abounded. When I sneezed, everyone in hearing distance blessed me. An elderly woman passed by a punky youth; “party on,” she encouraged. The park had become a well-organized tent-city. All different types of people perused the library, waited in line to get a hot meal from the food station, and milled amicably about. Then the General Assembly began.

The first order of business was a time-sensitive proposal sponsored by the Internet Working Group: Its members urgently wanted to purchase the website occupywallstreet.net. The domain name was currently owned by Mark R. Ellis, a gentleman in Florida who had bought the domain name months ago, at the beginning of the movement, and was now “desperate” to sell it due to his “financial circumstances.” He was so desperate to sell the name, the speaker warned, that if it wasn’t snapped up by the occupation or its affiliates, Mr. Ellis might be willing to sell it to anyone, even the Koch brothers. People in the crowd made “sad hands,” the signal where hands are pointed downwards, fingers wiggling, used to indicate dislike. For $8000 (negotiated down from $10,000), Mr. Ellis was giving the General Assembly the chance to buy the domain name before anyone else. It was important to buy the domain name to prevent others from buying it and using it for nefarious purposes: “Our web identity means everything,” the speaker pleaded. But it was also important to have a web presence that came from the General Assembly specifically, rather than merely one of its allies. The speaker explained that occupywallstreet.org is currently owned by Adbusters, the non-profit anti-consumerist group, and while their leaders are in solidarity with the movement, the site only includes several links to relevant websites. The speaker also explained that another group owns occupywallst.org, but that they have their own set of goals, and their own vision for what content should appear on the website. For example, while they do post a lot of official content from OWS’s press team (but not all of it), they refused to put a set of “solidarity principles” agreed upon by the General Assembly up on the website. The General Assembly had come to the decision that it was better to let Adbusters and the affinity group “do their thing,” and meanwhile try to secure a website that could belong the OWS General Assembly alone. They already own and operate nycga.net, but a website with an “occupywallstreet” URL would generate much more web traffic. The domain would be legally owned by the unincorporated group Occupy Wall Street; not a single individual but “all of us collectively.”

A middle-aged woman next to me elbowed me: “Wait, wait — who would own it?” “Umm,” I answered, “you, me, us — all of us. “But what is a domain name?” she whispered. “It’s like, I think, a website,” I answered.“ And how do you buy a website?” My expertise was exhausted and happily a young girl standing next to me took over. People began to ask questions and voice concerns about the proposal. Is $8,000 a lot or a little for a website, someone wanted to know. To put it in perspective, the speaker said, one hour ago, a trademark broker had called him offering to sell the domain name occupy.com for $150,000.

Who was this Mark R. Ellis of Florida? Why should we give money to someone extorting the movement? Weren’t there other domain names that were available that would serve the movement’s purposes? Is “.net” really a thing? One man in the crowd offered an answer to the last question: apparently he had started a freegan website with a .net domain name a few years ago, and it had gone great.

The speakers answered every question patiently. The crowd, forming the “human microphone,” repeated every phrase that was spoken. The repetition left me feeling dizzy, and the issue at hand began to seem hazy and very complex. The woman who had asked me about domain names wandered away, shaking her head and murmuring that she didn’t understand the internet. At this point, I turned to my friend and asked if we should just go. It had become clear that that nothing was going to happen. And as we debated whether or not we should leave, we barely noticed the facilitator announcing that she was conducting “a temperature check” — a gauge of general feeling about the proposal — to see if we were close to reaching consensus. The murmuring of the crowd quieted, and I stopped talking to my friend as people begin silently waving their fingers in the air. Maybe not everyone was as flustered as I was by all the back and forth, but I still felt doubtful. The speakers asked if there were any “blocks” (moral, ethical or safety concerns that prevent the passing of proposal).  There was a tense silence. A man said he had a block: Shouldn’t we rename ourselves “the Real Party” since we are not the Democratic Party and we are not the Republican Party?  The speaker firmly but politely explained that that was not a “block,” but likely a separate proposal that could be brought up at another time. Everyone held their breath. There were no other bocks. Another temperature check and suddenly, we had reached consensus. The domain name occupywallstreet.net would be purchased. A small thing in itself, perhaps, but the process that brought it about felt crucial. As I walked toward the subway, I felt chills, never mind the temperate night air.

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With the American consciousness preoccupied with either the nascent “Occupy Wall Street” movement or the latest episode of Dr. Oz, it seems worthwhile to delve deeply into mass social actions of the past that have otherwise been cast aside by the rising tide of nacho cheese-flavored apathy.

Please be aware that this is by no means a comprehensive list. For further reading on the subject, I recommend The Lunatic’s Guide to American Politics: From Tar & Feathers to Tea Parties, by Daniel Martin (Grinflarbin Press, 2009).

THE PITY PARTY

The search for a viable 3rd political party has been a torturous one in the United States. The closest we have come in recent years is Ross Perot’s Reform Party, which made gallant efforts in the 1996 and 2000 Presidential elections. The movement ultimately failed to gain traction, but it inspired a small, but dedicated group known as the Pity Party.

Running in 2004 under the slogan, “Brother, can you spare a vote?” Mitchell Allen, former City Planning Commissioner for Merced, California did his absolute best to shame the population of this country into voting him into office. In his first official speech as a candidate, Allen said, “If my mother taught me anything, it’s that guilt can get a person to do anything, even surrender their freedom to a highly unqualified individual such as myself who really just needs some positive reinforcement for once. I mean, I didn’t even have a date to the prom. I was bald at 26. I fight against Athlete’s Foot every day. My car payments are more than my rent. Throw me a bone here.”

After failing to qualify for any state ballots, the Pity Party ceased soliciting votes and began begging for hugs. The candidate will forever be remembered for his revolutionary yard sign that read, “Allen for President: I am all alone in the world and love is a lie.”

THE PEOPLE’S ARMY FOR MAKING BOOKS LESS GROSS

What initially began as a way to make Lady Chatterley’s Lover palatable for her young daughter soon became a lifelong commitment to censorship for Maggie Salisbury. A renowned homemaker and amateur bridge aficionado, Ms. Salisbury gradually lost interest in both pursuits once she found her calling in social agitation. The weekly bridge games became an afterthought and the children were sent away to a harsh Taiwanese boarding school where the greatest lesson taught was how to avoid the cruel recrimination of the bullwhip.

“I see so many books come out every year that are just icky. Like, The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Do people really have to eat each other? You say it’s because of an apocalypse, but we don’t even find out how it all happened. That’s why I lobbied to have the book edited to just say that everyone was off for Thanksgiving break and people went around eating Subway sandwiches instead of each other. And don’t even get me started on the classics. Don’t you think the characters in Thomas Hardy novels could stand to stop whining all the time? It ain’t that bad, OK?”

Salisbury’s cause was buoyed by the dramatic removal of the word “nigger” from the latest edition of Huckleberry Finn. That major victory led her to lobby for Gregor Samsa to turn into a birthday cake instead of a cockroach and for Myrtle Wilson to be given a series of deep tissue massages in lieu of being struck by an oncoming automobile at the end of The Great Gatsby.

Literary critics were shocked by the hubris of Salisbury, but purveyors of good taste, socially awkward shut-ins and Sean Hannity were thrilled by the changes. “I was so satisfied reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho when it was just 500 pages of astute fashion tips,” Salisbury was quoted as saying in The Washington Times.

The movement lost steam in recent months due to Salisbury’s insistence that the New Testament reflect her sensibility. Hardly anyone reacted favorably to her suggestion that Jesus fly to Heaven in the basket of a 10-speed bicycle, ala E.T. rather than being crucified.

THE SOCIETY FOR PESSIMISTIC THINKING

This particular group didn’t fade away into the background of history because of a softening of their ideological principals, but rather due to them. The Society never actually convened a meeting or protested anything, because, as explained by their founder, Arthur Taxsmith, “Nothing is going to change, so what the hell is the point?”

The closest the group got to a direct action was a sit-in at Newark, New Jersey City Hall that was canceled two weeks prior to the event. “The PATH train from Manhattan is never on time, so we were pretty sure no one would show up. Plus, it’s the rainy season and the Yankees are in the playoffs. The only protest sign I made just said ‘nah, forget it’ and I fell asleep soon after. Also, I think my wife is cheating on me,” said Taxsmith.

CAN YOU PLEASE WIPE DOWN THE ELLIPTICAL MACHINE?

After wading in human filth and waste while trying to get ‘a sweet six-pack’ at the gym, noted Los Angeles comedian Dave Schilling took to the streets to facilitate change. The cavalier attitude of the patrons at Bally’s Total Fitness could no longer be tolerated. Schilling set up camp outside the Downtown location and handed out rolls of paper towels and Windex to the oncoming horde of fitness junkies.

He sat and sat for weeks at a time, advocating furiously for his cause. He was wont to bellow out such clichéd slogans as “Cleanliness is next to godliness” or “Take care of your mess, asshole.”

All the sitting caused Dave to gain 15 pounds.

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Boston is where my blood is. The blood I left as a child, scraped against sticks, stones, and sidewalks. The blood I left as an adult, pumped by the hearts of family and friends there when I moved to New York less than three months ago. So on Monday night, as the @Occupy_Boston Twitter feed began to report escalating police activity and eventual use of force around the Dewey Square protest, my own heart beat anxiously and out of time.

When I visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City last week, I was touched by the alliance of hippies, punks, mothers, children, artists, and more that had assembled to speak out, largely against corporate corruption and a government that they felt no longer represented its constituents. It seemed like a thoughtful and compassionate demonstration of American dissatisfaction.

Then the protest in New York inspired similar action all over the country, and it transformed from an isolated demonstration to something like a movement. Citizens all over the nation from Atlanta to Chicago to Los Angeles standing together to make their voices heard. Still, even though I’d seen one of the sites and made a small donation to its makeshift “kitchen,” I still felt remote from the congregation.

Monday night’s action, in a literal sense, hit closer to home. Bostonians congregated in Dewey Square held hands and sang as riot police and emergency vehicles clustered around them. I finally fell asleep around two in the morning, nervous about the potential for violence. When I awoke Tuesday morning, I was crushed to learn the situation had turned ugly. Especially disheartening were reports of the police pulling American flags out of the hands of veterans and throwing a 74-year-old man to the ground.

A grassroots movement cannot be treated like a tantrum, ignored until it becomes unbearable and then crushed or shouted down. Though social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter are often rightly derided as frivolous time-sinks, they have the very practical social function of making the general public very, very loud. Violence and politically neutral statements from state officials cannot silence the voice of the people. It can only galvanize an indignant public to turn the general thrum of communication into an urgent roar.

Everyone at the protest that I attended just wanted to be heard. They carried signs with their slogans and were willing to explain themselves to strangers in the street. If city governments continue to show their unwillingness to engage in dialogue, I fear for what may happen. Like toddlers who lack the words to express their frustration, long-ignored segments of the population may begin to strike out physically, smashing people and objects in their way in a misguided plea for attention. I pray this does not occur. I hope that our educated, informed, frustrated citizenry maintains its code of nonviolence and that the one percent they’re trying to talk to listen.

“People are tired of being dominated,” a man at the Occupy Wall Street protest told me. And I agree. If there’s any unifying message of the Occupations of American cities, it’s that Americans want to make themselves heard. They will no longer submit to domination, legislative or as in Monday night’s case, physical.

To those who like to dismiss the protests with their attitude of “America, Love it or Leave It,” I say shame on you. Love is not the meek submission to the will of another. Love is the ability to grown and change together. To listen to one another.

America, please listen.

There is a mass of seething anguish within you. In a city like Boston that riots over sporting events, that could turn to recklessness and destruction at a moment’s notice. I hope that legislators and officers of the law remember who puts them in office and pays their salaries before that happens.

Tuesday morning I sat in the Newark airport, about to get on an airplane for a business trip. That sentence alone means I have more resources at my disposal than most people in the world. But I am far from wealthy, and I stand with those who feel disenfranchised and downtrodden. Money talks, but apparently, it doesn’t listen.

There is a palpable worry inside of me that violence could break out any moment amongst people who feel they’ll never be heard. As I prepared to get on the airplane that morning, I hoped for a smooth safe flight, but even more than that, I said a silent prayer:

“May the earth not catch fire below me.”

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