THE DIN BEYOND THE DRUM CIRCLE /// "You know, this is sort of an anarchistic bunch — kids — but I really am amazed for the respect they have," says unofficial Zuccotti Park librarian Eric Seligson (right). "They entertain everything." (Photographs by Elizabeth Griffin for The Politics Blog)
NEW YORK — Sal Cioffi and Randy Otero are union electricians from Local 3 of the IBEW in New York. They're working on the Freedom Tower a few blocks over in lower Manhattan. Over the past couple of days, they've taken to having their lunch in Zuccotti Park, in the middle of the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have set up camp here. The event has grown sufficiently that it's now attracted almost as many food trucks and mobile falafel units as it has television-news trucks, so there's always some place for Sal and Randy to buy lunch. So they park themselves on the stone bench, put their hard hats on the ground and, almost organically, they become part of the event."We've had demonstrations, and it never makes the news," says Sal. "We could have 10,000 workers demonstrating, and it won't make the news. At least, something like this, they get the publicity."
"We had a rally for the workers, two months ago, and we marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, and there were people crossing that bridge for an hour-and-a-half, and it didn't hit the news," Randy adds. "All organized labor, no press coverage whatsoever.
"Now, this here, they're not leaving, so the media has to cover it. And it's very close to Ground Zero, and once the police get involved, they have to cover it."
"They're waiting for someone to do something wrong," Sal says.
What the two of them have found for themselves, here amid the guitars and the drums, and the indistinguishable forms shifting in their sleeping bags against the advancing autumn chill, is a public space for ideas. If the primary criticism of the ongoing demonstrations is that they seem to lack, as a hundred media reports have put it, "a cohesive public message," that is also one of their great strengths. This is a very loud and clear yawp against the irresponsible use of power by unaccountable institutions, including, increasingly, the government itself. The protests here are omni-directional. They appear inchoate because their target is so diffuse — an accelerating sense in the country that there is no pea under any of the shells, that the red Jack is not in the deck, that the wealth of the country is being swindled and gambled and frittered away by so many people in so many ways that to sharpen the focus on one of the long cons is to let a dozen others reach fruition. This is a protest about declining wages and corporate greed, about baroque financial schemes and the unfathomable fine print on the back of your credit-card statement, about a grand critique of mutated capitalism and outrage at the simple tragedy of foreclosure fraud. So, for today, Sal and Randy are sitting on the stone bench and talking about the life of a union electrician in New York City in 2011 and, in what they say, there is the shadow of all these other things, waiting for one slip, one accident, one missed paycheck. Except for the very few, economic survival in America is a fragile, perilous journey over an increasingly narrow road. That's the cohesive public message here in the park, if you can see past all the dreadlocks and hear it over the drum circles, which most of the mainstream coverage of this event has been sadly unable to do.
"We have 200 guys out [of work] now," Sal explains. "There's a 60-week wait now if you get laid off today. That's the wait now, but the wait's going to get longer because it always does. The 70's were bad — the late 70's — but this is worse. Sorry to say it but, if that didn't happen down here — 9/11 — we'd have had a lot more people out of work."
There is some hazy utopianism in a lot of the rhetoric here in the park, but not as much as you might have been led to believe, and certainly no more than there is in the average gathering these days of Republicans, who believe in a land where the "job creators" are stifled by the mere possibility of returning the top tax rate to where it was under Bill Clinton, let alone to the 91 percent that prevailed under that Socialist bastard, Ike Eisenhower. There is some Truther nonsense being peddled, if you stop long enough to listen, but it's no more or less crazy than what I heard two weeks ago in Florida — from the podium — about the U.N.'s Agenda 21, a fairly tedious sustainable-development program that many of America's prominent conservatives believe soon will have the black helicopters landing in every American driveway, securing our SUV's and herding us all into Priuses for the drive to the internment camps. The difference is, of course, that the Republicans tend to elect these people to Congress. They make them governors.
The Tea Party, for all the protestations of how organic and spontaneous it all was, still grew out of the deep and tangled root-ball of politics and corporate money and from which all of modern conservative politics springs. Somebody had to pay to rent the buses. Somebody had to coordinate all those signs with pictures of President Obama as a witch doctor, or Hitler, or the Joker. Somebody had to pay to convert all that anger and paranoia into field organizations that put kooks like Allen West into Congress and actual thieves like Rick Scott into the governor's mansions. What's going on in the park these days is something that defines its target not so much as a who, but as a what. There's no sign at all that many national Democrats — with the possible exception of Elizabeth Warren up in Massachusetts, who's built a career on many of the same issues that have brought people to the park — are willing even to co-opt the message here. The national media largely have blown off the protests because none of the people on their speed-dials have had anything to do with it. Surely, in a presidential campaign year in which the effects of a savage economic downturn are the primary issue, an ongoing protest against the people largely responsible for that downturn is as worthy of inclusion in the national debate as something as useless as the Iowa Straw Poll.
Instead, we get snotty New Republic reporters on play dates among the hippies, and insufferable Chaunceys from the conservative press exercising the half of the wit they have, and Erin Burnett, who's never met a hedge fund she didn't adore, launching her new CNN show with video of a longhaired guy with funny glasses. And everybody else gets on the bus to drive around New Hampshire, mourning the loss of the transformational figure that is Chris Christie. Unlike the Tea Party, which ultimately became a vehicle for electing fringe Republicans, and, thereupon, a vehicle for instituting policies that the corporate class has been swooning over for decades, the people in the park are praying far outside the camp.
There is order here, and a kind of vague organizational structure. There is a schedule of activities posted for every day. People get fed from a kitchen in the middle of the park. The marches generally go off on time, and the park is developing its own internal institutions, like the free library that Eric Seligson tends along one wall— battered paperbacks, everyone from Howard Zinn to Robert Ludlum, donated by the protesters or by passers-by. The first batch of books got ruined in the rain when the police forced him to remove the blue tarps because they were "opaque" and you couldn't see what was underneath them. Seligson replaced them with clear plastic bins. "You know, this is sort of an anarchistic bunch — kids — but I really am amazed for the respect they have for the word," he says, "for literature of all different kinds, not just political. There's a real reverence for what has been written that has surprised me, since they eschew whatever came before, all the thought that came before. They entertain everything. You know, all the Isms, as well as the entertainment reading. We have the romance novels, too."
It is entirely possible — even likely — that the protests themselves will sink into history. Already, there's an effort underway to marginalize them in the public mind, and not entirely because so much of the media is owned and operated by the same corporate class that runs the institutions against which these protests are aimed. This a movement based on class, which, as an issue, most Americans don't much like to confront, largely because to admit that it is an issue is to admit that a great part of the American self-image is a delusion. We do not all have an equal chance. The game is rigged. The economy has been turned into a casino and the house always wins, and we are not the house any more. Not for a long time. Not by the longest shot. And if that's all these protests ever say, if that's all that ever gets shouted into the rising autumn wind, then that's an effort worth making.
People looking for "a coherent message" in the park would do well to talk to Brendan Burke, a tall, tattooed truck driver with a degree from NYU and The New School, who's based at the center of the park, where four or five young people are crouched over laptops, shouting into the wind in their own way.
"People are informed today. People are online," Burke explains. "People in Kansas do yoga, you understand. Country's different, you understand? There's no more mooks in the citizenry. We are working people and we're not getting a fair shake, so we took to the streets. It's an irrational act, an act of passion, but we need to use self-control and respect. Those who want to go down with the ship will go down with the ship. Those who will be there will be sensible people who are out here for a reason. The kids who are out here who just want to party, well, they're beautiful children and we protect them every night. I can't even tell you what's going to happen after today. The cops may sweep this when the landlord says I want them out.
"Not anti-anybody. We're pro-American citizen. Millions of Americans are getting kicked out of their house. They're losing their education, their health care. They can't take care of their parents. This is about people. Republicans are opening their bills. Democrats are opening their bills. I'll go all the way to $250,000 if you want. Everybody's opening their bills and they're thinking, 'Who's protecting me from people stealing from me?' This isn't what I agreed on when I signed this agreement with this company. You add all these hassles up in your life — your hospital, your credit card, your education, your mortgage — and you're getting nailed. And there are a couple of banks who created the instruments that made that happen. This is not a physical war. This is an oppression that's quiet, and through money, and through services, and through small print. They want you to be afraid, and not to know, and they want to bewilder you. Between you and me, I shouldn't get a credit card. But I got one. I didn't even apply for it. Why am I getting a credit card?
"This is not Tahrir Square. This is not Tompkins Square Park. This is not Yuppies against squatters. This is about minds. We need help from people who know. We need help from people in the financial industry who know. They should be here, too. He should want to see a better community. I want to see change in a systematic and legislative way. We're looking for real results. We're looking for protection for people. We're down here trying to play bills. It's serious out there, but it's quiet, because it happens at everyone's kitchen table. It's happening household-by-household. There's a sense out there, which I hope what's going on here will dissipate, that there's something wrong with me. I'm a jerk because I can't pay that bill. There are working men who will march tomorrow. It's all about people, who feel they got duped. There needs to be a systematic legislative change, so that this cannot happen any more."
Brendan Burke's head is shaved. He doesn't wear funny glasses. He doesn't beat a drum, or look like he failed an audition for a Radiohead tribute band. He is not what the smart people come down here expecting to find. He looks like the truck driver he is, and he talks like someone who works for a living. For a long time in this country, that was enough. That country is what the people have come to find in this little park, where the wind is getting colder.
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