Liberty and Owain

Occupy Cambridge meeting 8 February

2012-02-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

NEXT MEETING 7 MARCH

We introduced ourselves, we were four and then five, and we spoke about our experiences with Occupy and our thoughts on the movement, and the role that Cambridge can play in this, the great transformative event of our times.

We come from different backgrounds and perspectives, but there was a surprisingly clear consensus on some points:
1. Cambridge could have a powerful response to Occupy, being as it is a fundamentally tolerant and excellent centre of learning. Cambridge is a unique place, and we should consider a powerful response to Occupy.
2. Indeed, what we long for is a magnet to draw people out of their usual communities and begin speaking to one another and asking the important questions of our time.
3. These important questions concern democracy in its present form, capitalism in its present form, the health of the planet, our health, the monetization of identity (creeping consumerist, corporatist agenda), the truthfulness of the media, the inequalities in our society. We do not feel like we are getting good information about these things, because the media is controlled by a corporate agenda. (editor's note: don't kid yourself, the government is also controlled by a corporate agenda)
4. These questions are being addresses at the highest level here at the University, at least in environmental and sociological terms, and it would be a marvelous thing to organize an Occupy discussion that drew people out of whatever ghetto they dwell in (ex-pat, religious, activist). The 55 Cambridge professors who signed the letter of support should be contacted and asked to provide this information.
5. People of faith must stand with us in this. There is a broad consensus in the UK that the government and the market are immoral and in need of reform. There are many people of faith who believe this. Striving for justice is a vital component of most faiths, indeed all in the Church of England have sworn to do so. Interfaith events can be ghettos, as people at the meeting knew from experience. But applying something like the Winter Carnival model to the idea of articulating scriptures: holy words. Drawing on our holy words. One Baptist in Cambridge named Michael Schluter is speaking. This is what he wrote to me:

I will be speaking at Rock Baptist Church on Sunday 25^th March on the subject ‘What is Wrong with Capitalism?’. Any friends from Occupy would of course be most welcome to come along.The church is a small Baptist church which meets at Morley Memorial School on Blinco Grove, off Hills Road and Cherry Hinton Road in the south of the city. [There is car parking space on Baldock Way just around the corner - but please park considerately to be fair to local residents.]

Please let me know if you or anybody from Occupy is likely to come.

So that was the consensus, and what was presented, at the meeting. Of course, I have made the conclusions very pithy and perhaps slightly biased toward my own sentiments.

I note my own struggle between meeting my responsibilities as a mother and employee and taking care of myself and being in Occupy. When I start thinking about Occupy, I want to do nothing else but think more about it. I am watching the John Adams biopic right now and I am amazed at regular upstanding citizens, pushed into powerful revolution, actually met and talked and did things like draft the Declaration of Independence. I wonder if we need another one, all the peoples on earth. Maybe we can start with one for Cambridge? Somehow we all need to find the time to keep this happening. As we said in the meeting, we need to wake up the world, we need people to see how they are slaves. I did tell my Matrix story to these poor Cantabridgians. About taking the red pill on 15 October. Those crazy brothers were not even kidding.

I am an American or Shrouding things with Words

2012-01-29T16:04:00.000-08:00

Why I am even writing rather than trying to sleep is beyond me. Especially since the alternative is to sit and try to tell you with words how tired I am of words. I am tired of words, I am tired, I am not up to the tasks before me.

I don't trust words anymore. I guess that is what you get for changing cultures and beliefs the way that I have in the last ten years. Maybe this is what you get with bipolar. Maybe this is what happens when a person who is only trying to be honest with herself takes as much of a look at reality as she can bear. I don't know why, but I am sick of words and ill at ease with all of them. Words enslave us, and make us incapable of love. Here are some words I am particularly sick about: unholy, American, Christian, doctor, good, bad, fair, Jesus, God. They do not mean what they used to mean to me.

I wish you could see it with my eyes. I wish you could unwrap from your mind the assumptions you have about the rightness of your cause, your country, your religion, your views. Please don't unwrap it as far as I have unwrapped mine, because frankly I have gone too far for comfort, although not so far that I think my views are invalid. But it would be hard to say what my views are, actually, my brain seems to have made a decision without consulting me to shut down words for a while. This makes it quite difficult to think things through, but it is actually a relief. Here I agree with my brain.

I mean, you guys, in Washington I was the biggest cheerleader of liberal capitalism ever, and I thought I was super internationally minded, with my Foreign Sovereign Immunitiy Act and my nerdy habit of joyfully reading the Economist cover to cover on Friday nights. I thought with the Embassy parties and the Beaujolais Nouveau parties that I really was a citizen of the Earth. And I was so completely wrong. In the last ten years, I have discovered a powerful strain of American exceptionalism within me, one that only after ten years am I fully understanding. It makes me ill at ease with my country. I remember some British person saying to me around '07 that there wasn't much of a difference between Obama and McCain. I was completely shocked at their ignorance of American politics. There were life-changing differences between them, of course!. In retrospect, I see these differences as really small. Goldman Sachs and military contractors really had nothing to fear from either one. For on the biggest systemic issues of war, corporate favoritism and the monetizing of democracy, the candidates were pretty much aligned.   As was our government and our courts. And that alignment continues even more closely between Romney and Gingrich yet all of America is entranced by their differences. I see that as pure misdirection. I don't think anyone is orchestrating the misdirection, I just think we have not been policing our democracy while we have been busy getting and spending and now this has happened:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” —Noam Chomsky

The presuppositions of our system are that elections are decided by money, wars must go on, and environmental concerns are not pressing. Those are three that I think most people in the United States actually disagree with, but no one is talking about those issues in the GOP primary. The Republicans are shaking their heads over the Dukakkis situation they have going on, with no great candidate and much disorder among the ranks. The Democrats are getting worried and sending money to Obama. And those are your two choices. You get two. That, in itself, is pretty bipolar. Everyone in the US is damned to this binary thinking, and the left who would be Greens or a third party are told to stifle themselves and fall in line with the Democrats otherwise Ann Coulter will be president. It's an incredibly effective threat.    Meanwhile, from the distance where I am, the United States is like China, running Guatanamo Bay and Homeland Security and the militarization of airports. You get hassled by soldiers when you come to my country. It makes people quite nervous. The United States put Bernard Manning in prison and really, the deprivation of Manning's civil rights gets as much press as Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's. But somehow the good people of the United States don't see it.

Anyway, as of Tuesday I will have been resident in the United Kingdom for ten years. I have noticed that old people are happier and are comforted by national health care, which doesn't seem to work worse than private insurance and in many cases, works a whole lot better. I have noticed that people having more time to spend with their families because of the relatively greater job security they enjoy, and that seems a good thing. They may write the best plays. But oh, their laws are form over substance, as are their manners, and oh, the whole country looks back, worships the past and fosters their regional differences. And where I am, it is around 1958 and men (not, I hasten to say, my husband) are quite used to telling women what to do and that whole scene does not work for me.   The whole scene revolves around words about the past, but I am trying to get a feeling for the future. And for that, I need and miss my United States. I need the hope. The hope sort of gives you courage to look into yourself and question the big things that need to be questioned. I miss the honesty and forthrightness of Americans. They don't waste time shrouding things in words. They do here, they shroud every meaning that they can, and read obituaries closely and they love to eulogize so much more than they love to act, to plan, to envision a future.

What I love and miss is something that cannot be put into words. It is a feeling. Being American and interacting with Americans feels good: there is a confidence and a hope and there is a presupposition that we can change the world. I love it. I love being around Americans. It's easier than interacting with British people with the fewer shrouds and the pay-off is higher (because of the honesty and forthrightness). Also Americans accept that they have an interior life of feelings. When I moved here in '87 I found it such a relief to talk about ideas with my new British friends and have a break from the relentless Midwestern Christian School coffee shop discussions about how things made us feel. Really. But actually, there comes a time and place to talk about feelings, and the skills we developed in those coffee houses actually made us, on the whole, happier than many British people who lack these skills. Talking to someone who is putting their feelings into words is cleaner and more refreshing than talking to someone who doesn't understand or is ignoring their feelings. And I think the manners thing actually cuts in favor of the Americans too. Not all the time, but I find that some British people use manners as a sword, to judge someone who does not match theirs. The manners thing is sometimes genuine courtesy that is appreciated but it is also sometimes a pretension that serves only to distance people, a sort of misdirection.

In the past couple years, I have made some really solid British friends who I really love, and nothing is meant to detract from them. I even have a couple who agree with me that they are sick of words.

The Theology Centre, Mariella Frostrup and Occupy

2012-01-15T09:26:00.000-08:00

The chicken is in the oven and my 3 yo daughter decided not to do my hair so I have a moment. Did you read Mariella Frostrup today in the Guardian? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/dearmariella

She had the perfect message for Martin Luther King Day. Why not join with a church community, since everything else sucks so bad. This woman is a closet fan of Occupy and has been since 15 October and this one is her best message yet: when overwhelmed with life and parenting and work, put yourself in a real community. Have real friends and relationships. And churches are real communities and you don't have to believe in God to go. You need only believe that too much of your identity is getting and spending and that there must be more. Sorry about the typical pronoun slaughter but she was making a point. In the absence of answers from anyone else, why not try the church?

This is a big day for Occupy. The Camp in London is celebrating Day 90. And they are remembering Dr. King, a man who moved the United States by speaking church to church. This calling upon a common love of justice Dr. King's work, or, as he was misquoted saying - drum major activities - informed my work on Winter Carnival and my understanding that an alliance between people of faith and the people of Occupy is fundamental to improvement in our society.

Earlier this week I met with a group called the Contextual Theology Centre. I have concluded that there are pockets of powerful good will within the Church of England that seek to help Occupy. This would be a good and fruitful alliance.

A friend from the States is visiting and it is so very great, it has been way too long since I spent time with her. I keep boring her by complaining about how shockingly narrow the political discourse has become in the United States and saying the things I always say, that both the Democrats and the Republicans are just about the money, and the public dialogue stultifies with the narrowness of available discussions. No one speaks of stopping wars, the most left leaning Democrat seeks only to streamline defense spending. It is taken for granted that we will invade at the whim of our Federal government and not complain. For a start. Even the most progressive people I know will not easily give up on the system, not give up on the bitter bipartisan war in Congress, not give up on giving money to campaigns and thereby exacerbating the problem that campaigns are all about money. They do tend to think twice when I say that if anyone could fix Washington, wasn't it the Obamas? I mean, if these guys can't do it, then I can't think of anyone else who could. The system is irrevocably broken from within. The culture of money is too powerful to vanquish within the rules and means of the old ways. Here in the UK too. The good news is that there are lots of people of faith who think this as well.

So we will fix it. This is going to take a long time and I think things will get worse before they get better. But I am excited about the opportunity to leave a better world for Liberty and Owain.

I am with you, Occupy.

Happy New Year

2012-01-08T13:11:00.000-08:00

So happy New Year to you. My children are still not back in school, and it has been one long holiday at our house, and it only ended tonight. Playing Lego Harry Potter on Wii, watching Arrested Development, going on walks and snuggling has really eaten into my blogging time. Star Wars, incidentally, is becoming a big part of Christmas thanks to some cookie cutters shaped like Yoda's head and C3PO and R2D2 being in our nativity. I couldn't be happier about that.

For this new year I resolved to work on three prongs of Occupy that I thought to be most important. The first is the alliance with the Church of England. The second is litigation. The third is local organizing.

On the Alliance: Occupy is slipping into a ghetto. What it has accomplished is the awakening, but momentum is not building, the camping idea is not sustainable, people remain skeptical, and a long-term strategy is not apparent to people who are not there. I am concerned it is becoming another invisible activist group, instead of the 99%. Outreach through the Bank of Ideas exists but seems sparse. Local occupations in England struggle. Winter Carnival is only happening, if it happens, on a much more abbreviated scale and without the involvement of any of the London Occupy groups. That is fine. (Well, there is an issue of pride with me. I am a fighter and I don't let things go easily. Even now when someone very gently and nicely points out that the Winter Carnival is not picking up steam, I glower at them and think, screw you, buddy, I will MAKE it happen. But for reasons below, actually, I will not).

I continue to think that the commonality of peoples of faith and everyone drawn to Occupy is the Epiphany, is the connection that could really make this the 99% and keep us all safe - ie nonviolent. I fear for the next year with our militarized police and their protection of the corporate interests pimping the Olympics and the huge strikes and protests planned. And I fear that the more Occupy is marginalized, the more that the change it represents will be marginalized. I know there are people who see this Alliance as important and I wish them godspeed. I don't believe in god and I am an ex-Christian but there is something in this thirst for justice at Occupy that is sacred and holy and squarely within the remit of the Church of England so even though I know I do not make people happy when I say it, the Church of England needs to help. Both Occupy and the Church of England could use some new people.Work together to get some.

On the lawsuits: There was a conference at the Bank of Ideas yesterday about bringing criminal actions in the UK as a private prosecutor and the possibility of, under the Occupy banner, bringing lawsuits for war crimes, economic crimes and welfare crimes. I was going to go. I personally would love to do this. The existing Civil Rights and Civil Liberties organization in the UK, called Liberty, is the preening lapdog of the corporations and I would love to get in there and raise some hell. Put me in charge and I'll file some real lawsuits, the kind the Man is scared of. To me, that is FUN FUN FUN. I don't know much about this private prosecutorial ability, but I do think there is a wealth of possibilities in civil lawsuits against the Corporation of the City of London, shareholder actions, pension owner actions, class actions - a time-honoured element of modern rights struggles is the use of the courts. The court proceedings Occupy has been subject to thus far in London lead me to believe that actually the judges are hungry for justice. It always seemed to me that it is only British culture itself - a feeling, an unwritten consensus-- that prevents a lucrative deluge of lawsuits for fraudulent nondisclosure, bonus pay for bankers, wasting of shareholder assets/taxpayer money, Network Rail executive pay, violation of the EU Human Rights laws by Corporation of the City of London and others. Scrapper Duncan's blog is a great rallying point for that, as is the Occupy Justice Criminal Investigations. They deserve support.

On organizing locally: if this is about people and their networks and being willing to change, I have to, I think, reach out to people in my network where I physically am. Thus my involvement with the very new Occupy Cambridge. We had a meeting today. It was good. These are people who cannot drop everything and camp (well, most of them). These are people who want to slowly and sustainably build up relationships of trust so that we can truly act together.

On Friday I met with a theater producer. (I have been a fan of this guy for decades so it was really dreamy to meet him and fun to be excited to meet someone). It was about an idea for a play I had pitched him two years ago. I now am going to write the play so I have to drop nearly all of my Occupy work. No, I didn't see it coming either. The play is about Williams v First Government Mortgage, a trial I did in 1996, which is also, by the way, the subject of my first ever blog post. There is no doubt in my mind that this constitutes the greatest opportunity I have had as a playwright - maybe even as a person. And what is the play about if it is not about economic injustice and the horrible face of unethical capitalism?

What a strange thing. I know that I will go back to Occupy, I just need to write this play first. I mean, I have to go back, the events of 15 October, that moment when an officer of the law forced me to put down a sign that said justice is possible in order to be reunited with my family, well, that moment is never going away. It was my red pill, and nothing will ever be as it was before.

For one thing, I was so horrified watching people dressing up and going Christmas shopping this year. The untold hours. The desperation. The shoddily made crap people buy out of a sense of duty. The insecurity that somehow we are not enough for our children, and only in receipts and plastic may we truly prove our love and be enough. It was like being in a zombie movie. Man, thanks for that, Occupy. Great!

I Totally Agree with David Cameron

2011-12-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

This is the coldest and darkest night so far in 2011. I am on the ropes. But maybe I can be the Rocky of bloggers and pull this one out of the hat. Hope springs eternal. Here goes.

So apparently David Cameron has called for us here in the UK to be the Christian Nation that we are. The BBC called it a backhanded chastisement of the C of E, a criticism that they are not doing enough. Well, here is one person who couldn't agree more. Really. He is right about this. He is right about some things, actually. Yes, I would like to see the half-assed politically correct version of Christianity that silences and marginalizes the spirit of God that lives in all of us replaced with a Christian nation. Believe me. Some real Christians would be awesome. I know some great ones here in Cambridge. The ones I know live in a spirit of love and look for justice in all their actions. I have been around a lot of Christians and a lot of Occupiers and I will say they have this thing: the real spirit of God or Abraham or the Earth Herself, love. I always said that if you strip away all the language, the motivating force of Christians and Occupiers - that thirst for goodness and fairness and good stewardship and a more virtuous world, it's the same thing. It's the same thing holding the Occupation together that held together the early church. And that sounds scary, I know, but this is Advent and in Advent you are supposed to change. Because the world changed when Jesus came, Well, we need the world to change now and we can do it with the teachings of Jesus together. Because Jesus was all about tolerance, so we're set there.

So let's have a Christian nation! What would that entail? Let's look at their paperwork. There is a baptismal covenant. If you're a Christian, this is what you promised. This is your soul:

Q: Will you strive for justice and peace among all
people, and respect the dignity of every human
being?

A: I will, with God's help.

None of our existing institutions are more important than love, dignity, peace, justice and liberty. Not the Tory Government, not any political party, not the Corporation of the City of London, not the labour unions, not the churches. None are more important than the highest values, the core teachings on which they were based. They are there because we believe in democracy and freedom, charity and love. Yet we deny ourselves these wonderful virtues, we deny ourselves the very thing that our souls crave. We deny ourselves this goodness because we are in service to the very institutions that are supposed to feed our souls and our bodies, the very institutions that are supposed to be good stewards, uphold democracy and bring justice where justice is needed. We are police, and priests, politicians and lawyers and we are in thrall to institutions that we all know are not working. And everyone needs more love, justice and peace.

We as a Christian nation should strive for this. Strive doesn't mean doing the same thing you always do in the same way. Newsflash: that isn't working. It's not working for the activists and it's not working for the Christians. Strive means trying new things, going forth in faith.

That is why many people are trying to forge an alliance between Occupy and Christians and why many people at the camp have invested incredible amounts of energy and effort reaching out to the Christians. As much as it is a big fat discouraging pain in the ass from my perspective It has been my chief pursuit since Occupy Half Term Isn't that what Cameron was saying, let's see who we are and what values we share and let us live them, let us expect them, let us insist on them.

Really, if you read between the lines, I think David Cameron has just come out in favour of the Winter Carnival Proposal.

Will You Strive for Justice?

2011-12-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

So anyone in the Church of England who is baptized makes a baptismal covenant with the Church and the last question that they ask you is this:

Will you strive for justice and peace among all
people, and respect the dignity of every human
being?

And if you are in the Church of England, you answered: I will, with God's help.

This is what every one of those guys promised. So please, Church of England, the work of the Occupation is squarely within your remit, it is your job responsibility, it is your responsibility to lead the true church universal to humbly be with them and aid their cause. The people in the camps are tired and cold. They are dealing with alcoholics, mental ill health in the community, hunger, homelessness, and external enemies and lawsuits. Lend them your aid. If you do not agree with the form of this call for justice, then help the form to change, help the form to change in order to honour the substance, the very substance of Occupy -

Will you strive for justice and peace among all
people, and respect the dignity of every human
being?

Winter Carnival: Ten

2011-12-11T15:39:00.001-08:00

For discussion purposes only:

Revised Winter Carnival Proposal

put forth by the Winter Carnival Working Group

We recognize and respect the essential differences between people of faith, people of no faith tradition (who are people of good faith) and the Occupation.

We embrace, however, our commonality and believe it to be more important than our differences.

We are united in our fervent desire for justice, and united in understanding that the Occupy movement presents an opportunity (an unimaginably great opportunity) to bring the best desires of our hearts into this world.

We understand that there are deep moral failings in our governments and markets.

We recognize that these moral failings are as a result of choices some humans have made.

We want to make more moral choices.

We therefore want to remind ourselves of our moral traditions. And we must learn anew what they mean for today.

For these reasons, we have named ten weekends throughout the dark cold winter and ten virtues, or values:

Tolerance [diversity? respect? love. I think this one should be called love?],

Generosity [could rename charity?],

Temperance [prudence?],

Accountability,

Courage, [Fortitude]

Equality,

Liberation [could rename freedom? or Liberty? ; )]

The environment/Stewardship/Green/Environmental

Democracy

Justice

Ten sacred ideas. On those ten weekends, the Church of England and the Occupation will meet to discuss the sacred texts and modern failings of these virtues. The proposed format can be replicated any place, any synagogue, temple, mosque, church, town hall, living room,or school. It can be modified.

Format:

1. If the [summit/meeting] is in the evening, a Candelit procession to the meeting place for the town or neighbourhood.

2. Once in the meeting place, the format is

a. Reading from Sacred Texts by people to whom the text is sacred or important (Koran, Bible, Pagan writings) (music could be offered instead of a reading, or a short film). Readers are asked to bring the members of their community if they are in one. It is essential that at least two communities or faith traditions participate here, as the point is to engage with others. (With respect for our differences and an eye on our commonality, to engage with others.)

b. The vision of Occupy: how the virtue under discussion informs the Initial Statement, and ideas for making the UK (whether it is our governments, our markets or ourselves) more reflect this virtue.

c. A public discussion - This could be comments and questions, or it could take the form of a general assembly, and people could identify the commonality between a and b enough to vote assent to proposals.

3. Anything else is in the discretion of the locality. If people want to have an ancillary arts festival based on that weekend’s virtue, then they can. If they want to organize a big party or a potluck, they can. If schoolteachers want to teach the virtue that week, they can.

We propose the following schedule:

January 21-22 Tolerance [diversity? respect? love. I think this one should be called love?],

January 28-29 Generosity [could rename charity?],

February 4-5 Temperance [prudence?],

February 11-12 Accountability,

February 18-19 Courage, [Fortitude]

February 25-26 Equality,

March 3-4 Liberation [could rename freedom? or Liberty? ; )]

March 10-11 The environment/Stewardship/Green/Environmental

March 17-18 Democracy

March 24-25 Justice

For everyone’s information, here are the ten statements as amended.

Over 500 people on the steps of St Paul’s, #occupylsx collectively agreed the initial statement. Like all forms of direct democracy, the statement will always be a work in progress and used as a basis for further discussion and debate.

1. The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.

2. We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities dis/abilities and faiths. We stand together with occupations all over the world.

3. We refuse to pay for the banks’ crisis.

4. We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable. We demand an end to global tax injustice and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people.

5. We want regulators to be genuinely independent of the industries they regulate.

6. We support the strike on the 30th November and the student action on the 9th November, and actions to defend our health services, welfare, education and employment, and to stop wars and arms dealing.

7. We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich.

8. The present economic system pollutes land, sea and air, is causing massive loss of natural species and environments, and is accelerating humanity towards irreversible climate change. We call for a positive, sustainable economic system that benefits present and future generations. [1]

9. We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.

10. This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!

Paul Newman as Frank Galvin, Closing Argument, The Verdict

2011-12-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

http://movieclips.com/cQPH-the-verdict-movie-franks-closing-statement/

The Verdict is a Sidney Lumet film from 1982, a courtroom drama starring Paul Newman. It is the movie our evidence professor showed us in law school. I love the closing argument. Here it is:

Galvin: Well...You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, "Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what is true."

I mean there is no justice. The rich win; the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time we become dead, a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims -- and we become victims. We become weak; we doubt ourselves; we doubt our beliefs; we doubt our institutions; and we doubt the law.

But today you are the law. You are the law, not some book, not the lawyers, not a marble statue, or the trappings of the court. See, those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are, in fact, a prayer, I mean a fervent and a frightened prayer.

In my religion, they say, "Act as if you had faith; faith will be given to you."

If we are to have faith in justice we need only to believe in ourselves and act with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts.

Mississippi Goddam: could I be more alienating?

2011-12-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

I struggled with anger today. I get so incredibly angry that people cannot see the importance of this movement. I am furious that everyone will not drop everything and help. My long-standing hatred of humanity has really come back. Why won't everyone embrace this and give of themselves to make it work? Why are so many people on the sidelines? Why? This is a love revolution, that's what this is, and things are bad so what the hell is the problem with giving this a try? That's what I don't understand. I don't think people really are sheeples. I think a lot of people have had their humanity poisoned by consumerism and, let's face it, money, so much so that they do not even have the language or the breadth of thinking required to see what joy and happiness and healing we could bring to the world. But I think even the most poisoned of us still have hearts that ache for love and justice. And all of us want our children to have bigger, cleaner lives with more love and a healthier earth and moral government. We all want that.

So why are people letting these brave people at the camp languish and be abused by the police? Why aren't we helping them? Until we take them in and listen to their message of love, they will not leave their tents. They deserve a hero's welcome. They deserve a parade. Really, they deserve our respect and attention. And they deserve some fun.

I am a huge Nina Simone fan but I always disliked Mississippi Goddam about the civil rights movement because she gets so angry talking about how slow justice is, how slowly equality came to the United States. Her anger is unpleasant. I am sure mine is. At least now now I get hers. Once your eyes are opened to how change is possible and justice is possible, you get very impatient.

Or, I get very impatient. And I am especially impatient with people of faith and activists. These guys are living your principles. They want to do your work. They want to share your virtues and burdens.

If you believe in God, then this is your chance to show us, because we have sold the great gift of our lives for money and it has too much control over us.

News from the Occupy Front:

2011-12-03T10:51:00.000-08:00

I will be brief because Liberty's birthday party is tomorrow and so we are getting up all the Christmas decorations and making a cake all in one day. We bought the tree and got it home and I found a bird's nest in it. The most thrilling part of the day, definitely.

The camp had a really great success with the 30 Nov strikes but is now pre-occupied with the trial, which starts 19th December. This is why I didn't want to get sidetracked with high profile litigation. Believe me, I know it is really fun and absorbing. A diversion, however, in my estimation, from the more important task, the urgent task of bringing the 99% together.

Even if the Occupation is completely vindicated at trial, I don't see how it helps that much in regard to moving the movement forward. If a court of law rules that free speech extends to camping, then certainly this would be a wonderful and true ruling that beat back all the dismal rulings the courts have handed out recently, and beat back the assault on civil liberties New Labour committed under the horrible Blair and Brown regimes. That sounds pretty good. If a court of law rules that the land in front of St. Paul's is common land, as opposed to within the control of the Corporation of the City of London, which I understand is at issue in the trial, then that's really a big "meh" when it comes to moving the movement forward. If the court rules against the Occupation, it is a terrible blow, I think, something that knocks you straight into the activist ghetto; do not kid yourselves, this sets the movement back ten years.

I have no idea what the Occupy Barrister is advising the camp in private but the public statements are in my mind frighteningly optimistic. Ten years as a trial lawyer taught me that expectations must be managed, and success cannot be guaranteed. All I am saying is what I would tell my own clients, which is this: you might lose, and you need to really be thinking hard about what your plan B is going to be in case that happens. Whenever I won in court, I was so in the mindset of damage control when the verdict was read out, so ready to spring into action to limit damages, that I couldn't really comprehend the victory. They are very wonderful wins, those, and I hope the camp has one.

In the meantime, the idea of Winter Carnival is slowly spreading. There are several major things to clear up there: (1) it is not meant to be over Christmas, it is meant to be over weekends between January and April and thus needs to be renamed. (2) it remains my vision that this be an event with the express goal of people of faith and the occupation reaching out together to people who are not activists or people of faith, reaching out to all the people, to come together and fix the problems humans have on earth.

I had lunch with an incredible Quaker woman and we came up with the idea of zooming in on one lone event, and radically simplify the proposal. I love the idea we came up with, not least because it incorporates the sound ideas that really touch people of faith that were brought up in the Day of Repentance proposal that is going separately through the Multifaith and Outreach groups at the camp.

THe idea is that People of faith and the Occupation, the Church Universal and all activists meet in the streets of their towns one night in the winter for a walk. Physically walking together, shoulder to shoulder, with no masks or banners, no requests for money or even an ear, just a message that it is possible to stand together. That is the only message. A walk in the darkness, each person holding their little light. No talking necessary. Maybe even better if it is silent. Maybe the walk goes from the cities into the Cathedrals and maybe there people talk.

I had an idea that the United Kingdom, once they ended the walk, could write their own Book of Love. Every person who comes on the walk can if they want bring a single sheet of A4 where they write what they wish for the world, and for the world their children inherit. Imagine walking to the cathedral and each person writing their page in the Book of Love. Everyone could read the Book of Love, and thus we could begin our discussions.

We could even name a single date for this event for every place: 4 March.

One of the most special people in my life told me a story about a group of people who came into his restaurant.(Proof in Washington) They had just bought a pretty expensive bottle of wine, so he popped by the table. And they told them that this day was always a special day. For every year on that day, the group of friends awoke early in the morning. They get up early because there is much to be done with every day, and this is a day. They first on this day deal with something they have not dealt with that needs to be dealt with. Each person will know what this is. There was something else I don't remember, but the evening of that day was always a feast, a huge celebration of friendship and life, where they spared no expense and ate wonderful food and drank wonderful wine - hence the restaurant . And why did they spend that day doing those things? They explained because it was 4 March. On 4 March one must march forth.

What Occupy really wants to do is to bring love much more powerfully into the world. That is the fundamental coming together that must occur if the change they want can happen. The specifics of that change remain less important than the awakening of kindred spirits (The Walk of the Kindred Spirits), of commonality. I think it would be no bad thing if they held their candles and walked shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the 99. In that effort, people of faith are your natural allies. In the efforts of the people of faith - all people of faith - you are THEIR natural allies. They are a little slow on the uptake on this point, I grant you but the premise remains correct.

So a revised Winter Carnival. Not a Carnival, not even noisy, a walking without content, a coming together of feet and hears as a start, a walk. A March Fourth?

Thoughts on Christmas Repeated

2011-12-03T10:14:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas.

Every year the darkness of winter hurts me more. The icy winds, the black mornings, the monochrome of brown green outside. From October 30 until December 21st I tell myself how many mornings there are until I can hope again, until I can look forward to a little more light. And I feel this enormous empathy for the pagans, for the local people on this completely miserable island past and present, who kick it up a notch in December, who drag trees into their houses, and string up lights, and busy themselves in contact with others. These nativity plays and parties and travelling to relatives, all this stuff is really just about people banding together with good will. Truly this is the death of the year, and humans where I live now have banded together to survive this death with song and wine and comfort for each other, having a month of being the best humans we can be.

The traditions that make Christmas special for me, that make it work to protect me from this cold foretaste of my own demise actually have very little to do with Christianity. Decorating a tree (pagan), caroling (ancient pagan tradition of singing in the round), presents, parties, Ebeneezer Scrooge, mince pies, banana bread, Champagne at 11:00 (I do give Christianity credit for Champagne, having been invented by monks), Bill Murray as Scrooge, the original Grinch Cartoon, It's A Wonderful Life - let's face it, these are pretty unrelated to the birth of Christ, but I am comforted intensely by the ritual of revisiting them, and I am trying to pass on that comfort to my children. To me Christmas demonstrates this need for all humans to come together and support each other, this need so richly rewarded and so frequently ignored. If we didn't do it during these dark months, I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be any human life on this island. It's too dismal.

In the coming together we enjoy each other. I propose we come together, not only as a meek Christian who only gets to worship (rather limited activity), but just for now as humans, who many believe are made in God's image anyway. Humans who are fully all the parts of all the stories. In each of us there is a Tiny Tim who who desperately need love. In each of us there is a Grinch who delights in inflicting pain on others. In each of us there is a George Bailey desperately drunk in a bar wondering why the living fuck his life turned out the way it did. In each of us there is a Bob Cratchett who faithfully gets up and goes to work every day to provide for his family. Each of us is Clarence who sees so clearly the suffering of others. Each of us longs to fit in like Rudolph and his dentist friend.

So fellow humans, art tells us about ourselves, and I find this telling heals me of the wounds of this life. I love these stories, and I love Bruce Springsteen playing Santa Clause is Coming to Town. That one especially makes me happy every time I hear it even as I am telling myself -Grinch that I fucking AM - that it can't possibly do it again. Humans need the December hit of eating some yummy food, getting some love and feeling good. Christmas is enlightening for everyone. I find it enlightening - literally, against the darkness, enlightening.

Whether or not you are a Christian, the winter darkness is unavoidable, whether it is in the seasons of the years of our lives (unless you live in California, which is increasingly looking like the best option, frankly) or - importantly in our souls, part of our human nature. I think practicing pure Christianity mostly has too many concepts that blind you to your own darkness. That is why I really do not buy it anymore.

But I do love the story and I can lay claim to that. So here is my take:

We are all Roman Soldiers capable of genocide, we are all King Herod abusing our power, we are all Mary, and Joseph, naive and young, bewildered by bureaucracy and fleeced by an innkeeper. We are all the wise Kings watching and the cold shepherds laboring. We are all that hunted defenseless baby. You. You. You. You are the baby. You are the star.

So merry Christmas, entire world (really my 9 blog readers). Let us love and protect each other, let us give ourselves what we need, and guard against cruelty and the abuse of power, wherever it is found. Let us band together against the darkness by coming together under the light of a star.

Winter Carnival: Justice is Possible

2011-11-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

So word is getting out about this and I wanted to talk about my ideas.

This is no anemic little interfaith thing I am planning where people make points and don't really listen to each other and nothing is accomplished. This is big. Go big or go home. In the words of Keith Richards: "[I]f you don't make bold moves, you don't get fucking anywhere." So let's meet at our Cathedrals and spend the long cold winter engaging with each other to create a plan to make a better world. And since we will be working together to bring more joy to our lives and health to our souls, let us first start with a celebration.

Imagine that the people of Britain came together in the cold dark winter and planned for a new Spring. Imagine your streets flooded with the people of your part of England or Scotland or Wales. Imagine children, elders, soldiers, Anonymous, Occupiers, The Greens and all people of faith or no faith rising to their feet as one and venturing out into the cold to hold a candle, to walk and hold a candle and be willing to bring more light into the world. There is much work to be done, but the work has begun. Surely that is a reason for celebrating! People are out in the streets clamoring for justice. It's not all the people, and a lot of people are looking on from the sidelines unimpressed, but still, I think everyone is into the idea of a more just world where secured our children's health by securing the health of the planet, remaking corporations in our image, making our lives more about what they should be about and less about the endless chase of getting and spending that exhausts us and lines the pockets of others. Let's debate whether we should outlaw interest rates. Let us engage. Truly this could be the Church Universal's finest hour.

Or it need not be the Church. We could leave the campers. The Bank of Ideas and those fruitful camps are likely to get somewhere. But they are cold and pre-occupied with camping, they are set upon with legal proceedings, they must govern their own community. Let us help them and take them into our communities and let each person decide whether they will stand up and be counted among those who believe justice is possible. If everyone stands up for that and goes to their Winter Carnival, we will be the visionary populace who embraced change and made it smooth and fair. Let us move swiftly. The ghetto stands with its gates ominously open.

For surely, as a start, as the simplest thing we can all agree on, and as a big wonderful reason for a party is that justice is possible.

Justice is possible. We can agree that some of the old ways are no good anymore, can't we? That we need a better way of caring for each other and the planet than the constraints of corporations? Surely when the government and the universities must eternally be supplicants to corporations, we must transform them. We could start at the Carnival with a bonfire of Corporate Charters. And not just corporations, we can burn in effigy the instruments of war, the instruments of destruction of our planet . . . I am also thinking that it would be brilliant to burn Tony Blair in effigy at the Winter Carnival, not a move endorsed by the Church, to be sure, but one that Anonymous could do somewhere nearby. I mean, of all the elite who have hurt this nation, surely he is the symbol of all that is wrong with the old order, with his ten houses and his unjust war and his twenty-seven million dollars to run a bullshit interfaith foundation that says whatever Rupert Murdoch and Goldman Sachs want it to. That picture of him dressed in white on the banks of the River Jordan as godparent to Rupert's child made me ill. Didn't it make you ill? Because this wonderful spirit of God that he co-opted is actually so much bigger and more wonderful than this greedy money worshiper Blair could ever conceive. Church, if that is true come out and show us. Open your doors and call all the people.

And if you do not feel called by the Church, if you do not have, in the words of one planner of this event, "one religious bone in your body", then come to engage and partake and tell your views of a better world. Come for your children. If you don't come, the world will not be beautiful enough for them.

by Douglas Rushkoff: the best analysis so far of Occupy AND a poem!

2011-11-25T09:25:00.000-08:00

written for the human microphone at Zuccotti Park

I am humbled and honored to be amplified by your voices.
You are not fighting against people, but against a machine.
It was put in place over 500 years ago.
By a wealthy elite – trying to repress a booming peer to peer economy.
Those people are all dead, but their program lives on.
They invented an operating system called central currency.
People who used to trade directly,
were now forced to borrow money from the king’s bank.
At interest.
The elite also invented software for that operating system.
It was called the chartered monopoly. Today we call it the corporation.
It is a program designed to extract value.
It has legal monopoly over its industries.
We are legally prohibited from creating and exchanging value
unless we do it through the corporation.
We cannot work unless we have a “job.”
We outsource our work, we outsource our savings, we outsource our borrowing, we outsource our investing – all instead of sourcing one another.
This 13th Century, printing-press era operating system
is incompatible with a 21st Century economy.
It is broken and dying. But it is still occupying our reality.
Too many are mistaking this operating system – for the way things are.
They see the Occupy Movement as the impediment.
No.
We are not asking for wealth to be redistributed.
We are asking for the redistribution to STOP.
The Long Extraction is Over.
The peer to peer society is back.
We are ready to create and exchange value as people.
They say that the Occupy Movement has no leadership.
They are wrong.
You are the leaders
The rest of us are your followers.
What you do here – shows what we can do out there.
You are the classroom – we are the students
You are the experiment – we are the results.
You are the proposition – we are the resolution.
If you can sleep under tarps
the rest of us can tell your story to our children at bedtime
If you can resist the cops.
The rest of us can resist the market and the mall
If you can live on shared food
The rest of us can buy and grow local crops
If you can live with no money
The rest of us can start using alternative currencies
If you can stand firm in the streets
The rest of us can stand firm in our foreclosed homes
and stand with our neighbors in theirs.
If you can occupy Zucotti Park
The rest of us can occupy reality.
And by that same logic:
As the nights get colder,
as the Mayor grows less tolerant,
or as the police get more violent,
Remember that you have already won.
Whatever happens in this square,
the day you leave is not the day you have lost
it is not the day you have surrendered.
It is the day you have spread out.
It is the day you have declared a bigger battlefield.
It is the day you teachers and we students become the same.
It is the day we Occupy the World.

We Must Love One Another Or Die: An Auden Poem (Happy Thanksgiving)

2011-11-24T08:39:00.000-08:00

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; "I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work," And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

Winter Carnival Proposal 2: Better than Pepper Spray!

2011-11-22T05:35:00.000-08:00

Winter Carnival

General Proposal

This idea was presented to the National Occupation Conference General Assembly on 19 November 2011 and was the subject of a break-out discussion that night.

Whereas Occupy London has accomplished the beginning of a great moral awakening in Britain;

Whereas the Church of England, the Church Universal, people of many other faiths and people of no faith share the goals of a more moral marketplace and a more moral government put forth by the Occupation;

Whereas a public forum throughout all of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, is greatly to be desired by everyone who seeks to understand, decide and support the reforms necessary;

Whereas the spirit of the movement must spread beyond the camps or be in danger of diminishing;

AND FINALLY, whereas this is a land with a rich history of festivals:

THERE IS PROPOSED a Winter Carnival

There is proposed a great Winter Carnival, to roll through all of Britain from Cathedral to Cathedral. These Cathedrals are our commonwealth and they and the national Church of England should be pressed into service in this time of injustice and moral crisis.

Winter Carnival could have multiple components.

Candlelight Walk: A symbolic candelit walk beginning at St. Paul’s could start the Carnival – a victory march that recognizes the triumph of awakening the Occupation has started. The walk could go through London to St. Albans, Southwark, Westminster and beyond. In each city, the Occupiers could arrive at the train station and be met by local supporters, local activists, people of faith and people in need. They could then walk, holding candles, to the Cathedrals. A spreading of light.

Putney Debates: As in 1647, the Cathedrals could host debates or town meetings where the governmental and economic reform we seek could be refined, discussed, considered and our different options learned. Occupy would invite Ken Costa in his position at St. Paul’s Institute to hold public meetings about the need for financial reform. A constitution could be drafted by a travelling working group.

Occupation Tour: Instead of camping in one location, the camps could go from town to town, following the Putney Debates and opening the Carnivals in each town.

Open Forums: at the carnival, all interested parties, including people of the churches, synagogues, mosques, the Occupy movements, people from political parties and interest groups and grass roots organizations, would come and talk about how to make change for the better.

Reclaiming of Government: A walk from the Cathedral to the government buildings – the town halls – where people could hold a General Assembly, airing their grievances in this winter of our discontent.

Heritage: Open the Cathedrals to the Occupiers and children and have history teachers explain the martyrs, and the historical role of the Church in securing greater liberty for the people. Let us hear the stories of the martyrs and progress and reform. Let us remember our own past together.

Wine, Feasting and Song: Local amateur bands could play, local suppliers could offer food, mittens and mulled wine and fairy lights, a celebration to raise our spirits and by raising our spirits raising our humanity.

Practical Help: The touring Occupation could assist at local foodbanks, homeless shelters and elder care centres to bring attention to local cuts issues.

Natwest has come out with a glossy magazine for its Private Banking Clients!

2011-11-22T04:42:00.000-08:00

Dear Natwest Private Magazine:

I received my Autumn issue this week and it sickened me.

Why on earth do you think it is within your remit as a bank to publish lifestyle magazines when I already pay too much to bank with you?

I pay an exorbitant amount for the privilege of banking with you and I find your private banking services to be sorely lacking. Please become competent in your core services before you branch out and use my money to pay people to create something I do not want and did not ask for - namely, this magazine.

Problems that I have had for years with online access and setting up of accounts have not been addressed by the multiple fly-by-night “personal bankers” who do not return phone calls or e-mails. I have concluded that this is because you do not pay them or train them adequately. I have also concluded that if your personal bankers were to give truly good advice, the first advice would be to cease to bank at Natwest.

You have chosen to spend money that could go into improving your services on some sort of lifestyle magazine. Is this glossy celebration of consumerism supposed to make me feel better about your exorbitant fees? The writing is insipid and uninspired and the advice tired and useless. Why are you giving my money to these writers and photographers? I think it is because you want to distract the proles with pretty pictures while you mismanage our money and do not do what we ask.

Yours,

Rachel Mariner

You can write to Natwest too at letters@natwestprivatemagazine.com

When Everyone Finds You Annoying, You Know You're Getting Somewhere

2011-11-21T12:54:00.000-08:00

http://vimeo.com/groups/occupy/videos/32458762

Yeah, OK, this is so far out of everyone's comfort zone that no one really likes it or understands it. The poor activists have such a seige mentality (and you would too) they can't really get their heads around holding hands with the establishment and having a celebration of what they have done. And the church has such a staid, status quo mentality, such a sense that the problems in the earth are overseas, that Christians regularly look at me as if I had gone insane again when I ask them about what their response to the Occupation is.

We are all in our own ghettos, you know, we all live and move among the people we know, we tell them what we think and we know they will like it and we might be outraged or judgmental together in our ghetto, and we may have solidarity in our ghetto, but nothing changes.

The Occupation is rife with lifelong activists. These lifelong activists may win tiny victories, but largely they are in their marginalized ghettos and if the Occupation follows them, that is where they will be too. And look, the church in England is in its marginalized ghetto as well, it's much whiter and maler and richer than the Occupation, but it is a timid and dying voice in our culture.

It need not be that way. Let's open the gates of our ghettos, shake hands, roll up our sleeves, light some candles and change the injustice rife in our world. Not Africa, not America, not the Middle East. Let's start here where we live. We seriously need to take the logs out of our own eyes. It starts here or it doesn't happen. I honestly think all these Christian organizations point to the problems overseas because it's easier to do that than to address the fundamental bloat of consumerism in their own backyard. I am not buying any more goddamned toothbrushes for cute children in Liberia. We have our own problems. We have our own kind of moral famine going down.

This world is not good enough for my children. It is not good enough for your children. The government does not listen to the people and the function of the markets is to steal from us and from our earth more and more. Real change requires real transformation and real transformation is icky and exhausting and a big headache and requires you to act outside your comfort zone. But it is possible. That's what those cold and tired goofballs in tents have shown me. Look, the Farmer and the Cowman can be friends. The people of this island even though they are obsessed with the past and protocol and other annoying things have really from time to time beat the government back into place. They can do it now. We can do it now.

John of Purton, Author of the Occupier's Prayer

2011-11-19T01:53:00.000-08:00

The Occupier's Prayer

2011-11-19T01:51:00.000-08:00

The other day, an old man came up to the microphone during the 1pm general assembly and asked if he could celebrate his upcoming 90th birthday on the site. The GA unanimously agreed.

He then proceeded to read out the following prayer. He called it occupier's prayer:

LORD, make me an instrument of Thy power to combat evil;

Where there is sabotage of Thy creation; Let me strive to safeguard it.

Where greed seeks to destroy our moral heritage; Let me be first to oppose it.

Where power and money combine to undermine our community life;

Let me hasten to affirm the supremacy of love of neighbour.

Where there is passivity and conformism to powers of darkness;

Give me courage to radiate the light of truth.

DIVINE MASTER, grant that I may not so much seek to live a quiet life as to join with others to enhance life, not so much to grab as to give, not to evade my social duty as to shoulder it, and not to fear power as valiantly to strive with others that it shall serve worthy ends; for it is in striving to act with love that we affirm love, in devoting ourselves to noble causes that we are redeemed, and in giving ourselves utterly to the wellbeing of our neighbours, to the service of truth, beauty and the joy of Thy creation, we rise to the life immortal. Amen.

Winter Carnival Proposal

2011-11-13T10:19:00.001-08:00

Winter Carnival

General Proposal

13 November 2011–

Whereas Occupy London has accomplished the beginning of a great moral awakening in our land;

Whereas the Church has declared itself an ally of the people in the people’s quest to make their land more just;

Whereas the people of the camp are weary and need not face the long winter alone;

Whereas this movement is in its tender infancy and may be the work of decades;

Whereas this movement must next be strengthened by all who would lend their strength, whether those people are willing to camp or not;

Whereas the voice of all of the people of Great Britain must be heard in our great moral reform;

Whereas spirits are low and times are hard and the raising of our spirits and of our joy in our families and our relationships is a necessary step on this journey;

Whereas we have much to learn from each other and our history and heritage;

Whereas the people of Great Britain in order to go forward should stand proud in their heritage and their grand history of reformers;

Whereas a public forum throughout all of Great Britain, throughout all of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, is greatly to be desired by everyone who seeks to support this change;

AND FINALLY, whereas this is a land with a rich history of festivals:

THERE IS PROPOSED a Winter Carnival

There is proposed a great Winter Carnival, where we recognize the incredible victory of the camp in awakening our very souls and stirring passion and debate. After a New Year’s Celebration in London to rival all New Year’s, the vision is that some part of the camps would disperse, retaining a presence in St. Paul’s as they see fit. But those who would could travel the length and breadth of Great Britain, sleeping in the Cathedrals, meeting with local supporters, marching through the dark streets in candelight, spreading the word, speaking and listening about how the people can work together to bring about a better life for our children.

I propose that such a Winter Carnival can be created by each Cathedral or place as they see fit. I propose that it be financed by the Church. I propose that at the carnival, all interested parties, including people of the churches and the Occupy movements, people from political parties and interest groups and grass roots organizations, would come and talk about how to make change for the better the first priority of everyone in Great Britain.

Winter Carnival could have multiple components.

Let’s start with something very fun and uplifting. Let’s open the Cathedrals to the camp and children and have history teachers explain the martyrs, and the historical role of the Church in securing greater liberty for the people. Let us hear the stories of the wars. Let us remember our own past together.

Let the Occupation march with the Church and all who would from the Cathedrals to the buildings of the government, and stand together in support of each other in our mutual quest to reform a government out of control. Let us march by candlelight to our public buildings and reclaim them as our own.

Let’s have a carnival of ideas and public forums. Let us meet and inspire each other. And gently and with great love the Occupation can survive the winter. Even the bankers need to learn they have nothing to fear from us.

Winter Carnival Component Ideas

Some proportion of the camp tour the UK, going Cathedral to Cathedral, starting in the New Year being part of local Winter Carnivals, creating a touring Occupation where they could stay in each Cathedral and meet with people of the churches and local people. I see this as marching forth after a great initial victory. We must be mindful of how we unfold, and I think it would be useful to stand back and ponder these things in our hearts and with our neighbours. This serves the need I see for the UK Occupation to have the time and space and rest to take the next step. This also would serve the need of strengthening support for the Occupation through people of faith – essentially relying on the Church for financial support for the tour. (It would make sense for Ken Costa and St. Paul’s Institute to join this tour, at least for selected dates, for town hall meetings about Costa’s mandate)

Winter Carnival itself would take shape as an organically local event, organized by whomever stepped forward to do so, but hosted by the Church. It could be a conference, a festival, or a party. It could be all three. Some places may have many Christians. Some places may have many activists. Some places like Cambridge have think tanks and societies and groups. Local political parties would be welcome. There could be music and food and debate and lectures.

Debate: I do not think that it needs to be debated that our government is dysfunctional or our economic policies immoral. I think a useful debate to have at everyone’s Winter Carnival is what the moral principles of a just government and economic system should be. Let the church and the Occupation support each other thinking about that this winter.

This is a victory celebration, a party thrown by our allies, a beginning of a true grass roots building of a transformation of our society. This is a chance to reclaim back our own lives and our own land and to give ourselves the voice we should have in our government that seems to have been taken away.

Although this proposal makes use of the Church as an ally, it is not meant in any way to contradict Point Two of the initial statement: “We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities dis/abilities and faiths.” This is not about making people Christian or not Christian, this is about atheists and theists both working together here on earth to curb a government filled with injustice.

This proposal does assume that in order to fulfill Point 7 of the Initial Statement (“We want structural change towards authentic global equality.”), we must first take the logs out of our own eyes before we take the speck out of our neighbour’s. We must make structural changes toward authentic equality here in our own land first before the change can be global.

Occupy LSX: not an anticapitalist protest, more like a murmuration

2011-11-10T14:31:00.000-08:00

As long as we are a protest, we are defined by what we protest against. We need not limit our imagination and boundaries in that way. We need not let our anger sap our energy and cloud our judgment. The General Assembly has agreed we are a movement, not a protest. Yes, of course, anger at injustice brought us to the camp. Watching the livestream of the students and the intimidation by the police, believe me, I felt it too. But rage is not enough. Rage cannot sustain us. Rage might be in the DNA of this movement, but it is just that, DNA, the motivating blueprint, but not the plan. The embodiment, the literal making a body from this DNA requires love and patience, love and patience to the person sitting next to you, to your co-worker, to your mailman, to yourself.

We are more like a murmuration of starlings, sweeping through the sky in arcs of unimaginable beauty, not planned by any one person, but acting and reacting not to any leader or any direction, but simply flying with the starlings around us.

http://vimeo.com/31158841

Starlings move based on what the starling next to them is doing, and humans do the same thing. We must be moved by one another for something good to happen. We cannot keep doing what we have always been doing and expect these other people at the camp to fix things. We must be moved.

We are not anticapitalist, we are pro justice. We are pro earth. We are pro human. We are asking questions and looking for answers. We know where we see injustice and we know where we see suffering, but we do not know everything. Nor need we know everything to stand up for goodness. We do not have to understand derivative transactions to count ourselves in the Occupation. We are transparent, accountable and democratic and we believe the system we have is broken. How on earth could anyone disagree with that? The majority of criticism I read in the press simply ignores these fundamental tenets and instead chooses ad hominem attacks really so infantile that they do not merit a response.

How I see it, no one is in or out of the Occupy movement because they buy a latte from Starbucks, or because they have a job, or because they don't have a job. They are not in or out because they sleep in a tent in London, or they don't sleep in a tent. We are radically inclusive. I am sitting downstairs in my pyjamas while my two kids sleep in their rooms. Yes, middle class. And in Cambridge. Smug central! Yet I am in.

And all are welcome, all people. No institution is trustworthy, no way of thinking is sacrosanct, no person should be excluded We want everyone - landowners, conservatives, stakeholders in the financial system, shareholders, directors. At least, I want everyone and I think we should want everyone. We want ideas and we don't really care where they come from. An idea, as Anonymous shows us, should be judged on its merit, not on the speaker.

We need everyone because we need all ideas. We don't know exactly what this is yet and what it is becoming and what will happen next. People ask me every day how it is going and I have to say that this is not a product launch. It is not a jury trial. It is not a movie premiere or an IPO. It is not something that has happened before, there is not really a metric for phenomenal social change in the technology age. So I don't know how it's going. We probably won't have a clear answer on that for twenty years. Yes, the women of Greenham common, the indignatos, the anti-nuke protesters, these are in our DNA too, but make no mistake, they don't have all the answers either, and they/we don't have a plan. I am not saying that these people are not brave and heroic. I am saying that this is bigger than Greenham common. It's bigger than Windscale. It's bigger than Selma, already, and we have just begun. It is history being made.

And you are my nearby starlings.

It's so obvious I shouldn't have to say it. - Comments on 9 November for the Middle Class

2011-11-09T12:37:00.000-08:00

Thousands of students did not come to the protests against cuts to educational funding in London today because the police in London warned them the night before they planned to use rubber bullets on them.

What in the Kent State hell have we come to here?

The Prime Minister triples university fees and tries to privatize higher education - essentially seeking corporate sponsorship for university courses.

And do the Chancellors of the Universities of Great Britain rise up in protest and disgust at the idea that the orientation and focus of what happens in the classroom should be what corporations want? Do they? No. They are too busy sucking up to corporations themselves to get the latest Glaxo Smith Kline Drug Testing Facility/University Lab.

And do the alumni of the universities rise up and express disgust that corporations have somehow made the agenda of the universities their decisions? No. They are too busy serving corporations, shopping, spending, working, commuting in service to their mortgage, treading water, barely keeping up.

So the only people left to guard the idea of free inquiry into truth that is the beating heart of universities are these students, these people barely adults themselves, that is who we have left to send in this war against the corporations, in this fight for the souls of our universities and THEY are intimidated out of their right to protest by threats of violence. Who is threatening them away from this essential work? The police, the very people who should be protecting them. What kind of shitty world do we live in?

How long will we let every organizational unit of human identity go the hell because it has to suck up to money? The church, the government, the universities? I am disgusted at the weakness of our leaders. I am disgusted at our blindness. I am disgusted at our apathy.

I am also dog tired and in a bad mood so I am going to put my son to bed. But I ask you, dear reader, what do you think a university is for ? What does it protect? Should it protect its endowment or should it protect free inquiry and knowledge? Aren't you sick? Doesn't this make you sick? I can't pretend the world is not very very ill.

Winter Carnival

2011-11-07T14:59:00.000-08:00

So I have been thinking about the next steps for the movement, how to envision change and development beyond New Year's, beyond the camp. And I keep coming back to the practical need to play to our strengths. And strange as the situation is, in the UK we find a great strength of our movement is the fact that the Church of England is on our side. I also come back to Vinay Guptha's (@leashless) analysis of the movement, and that the camp should disband and regroup in Spring. I also come back to George Lakoff's idea from the US that this movement is poweful not for the individual items on an agenda of reform, but as a moral movement, as a movement that recognizes that what is moral in the markets is a question that sorely deserves our time and our attention. And I come back to St. Paul's mandate to Ken Costa and the public interest on the financial excesses of our time. And coming back to all of these things talking to my parents today brought about this idea;

What if some proportion of people at the camp left the camp on New Year's Day to march forward in victory to all the parts of the UK? What if they did that in connection with and conjunction with the church? My idea is that the Cathedrals of Britain would open their doors to a Winter Carnival, where people from the Occupation and people from the churches and synagogues and temples could meet with the local people, could get to know each other, to start to build bridges between them. We have the same problem to solve - economic injustice - and Ken Costa same as the Occupation essentially has a mandate to figure it out. Why not have a tour - the people of the camp can go from place to place, or local supporters can gather, and meet with Church officials and other interested parties - not to merge the churches and the movements, but to understand an alliance. To the Occupation ,I say that these are the people organized for social justice outside of London and are such a valuable ally.

It could be a totally fun one day party or overnight festival at the Cathedrals - our beautiful commonwealth, our Cathedrals - in the UK. People could make a pilgrimage, on behalf of their beliefs in the OCcupation or in the church or in whatever they believe in - it would be a chance to explore our commonality.

Let us spend the winter in a joyous festival, a party in support of what we have done, a calling out to people all over Britain. We don't want Ed Milliband and Ken Costa and Richard Chartes to do this work in a vacuum without the input of the people, and we don't want the Occupation to stutter or slow because the old paradigms prevent its growth.

If this is a moral movement, then this movement has a place for religious people, and the social justice that religious people yearn for is something that we too should support. We can lend our voices to each other. I am not saying invite only the churches and imams and Occupation, I am saying invite all who will come, like the parable of the Wedding guests. Invite everyone and see who comes. If UK Uncut or Anonymous want to come to the carnival, give them a place, let us have a public place full of expression and discussion and new connections. Let us spend the long dark winter learning to love the people we share this island with, and let us come back in the Spring renewed and with hope.

This could be one part of the Finsbury Square and St Paul's Occupations going on tour this winter - January and February, perhaps, around all the Cathedrals of Britain, with their new strange bedfellows the Christians, holding parties and speaking at churches or wherever they are asked and going forth, going forth, not retreating, but making the connections that will make the 99% possible and make this change real, lasting change. I am thinking candlelight and parties, mulled wine and vaulted ceilings, new friends and new hope. I am thinking something that is organized by the Occupation and funded by the Church (and maybe the Universities?). A camp out inside each of Britain's remarkable Cathedrals could be a wonderful way to spend the winter.

We have hope, we need to spread that hope, and we will have more hope the more we can bring the glad tidings to the farthest reaches of this tiny island. Look, if I thought there was a better strategic option than asking a number of hard-bitten secularists to befriend Christians, I would be pimping that one on this insignificant blog. But oddly enough, I don't think there is.

There could be music and dancing. This could be a winter where we keep hope warm and we learn of the possibility of a better world from each other. This carnival could celebrate our sameness and respect our differences. We could reach out to the people and see what happens. We could stand apart and together with our allies and bring about a shockingly better world.

From the Preface to Transforming Capitalism from Within

2011-11-07T07:25:00.001-08:00

"... Yet if the gross national product measures all of this, there is much that it does not include. It measures neither the health of our children, the quality of their education, nor the joy of their play. It measures neither the beauty of our poetry, nor the strength of our marriages. It pays no heed to the intelligence of our public debate, nor the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wisdom or our leaning, neither our wit, not our courage, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything, in shor, except that which makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about our country except those things that make us proud to be a part of it."

- Robert Kennedy, US Senator, Kansas City, 1968 J

Over to you, middle class, academia, churches, unions and activists

2011-11-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

It has been a complete rollercoaster of a week, I started brainstorming litigation strategy and ended up talking to a Rabbi. It is so exhausting to think so hard about something, especially something as formless and new as our movement, the Occupation. But now that there is a reprieve from a physical threat on the camp, it is time to plan our exit, or if the plan is never to exit, the plan must be to build bridges, wide and strong and beautiful, bridges that span St. Paul's Square and the Corporation of the City of London, that span out from the camp throughout London and all of England, Wales and Scotland, and maybe build bridges to every part of the world.

Occupy London has a special relationship with Occupy Wall Street, it does. But our story is different from their story - our Occupation should span the EU and all the people of all the countries that need our aid. Our Occupation is born from Madrid and Tahrir Square and even more ancient rebellions and has a different sort of feeling, our Occupation for reasons unknown to us now finds the Church of England a powerful ally.

The Occupation will only be successful if we enter into this new relationship with the Church of England and even the Corporation of the City of London with love and understanding. We are in this together and we can work for the common good together.

Somehow we must make new friends and build new bonds. The Occupation is not the people at the camp, it is all of us. If it is just the people at the camp, it is some kind of "them" who may be dismissed, who may succeed or fail without us. But if we don't want them to fail, and I don't think any of us do, then we must consider them as us. We all want more justice. We all want the ills of the earth to be cured. We don't want our loved ones to die violent deaths. We want people not to suffer for lack of life's basic necessities. We all want our governments to be sacred spaces full of extraordinary people devoted to service and not personal gain. And all of us in our hearts would like to leave the world better for our children, not worse. We can continue that work to meet these needs, or we can watch those other people get cold this winter.

And you know what, the Corporation of the City of London actually already backs what some people think is ingenius environmental reform. (It's called Contraction and Convergence) They gave an award to Aubrey Mayer about this.

And St. Paul's is also doing all that work about the City anyway. We can agree on things and work together. But for that we need our churches and governments know that we would like to support the Occupation.

A mum from my son's school gave me this book called Transforming Capitalism from Within written by Jonathan Rushworth and Michael Schluter. I am telling you, this book is simple and elegant and true. It proposes ( could be stronger but a wonderful proposal) to run corporations on a relational model where the economic value of the corporation becomes tied to the wellbeing of its customers, employees, suppliers and environment. And this guy who wrote it is some kind of Christian who goes to her church. Look, we all are concerned already. We are concerned but we are apart. We need to get together and talk. Ideas are out there. I think that this book is really trying to run corporations along biblical principles, but I have to say, I don't really care where the good ideas come from if they are good ideas and neither should you. A lot of people in a lot of churches in Britain care a lot about social justice and we should issue them a special invitation to St. Paul's - now that St. Paul's is open, we should ask them to have a Christmas conference in conjunction with the camp.

I keep spouting these ideas, sorry, I wanted to write about how exhausting I find this. I feel like the Grinch when his heart grew three sizes, but it is very tiring. I mean, I had never really let myself think that the government had become immoral until I had a conversation with a man who has come to be the great John from the Media Tent. He said that, and it resonated with all my frustration and rage and judgment. Of course it was true and of course I believed it, but I had never admitted it to myself. And that is when I began to open my heart, to occupy my own heart as suggested in that crucial Wall Street communication. I didn't do it by choice. But I began to let myself feel a little rage. Injustice angers me. I see it everywhere. I see it as almost a byproduct of the bloat of consumerism, of the need for corporations to always show a material return. And then it really was like I had swallowed the red pill in The Matrix. THe fact that banks were advertising sweet choral numbers to my children enraged me. The Liam Fox affair enraged me. The reaction of the government to the riots enraged me. And what that rage gave me was a thirst for justice, and I think a lot of people have it. A lot of people are thirsty for justice. But we have been lulled into a position where we feel powerless to act on that. That consumer coma has got to go. And it is not just corporations and banks that need reform. Inefficiency is in my estimation the biggest enemy of the euro. And inefficiency is resident in labor and labor unions and needs to be transformed. So what could happen and what needs to happen for this movement to move the earth to a better place is a constantly evolving set of ideas and feelings and this amazing new freedom in my imagination is pretty great.

I hope you all can join me. I hope the Universities can join me. I think the silence of our Universities with respect to the Occupation is truly a betrayal of their highest and best values. These places, which are supposed to be citadels and guardians of truth of all varieties, have basically become corporate lapdogs, begging money from companies, tailoring their research priorities accordingly. I went to hear the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge speak recently and he said that Universities aid society. Really? Because the last time I checked society wasn't doing that great. I don't think that the average soldier in Afghanistan or rioter really feels Oxbridge is helping them with anything in their lives. I think Universities should be bold and independent voices for truth and as such they need to report to Tent City University as soon as possible and share the highest and best learning on what needs to be done to heal the earth and reform the markets.

Why won't the London School of Economics provide a slate of reform proposals? Or at least offered its considerable resources? Why are the Universities pretend this isn't happening? And when there is a consensus- for instance on the immediate application of the Tobin Tax - why is the government ignoring that?

Well, one reason I have determined is stasis. I have learned that protest in England has, well, a protest culture rather than a movement culture, and the protest culture is happily ignored by the powerful. And then the protest culture becomes, just like the church and the government and every corporation, about sustaining itself rather than serving the people. I could use nasty words like ghettoized in this respect, but it is not only the problem with the culture, there is a problem with the actions of the people in the culture right now. There is a percentage of hard core activists in the UK who are standing back rather than joining in. And in part they are standing back because their thinking about their institutions and relationships really should be questioned as closely as we look at any bank. There is stasis, there is status quo and therefore security. But the most insecure position we can take for ourselves and our children in the coming years is to stay with the status quo. So all these activists need to stand up.

But this takes such time and energy (trust me to complain always). Time and energy that we need to keep up our income and parent our children. I personally have never been so exhausted in my life. It's not even that I am doing that much. I am just trying to understand what is happening, what can happen and what should happen. I want to keep this hope I feel alive. I am in love with this idea that it is not too late for our generation. I am very lucky to be working with Jeffrey Newman in the time I can devote to this, who runs the Earth Charter. He is the one who pointed out to me the extraordinary connections in this post.

I have been responding to some criticism that the Occupation is useless because it does not have an agenda. And today read the Occupation - which is now officially a movement and no longer a protest, interestingly - does not deserve our support because it is not global. I have an overwhelming respect for this speaker, Vinay Guptha. But let me tell you, these guys at the camps kind of have a LOT going on. These guys would love to be global. In fact, many discussions about regulating banks and money express a concern that a remedy for global finance likely needs to be global. They need people like you to help figure out how that could happen. This guy Vinay has an amazing take on the issues. He points out that to be in the 1% in this world of seven billion people you need only make $34,000 a year - £26,000. Suck on that. It seems to me that if we want justice in the world we need to feed the hungry.

I read a blog post about how narcissistic and ineffective blogging is as a thing. That person may be right. But that is what I have to offer, only these exhortations, only the electric thrill of my hope. I hope it is something.

A Response to Patrick Hayes

2011-11-03T06:40:00.000-07:00

Last night there was a debate about Occupy London and an observer (about whom I know nothing) wrote this piece:

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11369

So here is my response.

Dear Patrick,

Did you notice that you called the words honesty, justice and equality "banal and platitudinous" in your piece?

You say the camp has no point because it has no specific agenda, yet to me the point of the camp is a kind of liberation from the tragic idea that words like honesty, justice and equality are just banal and platitudinous words with no meaning and no effect.

What I see at the camp is the beginning of an understanding that honesty, justice and equality are in fact sacred words that have been trampled so much by getting and spending that you, an observer in good faith, can simply call them banal and platitudinous, as if they could never be real.

As a person who has made five trips to the camp, and who daily hears criticisms of the vagueness of the movement, may I point out that Occupy is not an event primarily for the media. This is an authentic awakening of hearts and minds not really susceptible to an Outlook calendar. There is not a brand or a message, it's not a movie premiere or a product launch or anything that is in our current lexicon of experience. It is not interested in a political party: just putting another horse in the same corrupt race. To me it has been a kind of transformation just to imagine what authentic democracy could look like.

So the Occupation has a lot going on. And it is enough now, to think and to stand and to begin. I think it is enough for now that people essentially wake up and realize that the institutions we have created to serve people are just not fit for service. For those institutions have dulled our imaginations and robbed us of our virtue to the point where we think equality, honesty and justice are simply banal and platitudinous words.

If you are looking for an agenda, let me suggest with all affection and respect that you spend some time considering - just considering - the idea that equality, honesty and justice are important, meaningful words that could reflect our human endeavors. Let that idea take root in your heart and in your life and see what happens.

Kind regards

Rachel Mariner

Eisenhower in 1953, Peter Mulvey in 2005

2011-10-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

Dwight Eisenhower speaking to the American Association of Newspaper Editors in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms in not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

And the lyrics of the beautiful song by Peter Mulvey

Abilene (The Eisenhower Waltz)
God bless you, Dwight D. Eisenhower
As I stand next to the truck stop shower
Watching our bright destiny unfold.
Now your highway rolls from here to gone
This land we’ve laid our hands upon
And sir, it is a sight just to behold.
Oh God bless you, Dwight D. Eisenhower
Though this is not our finest hour
Highwaymen have made off with your creed.
Now the band is marching no matter what
The eyes of history are shut
This is the hour of our deepest need.
And the wind howls through the fields of Abilene.
So God bless you, Dwight D. Eisenhower
As now, the youth in all their flower
Hang on the iron cross you warned us of.
And they say you wept to hang them so
You among us all might know
These things it seems we sometimes do for love.
Oh these things we do for love.

And the wind howls through the fields of Abilene.

A Petition to Sign -

2011-10-31T07:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk/2011/10/occupy-solidarity/

Please consider signing this online petition in support of the Occupiers' right to protest. Even if anti-capitalism bums you out, if the State - any state - America or the UK or Australia - can shut down a non violent protest, then things become considerably more frightening for the rest of us. That is some police state stuff, and then we get into some real problems. My brother started http://nonviolentoccupation.blogspot.com to emphasize two things about the Occupations: they are (1) nonviolent and they are (2) global. Let's keep them that way, and whether or not you want to camp, at least put your name down to let them continue to fight for a better world.

A Message to the City of London and all Humans on Earth

2011-10-29T14:45:00.001-07:00

Please consider reading this. It is relevant to you only if you are human and seek justice on this earth. Justice is an idea we have all forgotten, an idea that we are too cynical to believe will ever be a word applicable to any reality we encounter. And yet. And yet it is this cry that comes from all of our hearts, it is the highest and best truth in action that makes humanity wonderful. It is something we have forsaken. We have forsaken justice for money, we humans, and it is the oldest story in the book but here we are once again. I ask all of you: what does justice mean to you? Where is it? Do you see it in the government? Do you find it in your church? Do you see it in the marketplace? Does the ordering of the powers of the earth sit well with your soul? Or are things dark and in fact immoral? They are dark and immoral for me.

I personally am too tired, it is making me exhausted, watching all this immoral activity within our governments and banks. We were not vigilant in protecting our liberty which give voice to justice (all liberty lusts for justice). We were distracted by the price of our houses and the comparative advantage we had against our neighbo(u)rs in all the things money can buy. Consumerism, the constant getting and spending, it lulled us - its part in our lives is too bloated and too big and it has dulled us all. While it dulled us, the government has taken our young for unjust wars. And a few get ever richer to the ruination of the rest of us. And the survival of the very Earth looms in the horizon, we have been such poor stewards, we have been such poor stewards of the earth. The health of our bodies and the planet is in peril.

But these are wrongs that can be righted. Justice is possible.

And justice - truth - has gathered as the idea that unites this leaderless, disparate collection of people dedicated to bringing about a better world known as the Occupation. A nice clean church meeting, shareholder meeting or electoral candidate - that is not what cam to you seeking justice. This is what came. And you would do well to open your eyes and open your ears and listen to the Occupation.

Our governments do not aid justice. Our churches do not aid justice (feel free to prove me wrong). Our employers do not aid justice. Our banks do not aid justice, nor can they ever without a true, strong reformation. If you want them to aid justice and thus to give your children a much greater world than the one we have lived in, then you need to support this Occupation. I know you don't like the tents. The tents are a distraction. I know you don't like the anarchism - that is not a given. What is to like is much more important than our differences - what is to like is the commonality between us. The spirit is awoken. Let your spirit awaken to the justice you want in your heart and in your life and in your country.

Let justice sweep over you, you who now in your lives and jobs do not believe justice is possible. Believe. It is possible. It is possible for the good people of England, of London, of Britain, of every place, to take the goodness of life back for themselves, even after being trod upon for decades. It is possible to be Robin Hood. And like Robin Hood, we rise and rise again until the lambs become lions and we take back our cities and our lands, without violence, with unity, with hope. The people of England can live through anything. And they could live through the terrible dark ages of capitalism that will come if we do nothing. Or they fcould rise up and not only live but thrive. No one else is coming to make the world you know you long for in your heart. These guys have come. They deserve our support. They need our assistance. We need our assistance. Help them and you help yourself.

People excoriated me for bringing my children to St. Paul's during Occupy Half Term. And while I don't think my 7 year old really absorbed many of the finer points of anarchy, he did see people standing up for what their hearts told them. And people like that are good to be around. They liberate you to speak from your own heart and to be who you truly are, because there is this nice unity in their spirit. This kind of unity you don't see in the average high street shopping specimen. They give me hope. People ask why now, why did you start now and the answer is, because the Occupation gives me hope. No one else gives me hope. No one else has an agenda I can respect and hope to give my children. I am a mum with a mortgage who shops at Boden online. I buy lattes from Starbucks and I eat Subway sandwiches sometimes. I am a reformist not a revolutionary. But I believe justice is possible if only we come together and support those standing up for justice, in their weird contingent way, in their joyful way.

Everyone should look at their local Occupation and be like Mary. Be like Mary. Go away and ponder these things in your hearts.

Consider Settlement

2011-10-27T14:50:00.000-07:00

This is what the Bishop of London has offered the Occupation:

"The time has come to change the setting. Now that St Paul's can function again, albeit on a limited basis, the cathedral wants to help recapture the serious issues.
If the protesters will disband peacefully, I will join the Dean and Chapter in organising a St Paul's Institute debate on the real issues here under the Dome.
We will convene a panel from across the political and business spectrum and will invite the protesters to be represented.
The Dean and I will be available on Sunday morning, outside St Paul's, to listen and engage. Our message will be simple: pack up your tents voluntarily and let us make you heard."

I think it could be a start. If St. Pauls really is willing to align itself with the aims of the occupation, is willing to open itself up to support them, is willing to engage the leaders of England on the issues of economic justice preying upon all of us, then perhaps it is worth considering meeting their offer with a counter-offer, a very detailed proposal of what we need them to do to make us heard, what kind of panels they are talking about. This is their first settlement proposal and a lot more is probably on the table if we ask.

I think to be attractive to the Occupation, the offer of St. Paul's would have to be fleshed out and detailed, and planned. If that work could happen before a single tent is moved, then work of the Occupation could move forward with a powerful ally. I don't know everything about the camp and why the camp is necessary. The camp is a media flashpoint, of course. But if in a settlement St. Paul's become that media flashpoint, inside and outside, then perhaps the desires of all the parties could be met. Consider the following counter-offer:

1) The Occupation should have a permanent daily presence at St. Paul's, inside, perhaps, or at least with Tent City University and the information tent still outside and an exhibition on economic and social justice on the inside.

2) St. Pauls should keep the food tent to feed the hungry. Certainly this is within the clear remit of the church and could even be partially moved on to the Cathedral premises. Inviting the hungry and the homeless in for warmth and a meal would be a truly Christian move on the part of St. Paul's and would allow the Occupation to have a living presence that actually increased traffic to the church.

3) St. Paul's should go through the existing point in the Occupy LSX initial statement and say what specifically it can do to get the message across point by point. This could take some time. It could be worth it. If their proposed agenda could be good enough, those who want to camp could Occupy Finsbury Square and those who were there to make a statement, to be heard, could then use St. Paul's to be heard.

Here's the reasoning: St. Paul's should agree to these things both for their internal interest in being a business and their external or putative interest in serving the cause of Christ. Opening the dialogue on the issues as Chartres suggests involves making that dialogue perpetual and real and requires a straightforward plan that can manage everyone's expectations.

And as for the Occupation: I am saying not that people should capitulate but that people should be realistic. I have blogged several pages about the overwhelming work of the Occupation and how camping and manifesto and press can sap energy and time. Fighting to keep a camp has almost become a distraction from the cause of justice behind the camp in the first place. It is with a heavy heart that I report from the villages that regular people demonize the camp for impeding the progress to St. Paul's. I don't know whether it is better to capitulate to that demonization in order to bring in the rest of the 99 or whether it is better to fight what are in the main, lies about the camp.

I personally wish that the Occupation was not billed as virulently anti-capitalist. Occupy Half Term was not anti-capitalist. It was about witnessing the truth and heeding the calls of our own hearts for justice. Whether this ultimately translates into a reform agenda or a revolutionary agenda is not something that we know right now. If we could secure the good efforts of the church in creating a broader base of support for this movement, this movement could accomplish something, accomplish something nonviolent and real.

St. Paul's would have to be very brave, however. It seems to me that some of the points on the agenda would truly make its trustees (who are nothing less than the existing powers of the earth) mightily angered. Will they really follow through on the call to beat swords into plowshares? Could they? Will they really support a national examination of the bloated place of consumerism in our collective souls and community life? Could they really as shareholders in many English companies question executive pay and tax status? Would they? Could they be that brave? Yes? Then let's put it in a settlement agreement and begin the work.

Occupy Wall Street has a younger country and a cooler city and high approval ratings. Occupy London has strictures OWS cannot imagine: strictures of class and ancient right, feudalism and monarchy. But Occupy London has this massive strange twist that Occupy Wall Street never had. Somehow we are in the position of taking on the church. And while they have proved an impressive enemy, it is clearly their lawyers who are at the fore right now, and the lawyers do not have to be at the fore forever. We can talk to those who want to represent the church of Christ. And do you know why? Because whether you are atheist or theist or Jewish or Muslim or Christian, Jesus was hoping that all of us would live in the Kingdom of Heaven, a just world, a world we could bring about. If you can get St. Paul's Cathedral to start talking about that, then I promise you, you have a start. Pack up your tents for Finsbury Square and gain this ally and gain the affection of the middle class and I do not think you will go wrong.

Remember the word of Jesus as recorded by Luke: "Woe unto you lawyers, for you load the people with burdens hard to bear, and you lift not a finger to help them." The people are crying out for justice in the shadow of St. Paul's and the lawyers are about to load them with more burdens. This lawsuit should not be filed, should not be filed a million times over from every conceivable angle.

When I first moved to Cambridge I used to stand in the back yard and wonder who the hell was this person who had moved to Cambridge, who owned this house, who lived in this place. Now I feel the same sense of utter dislocation: who is this person holding up signs and blogging late into the night? Who is this person? It is me. It is me. It is me and I do not represent some extreme strange faction, I represent the 99, the middle, the ones weeping for their children and the life they will have bloated by consumerism and devoid of freedom unless we step in.

I have been questioned by so many people: why are you aligning yourself with the people in the tents? I will tell you why: because life does not give you perfect and convenient opportunities with clean and showered compatriots who are not camping anywhere illegal - in fact, life gives us this. This is the opportunity that we all have to fight the terrible creep of powerful corporations into the fairness of our government and shape of our lives. Opportunities must be seen and grasped. This opportunity especially, and by all. We have much to learn. We have much to speak about with each other. We have much to consider, especially if, in truth, we all consider our commonality, our need to talk and work things out, our communion in the cause of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. This chance will not come again. Our children get older and older and justice is no nearer in the institutions that now shape our lives. Let's reconsider these institutions. Let's reconsider them with St. Paul's, on the steps of St. Paul's, under an iron-clad settlement agreement.

Goodnight and much love.

Letter to Occupy London Stock Exchange

2011-10-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

    I will write later about Occupy Half Term, it was just marvelous, not marvelous as a media event, although it was that too, but rather it was marvelous as an example of the genuinely admirable people at Occupy London Stock Exchange. The Anons could not have been more honest, more courteous, could not have tried harder or charmed the kids any more. Great honest answers to hard questions. Then the Food Tent with its unending unheralded generosity. How I loved my children wandering around with bread in hand from a communal and free table. It warmed me and made me joyous. And then Tent City University, where the kids learned the ways of the general assembly and tried them out for themselves, where songs were sung and the story of Stone Soup was told so charmingly I feel it would leave English regional theatre in the dust. It was chaotic, it was raining, but every time I go down to that camp I am filled with hope and joy at the prospect of people making a better world and I think my children felt that joy, and now I am so happy. A million thank yous to the people at the camps, who are expected to be in contact with external supporters, sustain attacks from the Church of England, take care of survival needs, and formulate an exhaustive and definitive manifesto of the movement. That seems like a lot to me. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for your heroic sacrifice.

   More importantly, I am troubled about this thing with St. Paul's. It appears from the Standard that you face a lawsuit. It happens that I have a bit of experience in lawsuits and I would like to offer this perspective:

a. Going immediately to Settlement Negotiations rather than litigating these issues is in the interests of every party. You are being asked to do so much, and engaging in high profile litigation strategy is going to sap your time and their money. You want a resolution in good faith. Offer to go straight to settlement negotiations. This could protect the Canon's job as well.

b. Before the lawsuit is even filed, the three potential parties to the lawsuit, the Corporation of London, the Cathedral at St. Pauls and the Occupation sit down and work this out. On the Occupation's side is the right to protest and every civil liberty I so dearly love (sorry but may I remind you I named my daughter Liberty). On the Corporation of the City of London's side is incredible power, the power to tear us down slowly over time with distracting time and effort in every camping site we would ever want. We need to ask the Corporation in all humility - where can you put us? What do you want? Tell us where to go within your jurisdiction. Make us an offer. Let us make peace.

And to the Cathedral at St. Pauls I say you tell them this:   St. Paul's decided to close St. Paul's. My parents in their 70's retired in Florida and lifelong Christians. My father looked up at the looming edifice of St. Pauls, like the looming edifice of the nearby Bank of England and told me the words that Paul had actually spoken, about the living Church, the power of Christ, and truth and justice and he said it was obvious to him that the real Church was on the steps and in the tents. Christians will recognize this. The Christians should recognize the Occupation in every place as the living church. That is already starting, and that will give the Occupation leverage. But why not offer to move to where the Corporation of the City of London directs you to move within its jurisdiction - give St. Paul's no reason to keep its doors closed. Do not fight this battle. This battle will drain you and there is so much else to be done. Litigation in the UK is the product of an ancient system of enmity and it will drain you all. Find your common ground. I suggest that you offer St. Paul's two things in a settlement: (1) that you take the tents out provided that the Corporation of the City of London gives you somewhere else to go and (2) that you require as a condition of (1) that you have a permanent presence during the Occupation inside the Cathedral where people can inquire about the Occupation and perhaps the Cathedral does its best to connect the words of St. Paul with the actual Occupation: in that scenario, everyone is a winner. And if they do not accept that settlement offer, we know that they have forsaken Christ and the true church. Yeah, I said it. This is the true church. My Dad would not have brought that up if he thought otherwise.

Engage in radical consensus even with your enemies, treat them only with love and humour and non-violence.

That is my suggestion.

As incoherent as always but with a heart full of hope and love I remain your friendly Cambridge mum and

Rachel Mariner

2011-10-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

Today is Occupy Half Term

2011-10-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

I just did my fourth radio interview - pretty hostile- where the DJ excoriated the camp at St. Pauls (to which he had never been, of course) for closing St. Paul's, excoriated the protesters for having a camp, for not sleeping in the tents, and then asked me why on earth I would want to take my children to see people LIKE THAT. (Better people LIKE THAT than DJs LIKE HIM)

St. Paul's closed St. Paul's because its own trustees (banks) want to paint the protesters in as negative light as possible. The Occupation did not close St. Pauls. St. Pauls closed St. Pauls. People have set up an Occupation because social protests that DO NOT MOVE are more effective than ones that do. I want my children to meet these people and soak up this vibe because I RESPECT what they are trying to do - build a better world and I DON'T RESPECT the government. I hope those answers came across as ok.

The bullshit that is thrown at the people in the camps is unbelievable. These guys are being asked to defend their actions, clean the camp, formulate a manifesto, build a bridge to the non-camping supporters of the Occupation. I mean, it's not Syria, they are not getting shot, but man, these guys are working very hard to answer a myriad of claims and it is a burden. This is not a brand. This is not a corporation. These are people making up a lot of stuff as they go along and it is hard work.

I have been strangely exhausted and discouraged trying to push this to fruition the last few days. We will go today and what will be will be and I will as in every trial and presentation I have ever had in my life think only about its deficiencies and not its strengths.

It would be much safer to go shopping with the kids today except that I hate shopping, I hate injected molded plastic, I hate the way entering a store makes you feel insufficient, makes you feel need, robs you of the integrity of your identity a little bit. I hate that how much money people makes is a kind of calibration of worth in our society. I hate that people are really suffering out there. I find the indifference of this government to be tyrannical. I find our relationship to our government to be completely out of whack.

It may be only me, Liberty and Owain out there today. But no matter what it is, I am glad I took this stand and made this decision. My parenting obligations include introducing my children to reality and today that will happen for my kids much moreso than the kids who go to play at the Disney store.

With affection to my ten readers and a promise of more later from my self-pitying middle class mum self.

Occupy Half Term the Latest

2011-10-24T15:06:00.001-07:00

Please if you are not interested in Occupy Half Term do not read further; there is a political leaning here that may not be appropriate for a school website (although doing nothing is a political choice too, right?)

For anyone considering joining us for Occupy Half Term, I wanted to tell you more about how the events have shaped up for the day:

1. Meet at Cambridge train station at 10:00 for the 10:15 to London Liverpool St - stories and snacks on the train as well as sign-in and prep talk by me. Foremost here is that this is a neutral fact finding mission and we have much information to collect and ponder.
2. Arrive at Liverpool St Station at 11:45. The train will be met by some people from the camp and some other mums joining the event. We will walk together to St. Pauls
3. 12:15 A look around and orientation before meeting Anonymous - the group who wears the Guy Fawkes masks. They have promised a completely on the level question and answer period, where kids can ask them why they are there, what they are doing, why they wear those masks and what they want.
4. Lunch at the Vegan Cafe - There is a free Vegan Cafe that has delicious plentiful food so a packed lunch may not be necessary. While we sit and eat lunch, a very nice lady named Ruth from the outreach committee has promised to talk to us about the camp and what has happened and why they are camping. [Please bring your own plates if you can or food if your kids are not into lentil bake type arrangements - there is always plenty of fruit and cakes and tea] Please bring your own bottled water and be prepared to have a bit of an issue finding the loos.
5. 1:00 General Assembly and Tour: This unique leaderless format of direct democracy in order for a group to come to a consensus came via the Spanish indignados and Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street and thus to all the occupations in the world (more than 1000). It has its own protocols and sign languages and it is fascinating to watch. The kids won't watch a whole session, though, they will watch for a bit before they tour the camp, including the prayer tent and free book store, first aid tent.
6. 2:00 Tent City University: This will be amazing. The facilitators at the camp's Tent City University have promised to be there and listen to the kids and help them have their own general assembly about what they have seen, what they want to do next. The function of listening humbly while all have their say has really been a great personal learning experience for me.
7: 2:30 Dancing: There is a lot of joy in this camp, a lot of hope for a better world, a lot of pleasure in simple human activities like dancing and listening to music - things that do not cost money. It didn't seem that the kids would have a true taste of it unless they could let it rip out there on the steps with the Samba band: the band has not been confirmed, a kind person may have even written songs just for us, but there will be some music and movement before:
8. 2:45 departure to catch the 3:15 back to Cambridge. People from the camp have promised to walk us back .

St Pauls Cathedral: Several people have expressed concern to me that St. Paul's will be closed. It will probably be closed. I have directly requested that it open on the day for the kids; I have been involved in these negotiations and I firmly believe on the basis of the evidence that St. Paul's has decided to close because its Board of Trustees (Banks) do not want the protesters around; the health and safety reasons being a pretext. I promise you, this camp is clean, the kitchen is lean

Police: The police, unlike 15 October when the camp was set up and Fritha and I were kettled by the police, are totally friendly, plentiful, talking in a relaxed manner with the protesters and generally very cool. Certainly there is nothing even approaching tension or a lack of safety.

I have attached a flyer if you can't come but can think of someone who might come. I also provide somewhat obnoxiously the following links:

--A video of Saturday at St. Pauls including (starting at 11:30) my address to the General Assembly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38KrNjYady0

--A short video of me and other mums at Occupy London made by Jon Cheetham

http://nonviolentoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/10/for-all-mums-and-moms-watching.html

-- I am taking Liberty and Owain, and we may well be the only people at the train station under the Occupy Half Term banner, because I respect the vitality and love that is being infused into their hopes for a better world. I respect the idea of a leaderless general assembly. I respect their call for justice, my heart has the same call. I know everyone has plans for half term to make your kids more educated, happier and well adjusted, I know it is expensive and exhausting to get into London but I also know that this is the beginning of something and it could be something big and good, and the more good people who come and are heard, the better it will be. We are very busy raising our children but what kind of world will they have when our work is done?

A 2.5 min interview of me with the Independent on Sunday and other Mums:

http://nonviolentoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/10/for-all-mums-and-moms-watching.html

The Facebook page for Occupy Half Term is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Half-Term

The press release for the event is at www.occupylsx.org and my blog, as always, is strident and messy at www.libertyandowain.blogspot.com

Ponder these things in your hearts

2011-10-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

I come in at around 11:30 in the attached - some gorgeous quotes precede.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38KrNjYady0

Mums Support Occupy London

2011-10-23T02:31:00.000-07:00

Mums support occupy London from Jon Cheetham on Vimeo.

Petition to the General Assembly of Occupy London from Occupy Half Term

2011-10-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

First many profound thanks to John from Outreach, Ruth, Kai for the invitation to speak at the General Assembly today.   Those words about mom (mums I think we have to go with here) and teaching our children what to respect and yearning for justice were the words of my heart and I was grateful to share them.

I was interviewed by the Independent on Sunday afterwards, and people in the crowd, among them a professor from Oxford, an independent filmmaker, both expressed that my words resonated with them and they struggled in how to be involved in the movement from where they were.

So second, I petition the General Assembly to publicize Occupy Half Term. My view is that bringing the middle class mums in sooner rather than later is good.   I guarantee we are a force to be reckoned with.

Third Let me explain Occupy Half Term: there is a flyer in the Info Tent. If you as I believe that broader support for Occupy among the middle class, and especially middle class mums, is crucial to the success of the task of bringing together the 99 (and if you believe that bringing the 99 together is now your task), then perhaps you would be inclined to consider the following:

The Plan So Far:

1. The plan is to meet in the Cambridge train station and go together on the 10:15 to Liverpool Street and walk from Liverpool Street to St. Pauls. How wonderful if we were met at the train station by someone and we walked together through the streets, children and mums.
2. When we arrive at the camp, I propose (and have started) the following agenda:

a. I have asked Anonymous to have a full question and answer session with the kids in their masks. I have promised the mums that the kids can ask whatever they want - why they are there, what they want, why they wear the masks.
b. I have asked Ruth to speak from Global Women's Strike and answer questions.
c. Tour of the camp and a walk around St. Paul's
d. Attendance at a General Assembly: to see the practices and protocols
e. Kids General Assembly: where the kids discuss what they have seen so far and what they think and the adults listen. [twenty minutes]
f. Dancing: A Revolution without dancing is not worth having, right? This movement makes me joyful and gives me hope and that is a wonderful reason to dance.
g. a parade back to Liverpool Street

I also ask the General Assembly for assistance in recording the event. I imagine that these discreet parts could be filmed and released on YouTube in parts: These could then be publicized for any school that wants information about the Occupation. TentCityUniversity could perhaps guide the filming or run the Kids General Assembly? My view is that getting positive information directly to the middle class unfiltered by main stream media would be a great step forward for the Occupation, and you could perhaps have the youtube clips available for other children who visit.

I firmly believe that truth in action, justice is happening and I want children to be able to bear witness. Suffer the little children, please.

Finally, would you consider petitioning St. Paul's to open for tourists during Occupy Half Term? A lot of the children coming have never been inside and it may be a way forward in working things out with them. I actually think the Christians should organize and petition St. Paul's if you have any of them at the camp.

Thank you for reading this and I am sorry I cannot be there.   Thank you for giving me hope and helping me spread the word.

Rachel Mariner
@rachelmariner

Facebook Group: Occupy Half Term

A Letter to the Christians at St. Paul's Cathedral and all Christians

2011-10-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

Today the Church of England issued a statement requesting that the protesters leave the camp. It is super polite, of course, this is England, and it is indirect, but the bottom line is that someone is telling them that they have to shut this down, or at least cease all aid to the Occupation. They asked Occupy London to get out.

I watched the livestream of the general assembly held to discuss this and I cried with love and wonder as people discussed, given that the guys at the Cathedral seemed like good guys, wouldn't Jesus really be out among the people? Didn't he get rid of the moneychangers? Wouldn't Jesus be on the side of the homeless, the jobless, the poor?

And may I add, didn't Jesus when tempted in the wilderness make it clear that holding on to the power of the state, and siding with the state, as the church has here, is to be on the side of evil and not of Christ?

There are wars and rumors of wars. Our earth is poisoned and thus our children's food. The earth itself rises up and knocks down the spires of the National Cathedral and wounds the Washington Monument. The people come into the street and demand justice. You can cower in the shadows, or you can join Jesus among the tents where you belong. Surely if you ponder this in your heart, you will know I speak the truth. The church should not stand in the way of a call for justice. God is being glorified outside your soaring walls by drunken anarchists, as they stand for the poor. These hippie proto-fascists are the Good Samaritan. They are Moses and you are the Pharoah (and I am Rachel, weeping for my children). They are the little children and you must suffer them to come onto you. .

On Sunday morning, the 16th of October, 2011, when you sent the cops away, my heart leapt with joy and my hatred of the church and what it has done to me abated considerably. You were acting from the heart then and I don't know who has been talking to you since then. Could you tell us?

And if you are truly concerned that you cannot serve the people of the Church with the tents there, then I ask that you at least ask the people you seek to serve what they think of the matter. Why not ask the Archbishop to send out an e-mail to every Church of England service and tell them that St. Paul's is looking to the Christian people of England to show the Church what it is. And invite them to come, for Halloween, for services on the 30th, for Occupy Half Term, invite them, suffer the little children, see what these good followers of Christ will say.

Is it not written of Jesus and the tax collector:

He entered and was passing through Jericho. There was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, and couldn't because of the crowd, because he was short. He ran on ahead, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and saw him, and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house." He hurried, came down, and received him joyfully. When they saw it, they all murmured, saying, "He has gone in to lodge with a man who is a sinner."
Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, "Behold, Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor. If I have wrongfully exacted anything of anyone, I restore four times as much."
Jesus said to him, "Today, salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost."

And all is seared with trade: Hopkins on the Occupation

2011-10-20T14:04:00.000-07:00


THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Justice is Possible

2011-10-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

When I got out of the Priory in May 2004, the shrink told me that I would not treasure what I had thought and said during my manic phase. He said it would all be nonsense in retrospect. Of course, as men in positions of authority so often are, as we as humans so often are, he was completely dead ass wrong.

What I wanted to do when I was crazy is start The Jedi Project. Founded on the principal that there was fundamentally no difference between sovereigns, religions, corporations and banks, that they should all be transparent and accountable to their shareholders, workers, citizens, voters and gods. Along these lines new laws could be written so that these legal fictions of human organizations served human well-being, served the well-being of the planet, served the well-being of our souls and of our happiness, served to further appreciation of the sweet goodness of life, our commonwealth. I imagined the coming of this project as an IPO the whole world could buy into. Money is not the enemy. Capitalism is not the enemy, the enemy is these legal fictions and how they loom as the machines in the Matrix and in the Terminator films, how they loom as Darth Vader's Republic, how they have insidiously and ingeniously put the government and universities of this world at their beck and call. I blame no one person and I do not call it greed. Our liberties have been restricted by our own stale laws which we have outgrown. It is time to write new laws, and for that we need a new theory. I think this theory is what many in the Occupy movement are struggling to find in their own hearts.

Anyway, I recovered from the mental hospital drugging me out of my manic, ecstatic, philosophical realizations, which took many years, and I have two children I have raised. I blog for them because to sit and be completely honest with myself on these pages about who I am fosters a full humanity that I want my children to possess, and which I am sure you want your children to possess. Some form of authenticity, some form of internal justice and mercy.

You see, I moved here to write plays and be a writer and it is that kind of unbearable honesty that I admire in other people's writing. While I was working on the play of my life, Mother Daughter Holy Spirit, I flew to DC to be with my dramaturg for a final five day push and I had a dream. Two dreams, actually.

In the first dream I was watching a shoreline from a concrete embankment with faceless white men in suits. I felt great fear. Flashes of white light in the sky preceded what I can only describe as a black prism and rainbow. Then a wave taller than the Chrysler building engulfed us and over us through the water I could see dolphins, swimming in military formation carrying ammunition, and I felt their unstoppable rage and I was so frightened. Then the vision disappeared and I was back on the embankment and I turned to the men speechless at the vision. But they had not seen it. They could not see it.

Those men, are, of course, the representatives of our banks, corporations, governments and religions. They are faceless fictions created by law. The dolphins expressed the rage of the earth and the rage in all our souls against how consumerism, and the whims of sovereigns are starting to destroy us, body and soul, earth and human. We are all one with the earth, right, we are all part of the same big cookie, this project of god if you must, in the end.

The first dream was immediately followed by a second dream. In that dream I heard a man crying out in real suffering. I turned a corner and in a bricked back garden, a man in a suit, like the men in the first dream, was pinned to the ground. He was lying there against his will, on him was an oversized and incredibly lovable huge Bernese Mountain Dog, sitting patiently, happy and expectant. As I got closer, I saw the man had dropped his briefcase, and then I saw behind the dog a woman, a woman like an Italian mother, broad in a black dress, clutching a pocket book, unhappy to be there and frightened but still, sitting there. Despite the screams of anguish from the man, I felt happy and energized, and I walked away without changing a thing.

If the man is all our sovereigns, corporations, religions and banks, then the dog is what the Occupy movement starts to bring. The dog is the balance of our humanity, the commonwealth of the earth and its resources, which must only be shared among us to be enough. The dog is every animal on this earth, every tree, every stream, every flower, and the dog is the animal part of humans too, he is us, he is the part of us that is if you must a child of god, craving justice and beauty, truth and joy. We need only find that part of ourselves and climb up there with that dog to put the earth back into its proper balance.
.
The Occupy movement, as it is rapidly unfolding, seems to be that dog, seeking first to shrink the power of corporations. I mean, it's just messed up what we have now. Governments feel they must serve corporations and banks, Universities feel they must serve corporations in order to be endowed. Political candidates are supplicants to them, and their escalation of the economy in the voracious unending quest for profit and money has damaged the earth. That is why the dolphins are so mad.

But look, the second dream is coming true and we have a chance to write new laws, where justice and mercy to ourselves and to the earth is the first and highest calling of the law, the spirit, the spirit must prevail. Call it a brand, call it a holy thing, call it what you will.

My saying on Facebook is Fiat Justia Ruat Coelum. This means: Let justice be done though the heavens be torn asunder . Justice is our responsibility here on earth. People are starving, the earth is being poisoned, the earth we leave for our children becomes more horrible every year we do nothing. Doing nothing now is to choose to stand on the side of the oppressor, of the clueless men in suits in my dream. Let the heavens be torn asunder. What we can do is write some new corporate laws. The lineage of the Corp in corporations is of course corpus, the body, the flesh. How perfectly ironic that we have let this legal fiction hurt our flesh and create a rat race of the world where we are its scuttling servant. It is not just.

But how wonderful that we live in a time when the dog is just beginning to pin our institutions down. How important it is to help. Shrink the getting and spending in you, shrink the banks down, shrink the corporations down and make the government the just voice of the people.

These dreams I believe are no coincidence, nor my rantings during the Jedi project, nor my education and friends and influences. I believe I am well situated to help. I want to help this leaderless movement. And I think it is perfect that the movement is leaderless and that must continue: we are all parts of the dog, now, right, or we're that reluctant woman and now we have to climb on top and stick it to the man. And to do that we need no leaders rising up to have more power, we need the ideas to prevail, the ideas of justice and compassion and love, how they manifest in our own hearts and lives is much more important than any leader, and it is only by finding them in ourselves that we can save ourselves.

Occupy London Stock Exchange: The First Statement

2011-10-18T05:49:00.000-07:00

From St. Paul's Square, 16 October 2011.

At today’s assembly of over 500 people on the steps of St Paul’s, #occupylsx collectively agreed the initial statement below. Please note, like all forms of direct democracy, the statement will always be a work in progress.
1 The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.
2 We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities dis/abilities and faiths. We stand together with occupations all over the world.
3 We refuse to pay for the banks’ crisis.
4 We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable. We demand an end to global tax injustice and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people.
5 We want regulators to be genuinely independent of the industries they regulate.
6 We support the strike on the 30^th November and the student action on the 9^th November, and actions to defend our health services, welfare, education and employment, and to stop wars and arms dealing.
7 We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich.
8 We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.
9 This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!

This is the Fight of our Lives (Bill Moyers, 2004 at NYU)

2011-10-17T06:25:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me this last night and man, this is Bill Moyers nearly ten years ago. I know it is a long article, but to me this sets forth very clearly the conceptual groundwork of the Occupy movement:

>
> This is the Fight of Our Lives
>
> by Bill Moyers
> Keynote speech
> Inequality Matters Forum (www.inequality.org)
> New York University
> June 3, 2004
>
>
> "The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us."
> -- Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004
> It is important from time to time to remember that some things are worth getting mad about.
> Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with a headline that stretched across all six columns, The New York Times reported that tuition in the city's elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming school year -- for kindergarten as well as high school. On the same page, under a two-column headline, Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library -- no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books -- largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book -- the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady -- are white. There's a 1967 book about telephones which says: "when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes -- "b" and "r" -- missing. There is no card catalog in the library -- no index cards or computer.
> Something to get mad about.
> Here's something else: Caroline Payne's face and gums are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit. Because they don't fit, she is continuously turned down for jobs on account of her appearance. Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler's new book,' The Working Poor: Invisible in America'. She was born poor, and in spite of having once owned her own home and having earned a two-year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped with the will to move up, but not the resources to deal with unexpected and overlapping problems like a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a sudden layoff crisis that forced her to sell her few assets, pull up roots and move on. "In the house of the poor," Shipler writes "...the walls are thin and fragile and troubles seep into one another."
> Here's something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year -- families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington Post called this "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be embarrassed," said the Post, "but they're not."
> And this, too, is something to get mad about. Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.
> Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years -- the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it -- among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
> Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns. During the last decade, I produced a series of documentaries for PBS called "Surviving the Good Times." The title refers to the boom time of the '90s when the country achieved the longest period of economic growth in its entire history. Some good things happened then, but not everyone shared equally in the benefits. To the contrary. The decade began with a sustained period of downsizing by corporations moving jobs out of America and many of those people never recovered what was taken from them. We decided early on to tell the stories of two families in Milwaukee -- one black, one white -- whose breadwinners were laid off in the first wave of layoffs in 1991. We reported on how they were coping with the wrenching changes in their lives, and we stayed with them over the next ten years as they tried to find a place in the new global economy. They're the kind of Americans my mother would have called "the salt of the earth." They love their kids, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week -- both mothers have had to take full-time jobs.
> During our time with them, the fathers in both families became seriously ill. One had to stay in the hospital two months, putting his family $30,000 in debt because they didn't have adequate health insurance. We were there with our camera when the bank started to foreclose on the modest home of the other family because they couldn't meet the mortgage payments after dad lost his good-paying manufacturing job. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.
> What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that they are patriotic. They love this country. But they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. When our film opens, both families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television in 1992. By the end of the decade they were no longer paying attention to politics. They don't see it connecting to their lives. They don't think their concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up our dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them. They know this, and we know this. For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold.
> Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that's not the case. As the economist Jeff Madrick reminds us, the pressures of inequality on middle and working class Americans are now quite severe. "The strain on working people and on family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television sets are cheap, but higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. And life has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means." You can find many sources to support this conclusion. I like the language of a small outfit here in New York called the Commonwealth Foundation/Center for the Renewal of American Democracy. They conclude that working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
> Household economics is not the only area where inequality is growing in America. Equality doesn't mean equal incomes, but a fair and decent society where money is not the sole arbiter of status or comfort. In a fair and just society, the commonwealth will be valued even as individual wealth is encouraged.
> Let me make something clear here. I wasn't born yesterday. I'm old enough to know that the tension between haves and have-nots are built into human psychology, it is a constant in human history, and it has been a factor in every society. But I also know America was going to be different. I know that because I read Mr. Jefferson's writings, Mr. Lincoln's speeches and other documents in the growing American creed. I presumptuously disagreed with Thomas Jefferson about human equality being self-evident. Where I lived, neither talent, nor opportunity, nor outcomes were equal. Life is rarely fair and never equal. So what could he possibly have meant by that ringing but ambiguous declaration: "All men are created equal"? Two things, possibly. One, although none of us are good, all of us are sacred (Glenn Tinder), that's the basis for thinking we are by nature kin.
> Second, he may have come to see the meaning of those words through the experience of the slave who was his mistress. As is now widely acknowledged, the hands that wrote "all men are created equal" also stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman named Sally Hennings. She bore him six children whom he never acknowledged as his own, but who were the only slaves freed by his will when he died -- the one request we think Sally Hennings made of her master. Thomas Jefferson could not have been insensitive to the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms. He had to know she was his equal in her desire for life, her longing for liberty, her passion for happiness.
> In his book on the Declaration, my late friend Mortimer Adler said Jefferson realized that whatever things are really good for any human being are really good for all other human beings. The happy or good life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction of the same needs inherent in human nature. A just society is grounded in that recognition. So Jefferson kept as a slave a woman whose nature he knew was equal to his. All Sally Hennings got from her long sufferance -- perhaps it was all she sought from what may have grown into a secret and unacknowledged love -- was that he let her children go. "Let my children go" -- one of the oldest of all petitions. It has long been the promise of America -- a broken promise, to be sure. But the idea took hold that we could fix what was broken so that our children would live a bountiful life. We could prevent the polarization between the very rich and the very poor that poisoned other societies. We could provide that each and every citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a voice in the system of self-government, and a better chance for their children. We could preclude the vast divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the very countries from which so many of our families had fled.
> We were going to do these things because we understood our dark side -- none of us is good -- but we also understood the other side -- all of us are sacred. From Jefferson forward we have grappled with these two notions in our collective head -- that we are worthy of the creator but that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Believing the one and knowing the other, we created a country where the winners didn't take all. Through a system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a safe, if shifting, equilibrium between wealth and commonwealth. We believed equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy. So early on [in Jeff Madrick's description,] primary schooling was made free to all. States changed laws to protect debtors, often the relatively poor, against their rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most, if not all, white comers, rather than held for the elite. The government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. The court challenged monopoly -- all in the name of we the people.
> In my time we went to public schools. My brother made it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first car for $450 I drove to a subsidized university on free public highways and stopped to rest in state-maintained public parks. This is what I mean by the commonwealth. Rudely recognized in its formative years, always subject to struggle, constantly vulnerable to reactionary counterattacks, the notion of America as a shared project has been the central engine of our national experience.
> Until now. I don't have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political debate' in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on -- the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.
> We could have seen this coming if we had followed the money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth Drew, says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years -- in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here -- has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: "[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives." Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold of money. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."
> Small wonder that with the exception of people like John McCain and Russ Feingold, official Washington no longer finds anything wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. Hit the pause button here, and recall Roger Tamraz. He's the wealthy oilman who paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White House with President Clinton; he wanted help in securing a big pipeline in central Asia. This got him called before congressional hearings on the financial excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn't think he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they pressed him he told the senators: "Look, when it comes to money and politics, you make the rules. I'm just playing by your rules." One senator then asked if Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in his reply: "No, senator, I think money's a bit more (important) than the vote."
> So what does this come down to, practically?
> Here is one accounting:
> "When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed."
> I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time magazine. Time's premier investigative journalists -- Donald Bartlett and James Steele -- concluded in a series last year that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many." Economic inequality begets political inequality, and vice versa.
> That's why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned off by politics. It's why we're losing the balance between wealth and the commonwealth. It's why we can't put things right. And it is the single most destructive force tearing at the soul of democracy. Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.' " Learned Hand was a prophet of democracy. The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
> I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
> The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.
> To create the intellectual framework for this takeover of public policy they funded conservative think tanks -- The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute -- that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.
> To put political muscle behind these ideas they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class -- Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post -- wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right -- Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition -- who mounted a cultural war providing a smokescreen for the class war, hiding the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the cause of privilege.
> In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman describes what he calls the "neo-economy -- a place without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds -- and [said Altman] it's coming to America." He's a little late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all: "My class won."
> Look at the spoils of victory:
> Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts -- almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the country.
> Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.
> Cuts in taxes on investment income.
> And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.
> More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.
> Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.
> These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" -- with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.
> There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.
> And they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of practicing journalism I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this crew have been saying. The president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers report that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president's Federal Reserve Chairman says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in social security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway. The president's Labor Secretary says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter."
> You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.
> But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans -- and to the workings of American democracy -- is no laughing matter. Go online and read the transcripts of Enron traders in the energy crisis four years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the California power market in telephone calls in which they gloat about ripping off "those poor grandmothers." Read how they talk about political contributions to politicians like "Kenny Boy" Lay's best friend George W. Bush. Go on line and read how Citigroup has been fined $70 Million for abuses in loans to low-income, high risk borrowers - the largest penalty ever imposed by the Federal Reserve. A few clicks later, you can find the story of how a subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC has been fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access to poor schools and libraries. And this, the story says, is just one piece of a nationwide scheme to rip off the government and the poor.
> Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this isn't class war, what is?
> It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.
> But I don't need to tell you this. You wouldn't be here if you didn't know it. Your presence at this gathering confirms that while an America with liberty and justice for all is a broken promise, it is not a lost cause. Once upon a time I thought the mass media -- my industry -- would help mend this broken promise and save this cause. After all, the sight of police dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators forced America to recognize the reality of racial injustice. The sight of carnage in Vietnam forced us to recognize the war was unwinnable. The sight of terrorists striking the World Trade Center woke us from a long slumber of denial and distraction. I thought the mass media might awaken Americans to the reality that this ideology of winner-take-all is working against them and not for them. I was wrong. With honorable exceptions, we can't count on the mass media.
> What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes -- there's plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our lives.

Today is the 15th of October

2011-10-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

There is a Welsh saying, let he who would be a leader build a bridge. I want to build a bridge. A bridge between the Occupy movement and my generation, my friends, the moms with mortgages, people from Corning, from Wheaton College, from Harvard Law School. from Washington, from London, from Cambridge, from all my life.

I got to witness the birth of the Occupy movement in England. I had my Samuel moment, gazing with wonder at the baby, so pleased to bear witness. It truly was great. It was overwhelming to me, actually, draining. And make no mistake, I am manic and unbalanced about this. But I think there is an inevitability here, because our cause is just.

The story of the day: my friend and I met in Cambridge and got the train to London and made it handily to St. Paul's for noon. I haven't had my picture taken that many times since I got married, walking to the protest. After a couple hours of torturing myself with essay-length sign slogans, I finally at midnight last night decided on my sign: JUSTICE IS POSSIBLE. Upbeat. Hopeful. Since I joined the Occupy movement, I have seen some of my long-standing hatred and disgust at the direction of humanity be replaced with some hope. My friend was signless.

When I tried to leave St. Paul's Square, though, to find a bathroom, actually, I couldn't. My signless friend was allowed out of the Square by the police, but I was not. I was told to stand in a line, single file, to beg the police, after handing over my name and address, to be allowed to leave. The police told me that I would not be allowed to leave with my sign. The police I was speaking to did acknowledge upon close questioning that actually the phrase "Justice is Possible" is not subversive or likely to breach the peace. But still, I could not leave. That scared me. Suddenly I longed for my children and the feel of their arms, I longed for the sight of Rhys and our family. What do you want? I'm a drama queen.

My friend waited on one side of the police barricades as I lined up to be permitted to walk down a street that my tax money had paid for. We are in a police state. The police are crushing people choosing peaceable assembly. This situation is unacceptable. I didn't get arrested and I still found it hard and kind of awful to be detained against my will and to be penalized by the state for saying what I think.

The plan to occupy Paternoster Square was foiled before it began: large signs outside the St. Paul's tube announced that we would be arrested for trespassing if we tried. This is police intimidation. They had a circle of police officers, on horseback, no less, around the square. So we loitered for a while, when I arrived the crowd was about 700 and it quickly swelled to, by 2:00 or so, a couple thousand people. No matter what space we were in, we were surrounded by the police who effectively blocked off exits, it was very claustrophobic outside of Paternoster Square, and a little better when we moved onto the steps of St. Pauls where I stayed, witnessed the incredible thrill of energy that accompanied Julian Assange's visit, and had a small group discussion.

First, Julian Assange was right. He surprised the General Assembly today. He spoke, he said we were not outlaws because we gathered not to break the law but to enforce it. This is rule of law in its best conception so far, a conception of radical inclusiveness, a conception of fairness. The General Assembly in progress today was fair and peaceful and I was so thrilled to be there.

Now that I have done two of the Occupy London small groups, I can report the following about the crowd: I have had in my small groups people from Egypt, Spain, Italy, Jordan and Canada. The stories people have from Spain and Egypt are inspiring, frightening and wonderful beyond any story I have heard in a long time. Stories of bravery and human kindness. Also in every small group apparently there is a person who is very serious about needing to talk about the alignment of crystals. I shouldn't say this, but to me they are like the comic relief of the movement. Probably next week when I am blogging about an outbreak of world peace caused by an alignment of crystals I will regret that I found them so funny.

We are here in peace and with good will, we are here knowing we are right, that we are on the side of justice, that we, and not the sovereigns have moral authority, that the people, and not the religions have moral authority, and the people and not the corporations truly hold the power.

These are big ideas of justice, huge ideas of moral authority, of human organization, of the failures we as humans have in our organizations, failures that keep people hungry who need not be, failures that mean the most serve the few, failures that mean the culture of our politicians is such that the voice of the people to them is an annoying cry in a foreign tongue. Remember tonight - 100,000 people marched through London the last time I protested (and by protested I mean I was early to my playwright class and hung around for fifteen minutes) and it did not move the government, even one bit, to stop the war in Iraq. The government will not be moved. And the police do their best to starve us of the oxygen of witnesses.

If you think, as I do, that change is possible, that justice is possible, that we could actually live on the earth not in service to banks and sovereigns, but with, as is right, them in service to us, then these guys are your foot soldiers. Life could be free and beautiful. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world. They are fighting. Right now according to twitter where I was sitting a few hours ago, the police are throwing protesters down the stairs. Those are some serious stone stairs by the way.

Don't you want to help them? Don't you believe that the cooperation among humans is essential to the health of humanity? Doesn't your whole world of shopping and competing against your peers seem very Matrix before the red pill? Believe in this change, and put your belief into action, and occupy your own lives not with fear but with love. Reach out to your fellow human beings, fellow Christians, and artists and parents and streetdwellers. Reach out to them and say, you know, we may in fact have a lot in common. Does it bug you that the government keeps giving money to banks? Does it bug you that the culture of politics is to take what you can get, and that ethics and honor have no place there? Are you worried that your children will be wage slaves, lucky if they try very hard and you can afford private school fees to get in the 1%? Are you worried that the great Off Track Betting system that is Financial Services does not serve people? Does it make you sad that food banks are full to overflowing with hungry people? Talk to your communities. Talk to your families. (Also please send food) What will move the government is when this movement spreads to rural areas, to small cities and villages, when the ideas of the occupation - justice and truth - become watchwords for all of us in our own lives. The success of this movement is not the success of those now standing in defiance of our oppressive police state (yes, I said it!). It is the success of bringing together the 99. Please stand together. Or, you know, you could keep shopping. Because nothing ever really gets better and nothing ever will change. Yes, the whole thing is on that much of a knife edge between ridiculous and sublime.But it began today, the 15th of October, 2011. I was there. It began. It will not get smaller and it will not go away.

Occupy Wall Street: This is a flowering of the human spirit.

2011-10-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

I posted on the Occupy London Stock Exchange page that I felt like Neo after he took the red pill, I feel I have woken up. I am so excited - I did not know that it was possible to feel such hope. I remember Gerald Frug in my first year contracts class warned us that we would soon see our choices as inevitable and the world that we live in unchangeable, and that would be the real tragedy of our lives. The way that the world is, we are learning this year, is not at all inevitable. Justice can replace injustice. And justice is what the people are crying out for. You know there is a lot of talk about demands and I wish everyone would shut up about the demands. We need only silently stand together and show the power structures that they simply must serve the 99 and not the 1. And to show them that, we need not speak, we need not issue a single demand. The call for justice is somewhat beyond language anyway. Just the fact of standing together. Just the fact.

I partly feel like I swallowed the red pill because I am seeing everything in such a different way. The poison of bloated capitalism has infected our arts, our markets, our information, our well-being, our lives. I see it everywhere. And even though I am at heart probably a reformist rather than a revolutionary, the braver I try to be and the more I think about it, the more I come to hope for the possibility of revolution. Our wars could cease. The hungry could be fed. Wealth can come back to the 99 and flow through it. We could begin to heal the world and use the best and the brightest of us to solve the problems of clean energy and a sustainable planet.

I have always tried to be a warrior of thought, to think swiftly and accurately and bravely, questioning my own conclusions at every step of the way.and a keen student of moral philosophy and all the suspicions and instincts, dreams and visions, the narrative of my mania: it all comes together for me now.

But I'm going out dancing. More later.

Three from Buzzfeed's 50 best signs.

2011-10-13T04:42:00.000-07:00

Report on the Occupy London General Assembly

2011-10-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

The happiest few hours I have spent in many days. An amazing assembly that taught me so much. A couple thousand people on Westminster Bridge, most there to protest NHS cuts. Hard-core serial protesters, many of them, but with an air of hope.

We have learned from our mistakes and we want to get it right this time, one of the hard-core protesters said at the beginning. Amusing to me the ravaged veterans were under 30. And interesting to find out that Seattle '99 WTO protests are considered the gold standard of protests.

I didn't expect this (a decade in this country and I still am so American in my thinking) but many of the people on the bridge were not all that interested in Occupy Wall Street but were fixed on October 15 in solidarity with the rest of the EU in a movement referenced as 15m for the 15th of May which I haven't even heard about until the General Assembly. The world is transforming. What an outpouring of passion that is the best flowering of humanity. I felt that the people I spoke to looked me truly in the eye, were insightful and kind, were fascinating. Caveat: the people from Occupy Manchester looked a little scary to me - like you wouldn't want to mess with them scary. Many from Anonymous, looking good in business suits and the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta. There were loads of cops, of course, who didn't stop you from entering the bridge. Interestingly, if you asked them if you could walk past them onto the bridge, they told you no, you should find another bridge. They didn't stop the protesters from walking past them either way, but they did actually pretty effectively isolate them from the tourists by diverting traffic.

The 99% are beginning to gather - people forced to admit that the system has failed, that it is corrupt, that it is, in the end, immoral. The way goods and services are distributed among the people of the earth is immoral and in need of correction. It was an astounding thing to hear this spoken - to hear the language of ethics and morality - in the most tenuous of ad hoc communities, without a single reference to any god. But of course they are right. We have an economic and political system that is so corrupt, so riven with cronyism, that it is manifestly and on many levels failing. But besides this enormous economic failing, this bust perhaps inevitable in a boom and bust cycle, we have even bigger fish to fry: we have a system that is corrupted by money, by consumerism. In the United States it is PACs and political parties, in the UK it is that cosy unregulated relationship between Treasury, Bank of England and investment banks so that no matter what banks want, the government is their faithful handmaiden. Governments should not be handmaidens to multinational corporations. Governments should be handmaidens to the people, to the 99%. We all want a sustainable relationship with the earth. We all want the economy to improve. No one really wants consumerism to become the most powerful force on the planet. (Well, no one except the Kardashians.)

Here is the speech I wrote on the train. I didn't give it, I completely could have, it was an open event and megaphones were available to everyone, but somehow the moment did not present itself:

My generation spent the last fifteen years discussing house prices. That kept us so busy we didn't notice that government privatisation had made the elite rich, that the explosion of derivative financial products was scraping wealth away from the middle class and working class and into the hands of an elite few. We didn't have time to complain that Network Rail had its obscene bonuses and yet the trains were more expensive and less efficient. We planned out holidays and did not have time to point out the rampant corruption in the police department. We let our identities be led by consumerism, what we bought, what we wore, the unreflective conviction that our jobs were SO IMPORTANT. We ignored the parts of our identities that cared for others, that craved justice, that longed to belong to a species not burdening the earth and poisoning it. But we were really dedicated to the housing market. That is the shame of my generation. Our spirits have been smothered by a continual buying in, buying in, buying in, going shopping.

And look how we have made the world. We stopped paying attention and the government has been completely co-opted by private interests. So much so that it is apparently just a lark to be a government official: invite your friends and fiddle your expenses, and do whatever the banks tell you. The U.S. and the UK governments have become this.

The power of a government is only justly derived from the consent of the people. I have become part of the Occupation because I do not consent. I do not consent to a government that serves banks instead of people. I do not consent to a government that is bloated and corrupt. I do not consent to a government where the culture of politics has blinded them to the reality of their sacred undertaking: democracy.

The power of the government is not derived from the consent of the Bank of England.

The power of the government is not derived from the consent of Barclays.

The power of the government is not derived from the consent of James Murdoch.

For this government to have power, it requires the consent of the governed.

I do not consent to a government so choked in cronyism and inefficiency that it tolerates multinationals not paying taxes.

I do not consent to derivative trades being untaxed but food and holidays for families being taxed exorbitantly.

I do not - to expand - consent to a government that taxes the middle class and cuts health benefits before even considering a minor tax on the billions of pounds (notional value) of derivative trades that generate multi-million pound banker bonuses.

I do not consent practices that are destroying the earth being legal. I don't know what those practices are, but I think everyone wants safe air and food and water for all.

I do not consent to a government that is homogenous Oxbridge, with its terribly polite way of turning a blind eye at the failures of itself. A task admirably covered by Private Eye, but not to great enough effect.

I do not consent to a government that is so paralyzed by fear of offending the rich that they cannot consider just and fair property taxes.

There are plenty of ways to create jobs and economic growth in Britain but none of these ways will ever by pursued by the government while that government is enslaved by monopolists and bankers and multinationals. You only have to think about the Digital Economy Bill to know that I am right on that one. We are talking wimpy little handmaiden of corporate interests.

If they are going to be anybody's wimpy little handmaidens, then they should be ours - they should be the handmaiden of the people, of justice, of integrity. They should be moral. Phenomenal to me that I am using that word. The way they have cast aside the rule of law really is nothing else other than immoral. Funny that it was mostly godless grubby anarchists that clued me into that. But really, I can draw no other conclusion.

I see so much hope and possibility in this movement. I hear the sound at the end of Jez Butterworth's play, Jerusalem. I hear the sound (spoiler) at the end of Jez Butterworth's play, Jerusalem - the sound of the giants gathering to defend their England. I feel hope.

I have a facebook page for Occupy Half Term - a chance for parents to get involved in the Occupation. I am thinking of going to London one of the days of half term with my kids to express all this solidarity, outrage and hope. Please join me.

Occupy Wall Street Is Truly A Great Moment in Human History

2011-10-05T08:42:00.000-07:00

It was all I could do to not make an announcement about Occupy Wall Street after the performance of Desh at Sadlers Wells. I wanted to stand on a chair in the crowded bar and be an announcing angel, manic and exhausted, overworked and chubby but so excited. It was all I could do. Then again at this pub, Harlequinn, then at drop-off at my son's school, then finally while waiting for hot yoga I could contain myself no longer. I started in on someone.

Have you heard about this thing Occupy Wall Street? I think it is just the biggest, best thing. Around 2000 people in a park in New York north of Wall Street, gathered spontaneously because the overwhelming ills of this planet demand it, gathering because the economy is stagnant and the earth needs our care, because people are suffering. They are there for all of us. They call themselves the 99 percent, and so they are. A protest that is about what you want to protest. People are there because food is not clean, because they can't stand the death penalty, because too much of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of too few who do not pay enough tax, they are there because they hate war and love freedom. They are there because they are idealists willing to act. Our Jedi are gathering in urban centers across America. Sign up now!

They marched on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday night and 700 were arrested. There was almost no camera feed for much of it as the camera operators kept getting arrested. The next person would pick up the camera and they would get arrested. They are determined. Yet much of what happened was completely unfilmed and not followed by the media. All these 24 hour news stations and this media blackout is striking. Bits and pieces are coming through here and there but it doesn't seem to me that anyone is telling the whole story I see from their websites and tweets and clips on youtube. Did you know they have no permit for a sound system so when someone speaks, the people standing near to her say it back loudly so all can here? Have you seen it in action on YouTube? (The Michael Moore clip)

I think what is going on is the highest and best demonstration of the capacity of humans that we have seen lo this long hard decade. These guys are you and me. This is forming now. This is starting. OWS has their own community at that park, and they are using passion and collective wisdom to make the world a better place, a place that is better for the 99. That includes all of us. It is not a fast process, but it is a thrillingly new way for humans to come to decisions that rely on proximity and requires the speaker to convey the essence of her ideas in succinct phrases.

Right now the Occupiers are in America and Ireland, and an action in London is planned. I want to go so bad! I haven't wanted anything so much in such a long time, I want it more than the play. I am itching for this. This is my dream coming true. These are the Bernese Mountain Dogs, the best spirit of animals and of the Earth, pinning down our banks, corporations, governments and religions and staying patiently while they suffer through necessary change.

The Wall Street Occupiers in considering their demands are pretty domestic in their considerations rather than international but I think the kind of lasting fairness and openness that they ultimately want to bring to the economy would have to be international in scope. No one country can chase multinational corporations and stamp out fundamental unfairness in banks. One could see that perhaps the only realistic regulation is multinational. But I am getting ahead of the game here.

It appears that as of yesterday many of the Wall Street Occupiers were really taking their job - to step back and imagine a better world - very seriously. I can't tell you how much I love this.

They deserve our help. If you are reading this blog, I am sorry to use a dirty word but you are an intellectual. You have the concerns in your heart about this world. More than that, if you got your education at a publically funded university, or you teach there, I think you owe your fellow citizens. I went to see the Vice Chancellor give his annual speech this weekend and he said something that made me gasp. He said that universities benefit society and that society, through the state, should therefore fund the universities. My mind flashed to the riots, to the underclass. I was very hard-pressed to think of a benefit that the rioters got out of the universities. But I can think of a few benefits they could provide to the rioters. As well as a few benefits for their own children.

Every academic, economist, ethicist, climate change scientist, renewable energy expert, sustainable agriculture maven could easily support their local occupation by making themselves available. OWS has a beautifully broad goal. Our institutions are flawed and corrupt. Every intellectual should be assisting OWS (that expensive education you got that purportedly benefits society would be useful here, thankyouverymuch). I think these guys are the Civil Rights Movement, they are the heroes, they are the chance for our generation to redeem themselves. These guys are like Dr. Who and Superman, they are like the early church, I feel in their beautiful philosophies (asking us to first go and occupy our own hearts as the most important thing to do to get involved). I want to help. You had me at Occupy.

OWS is radically accepting of diversity and all want the world to be better for humans. It is hard not to want to get behind this. It is an opportunity to help our children in much more important ways than late night Mandarin sessions and home-grown kale ever will. This is it. Hey, look over here. THIS is the change we were looking for. Not that other change that was just pretend change. And certainly not the other pretend change that made fun of the first pretend change in rural locations with firearms.

Nothing personal against Obama. Thank god he was steering the ship the last few years. But that ship - the government of the United States - it's the ship that is the problem. If we don't change Washington, every administration will be either Democrat or Republican, shall be beholden to bankers and corporate interests, shall first and foremost be about deploying money. That is what it will be about, every single administration. That is where the system is broken, both in capitalism and in democracy, in the middlemen.

Right now I think OWS could benefit from the brightest minds of our generation to help them think things through and be living sources of information. OWS as of yesterday was very borderline about retaining democracy and capitalism. A dismantling of the current system in favor of anarchy is a popular view. They may come out that way. (Although in the short-term they have a series of simple, easily-obtainable legislative and executive actions listed in their demands). I hope they don't leave off democracy and capitalism, in whatever sort of vision or nonvision of the state and of the economy that comes out of this project. (It would instantly radicalize OWS and there is so much good to be done the 99 could easily support) Plus I honestly think that democracy and capitalism are the best ways to distribute power and goods among people. Well, they are the worst systems, except for all the other systems. The problem is that democracy and capitalism have too many middlemen. And now the middlemen take all the power in democracy and all the money in capitalism. We don't need the middlemen. We don't need political parties of any description. Or we need to dissolve them all and start new ones. Or we need everyone to just stop giving money to political parties. One of the most beautiful phrases, the phrase I think they will teach my descendants, appeared in their inaugural document. No true democracy is available when the process is decided by economic power. I think they're right. I think it's the whole problem. It's why I got a C on my corporations final when I wrote an impassioned essay about corporations as fictional entities and not true humans should play no part whatsoever in the democratic process, including election financing. Hah! I was right. I always thought I was right and that grade bummed me out. History tends to vindicate my oddest moments. But you know, of course that viewpoint would be scorned in a corporations class.   In 2010 I considered a run for Congress in my hometown district in Western New York State. I contacted the Democrats who were welcoming but told me that I had to raise a million dollars, I had to spend almost all of my time fundraising and I would not have any power in my first couple years in the house to actually do anything. They also told me redistricting could rob me of my seat at any time. The powerful culture of politics descended and I didn't like it. I was encouraged to consider myself a supplicant to the rich, to lobby groups and special interests. I was encouraged to consider myself powerless before the party. I declined to run. That culture is not healthy. Imagine elections where people spoke simply from the heart, where "getting someone elected" is not a billion dollar exercise. Democracy needs to be practiced in communities with hearts and minds, not with checkbooks and incestuous lobbying firms. Dial down the capitalism. No true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.   Let's put a couple videos on YouTube and call it a day.

And as far as capitalism's middlemen. We don't need banks, we should use cooperatives and nonprofits to store our money, we wouldn't even have to wait for a law to be passed, we have the power to put these guys out of business. Although if a law could be passed, I think it should be to simply tax these guys out of existence. As Michael Moore says, "How much? Not enough." Society does not benefit from derivative trades, synthetic financial products, tracker funds, swaps and excessive monetization as we saw in the sub-prime lending market. All those areas exist only so that banks get richer, that brokers get their fees. And the money attracts the best and the brightest, some of the most brilliant people I know are tax lawyers, bankers. They got their money. And they are nice people who were playing by the rules as they were understood at the time and there is no need to villify them for it. Even the 1 percent should not be the enemy of OWS. Warren Buffet stepped up. People do. I think no one feels rich. There is a consumerist thing where we constantly crave more and easily see just what we don't have, and we don't enjoy the things that we have today. That is a poison of capitalism it would be nice to abate.   The guy with the yacht literally feels a little pinched when he sees a guy with a bigger yacht. It's crazy. But I do it too.

Tax these middlemen, the unnecessary baroque flourish (cancerous tumor) that appeared on capitalism in these 20 years. Replace them with the microloan model that has been used so successfully in Africa and India, direct investment, no middlemen. And slowly our best and brightest will either go to where the money is - whether we create incentives to work on renewable energy, a sustainable planet -- or possibly they will follow their hearts, and with the newfound strength of their convictions find a life's work that shrinks capitalism into its proper proportion in our hearts and our lives. Money is just one aspect of our identity. First we must occupy our own hearts.

The Occupation of Wall Street: No true democracy

2011-10-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

I don't know if the people in the United Kingdom are aware of the occupation of Wall Street. It is amazing to me how this is being ignored by the mainstream press. In Liberty Park, north of Wall Street, about 2,000 people have moved in and are working together to change the world for the better.

http://www.thenation.com/article/163719/occupy-wall-street-faq

This gives me so much hope. When I read that article, I was ready to fly to Manhattan, term time be damned, and move my family into a tent and live the life that my heart is telling me to live. Especially when I read the end of the article:

A lot of people are already taking part in important ways from afar—this is the magic of decentralization. Online, you can watch the livestream, make donations, retweet on Twitter and encourage your friends to get interested. People with relevant skills have been volunteering to help maintain the movement’s websites and edit video—coordinating through IRC chat rooms and other social media. Soon, the formal discussions about demands will be happening online as well as in the plaza. Offline, you can join the numerous similar occupations that are starting up around the country or start your own.
Finally, you can always take the advice that has become one of the several mantras of the movement, expressed this way by one woman at Tuesday night’s General Assembly meeting: “Occupy your own heart,” she said, “not with fear but with love.”

That is a distinctly Christian thing to say, isn't it? I mean, why not get involved and see what these guys have to say. To me, the world is in such bad shape that fundamental rethinking needs to happen quickly to avert a crisis. These guys are doing something. They issued their first statement yesterday:

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

My views of the kind of world my children will likely live in and the kind of life that they have get darker by the day. But not today. I see this movement - imperfect and unrealistic, fragmented - but alive! Taking to the streets to make a better world! Democracy, capitalism and the rule of law need a shakeup. Read what they say. See if you agree. Join your local protest. 15 October in London. See you there.

Global Economic Outlook Worsens

2011-09-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

That is the cover of this week's Private Eye. There is a picture of the apocalypse on the cover, floods of lava and earthquakes, and one of the fat renaissance ladies falling into the abyss has a dialogue bubble: "Time to think about decisive action, possibly."

Unlike The Economist, Private Eye is not wrong about these things.

The chickens really came home to roost for me today when my son picked up Private Eye from the bedroom floor and questioned me about it. I consider it my obligation as a parent to reflect reality back at my children, so I tried to explain how the lava and the earthquakes were symbols for the problems with the economy. I could not in good conscience after this summer, with Texas burning and the Cathedral falling, guarantee to him that no chaos of this degree would absolutely not befall us.

"Does "chaos" have a kicking k or a curly c?" , he asked. Spelling is important.

It does feel like chaos. Decisive action needs to be taken. But who is brave enough to do it? What stakeholder in the current power structure is going to relinquish his stake? I don't know. With Wall Street occupied, I do wonder if a Warren Buffet rule would work: rich people better step up to the plate and get things in line because they are good people (otherwise when we hold the revolution via google mail you're the first against the wall).

I have some ideas for the decisive action, whether they be at the intensely theoretical level (money is an expression of identity and should be valued as such) or international level (there should be one uniform banking code, and banks should be run as non-profits) or national level (people should leverage their sovereignty and add value to their budget by negotiating trade treaties and entering into long-term partnerships with like-minded sovereigjns).

I am not an economist, but as the Global Economic Outlook Worsens, I can't help but applying the skills I have acquired in my ridiculous life to this problem. The solution is not business as usual. The solution is not respect and deference to the existing economic structure, the solution is a short sharp shock to the institutions - banks, religions, sovereigns and corporations - that currently obstruct economic growth by trying to hang on to the way capital flowed in a great long period of growth. I am not sure our answer is, as The Economist continually mewls, getting to more growth. I think the answer may be to accept the lack of growth as a correction - as part of the game of capitalism (which I still think is the most successful distribution system of the ones we have come up with so far); there are booms and busts, and we are bust.

But I think that we are busted in more ways than a free market depression/recession. I think we are just busted: the way that banks have so much power over sovereigns, the way that global corporations do not pay taxes, the way that the best and the brightest are drawn to lucrative careers in capital markets instead of thinking of ways to cure the ills of humanity- our bloated weight on the planet, our, excuse me, shitting where we eat.

Someone said to me today in defense of an almost-no-screen parenting style: children can identify a hundred brands, but not the names of the plants in their backyard. That made me think. Life is only one part economics, and we have let it become 80%. That's why the riots happened: rampant consumerism. Look, I hate injected molded plastic as much as the next middle class mum, but look, if you really think that capitalism is the best distribution model (and I defy anyone to come up with one that has outlasted this one), then you have to live with marketing and you have to live with consumerism. The good news is that the personal is political, and you don't have to make the money part of your identity the primary part of your lives. Beat it back. Do it now by choice or soon by necessity.

The Language Issue

2011-09-28T05:55:00.000-07:00

An Irish poem by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill translated from the Irish (I know) by Paul Muldoon.

The Language Issue

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither
not knowing where it might end up;
the lap, perhaps
of some Pharaoh's daughter

So That's Who I Remind Me Of

2011-09-25T05:51:00.000-07:00

A poem by Ogden Nash:

When I consider men of golden talents,
I'm delighted, in my introverted way,
To discover, as I'm drawing up the balance,
How much we have in common, I and they.

Like Burns, I have a weakness for the bottle.
Like Shakespeare, little Latin and less Greek;
I bite my fingernails like Aristotle;
Like Thackery, I have a snobbish streak.

I'm afflicted with the vanity of Byron,
I've inherited the spitefulness of Pope;
Like Petrarch, I'm a sucker for a siren,
Like Milton, I've a tendency to mope.

My spelling is suggestive of a Chaucer;
Like Johnson, well, I do not wish to die
(I also drink my coffee from a saucer);
And if Goldsmith was a parrot, so am I.

Like Villon I have debits by the carload,
Like Swinburne, I'm afraid I need a nurse;
By my dicing is Christopher out-Marlowed,
And I dream as much as Coleridge, only worse.

In comparison with men of golden talents,
I am all a man of talent ought to be;
I resemble every genius in his vice, however heinous -
Yet I only write like me.

- Ogden Nash

Alex Scheffler and Julia Donaldson: A Story Brought Me Home Again

2011-09-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

I write today in praise of the collaboration of Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler, writer and illustrator respectively of Gruffalo, Gruffalo's Child, Room on the Broom, Tiddler, Stickman, The Smartest Giant in Town, Zog, Charlie Cook's Favourite Book, A Squash and a Squeeze, their new one, Highway Rat, and others.

Last week I went shopping with Liberty because we bought six Donaldson/Scheffler books for her long-distance boyfriend who just turned two. I hadn't read Highway Rat, so Liberty and I snuck it into a playhouse on display at John Lewis and read it before we bought. This is how good I think Scheffler and Donaldson are: each story they write together is so wise and insightful that I crouched in that playhouse half expecting Highway Rat to be so beautiful and true that I exploded in a ball of perfect enlightenment. This did not happen. I always set myself up for disappointment.

My favorite one is Tiddler, a fish always late for school because he is making up stories. He gets really lost, and through the stories he has told, sea animals repeating his tale, he finds his way home, or, as Donaldson says, a story brings him home again. The power of narrative.

Room on the Broom is about a witch who gathers a posse of animals who eventually save her when she is captured by a dragon. It is about community and the pay-offs of cooperation, it is about the joy of togetherness.

Squash and a Squeeze is about an old woman who frets her house is too small. A wise man tells her to take first her chicken, then her pig and finally her cow to live in the house with her. When she lets them out the house seems very spacious. An education in perspective and thankfulness.

Charlie Cook's Favourite Book is hard to describe. It's phenomenal - like Tiddler it really explores the tapestry of fact and fiction, stories and distractions, that keep us connected. Charlie Cook's Favourite Book definitely channels reality better than any reality show.

Zog is about the benefits of compassion, in the form of a dragon who becomes an ambulance.

The Smartest Giant in Town is about the karmic benefit of kindness.

Stickman is about identity, how other people don't recognize what you are, - or people see what they are looking for rather than what is there - about how the job of defining yourself is up to you, is in your actions. It is also the story of a father who longs for his family and has a great appearance by Santa.

And I think Gruffalo and Gruffalo's Child are well known, right? With their stories of small, calm heroes who think carefully before they act? Anyway, Scheffler's drawings are so knowing and distinctive. Check these books out next time you are in a bookstore.

I love these books so much because my kids love them and because, unlike the Nick Jr. Dora the Explorer book series, the stories are no insult to intelligence and language. Donaldson's rhymes scan sometimes imperfectly but frequently with astounding charm. Much better than the standard offering. Man, I was in the library with Liberty a couple weeks ago and we read a story she randomly picked and you know what it was about? A tiger who bought things for no reason. The prose was wooden and uncreative and the message was mindless consumerism. I say get that book the fuck out of the library. No one can do outrage at inferior prose in the middle of the library like an ex litigator mom philosophy major! Feel my rage!

But every kid should have magic stories of good things, and Donaldson and Scheffler have given us many. I am grateful.

This Anniversary- 9/11

2011-09-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

   Last May the parent group for my son's school set the date for the fall family get-together: September 11, 2011. And immediately when we said the date my heart leaped out of my chest. I don't have any great insights ten years after that day, but it is an anniversary too compelling for me to ignore. It is a physiological reaction to a trauma, a welling up of fear.

How could it be otherwise? So many of my best beloveds in harm's way, there were agonizing hours of not knowing, and nothing particular happened to me. Sitting in Rhys's bachelor apartment in Limehouse, East London, wondering why I wasn't where my heart was, as I heard news reports of the State Department bombing. Holding the landline receiver with sweaty palms. I was on the phone to a fellow expat when the towers fell. We didn't hang up, but we didn't have words, we silently witnessed each other's violently (and silently) breaking hearts. I am sure everyone has a similar story.

Yet I am concerned given how the world is that this anniversary be glamorized, be a very American opportunity to relive our outrage and sense of violation. It was outrageous. We were violated. But ten years later, we know a bad guy was minted that day in American popular consciousness. And we have poured the force of our sovereign onto getting that bad guy, and it didn't, in the end, turn out to be right, or just. It didn't end well.

There are many in the Tea Party and the GOP who desire that we have a Christian nation. Who can blame them? They burn brightly with the reality of their God, and their love of the United States. To them I say, well to all (my eight blog readers) I say this: on this anniversary I say we need to love our enemy and forgive them their wrongdoing. Their trespasses against us. Sure, this is a big ask. But it isn't me making this up on a random Thursday night in Cambridge. It's Jesus: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Understand them and forgive them. Because if you love someone, that is what you do. That is how you get closer to the truth that will set you free.

And that's not just Al Qaeda. That's the Democrats too. And the Republicans. Love them. Love them all. This is the greatest commandment of nearly every religion. Jesus did not ask you to gain power, he only stood at the door and knocked. He left everything to our discretion. Our discretion has perhaps not been so great over the last decade. We have made mistakes, we have handed our discretion over to consumerism, we have been blind to the injustices we ourselves have perpetrated upon people outside the United States and even on people within the United States. We have used our laws to keep us rich and to control people who have not heard the knock. We have stood behind the United States blindly even when it has acted unjustly.   This blindness is a problem.

The cure for our blindness is a willingness to see. That willingness has its heart in compassion, even for our enemies. My highest and best hope for this anniversary of 9/11 is my highest and best hope for the world I would like my children to inhabit: a world where people are brave and enlightened enough to set aside their differences and work for a better place, an inhabitable planet, just capitalism, fair democratic sovereignty. I imagine this, and I think I am a dreamer and then I remember thanks to a certain guy from Liverpool that I am not the only one.

Review of Edinburgh 2011

2011-08-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

This was my tenth fringe and around my seventh I started to realize that each year, I could find themes in the plays and comedy. This year was about the biggest questions of human existence asked with icons and stories of the past. This year I saw a sort of mass acceptance of schizophrenia as a state of being: we can be two things at the same time, we can be different things.

(Spoiler alert for everything. In my mind it doesn't even matter. Who is going to manage to see all these plays? I write these like the NYT reviews books: knowing that the person reading the review will probably never pick up the actual book. Is that so wrong? I don't feel any duty to withhold narrative. Does that make me a monster?)

Friday started with Tuesdays at Tescos, an English adaptation of the Parisian hit Mondays at Monoprix: a monologue of an over the hill transgendered daughter who used to be a son, and her Tuesday visit to her ancient father. The writing is so rich, and has layers that I am still considering. The monologue was performed by Simon Callow, the guy who dies in Four Weddings and a Funeral, remember, the totally jolly gay guy with a beard who danced like a maniac? He was occasionally mesmerizing, but the monologue was punctuated with dancing. And instead of the sensuous grind you would expect from a person who made their living as a prostitute, I'll be damned if he didn't dance just like in Four Weddings. It did not fit into the piece. It was performed with a musician onstage and sparse, discordant music. Companion K thought it excellent. I was a little too distracted by Callow (Is that really the only way he can dance?) to be too moved, although the ending is moving (cheap deus ex machina moving). (You may think this demonstrates that people who review plays are just bitter playwrights constantly critiquing the successes of others like craven Salieris. Well done you for spotting this. Ten points to Griffindor!)

Next was the famous impresario and occasional actor Guy Masterson acting in a revival of a 1998 production: a one man character study of Shylock. The beginning is really unbeatable. A human being telling the story of how his race had been the whipping boys of humanity since Ceasar and Shakespeare's place in that continuum. And how Shakespeare's imagining the Jew as human - if you cut me, do I not bleed -- maybe started to turn things around for old Shylock and the Jews a bit. Maybe reminded people of their humanity. I know a Jewish guy in his 40's and when he moved to Texas as an adolescent, kids in his school really thought he had a sawed off tail and horns. We have not done right by the Jews, and the slow realization of the scope of the persecution with a Jew performing was very moving. Unfortunately, the Jew is also British and as such the show had twenty minutes of mostly very boring stories about the great actors performing Shylock in the past (there were to be fair some very funny lines). The British and their obsession with the past. Their backward looking DNA. It has some downsides.

After that was Dave Gorman's Power Point Presentation. I went to see his Googlewhack show in 2003 when I was pregnant and we had run in from another show and I had to go to the bathroom through the whole thing. I had to go so bad. I thought I was going to get a bladder infection. The thing was, though, he was too funny to leave- he has this magic build in his comic storytelling. I can think of no higher praise for a comedian that I once risked a bladder infection to see his show. He had another big thing about Jews, everyone thinks he is one, and it's an awkward as hell thing to play. He also had a segment about mobile phone marketing, he is obsessed with the Facebook and Twitter icons of fake people that appear in the picture of the phone in a newspaper. It was a very sly attack on the utter pointlessness of advertising. Perhaps so sly that he didn't even notice it?

Last on Friday was Mat Ricardo in this great venue - The Viper Rooms - performing Three Balls and a Suit - more obsession with the past but also a genuinely talented but sweetly insecure juggler. He told tales of gentlemen jugglers of the past, and tried his own sleight-of-hand to a Tom Waits song. The Fringe has had a real surge of circus and cabaret, and I do appreciate seeing feats of skill. It is entertaining. It was only OK. I actually think he would be happy with me saying that.

Saturday began with Ten Plagues - this is a song cycle about the plague year - 1685 -- that killed 100,000
in London. It was performed by Marc Almond, one half, I came to find out, of Soft Cell (Tainted Love, dude!). The book was written by Mark Ravenhill (Shopping & Fucking). This was the highlight of the Fringe for me, so ingenious and powerful was the end of cycle. Oh, this piece crept up on you. It had some sweeping music, but the story of a lone man who lived through the plague, who got so close to death, who knew and lived at that powerful edge between life and death for so long. When his friends returned to London, he could not understand them, he was a different person. Suffering turned him into something different. It made him indifferent to the petty commerce of the time, but indifferent in a true and enlightened way. The way the world goes on and ignores its own mortality is simply appalling. And one of the great tragedies of this world and of our own time. The way this man changes is artistic genius of the highest order. So powerful that I felt the waves coming out from the stage into me. (I hate using that phrase and all real artists I know truly hate it as well - artistic genius - but I felt such a resonance, such a resonance that continues to today and to now that I don't know what else to say) I was sobbing despite myself at the final blackout. Also during the final blackout, two teenagers sitting next to me, stood up, announced "WELL THAT SUCKED!" and stomped out. So then I cried and laughed at the same time, such is the absurdity of the world.

And the absurdity of the world and more precisely the observation that life is a joke -- a very funny joke, but a joke -- was the point of Theatre of Wales' Dark Philosophers. This told the story of the inhabitants of a terraced street under a mountain owned by a lecherous tyrant and the perverse behavior and bizarre coping mechanisms that evolve to protect humans from and through such suffering. Coal mining. It is the gift to the Welsh that keeps on giving: this time in a metaphor for the Welsh themselves, digging down through the black rock like some kind of polluted cortex. It had Welsh songs. It was fantastically inventive. The snatches of narrative were interlaced with a possibly true story of one of the boys becoming a TV personality. (But the sound system was way too loud and I watched the end with my fingers in my ears). Since I am Welsh but am not always very clear on what that means, I really ate this up as immediately useful information. One of the best descriptions of my brain was provided by a woman singing a love song so passionately while at the same time, six actors told the story of love, by three fights of two people trying to kill each other. But in a slapstick way. There was waves of this kind of symbolism as well as absurdity. It was a little long.

Next a very different show: Bryony Kimmings in 7 Day Drunk. This is a comedian, an incredibly adorable young woman who must draw inevitably comparisons to Katy Perry (but cuter and smarter). Her show was the result of an experiment: she got drunk for seven days and it provided the material for the show. There are segments where she is chewing on a lemon, chewing on coffee grounds, stabbing a pen into a teddy bear and you think, WTF? then you think, ok, right, she was drunk. She also got an audience member drunk and tracked her progress. It was billed as tackling the question of substance use and creativity but it didn't tackle it with any profound or even very interesting observations, she just sort of said that being drunk probably ended up helping the process a little. She succeeded in getting three sets of people to make out for a while who didn't know each other, in a great slow dance sequence, and ended with a dance party that was supposed to celebrate the now, the fun of this moment, and kind of did, but mostly for the people who had been making out and the girl she got drunk.

We then went on to the East End Cabaret in the delightfully anarchic Free Festival; the Fringe is broken down into theatres and venues - aggregators who have fifteen or so venues near each other. The price to go to a show has gotten really high (I remember when the most expensive ticket I bought at the Fringe was £6, I am now paying on average north of £15 for a play) so most people need to take advantage of discounts offered for seeing multiple shows at the same venue. I kept talking to people who had only seen shows at Pleasance, or the shows at Assembly. The Free Fringe is a collection that seats for free but then solicits donations on the way out. Refreshing. And the show was a fantastic naughty cabaret that was funny and racy and had a song about ping pong balls in Bangkok and the trajectory they travel that had marvelous sound effects. The crowd is definitely drunker at the free shows, and for late night cabaret this is a plus.

We ended with Glen Wool, a comedian who looks like a roadie in a tribute Metallica band tour of Australia. (I think he would agree with me.) He was funny, but the show's conceit was a revenge story involving feces and you are never going to get me completely on board with that material.

Sunday started with Phil Nichol performing a monologue written by Royal Court young writer David Florez. It was putatively about a man in a North London cafe lusting after a Lithuanian restaurant. Also it was about the life and death of a perhaps fictional but maybe not severely disabled guy. Also it was about the cheap trick that a play is, that storytelling can be. But the narrative twisted and moved and grew in a way that belied the cheap trick protestations. Phil Nichol is unreal: one of the greatest shows I have ever seen on the Fringe was his 2005 Naked Racist. I really don't understand why the United States hasn't discovered him yet. This show was called Somewhere Beneath It All A Small Fire Burns Still and if you get a chance, see it. It replaced Ten Plagues as my darling of the Fringe.

Next was Futureproof, like Ten Plagues at the Traverse, which has reputedly the greatest bar in Europe. I dispute this claim, but it is a great bar. Futureproof is the story of a travelling freak show trying to update for the times. Conjoined twins, a Fat Man, a hermaphrodite, a armless bearded lady and a beautifully mysterious fake (maybe not fake) mermaid. Everyone is starving using the traditional freak show, so the circus owner comes up with something good for business: show the freaks becoming normal. SO he puts the fat man on a diet and shaves the bearded lady and they lose something essential in their identity, of course, even as he eyes the conjoined twins and hermaphrodite for corrective surgery. It was beautifully staged with mesmerizing costumes and this idea of cutting off part of your identity to fit in is very interesting to contemplate indeed. The images stay with me, and I think of the truths behind this piece quite a bit especially because I am not clear what they are.

Then a mad dash over to a real Festival play - the Fringe is called the fringe because it took place at the periphery of a large international arts festival. Now the Fringe is much bigger than the Festival but to be high art and old school we thought we would check out the Festival and saw a Japanese-American play called Wind-up Bird Chronicles, an adaptation of a psychological Japanese novel. As we were finding the theatre, an officious intermeddler informed me that we would never be able to follow what was going on in the play if we hadn't read the novel. She was kind of right but I got a few things anyway. There were some nice symbols but after all the crashing tumult and bravery of the Fringe it did seem a little staid. Only incest? Only two stories unfolding at the same time? Still, some nice puppet work and a very multinational audience. Subtitles are a bitch in a play though.

Then from Festival to the Pyjama Men - an extended hallucinatory sketch show roughly revolving around an alien kidnapping a baby, I think. It mostly was funny because the two performers kept corpsing, although I thought they were legitimately trying to make each other laugh.

What a great three days. It was magic.

.

Review of London Road at the National Theatre, August 2011

2011-08-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Book and lyrics by Alecky Blythe, Lyrics and music by Adam Cork.

In 2006, a part-time truck driver named Steven Wright rented a house on London Road in Ipswich and proceeded to murder five prostitutes working nearby. He was ultimately found guilty in a jury trial and is serving time in prison. This musical tells the story of Wright's murders entirely through scripts of interviews with actual residents of London Road. It is the legacy of Anna Deveare Smith, in that it is composed entirely of first person commentary. It is the legacy of Sarah Kane because the language sung, the music sparse and enhancing the inherent musicality of the language, is meant to wash over you. It is multitudinous and inaccessible except as some new kind of noise. (The musicality of the language is dependent upon the severe country accent of the Ipswich dwellers. One of my companions was a woman from Singapore who found it impossible to believe that English really was spoken with such distortions and assumed it was a creation of the playwright. Sweet heart, I said, welcome to England). It was so rich and complex I found myself wondering how the musical form would ever go back to the likes of Les Mis.

This is an amazing work of art and everyone should see it. A cast of twelve plays a bossy woman intent on creating a gardening competition to give London Road a better reputation, the prostitutes, the police, the reporters, the photographers and an affable man heading up the local neighborhood watch. It is seamless. The choices made by the writer created a mesmerizingly intelligent picture of the real London Road: the neighbours were quite excited by the whole thing and enjoyed it, and deep down, they were glad that the prostitutes weren't going out on London Road anymore. Of course, the interview scripts don't say that clearly, that is something that comes across gently, partially hidden, something that only an audience listening to the same words spoken over and over could tease out, could interpret. This is a musical told in subtext.

Much of it reminds me of Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos: the idea that it is fun and interesting to witness or be a part of something big and transgressive, much more interesting than our normal dull lives, so we feel more alive. Suicide rates, they say, go to zero in a hurricane.

The best musical number is based on two women being interviewed. They talk about what it was like to go into town shopping during the murders. They are standing at a bus stop. Their eyes stray on a man and they say: "You automatically think it could be him." The ominous repetition of this phrase reminded me of all those scary walks late at night in my life. It is accompanied by a nervous laugh and cascading into it are the other women of the company. It is worth the price of the ticket to see that alone.

By the intermission, my other friend was shaking his head about the banality of the neighbour's concerns. I found it at the same time amazing and boring to consider and reconsider the messages behind the banality. Because in taking the time to consider it, I eventually saw how none of the characters are actually very wise, and all (as are we all) are blind to themselves.

There was throughout an amazing lack of empathy for the victims and a unsurprising obsession with property values on the street of a serial murderer (described by Sky as the Red Light district of Ipswich). The acting was unobstrusive, as were the songs, a kind of minimalism that would sneak up on you. Absorbing.

That is what I love about this kind of art, this hyper-real form that makes you revisit reality more and more, kind of a chance for a slow-motion replay. Our gardening hero is separately interviewed near the end, and says she wishes she could shake Steven Wright's hand and thank him. Because those prostitutes were nasty and for years she had been calling the police on them. At the very very end of the play, the gardening woman, with her property value intact, the murderer in jail, the gardening competition in glorious bloom, cries happy tears as the local paper gets its photograph as she exclaims how wonderful it was to have people share their gardens. Which is what none of them would do with the poor and tired drug addicts who sold themselves and who Steve Wright preyed on.

Walker Percy also liked to say that sentimentalism - like the tears of the gardener - leads straight to the gas chamber. This work has considered this connection. I think there's a pretty good chance it will move to someplace small in NY and if it does, please go. And please see it at the National if you can.

Pending verification by the Blues Brothers, a message from God

2011-08-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

There is so much to write about - I have seen 15 plays and shows and want to tell you about them all. My annual present to myself, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Thousands of Jacobs, wrestling with their angels, demanding the truth.

I wandered in a swoon through Richard Bach's pictures from the bible. His nativity, passion, Tower of Babel and depictions of heaven and hell done as mosaics of modern images. In these times, it seems to me, atheist or theist, it makes sense to look at these archetypes, these images, and ask what they tell us about our times. Our times now.

In the States everyone told me about the searing heat of the summer. Searing heat. And then an earthquake, that reaches to the United States capitol and while ignoring all other buildings, alters forever the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral. A visual assault on the most easily recognized icons of church and state. I am finding the fact that these buildings were the only ones damaged too much to bear. I believe in the interconnectedness of all things. I guess at a time when I am obsessed with the nature of the law and the state, of God and belief and identity we also seem to be having a lot of extreme events displaying the raw power of the earth. And at the heart of my own obsession, I feel that power and I want to speak for the earth. Problem is, that would probably buy me a couple weeks at the Priory. Because I know, other people don't see it that way.

I know. I still do though. I don't care whether you call what happened God or Karma, or the power of the very earth rising up against a parasite as I described in my first dream:

Here is the earlier blog post so you don't have to look it up:

I had a dream. I had a dream last night and in the dream I was watching the sea with some men I did not know. And the sky was white, swirling light. And I felt dread and fear. The sea came over the earth and enveloped it in water and I saw dolphins, soldiers, swimming in formation to attack the people of the earth. Then I saw in the sky a prism and a black rainbow and I was afraid. I looked to the men who were with me. They could not see what I had seen. I knew more.

It's hard, I grew up in a Christian home and I ingested plenty of Old Testament stories. I read Revelations. Plus I get messianic and people I respect consider that pathological. Still. If I was still a Christian I would be hard-pressed not to consider in light of my Christian traditions the reality of these earthquakes. What is God trying to tell you? (Answer: He is trying to tell you to read my blog)

I am no longer a Christian and I am even more hardpressed to ignore this event. What if all the yogis are right, and the earth will be balanced when we are balanced? What if you think the fact that an earthquake took out the two poignant symbols of church and state in Washington is a pure coincidence? Perhaps you could still have some reservations about the bloated corporations that have slowly replaced over time our religions, our corporations and our sovereigns? About the nature of the economy when capital is concentrated in the hands of too few?

Usually on a good day - and almost always when I post a poem - I get around 60 blog hits. When I wrote the previous piece on the riots, all of a sudden I had a couple thousand. I don't know why, but two of the comments speculated that perhaps the far left (if you can call me far left and not just far OUT) and the far right have more in common than we think. No matter where you come from, ideologically, chances are you are not very happy with the way things are now. Probably, like me, not enough to quit your job and take to the streets and do the hard work of clawing back power from institutions to people, but I don't know, I get closer every day.

The Riots: Why is The Economist confused?

2011-08-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

I am sitting on the South Bank (London) right now, working at a Giraffe (are those in the States yet?) and waiting for a play – tonight I see London Road, a play about a serial killer of prostitutes in Ipswich in 2006, a musical with book and lyrics taken entirely from interviews of witnesses, Anna Deveare Smith style, if you remember her incredible first play about the LA riots.

It’s the first time I have been to London since the riots.

And now comes my full and heavy heart spilling over about the riots.

When I lived in West Hampstead/Maida Vale/Kilburn – leafy North London - in 2006, I was pushing Owain in his stroller home from nursery one summer evening. We walked past a gang of, as they say, youths, who were harassing a blind guy walking along with his seeing eye dog. There were three of them, and one articulate one was explaining to the blind guy how he had a knife and was going to gut his dog right there on the sidewalk. I pointed out to Articulate Thug that it really wasn’t an impressive act of bravery to harass a blind guy and/or kill his seeing eye dog. At that, all three thugs ran up to me and spat in my face. (I called the police: useless. They told me not to wipe the spit off. Morons.)

The thugs were shaking with rage. I still can see the closeup of a throbbing neck vein and the erratic hopping run down the street. I could feel their rage standing near them. It was a forcefield. Like physics, like psychosis, it was an unarguable fact.

This is the rage that was rioting.

Yet the coverage provided by that touchstone of reasonableness, The Economist, my faithful Friday night date spoke not of the rage. It said only that it was confused and depressed that the urban youth of Britain had no morals and did not feel they had a stake in the future, at least not enough of one to refrain from looting. Those editors said they were confused.

I’m not confused. It’s all so clear that it hurts. Really, incredibly obvious. We raise these kids on a diet of consumerism, on enforced obsolescence of technology and the essential nature of the next new thing. Then we give these kids no real prospects of being in a position to acquire these things, because the state education competes so ineffectively with private education that sending your kids to a state school is in most cases dooming them to a working class, or lower middle class life. And when those kids take to the streets and get unruly, instead of forcing the police to interact and deal with them, we demonize them further by giving the police ASBO power – essentially non-judicial authority to put under house arrest unruly youth who have been convicted of no crime. Then the police kill an innocent man, the second that we know of this year, and refuse to explain their actions at a peaceful protest. Then there is rioting. Not such a confusing unfolding of events.

Now the government is talking about punishing this rage with yet more stupid laws. To me this is like punshing psychosis. Sure, some people were in it for the blackberries and the sneaker/trainers and property laws were broken, but punishing the rage misses the point and misses the big picture. It’s weak and cowardly to focus on the hoards and their property crime. Much bigger and braver and more important to ask ourselves why – attempt to clear up that confusion When they rioted in LA, there were reasons. When they rioted in Paris in 1789 there were reasons. And there are reasons why they riot now.

The most succinct summary of those reasons was provided by my husband: a fish rots from the head down. The government does not have moral authority nor does it deserve our respect. The government is more interested in preserving its cosy relationship with Murdoch and taking care of the banks. The people in government are more interested in tinkering with their expense accounts for their own personal gain. When police are regularly bribed by journalists, who regularly Christmas with the Prime Minister, who has rarely lived or worked beyond that rarified Eton/Oxford air, isn’t the state rotten beyond all respect? Yes. And the profit motive – not even efficient profit for the state, just creating more profit and more growth for the wealthy – that mandate of the state has become the mandate of the people, absorbed down to their very pores. We as a species are affected by each other like this, like this always. When the leaders act only for their personal gain at the expense of their institutions, it filters through. When the train prices go up but there are no more or better trains, when the economic development private initiatives created by the government to generate wealth only go to wealthy people, when a 25 year old banker on Wall Street gets a bonus of $22 million and an office manager I know commutes 2 hours each way every day for a salary of £19,000 per year, and the government only subsidizes the former’s salary, believe me, the message is getting through. Robbery has been in fashion for a long time.

My generation is a terrible failure. Our great legacy will be the extensions we built on our houses during the property boom. Our great legacy will be Sex and the City and the mass fetish of fashion. Our great legacy is that we have let our human organizations –the market, the state, the church – bloat bigger and fatter for the benefit of the few, for our own comparative advantage. And corporations, sovereigns and religions spoil the earth and disrespect the rule of law. And the Economist is confused?

I remain an ardent fan of democracy and capitalism and – to a lesser extent -- organized religion. All I want is for all to function clearly under the rule of law. I keep posting this on my blog bur nothing is happening. It’s enough to make me want to take to the streets.

But I have two children. And I am interviewing architects for my own extension. I want a guest room for when my parents come to visit! My condemnation of our generation – which was first presented to me by my old friend Steve – is perhaps mostly a condemnation of myself. Now, my husband tells me I will go mad again if I pursue this, so I’ve been warned. But every time I see a child walk by this South Bank, I wonder what it will look like when they are forty-four.

I remember again my father in the car in the summer of 2009 when people were on the streets following the Iranian election. I was upset about this woman, Neda, who was shot. My Dad, ever clear-eyed and reasonable, pointed out that tyranny is only ever defeated by blood. His generation knows and accepts this, that some things are more important than guest rooms. His generation – Warren Buffet’s, I might add – his generation felt ok about paying taxes. I remember coming to understand with some horror when my first paycheck arrived one summer the tax I was paying. My father took me outside immediately and pointed at the road. The government pays for that, he said. And the sidewalk. The fire hydrant and the fire department. The police and Judge Githler and the school. The library and the playground. Denison Park Pool. And for Mrs. Mitford to buy groceries now that she is old.

I feel ashamed that I work at a corporation when I see how much structural damage has been caused by them and when I think about how much the world needs the activism of stakeholders like me. But I do think that it is working at Skadden and then in my current job that helps me understand the underpinnings of the problem.

The underpinnings make it more difficult. At least my dad’s generation – children during WWII – had an external manifestation of tyranny. An army marching across Europe. Ours is within ourselves and our own organizations, a swelling, an obesity in our own institutions, a tumorous tyrannical working of tax code and derivative trade so that banks can and must do whatever they want, period. A tumor fed by the best and brightest out of our universities, because of its promise of wealth so much greater than any other field. But wealth without honor – paying taxes is defeat – wealth without fairness, wealth without kindness.

Big Brown Pills by Louis Jenkins

2011-08-08T05:20:00.000-07:00

Big Brown Pills
I believe in the big brown pills, they lower cholesterol and
improve digestion. They help prevent cancer and build
brain cells. Plus they just make you feel better overall. I
believe in coffee and beet greens and fish oil, of course,
and red wine, in moderation, and cinnamon. Green tea is
good and black tea, ginseng. I eat my broccoli. Nuts are
very good and dark chocolate, has to be dark, not milk
chocolate. Tomatoes. But I think the big brown pills really
help. I used to believe in the little yellow pills but now I
believe in the big brown pills. I believe that they are much
more effective. I still take the little yellow ones, but I really
believe in the big brown ones.

This is what should count for blasphemy.

2011-07-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

This Murdoch/News of the World/police/politician thing that rocked the UK this last week has died down a little, I hope it is a calm between some more profound and powerful storms that should happen.

I watched the questioning of James Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch this week and partly it was with a big thrill: man, this game is fun. This game is fun and important. Hearings like that are a sacred space where we let the rule of law in, and we do it through witnesses. And we do it through answers to questions.

And Rupert and James were masterful at not really answering any of the questions. I am a citizen and a taxpayer and I would like to know exactly what happened and who was protecting who. We didn't get those answers. I found the MPs far too deferential to the Murdochs.

That was a piece of theatre and perhaps for some, it was a shaming and a calling into account, but I saw a scene that communicated with blinding clarity: the government defers to business, and is unwilling to do the hard work of cleaning house, so even the questioners did not have an absolute incentive to get to the truth. A striking detail is that there was not a single question about Sean Hoare. Sean Hoare was the News of the World journalist who died - he had a history of substance abuse, but hey, a lot of people have a history of substance abuse and don't die. Fucking Keith Richards is still alive. It could be that the thing that killed Sean Hoare was the fact that he was willing to testify to a fact that now is considered false: that Coulson knew what was going on (and thus perhaps Cameron new) regarding phone hacking, settling hacking lawsuits, paying off the police, paying legal bills of scapegoats who took the falls. Hoare would have explained that Coulson knew all this. And now he is dead. And the investigation goes forward on the strength of Coulson's unchallenged statement that he knew nothing.

And I keep thinking of David Kelly, who would have testified that Blair substantively understood there were no weapons of mass destruction, but was found in the woods, dead, before he could do so.

Come on.

Britain is so proud of itself for its rule of law, but the first rule in the rule of law is this: you should keep your witnesses alive and well. Once witnesses get killed off, the rule of law has failed. And it is the sanctity of the rule of law that every MP should protect by getting to the bottom of it.

There is a lawlessness in the actions of the government, the police and Murdoch that is exactly equally terrifying to me. They hide behind the protections of their corporation and sovereign affiliation, but what we have here, as citizens of this country, what we have here is a big stinking mess. Police harass protesters. They killed Ian Tomlinson.   They shoot innocents. They have internal investigations about those things that always find everything was fine. Come on, you guys, how is this any better than living in China?   Corporations buy police action or inaction. Politicians are silenced. No questions about a dead witness. No questions about a dead witness. No questions about a dead witness. This is wrong. Shame on every MP.

If this is the first time you have read this blog, please be aware, I am crazy, although I prefer to think that I actually am just different than other people, neurodiverse, if you will, in a way that is not necessarily pathological. I would like to think that but I am pretty sure there is some pathology involved in what I am. And you should also be aware, dear reader, that I had two dreams, dreams I feel to be portentous. Dreams that should be heralded. In the second dream, at least how I see it, it is time for people to shrink these governments and corporations, shrink these banks and monopolists, shrink them back down to their original purpose, and bring them within the rule of law. We have judges in the UK who are handmaidens to the aims of the powerful - hence the superinjunctions - and we have judges in the US who are blind about corporations.

The US Supreme Court keeps giving corporations powers more like sovereigns than like individuals, and creating special beneficial treatment for them in civil and criminal proceedings and the effect has been to grow a successful country - to a point. The effect now is a great hollowing out of the middle class, distribution of wealth to corporations and governments, to bankers, to the detriment of all the people who are not elite. This can be addressed by simply a fair application of existing law, and a rethink of the regulatory frameworks in which sovereigns and corporations operate.

The United States invades a foreign sovereign illegally and executes a man without trial or charges. Bin Laden. And you know what? That night I am sitting next to a British judge, an important one, and he says that justice was done. I said that if justice was done when the US killed Bin Laden then justice was done when the planes went into the towers. Truly, all we can ask of each other is to live by the rule of law. The United States has long operated outside of international law, and Britain joined them. The US should have turned over Bin Laden to the international criminal court. The actions of the people - and they were people as well as terrorists -- who flew the planes were in their minds a kind of justice - both that and bin Laden's execution were blind vengeance outside of the rule of law. And people who live in the US are a little blind, sorry, but its' true, a little blind to how the US has broken a lot of laws and hurt a lot of people. Neitszche said it. We are unknown to ourselves. We truly are. (Aside: Admitting that ought to be the Christian thing to do, if you ask me, which you didn't, since I am not a Christian anymore)

I think the Murdoch hearings should be an excellent way to kick off my new Rule of Law initiative. Which exists only in this blog because I am busy. I ask all the MPs to at least ask about Sean Hoare. On a going forward basis, please, MPs, be citizens of Britain before you are party members, and find it in your heart to ask the hardest questions.

I am angry because it was my generation that let the corporations and sovereigns get out of hand and we did it because we all have such unthinking faith in capitalism. (And we were busy competing against other humans to obtain better/more goods) I am still convinced that capitalism is the best way to distribute goods, but it must be balanced by the more pressing need to address the rate of consumption of the world's resources, and everyone with a brain thinks that and wants that for their children, but we see ourselves as oddly powerless to use the force of law to bring this about. We are set against each other competing for goods in this set-up, and it keeps us too busy to get involved and change anything. We have children to raise. But yet what are we raising them into? Can't we do better than this?

I was with a friend who is a magnificent stained glass artist yesterday and I asked him about making me a saint window of Sienna Miller. Because to me she is a saint. When she sued the News of the World over the phone hacking scandal, those guys threw all kinds of money at her to settle the case. It worked for everyone else. But Sienna didn't take the money, she pressed her case, she made the government take evidence under penalty of perjury, and she made the judge rule on it. God bless Sienna Miller. Because if she had not done that, we would not even be here, with at least a glimpse under the rock of bloated corruption our government, police and media have become. She used the rule of law to bring us closer to the truth.

David Kelly and Sean Hoare. We need to know what those names have in common.

the lesson of the moth by Don Marquis

2011-07-18T03:34:00.001-07:00

the lesson of the moth

By Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself.

archy

HP7 Review: The Battle of Hogwarts spoilers, spoilers and more spoilers.

2011-07-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

I have been daydreaming about the Battle of Hogwarts for years. I am usually not one for battle scenes in movies, too overwhelming, too hard to tell what is happening, and the characters are in a fear and adrenalin white-out.

But I have known Harry Potter for some time, this story defined my decade, and the Battle of Hogwarts is the pinnacle of the series. I first heard of Harry from a nine-year-old girl. She had read the Philosopher's Stone and needed to write a book report on it. So I asked her the plot and, well, it is so richly plotted that her telling was a bit incoherent. But she was so excited. I mean, she was thrilled about what she had read in a book. And thus I came to the real magic of Harry Potter.

Not long after I met my husband, just after Goblet of Fire came out. I read Prisoner of Azkaban aloud to him as we drove someplace north to attend a wedding and meet his best friend. I had only met Rhys about two months before that and I already had his name tattooed on my back. It was a heady time. I would do a little Grindylow impression that would crack him up while driving.

I read Order of the Phoenix married and pregnant and commuting to Kensington from East London working for this start-up. It was a hot summer. I am glad that book is long. Rowling's prose is charming and her plots are absorbing and when that book was over, the tube seemed hotter and the commute seemed longer. Half Blood Prince came out when I had a one-year-old, and we would go play in Princess Diana's park and then when he fell asleep, I would sit in Hyde Park in glorious long grass alone with my sleeping son and feast on the thrill of what happens next.

Deathly Hallows came out four years ago, days before we moved to Cambridge. Even on the first reading, even before I shared all these stories with my son and they became such an important part of our relationship, even then, I was so thrilled by Snape. That marvelously brave, endlessly fascinating man, who himself was not sure whether he was good or evil, maybe ever. I saw the movie last night and of the many parts of the movie that exceeded my imagination, Rickman was just, well, every second of Snape on screen to me is this guy breaking my heart and kicking my ass in the same second. This blend of arrogance and self-hatred, this talent and insight and tolerance of suffering. All those looks Snape had been giving Harry in all the previous films had such a resurrection in Deathly Hallows, a transformation from cartoon hate to a kind of ingenious tortured love.

Thank you, J.K. Rowling and Alan Rickman for Snape.

So Owain and I were so excited about seeing this movie; we got our tickets way in advance and read all the reviews and watched all the trailors. I parent in the Venn Diagram overlap between my interests and my son's interests. When my son got really interested in Harry Potter, it was fantastic. There we were together in the shaded area, and I read and reread and read aloud to Owain and we talked endlessly about Harry and Tom Riddle, about why Hermione didn't marry Harry, of what the horcruxes were, of what exactly was the issue with the Slytherins, and lately about Neville Longbottom and how he really could have been Harry Potter.

I note with some sadness that the film, while giving Neville some moments, wasted time by doing a few Neville= Ralph from the Simpsons gags. No. By this movie, Neville is a man who leads a ragged resistance. And he can dance. And Neville's legacy from Voldemort is even more terrible than Harry's: the death of a narrative consciousness for Neville's own parents, tortured into insanity and in a mental hospital. Neville's slaying of Nagini was heroic, but still, he was back looking a little dorky at the end. Not right.

The movie moved along so brilliantly in the beginning, the Gringotts raid, Aberforth and Ariana, so swiftly. Helena Bonham Carter playing Hermione pretending to be Bellatrix LeStrange after drinking polyjuice potion nails Watson hilariously. Then, really, way before we were ready, it was time for the battle.

The battle starts with McGonagall bringing the castle to life to defend itself, stone knights appear and the music is exciting and I was so excited! But the battle . . . It deviates from the book in the order of the battle and in the ultimate victory Harry has over Voldemort. Unfortunately, I found some of those deviations really detracted from what I loved best about the books.

In the book, when Harry finally defeats Voldemort it is in the great hall of the school, everything is happening at once, Fred is dead, Mrs. Weasley kills Bellatrix and out of nowhere, Harry, who they thought was dead, jumps out just as the sun is rising.

And the way Harry kills Voldemort in the books is really important to his character too, so I was sad that it was left out. In the book, Harry uses his favorite spell, his trusty friend, his little zen master tool: he uses Expelliarmus, the spell that merely fetches the instrument of the aggressor and nothing more. And that moment is witnessed. Hermione, Ron, Neville, Luna, the Weasleys, they witness that moment and their own faces tell what it means to them and all they lost to be there and bear witness.

But in the movie, Harry and Voldemort go off for a longer struggle alone. I guess I have some sympathy, cinematically, for making their struggle real, but you know what, not enough to excuse it. We have known their struggle for a long time. I have known it for a decade. Who would win in a fight - the White Witch or Sauron or Lex Luther or Voldemort? Harry or Superman or Frodo? My son and I converse about the heroes, the villains and their struggles all the time and this was the fight we wanted to witness.We earned the right for that fight to be big and cinematic and for that on-screen audience to cheer for these characters and to hear them be cheered, for the sun to shine and eyes to reflect hope. We earned the right for Harry to have a big moment. If not Harry, then who? But no. We didn't get it. Harry kills Voldemort in, like Parking Lot C of Hogwarts and then the next you see him is walking through the great hall and he hasn't even mentioned it to anyone. It's so English! What the hell? I mean, it's actually unclear if anyone knows if Voldemort is dead.

So we get no thrills when Harry kills Voldemort and we get no satisfaction AGAIN when Harry does NOT GO back to Dumbledore's office to talk to him about the Deathly Hallows. In the book, Harry goes back to the headmaster's office as soon as he kills Voldemort and all the past Headmasters of Hogwarts living in the portraits rise to their feet and cheer him. Having married into a family headed by an august academic, I know how hard it is to get those old dudes out of their chairs, and I never could get past that part of Deathly Hallows without crying. Really, it was the least he deserved, and while maybe Harry didn't need to hear the cheers, I wanted to hear them on his behalf. And I wanted to hear them BAD. No cheers. Yet the collective consciousness needed them. Unfairoes! (That is a spell my son made up. It doesn't do anything except express an opinion)

Instead of getting counsel from portrait-Dumbledore in which Harry explains his decision to lay down the instrument of ultimate power, the Elder Wand of the Deathly Hallows, Harry instead has this John Lennon moment with Ron and Hermione and tosses the wand without a word and the movie sort of ends with them holding hands. Before the very last scene, the flashforward which should have aged them all 19 years but actually aged them about ten minutes. I mean, really. What the hell is wrong with these guys? They can make a blind Ukrainian dragon captive in a cave for decades fly across London and make it completely plausible and they can't age Daniel Radcliffe 19 years? What is that about? With that budget, they could have called up the Benjamin Button guys.

I will leave you with one of the many moments that did not disappoint. the moment that Harry, after reading Snape's memories (which, in a gorgeous touch, were held in Snape's tears instead of the grey wisps of cloud) realizes that he is the unintended Horcrux, that Voldemort lives in him, so he has to die. That face. Those eyes. That stunned silence. Oh, he was there and it was filmed perfectly. Daniel Radcliffe's greatest moment. I was a little breathless.

But I missed the cheering. I wanted it for Harry Potter and for my son. And for me.

Fight Club

2011-07-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

So the last two days Owain and I hosted Fight Club in our backyard. Twenty kids, one combat for stage instructor and hours of enthusiastic and mostly successfully fake punching, slapping, hair pulling, eye gouging, uppercuts and strangulation. The enthusiasm with which a seven-year-old will pretend to scream in pain and expire is almost disturbing. It was about the most fun I have had in Cambridge. I like that transgressive, dark stuff. In my defense, Fight Club requires body awareness, cooperation, choreography, intention and commitment. It is an introduction to theater and it was totally fun. In the last 45 minutes, we put together a short play based on the scene in The Hobbit where the dwarves attack the Goblin King. In our version, an elf prince killed the Goblin King and the elves were assisting the hobbits to free a hobbit hostage/future roast hobbit dinner held by the Goblin King. The elves took out the trolls guarding the goblin lair and the hobbits attacked the goblins. (There were two girls out of twenty and when faced with their options, whether to be a goblin, hobbit, elf or troll, they wanted to know who was the prettiest. That was a little depressing.)

Open Letter to UK Journalists and Conservatives

2011-07-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Six Regulars:

I know how you LOVE it when I get all angry pants about regulatory issues. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. No LOL for me, lads, ever.

Anyway, the Conservatives who control the UK despite the pretend alliance with the LibDems have set aside £40 million for a local business stimulus in the form of local tv stations. This idea is intriguing and has a lot to offer. It is really a step in the right direction for Conservatives. It's an olive branch. But politics is so stupidly partisan here that everyone who is not a conservative is condemning it, killing it before it even comes alive. The shit I am reading in the Guardian makes me want to puke.   They have gotten old and lazy and the quality of analysis is so poor. Therefore, I present for the pleasure of anyone who delights in scorchingly accurate analysis and bettering the plight of the planet:

AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL JOURNALISTS AND CONSERVATIVES

First, take note, the standard of excellence in reporting and analyzing the news in the UK is no longer "at least we are not News of the World". Left wing press are printing editorial after editorial to sink government initiatives that could turn out to benefit everyone in the UK just because those initiatives orginated with the Conservatives: that is bad form and bad for your country and the lives of your children and for that, you suck. In case you haven't, noticed, things are not so great here, and everyone needs to pitch in and support the intelligent actions of this government. I read the Tory culture website about local television and it is a cogent, intelligent plan. That has been utterly ignored in the press. Despite the fact that if the plan succeeded, it could really help the United Kingdom. Not only help the United Kingdom economically and socially, but help its soul, help its spirit. You know, I think it's just fabulous that it was Blair who promised to consider our souls, but it is the Conservatives who are really thinking about it. You journalists stink of Blair in all his vague evil with your partisan coverage. Set it aside and help Britain. And also, Private Eye and Economist: GO SIT ON THE NAUGHTY STEP WITH THE GUARDIAN. Seriously. You have to be more broad-minded than you are.   Because I am sitting here feeling sorry for David Cameron. THAT IS NOT RIGHT. Grow up and do the right thing and don't make me tell you again, or it will be ALLCAPS.

The Conservatives have put forth an embryonic plan to create and sustain local content, through some kind of assistance in broadcast and otherwise of local tv stations. The regulatory contours of this one are, as far as I can see, pretty open-ended. I don't think anyone has that much of an idea of how good this idea is. Here is why I think it is a phenomenally good idea that should be supported. The government is creating a market for locally-created content. It could be a competitive market.

This feeds the very soul of this nation powefully: its Eisteddfod, its X Factor its So You Think You Can Ice Skate, its sports day, its talent shows.   This island is artists and story-tellers, sharing the soul of Harry Potter and Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Reepicheep in Narnia, in Middle Earth, in the Gruffalo's cave. The inhabitants of this island have an almost creepy childhood fetish that produces such marvelous childhoods and such good art. This is Shakespeare's country. This is the country of stories. A cut above New York and Sydney (though it pains me to say). It is in the soil and blood here.

So anyway, this government project would give local content producers the opportunity to create content, content that could then be broadcast locally or licensed on.   Fantastic. You have the will to produce art and you have a potential economic upside for all parties.

So assuming the Conservatives are fairly intolerant of risk, this is a great first model: create a separate non-profit production company with the seed money, quasi-independent but not like the completely unworkable crappy Network Rail situation (Or YOU'LL be on the naughty step), and have this company solicit content. Don't worry about creating distribution networks, just use local ITV stations.

,- This requires you to understand how the model would shift from the somewhat primitive proposal you have now. I propose it be more about creating quality content rather than filling local airspace, and that NewCorp simply contract and support specific programmes. I think this actually strengthens the case for local advertising investment over the current model. I think you create a huge incentive for local tourism industry to invest heavily in advertising knowing that should the programme go to national or even international distribution, the original advertisements would remain. It's like buying a lottery ticket of fame. This would create added value for the hospitality industry through intelligent regulation.

- I propose that the government endow this corporation with immunity from prosecution for breach of copyright claims. That is right. All these people creating local content: they must be able to use any song they want, any film clip, to be free to sing the songs they love and create the content they want heavy though it is on pastiche and references. We live in a post-modern world, and our art should reflect that without the disproportionately inflated opportunity costs thrust upon us by bossypants record companies. This would be an awesome opportunity for the Conservatives to CLEAN HOUSE AT OFCOM - give Ofcom the job of securing all rights for NewCorp.

Then sit back and let the proposals come in, and allocate resources accordingly.

Review of MacBeth, on Trumpington Road 6:30 - 7:10 p.m.

2011-07-05T15:41:00.000-07:00

I just came back from my son's school's first play, an evening showing of MacBeth. Owain was too young to be in it, but we were both eager to attend.

The witches foremost should be commended in this production, they were mesmerizing in the ways they moved around each other and the voices that they used. I was impressed at that imagination, and at the voices. The girls spoke in very different voices than their own, it was apparent to me that they had considered these witches and really brought them to life. I would describe the voices they chose as hazy and harpy, with some munchkin from the Wizard of Oz and a lot of Karen Walker from the tv show Will & Grace. Fantastic.

But my favorite parts of the play are still Lady MacBeth's Out, Out, Damn Spot and the Tomorrow speech. Lady Macbeth was absolutely ethereal, and moved like a ghost. MacBeth was played with a grim good humour that I would more often associate with Hamlet than MacBeth, capable of flashes of anger but perhaps a shade more toward bemused that was necessary. MacBeth is a greedy jackass capable of evil. Having said that, it is a hard part to find inside yourself for any actor with decades of professional experience and I liked the MacBeth he came up with. The tomorrow speech was the best part :

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The whole play, to me, is the fact that MacBeth continually disappoints himself as a human being so much that these words mean something. That's why they keep performing Shakespeare, I think, year after year here. Because Shakespeare lets us sit and contemplate, or remember the times in our lives that would make the Tomorrow speech true. Sometimes life feels like that tale told by an idiot.

The length of time for the play was great. I felt that it was a pretty good combination of narrative and scenes. I did find the narrative probably unnecessarily moralizing and too heavy an annotation on words that need no adornment except the active engagement of the speaker. I thought making the scenes shorter but with greater preparation time, so that, for instance, the Tomorrow speech lines above are the only lines in that scene, you might get good concentrated fifteen second performances. A sketch show with deaths, murders, despair and a crazy soap lady!

I found the scenery oddly effective. Having not been involved in producing despite offering, I was prepared to hate it but I did not. The music was evocative. The battle scene at the end really came alive. It made me see that these kids could move really effectively and use the space imaginatively, the battle was a wonderful picture and everyone really terrific. And a special shout out to every backstage scream, which I thought were so full of life! I loved them.

The edges weren't very sharp, but were fairly well organized and the actors stayed in the round watching the performance. I thought that was effective. And the slight blur of when they began and the post-bow mayhem are actually very much considered wonderful studies in themselves, about the audience and their engagement, and the relationship that the audience has with the actors. And the audience, the parents, were so full of love and support. I am not that generous a person so I thought they were being a little soft, except that the set and the battle scene and the witches and the blonde servant of Lady MacBeth who cared so tenderly about her, they all actually did deserve their wild applause.

A Real Death Waltz: Thank you, Clarence Clemons

2011-06-21T07:04:00.000-07:00

In 1981, Patty Burrell made me, Skippy and Bop, new friends and freshman at East High School in Corning, New York listen to the greatest saxophone solo ever recorded. It was Clarence Clemons in Jungleland. We were sitting in the Burrell's back room, three on the sofa, we listened quietly to the whole mesmerizing ten minute song, a story of a boy named Rat out on the streets, who takes a stab at romance with a barefoot girl, but whose dreams gun him down. He winds up wounded, and not even dead. If you do a statistical analysis of Springsteen's lyrics, the three most frequently occurring words are girl, street and night. Jungleland is pretty much in the mean.

Jungleland has been one of my favorite songs since that day thirty years ago. I don't relate to gang violence in New Jersey, it's because I sat with Bop and Skippy when I heard it for the first time, it was the first exclusive piece of information provided to me as a high school student by an actual big sister: this sax solo is important. And it is because Patty's tip is right. That sax solo. It's important.

The solo starts with a sustained single note, builds slowly to another one, Clarence, a mountain, over piano work of Roy Bittan. About 16 bars in, Max Weinberg swings it into an anthem, an anthem of the every day, an anthem of the drama of each person's life, an anthem of small things, and Clarence blows this haunting anthem so your heart aches. It goes on and on. And just like life itself, you don't want it to ever finish.

What that song gave me when I was 14 was an outlet. I am sure that every teenager before 1975 felt the longing and despair and loneliness that I did, but it was never scored so accurately. I wasn't getting stabbed, but in the quick of the night I was making my honest stand. We all fucking were. We were trying to be adults. Thirty years later and I am still always trying to make my honest stand and I am always finding life wounding, always, I am wounded but not even dead.

So great was my loyalty to that song, and to Patty and Bop and Skippy that I made my own ritual. The last thing I do before I move out of any place is listen to Jungleland and think about my life in that place, in all its boring glory, in all its pedestrian wonder. Listening to Clarence play the perfect anthem of small things transformed my small things into things as huge as the ache in my heart. You see, I am terrible about moving, I never want to move, it's a little death, a little end. I guess I play that song to mourn the passing of my own life. But this week I play it to mourn the end of Clarence Clemons.

Where I grew up, Springsteen and Dylan were indisputable geniuses, poets and artists of the highest order. And you know who Clarence Clemons was? He was the guy who was cooler than Bruce Springsteen. There from the beginning (not like the ridiculously late on the bandwagon Patty Scialfa or the questionable Nils Lofgren), Clarence was immutable. What I felt for Clarence Clemons before he died was more respect than affection. I believed Patty and I believed Bruce, he was the Big Man, the greatest saxophone player who ever lived.

Key Instructions in Creativity from Johnny Cash

2011-06-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

The most beautiful moment in the Cash biopic is when he goes to audition for a small time record producer with his first gospel band. He is trying, at this point in his life, to hold down a job and be a good husband but he is drawn to the back door of a record producer, he wants to sing. He forms a band and has an audition. They sing the song of the time: I know that Jesus saved me, by his power he forgave me . . .

The producer stops them. The producer is played by Dallas Roberts with such restraint and integrity that I have to watch it three times in a row whenever I put it on. The producer says he can't sell gospel. Cash presses him for an explanation: is it the song or the way I sing it? The producer explains that he didn't believe it, he didn't believe Cash singing the same old tired gospel songs. Cash then objects, gets upset, claims the producer is telling him he doesn't believe in God. Roberts explains. This is a song that everyone always sings. We've already heard that song a hundred times, just like that, just like you sang it.

But, Johnny Cash counters, you didn't let us bring it home.

The producer then responds with this speech:
(Everyone who aspires to anything creative should read it once a year)

Alright, let's "bring it home." If you was hit by a truck, and you was lying out in that gutter dying and you had time to sing one song - one song people would remember before you're dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on earth, one song that would sum you up, you're telling me that's the song you'd sing, the same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day, about your peace within and how it's real and how you're going to shout it?

Or would you sing something different. Something real. Something you felt.Because I'll tell you right now that's the song that people want to hear.

That's the kind of song that truly saves people.

It doesn't got nothing to do with believing in God, Mr. Cash. It has to do with believing in yourself.

Walking Through A Wall by Louis Jenkins

2011-06-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

This is the poem Mark Rylance quoted last night when he accepted the Tony. I am a sucker for Rylance and for the play and now for this poem:

Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said, "Say, I want to try that." Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren't so good. They won't hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren't pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it's the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence, I don't know, but I've torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it's a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side.

Jellicle Cats - In honor of Early Night Club

2011-06-09T07:41:00.000-07:00

The Song of the Jellicles Jellicle Cats come out to-night
Jellicle Cats come one come all:
The Jellicle Moon is shining bright -
Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.
Jellicle Cats are black and white,
Jellicle Cats are rather small;
Jellicle Cats are merry and bright,
And pleasant to hear when they caterwaul.
Jellicle Cats have cheerful faces,
Jellicle Cats have bright black eyes;
They like to practise their airs and graces
And wait for the Jellicle Moon to rise.
Jellicle Cats develop slowly,
Jellicle Cats are not too big;
Jellicle Cats are roly-poly,
They know how to dance a gavotte and a jig.
Until the Jellicle Moon appears
They make their toilette and take their repose:
Jellicle Cats wash behind their ears,
Jellicle dry between their toes.
Jellicle Cats are white and black,
Jellicle Cats are of moderate size;
Jellicle Cats jump like a jumping-jack,
Jellicle Cats have moonlit eyes.
They're quiet enough in the morning hours,
They're quiet enough in the afternoon,
Reserving their terpsichorean powers
To dance by the light of the Jellicle Moon.
Jellicle Cats are black and white,
Jellicle Cats (as I said) are small;
If it happends to be a stormy night
They will practise a caper or two in the hall.
If it happens the sun is shining bright
You would say they had nothing to do at all:
They are resting and saving themselves to be right
For the Jellicle Moon and the Jellicle Ball.
T. S. elliot

Pater Noster: A poem by Jacques Prevert

2011-05-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

Pater noster

Our Father who art in heaven

Stay there
And we'll stay here on earth
Which is sometimes so pretty
With its mysteries of New York
And its mysteries of Paris
At least as good as that of the Trinity
With its little canal at Ourcq
Its great wall of China
Its river at Morlaix
Its candy canes
With its Pacific Ocean
And its two basins in the Tuileries
With its good children and bad people
With all the wonders of the world
Which are here
Simply on the earth
Offered to everyone
Strewn about
Wondering at the wonder of themselves
And daring not avow it
As a naked pretty girl dares not show herself
With the world's outrageous misfortunes
Which are legion
With legionaries
With torturers
With the masters of this world
The masters with their priests their traitors and their troops
With the seasons
With the years
With the pretty girls and with the old bastards
With the straw of misery rotting in the steel of cannons.

What the Dreams Mean/ Rapture Saturday

2011-05-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

***Note: I am sorry about the overall inaccessibility of this post, it really is fairly necessary to read The First Dream and The Second Dream to have any idea what I am talking about, and even then, I lapse into what I fear is incomprehensibility frequently. I am sorry. It is the best I can do in the time allowed. ***

In the second dream, the man who is lying on that brick patio in a business suit, that guy is authority in all its forms: sovereigns (governments), corporations (including banks) and religions (broadly defined). He is screaming out in pain because he is really suffering, the inversion of authority that presses him into the ground really causes genuine distress in him. Yet it is necessary. Of course it is. Currently in the world, governments, corporations and religions absorb our life energies, they tell us what we can and cannot do and can and cannot have, whether that is by salary, by prohibitions to travel or marriage -- all these things. Reform is necessary.

I don't know if I need to stay longer on this point, that governments, corporations and religions are essentially more alike than different. They all should be subject to the rule of law, of course, because they are comprised of people and no person can stand above the law. It makes me sick to think how banks, corporations and governments and religions -- their constituents, the people, humans, use these organizations to be above the law. Corporations evade transparency requirements without retribution, corporations elect candidates, religions make laws, yet somehow the organization, the entity itself is not subject to the law the way you and I are.

In the dream, the man was pinned to the ground and from the angle I entered, I saw a huge, outsized Bernese Mountain Dog, sitting patiently and happily on top of the man. Just beautiful. And to me the dog is the Earth, it is all of nature, it is everything left when you get rid of governments and religions and corporations, it is the present moment, it is all animals, including humans. Because here is where my interpretation of the dream veers wildly away from mainstream thinking: I think John Gray's Straw Dogs is right, and the only ethics I am really interested in espousing are ethics that do not presume that humans should dominate the earth, that do not create fundamental distinctions between them and animals. John Gray was basically saying the only ethic that seemed right to him was an ethic that somehow took into account everything represented by that big Bernese Mountain Dog, holistically, as one. So what flows from that practically for me is that I have to vote green and think long and hard about where I stand on animal rights and eating meat. But certainly the inversion is right, these institutions of humans should serve all humans and the planet, and now, today on Rapture Saturday, I think the situation is way too much the other way.   We serve them. They tell us what we can and cannot do, and the capitalist system shapes who we are. We hand these pieces of our own identity over to them. Their identity must stretch to us, and what we think we should be, rather than our identity stretch to them.

These organizations of human power are simply too big and powerful in and of themselves, they have grown so their only real interest is perpetuation at any cost. And we have a special sort of blindness in ourselves that prevents us from seeing that for what it is. What you eat -everything you eat - is a sort of sacrament, a piece of your identity. Your Friday night pizza night is a communion and you tithe Dominos. Your choice of investments for your 401k is as significant in religious consequence as your prayers. Your votes, your dollars, your choices, your relationships. It's all part of the same big cookie. . . .

The flow of capital on earth right now is desperately uneven and unfair because we serve banks. Because governments perpetuate themselves rather than serve, because religions dictate rather than listen.   And the thing is, we gave them that power. And they consistently retain power by being in charge of the laws, the budget, the policy, the message. And the animal in us should rise up in solidarity with all the creatures of earth, all its rivers and mountains and glaciers and put a stop to it. I want to write "before it is too late" but I think this feeling of end times I have is just a meaningless leftover symptom of my upbringing (see, e.g., my brother's Facebook post on Odisagih). But I still want to write it, because the dolphins looked mad (see the first dream).

I don't know if you've read the earlier posts about having the dreams. It was freaky. I put the dream about the giant wave engulfing the shore in the play, word for word from my notes at 4:30 in the morning, I sent that play out into the universe, flew back to Cambridge and there on the TV screen was the tsunami in Japan. The experience of writing the play was so intense and in some ways holy that I was somewhat convinced that something huge just had to happen when it was over. And there it was. And the thing is, sure, it was a coincidence. But I don't really believe in coincidences, I believe in the "interconnectedness of all things".

Diversion re interconnectedness of all things:
I was the student editor of Emily Hartigan's article in a law review called The Power of Language Beyond Words, (H.C.R.-C.L. circa fall '90) and she was weird but man, she could speak the truth. She ended up writing my recommendation that I used to apply for clerkships and jobs after law school and it included the immortal sentence: Rachel has a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. This became a fairly big joke among my friends. At the Civil Rights - Civil Liberties law review, Peter Ciccino photocopied it and put it up on the wall with the sentence in yellow highlight. When I would speak at subsequent meetings, he would point solemnly to the wall. It actually was pretty funny. As if the hardbitten Manhattan federal judges were looking for someone who not only understood the interconnectedness of all things, but actually understood it deeply. And the rest of my friends found it such utter, overwhelming bullshit. Going to law school was like going to the grocery store, one said, as long as you pay you get what you came for. It was like, another said, going to plumbing school, just learning a set of skills and knowledge to deploy with clients later. I always thought there was something more powerful, fundamental, mystical, magical about law. Fuck it. I DO have a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, I don't know if it is right and it is something I feel but it makes more sense to me than anything else I have believed in my life.
.
Diversion over

One last thing, if you haven't read the earlier post, you don't know that behind the dog was a woman, a 1950's style unibusomed housewife with a black dress and a clutch purse looking extremely uncomfortable. I think that it showed the Mountain Dog was not going to climb up on top of that guy until women, women, women -- yes, us -- pinned him down first.

So I am writing this the day the Rapture is supposed to occur. And it would be nice if it was the end of the world as we know it, an end of the man in the suit controlling the woman and the Bernese Mountain Dog had its beginning on this day. Climb up on your religion, the companies you invest in, your bank, your government and demand justice. Get on top with the dog on this beautiful sunny Rapture Saturday. That's what, essentially, I am saying.

Dear Psychopharmacologist

2011-05-09T05:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Doctor:

I would like to make an appointment to see you, although I can't really afford it. I have bipolar disorder but I am functioning which means that in the eyes of the NHS and my health insurer, I have nothing, I am fine. I need some sort of "separate episode" to trigger coverage. I could tell you I was suicidal, and that would get me in to see a harassed shrink once, maybe, but then you might take me away from my children. And really, I'm not suicidal. A web of love and promises keeps that option from ever gaining purchase in my thoughts. I do not let it become, in the recent faddy parlance of contract negotiation, a "load bearing idea". My own effort keeps me away from that. But that effort is ongoing, no separate episode, just increasingly harder from time to time with no relationship with a doctor to help.

I could use some help, though. It's been a while since I even spoke to a shrink. Nearly two years. Have you come up with a pill yet that would take away all the hatred I feel toward myself? Have you developed, say, a nasal spray that would stop me from despising what I see in the mirror? Stop my judgment coming down so hard that in seconds, I break my own spirit with my own crushing criticism of my reflection, and it becomes insanely courageous that I can even walk out the door to pick up my children from school, so horrible and damned am I. I was wondering if you had some kind of cream that would smooth away the shame and anxiety I feel about my entire life and all my choices, so that there is something other than the red hot buzzwords: failure! crazy! idiot! pathetic! zinging around my brain when I try to sleep. Maybe I can rub some new words into my skin so they can be under my skin instead of these old, awful ones. Maybe if you don't have some kind of cream, some kind of gum? Some kind of gum to take away the craving for self-condemnation that consumes my brain? If you could do it for nicotine cravings, can't you do it for condemnation?

And maybe in the past couple years, you have some up with something I can take for my nastiness and anger. You see, now that I have had a couple decades of therapy, on and off, I am - and I understand this is late in the game at age 43 - I am ready to see now where I am angry and where I am nasty. It is another little death to find these things out about myself every time, but such is the quest for truth. In retrospect, of course, I should have seen it sooner. I remember one Washington Post reporter introducing me as the woman who ate CEO's for breakfast and I thought he was just being nice. My experience of myself was of a fearful, incompetent fool. So eager are the children of Evangelical Christians to not be bad, to be good, that we hide our own badness from ourselves, we hide our own anger from ourselves. Really, quite incredible if you think about it: I thought he was just being nice.

And I finally see, thanks to a patient husband, that I am angry sometimes and I am nasty sometimes but always in those times, in those moments, I feel I am only defending myself from the eternal endless criticism, the eternal threat of sin, the unfettered fear occasioned by a cortisol dump created in my youth now unregulated and unfixable. In those moments I am threatened and I am afraid. Please tell me you have come up with something for that? Please? How about some kind of insight spray?

No? Nothing like that? Just the same old heavy-handed anti-psychotics that make me a zombie? The ineffective SSRI's? The lithium that made my hair fall out? Shit! You should get on that self-condemnation gum, I think it could really sell. As a spray or a gum or a pill! Anything else for me? No? Really? Nothing? No?

OK.

Rachel

April 13th

2011-04-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

So today is the ninth anniversary of the day Rhys and I got married. I said to him last night that I thought they said the first nine years are the hardest.". We are in Antibes for a week, a very generous friend having offered us his flat. We arrived and Rhys's cold that wouldn't quit evolving into allergies took a turn for the worse. I mean, man, what is there like a continual cough and reduced lung capacity to totally wear a person down? Our friend T suggested that we meet up at the Fondation Maeght near St. Paul de Vence inland and we thought maybe the relatively cosmopolitan Antibes was worsening his allergies so despite his incapacitation (coughing most of the night for two nights really takes it out of you) he got behind the wheel and we went.

Except we couldn't get out of the parking garage, we kept having to stop for coughing fits and inability to breathe as well as lost pacifiers and dropped Good Girl, and then when we finally managed to pay the parking ticket (€50/day) we got to the car and realized we had left the keys in the apartment. So the question was, who goes back to the apartment: the one who cannot see for streaming eyes who is having trouble breathing, or me, who can get lost going outside of an apartment for a cigarette? (I did that in March, actually) Rhys went, and then we drove off, with two hungry kids, in insane traffic and an uncooperative google maps operation for directions.

Bad. Awful. But then we got to St. Paul de Vence. This is where Chagall, Picasso and other moderns, in their penniless days, came to paint and live cheaply. It is an exquisite village. We met up with Tanya and had lunch at a brasserie nestled between Column D'Or (the impossibly beautiful hotel that has a private collection of Chagall, Picasso and other moderns because that's what they paid their bills with - only available to guests) and an ancient boule courtyard. We wandered around the village and I bought rose Champagne and ate violet ice cream. Violet ice cream! If you know me, you know what this means to me. Eating flowers. Rose sorbet. Lavender and peach crumble. I believe in eating flowers whenever possible. It is a whole other way to love flowers.

Then on to Fondation Maeght. I was so excited to go to this place, and it was better than my imagination. I mean, it's a little like Alambra in Spain or Macchu Piccu but it's also like the Guadi cathedral in Barcelona and the sculpture garden at the Rodin museum in Paris and MOMA. It is this beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright Falling Water style 1960's museum and landscaped sculpture gardens. It is full, full, full, of Miro and Giacometti and best of all for me, Chagall. The Maeghts were art dealers who set up this foundation and, well, man, this sculpture garden: Calder, Miro ... everywhere you look, enormous modern sculptures, crowded together, each singing in chorus together about the nature of humans, clawing and trying to understand. There was a huge Erik Dietman exhibit. I had never heard of him but, man, the more I write plays the more I appreciate sculpture. And the more I love Chagall.

But before we got in somehow the engine of our rental car started pouring out acrid smoke and we had to evacuate the car in the parking lot of Fondation Maeght and Rhys could barely function so I had two kids and a broken car to deal with and I was on hold with Europcar's Service Line (what hell is really like) for most of the time I was looking at the sculpture. Rhys was heroic. And if you have to be stuck somewhere waiting for the rental car repair guy, we were stuck in the right place. By no means am I a great mother but I do feel great when the kids are looking at great paintings.

After we had been at Fondation Maeght for just north of too long, a mechanic showed up and fixed the car and was incredibly charming as well and entranced by my children (that makes you charming to me).

The French. Here I am eating their seafood, cooking it in their unparalleled butter actually, and smelling their lemons, drinking their Champagne, complimenting their mechanics and walking through their villages. And eventually Rhys got much better when he actually took the pills the French pharmacist had given him. Perhaps we have something to learn from the French.

Perhaps we all have something to learn from each other, but we must be patient and tolerant of each other for them to give up their secrets.

Ah, this is true in international relations and this is also true in marriages, in my humble nine years of experience.

Strong bonds are bonds that have strands of both love and hate. Tonight as we stood on the balcony over the Place de Gaulle, Rhys asked me how I wanted the headline to read. American screenwriter plummets to her death? We settled on Great Undiscovered American Playwright Falls To Her Death. The point is, I personally have not experienced marriage where you didn't want to kill the other person sometimes. Ah, these bonds are not only of love, but also of hate. And in that moment of falling in love, we fall in love and we fall in hate, and there we remain, each other's life work, figuring it out, trying not to judge, remembering it is hard.

Good night. Good night. Nine years. Good night.