By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
As I contemplate my many blessings this year, what is probably least obvious to most people is the one thing I treasure most: our great discontent. I’ve waited for it to discomfort us. Nothing less would awaken us. Nothing else would shake us until our eyes popped open in disbelief. And nothing more will be required to make us understand that simmering in this hot-pot with all the other frogs is a choice. We can choose again. We can select anew.
When I was a young’un we had outdoor theatres — drive-ins — that, in California, were good to go all year round. Some increased their revenue by offering a 4-plex, placing their great screens in the classic medicine wheel configuration — north, south, east, west — with cars nestled in the middle, hoods pointed toward the movie they’d selected. Once settled in, it was simply a matter of mounting the squawk-box on the car window, running for the drinks and popcorn and waiting for sunset. Every so often I’d get bored with whatever we were watching, and flip around to view the other movies playing simultaneously. In those moments, I determined that lip-reading would be a rare and useful skill. Now, as reality shifts depending on which window we look out, I am reminded that the dialogue suffers when you can’t get a grip on it, leaving the story line up for grabs. Perhaps now we can make up our own ending, rewrite the script, like I did as a kid, looking out the back window of the family car. In fact, I’m pretty sure the script-writers have all lost control and the future is ours to create.
For instance, I don’t follow sports, so I didn’t fall into deep depression upon hearing of the Penn State hysteria. Within a few days of the headlines, Bill Maher called bullshit on those who worried more about the fate of a ball team than the fate of sexually abused children. I still wonder how so many people could turn a blind eye to the suffering, the perfidy and the blatant illegality of this sad tale. More of Sandusky’s victims are coming forward as we speak, and I have to wonder how this man sees his reality. Campus security, the police and even the governor having knowledge of his behavior surely must have given him a sense that he was safe to continue raping children.
On the movie screen he was watching, he got to hide in the smoke and mirrors of hero worship, fan frenzy and the warrior dreams of sports tradition, all the while buggering the innocent. I bet that even now, caught with his pants around his ankles, he still hopes that this will all blow over and he’ll be allowed to retire from the public spotlight gracefully. Nobody warned him that the scripts have all been tossed, the contracts declared void. His protestation that all this was merely “horseplay” isn’t even worth a horse-laugh. His drama’s gone dark now. It’s tar and feathers time.
Switching screens, there are only a handful of days remaining for the Congressional Super Committee to come to some agreement about debt. Charged with making 1.2 trillion dollars worth of deficit reduction, the cross-section of politicians selected for this “Gang of 12” is as diverse a set of officials as is represented in Congress. I suspect that paring this discussion down to a handful of partisans, as opposed to an entire Congress full, will make little difference in the end, but it has freed the congressional critters to attend more important business, like spending an entire day affirming that the nation does, indeed, trust in God and another declaring pizza a vegetable. Regarding the latter, Jason Linkins, over at Huffington Post, said it best: “I have to imagine that this news instilled confusion in many Americans, as many Americans are (a) familiar with pizza, (b) familiar with vegetables and (c) sane.”
While it’s a relief to know that “sane” is still an option, it’s evidently only one of several. For a moment there I thought trying to assassinate Obama because he was the anti-Christ seemed bat-shit-crazy, but considering our options, it more likely reflects the neurosis of a population unable to sort fact from fiction. Another fiction is that something vital to the nation will be decided by this select group of 12 politicians. John Kerry, dour on his best day, reported that the committee was working tirelessly, but he seemed to hold out little hope of compromise. Reaching no agreement will trigger draconian budget cuts that nobody wants, of course, indicating that we should all hold our breath over the dreadful possibilities. I suppose it would be cynical for me to suggest that — even leaving the Bush tax cuts and entitlements untouched — given our ability to cook the books with clever accounting, rearranging a trillion over ten years should be a cake walk.
Ah, but no worries, fellow citizens. It will all turn out all right. Some last minute deal will be reached, the nation can stop holding its breath as one political party will momentarily count coup on the other and the curtains will close on this little drama. All eyes will then turn to another screen. There are so many to select from, aren’t there? There’s the newest crop of child molesters and the rise and fall of Republican presidential candidates, their sexual history oozing from closed closets. There’s the confirmed demise of Demi and Ashton’s marriage and speculation over the mysterious death of Natalie Wood in a tragic love triangle. Rapists and perverts and cheaters, oh my! News has become American theatre, as reflected in faux “reality shows.” All the drama without the price of a ticket and most of it scripted — until just lately.
Now there’s real drama out there, if we want to get out of our heads and put our bodies on the line. Having grown accustomed to apathy and lethargy from the American public, many of us find the last two months of fledgling revolution downright inspiring. The rout of Zuccotti park, the subsequent legal challenges, judges sympathetic — or not — all played into the kind of street theatre that’s keeping the movement in the public eye. Planet Waves readers are aware of the particulars, so I won’t belabor the point. And I’m sure it doesn’t feel like theatre to those who are getting bashed, sprayed, detained and bullied, but I would remind them that all the world’s a stage and they’ve put themselves in the center of it. This is a screen worth watching, a script that is writing itself. I suspect that eventually, the movie will be called “Rule of Law: 2012.”
Like many of those on the political left, populist heroine and senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren has declared her commonality with the #occupy movement. A lawyer and Harvard professor, Warren advised that protesters stay within the limits of the law. But — among other references here that should be credited to the Bard — there’s the rub! Writing for TruthDig, Bill Blum explains why the weakened protections of the First Amendment won’t do the job any more:
Given the sorry state of the law and the unfortunate direction of the courts, it should come as no surprise that the Occupiers lost the legal battle to keep their Zuccotti encampment. It wasn’t wrong to turn to the courts. Litigation has been and always will be a basic component of any movement for progressive social change. But popular mythology (as regards First Amendment protections) aside, it’s seldom the leading component and rarely a substitute for the long, hard slog of collective political action that has been Occupy’s hallmark.
Do make time to read the entire article. It’s an excellent overview of how the rule of law has turned into a collection of loopholes that authority can use to justify its every action. Read into it a bit and you’ll also consider it a heads-up that the legal arena is the place where much of the drama will be taking place in the coming months. Previews of coming attractions are already in the news: the Supremes have agreed to take on the legality of the Affordable Health Care Act and will issue their rulings just as 2012 election season comes to frenzy. But since we’re tone deaf to the dialogue that the script writers gave us, perhaps now we’ll write a new ending to this story. Perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at the Supremes and the authority they presume to wield.
The righties are already demanding that Elena Kagan recuse herself, due to her involvement in health care when she was Obama’s Solicitor General. I would like to think the Lefties would not miss the opportunity to make a similar fuss about Scalia and Thomas, who — on the very day the Nine agreed to take the case — were honored at a dinner sponsored by Pfizer Pharmaceutical and the law firm that will argue the case before the high court. Thomas, of course, is married to a woman deeply involved in attacking Obama’s presidency and this particular legislation, her mission funded by Charles and David Koch. Sam Alito, meanwhile, is a dyed-in-the-wool Federalist with a very narrow agenda, much like that of Chief Justice Roberts, who never met a corporation he didn’t favor over the rights of the individual citizen. It is safe to assume that NONE of those Justices will be recusing themselves as they ponder the fate of American health care.
That’s the makings of a first class drama, don’t ya think? Maybe even a squeaker, as Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, is torn between whatever conflicting emotions a man in the middle suffers. And instead of the same old predictable plot line, perhaps we’ll write this one differently. Perhaps there will be public outcry that these judges have no ethical rules to follow, that just as Greenspan assumed the bankers would self-police, the nation has made the same assumptions about the high court and been regularly disappointed. Not that we have heard about that in the news, of course. FreePress.net sites the arrest of 26 journalists during the past two months of #occupy, even as mainstream media has kept mum. The banks, the courts, the congress, the news rooms? All need to be occupied. All need to be rewritten, rescripted. The old, violent models of authority need scrapping. Could we superimpose ethical behavior over a system marked by injustice? Could it be — in our movie — that love and compassion are even more powerful than money and privilege?
Yes, this year I’m thankful that so many of us are finally able to SEE what we’re looking at. And if the Bard was right — if the men and women of the world are merely players on the stage of life — then it’s up to us to define our role. How do we want this to look? Who will we stand up to be? When our grand-kids ask what part we played in the Great Turning, what will we tell them? Me? I want to be like 84-year old Dorli Rainey, pepper-sprayed during a police incident. If we need somebody to model our attitude on, listen to Dorli. When Keith Olbermann asked her how she was, her replay? “I’m feeling great,” she said. “I’m so energized! It’s amazing what a little pepper spray will do for you.” Her rationale for occupying Seattle? “… somebody’s got to keep them awake.”
Somebody’s got to. You, me. All of us, awakening and looking around, suddenly aware that we can watch this old movie or write a new one, feet on the ground, hearts engaged. The old plot lines? Predictable. So this year, as we celebrate where we’ve been by honoring our arrival on these shores — even if not all of those first occupiers had the best of intentions — let’s remember to be especially thankful for where we’re going. Let’s show some gratitude for how quickly the energy has shaped a change of attitude and dialogue. Let’s offer gratitude that ushering in a new era isn’t history we’ll eventually read about. Instead, we’re writing the future, scripting and casting, imagining and dreaming it into form ourselves. This Thanksgiving, let’s celebrate the power of our collective intent to recreate our world in peace and love.
Excellent link, baycyn — I especially appreciate activist ops; I like to put people on notice that WE’RE WATCHING!! And thanks to the rest of you for cogent and moving comments, and just for being wonderful YOU … aware and awake! Pre-Thanksgiving awesomeness!
another great post, I look forward to Fridays on Planet Waves.
What I am hoping is that we all start talking to each other. The street theater needs to continue so the community can evolve. The small things, like tearing up those credit card offers and mailing them postage paid back to the banks, is very satisfying. For those of us who lived through the demonstrations of the 60’s let’s not make the same mistakes again. We can’t afford to be distracted, there is too much at stake. What do we value, and how do we express that? Especially with the Holiday Spending season approaching. I’ve been so happy watching the Occupy movement, hoping that it will grow to unstoppable proportions by the spring.
Thanks for the movie and the pot of frogs, Jude. As always, I thank you so much for your perspective and sharing it here.
Rob, thank you. You have reminded me of much here today — that I learned to bury without thinking about it; a child taught not to feel. Thank you for your gift here today.
All: I too an grateful for all of us here at PW. Thanks and Giving. xo
Thanks Judith,
I am off to pick up a turkey today for the feast of gratitude come Thursday. While reading your article I pondered how much has transpired recently and thought of how this years meal will be in contrast to that of next year following Tuesday November 6, 2012. Let’s hope that meal will be shared with like minded people who are amazed at the great strides towards the new world. Uranus and Pluto does that spell recreate!
Quite simply – ditto for Katt’s message. I, too, find the PW community an incredible grounding anchor in this fast moving time.
I, too, will carry the meditations of everyone’s writings with me today.
I’m not going to repeat my question of where is the Constitution I swore to uphold thirty-five years ago. It needs to be rescripted anyway, part new and part restoration.
So, my thanks at this time is for the entire PW community.
JannKinz
PS: Pizza sauce as a vegetable? Wasn’t ketchup/catsup similarly declared a school vegetable during the reign of Ronnie Reagan? It’s deja vu all over again.
Jude – Many thanks, as usual (but, I don’t want to minimize the import of your message, by calling it “usual” in any other sense then you continue again and again to inspire, inform, contextualize, and bring poetry to the amazing and meaningful moments we share)
And Rob44. Your meditation brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts – a gift to me, an I suspect, to many others – continuing to contemplate the overwhelming meaning(s) of this time in history and the roles we have an opportunity to play.
And bacyn – I appreciate the lead on more information about the Supreme Court ethics issue (is it an oxymoron?)
And bkoehler, cool that you got Sandusky’s birth data; I appreciate your thoughts.
These conversations we are having here at PW have become vital to me – giving me a sense of community with what I have come to realize is one of my tribes. Speaking of grateful – I am so grateful to have found you all. Kat
On a warm, quiet evening in the spring of 2008, I found myself sitting alone high on the steps of the US Supreme Court, taking in the sunset over the Capitol Building. I had spent a few days exploring that monumental city of history and dreams, and in the wake of all that absorption, gravitated to what felt like the penultimate symbolic site among a panoply of edifices as much symbolic as functional.
Held within a surprising quiet that descended on the area after legions of federal workers and elected officials had left for the day, it felt as if I had the whole place to myself. A lone, aged police officer slowly shuffled around the plaza below, occasionally glancing up at me as if to assess whether I was a reasonably well-dressed homeless man, or just a newbie tourist awash in somber awe over the spectacle of this Rome on the Potomac.
I was more the latter than the former. A student of history both received and self-taught, my travels to that point in life had led me through several realms of the continental US. But for various reasons, my roaming impulses had never pulled me East. Finally, circumstance had led me to the colonial regions of the country, where I encountered in person the enshrined archetypes that had informed the genesis of the national psyche.
I was mid-way on a journey from the southern tip of Florida to New York’s Hudson Valley. Having wended my way through the Blue Ridge Parkway, another kind of national monument, and other parts of the great Eastern Seaboard, both wilderness and civilization filled my reflections on the meaning of America. Now roughly two-thirds of the way toward my destination, those musings occupied my mind and heart to the point where I sought to pause and integrate what I’d seen and felt.
It was a time resonant with personal meditation on the painful and disillusioning collective journey of the previous eight years; a century initiated in my own land by an unprecedented and tragic usurpation of democracy, perpetrated by cloaked men and women who had held court in the cathedral of law behind me. Everything that followed that fateful turn of events had taken on enormous weight and size since then. History had become so large and afflicting that it seemed oppressive as a stone ’round all our necks, relentlessly dragging us further down into waters we could neither fathom in any sense of that word, or find release from.
I struggled to take it all in, this achingly full pilgrimage across the first edge of the old, new world of my ancestors. I tried to put into place–the stunningly innocent beauty of the landscapes I’d seen; the sad and idyllic little towns that peppered them; the cities on the ocean. I had threaded my way from the paved-over remnants of Seminole villages in the tropical south through Georgian savannah and mountain precipice to this marbled, riverine city of temples.
And of course it felt like a temple, the soaring artifice on which I sat. It was designed to feel that way by its architect–even called the Temple of Justice in one of its appellations. The very words engraved over its soaring entrance were chosen by that architect: “Equal Justice Under Law”. The first half of that phrase dates back to the dawn of western civilization, to the Funeral Oration of Pericles. One translation renders his utterance thus:
“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit. Nor again does poverty bar the way; if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.”
A few years after the contested election of 2000, a piece of marble above the word ‘Under’ inexplicably fell from the parapet to the steps below, striking very near where I later sat. I pondered that bit of historical synchronicity as the sun sank behind the Capitol. And I realized then, as I reclined on the grand staircase, an essential truth.
The Supreme Court is just a building.
They were all just buildings, arrayed grandly before me. There was nothing sacred about them, no special magic or power imbued in or by them, in spite of their physical grandeur. They were as empty and meaningless as a voided broom closet or an abandoned church. Nothing about their structure, or the plans that laid them, had anything to do with democracy, or justice, or law. They were just symbols; they were prompts, in a sense.
The essence of the great Court behind me had years before been voided by some of its custodians in an act of deliberation; deliberation of a sort far removed from its legal context. I didn’t know that spring night if equal justice in any true sense would ever be restored there. I still don’t.
But the archetypes visaged in ancient form across that city of stone aren’t really held there. They’re not frozen within those institutions. They have always found new expression, breaking through the dams that bind them, flowing ultimately unimpeded into tomorrow. Today, I see the archetype of justice released from its old cages, running in and with the blood of those who seek it on the streets of America, and of the world.
I don’t know how any of this will turn out. I don’t know how long it will take to achieve true justice, and to hold it. But I know the narratives around it are being re-written. The archetypes themselves, long held within myths we raise like filters to apprehend a light too great for us to fully receive, are changing also. But they can’t evolve unless we write new stories for them to live in. That’s the work before us now. May we recognize that we have the freedom and obligation to do so.
Thanks be to you Jude, for such a panorama of our world today. What an epic film it will be a few decades from now. I see it done as a comedy myself but I guess that would depend on the way it all turns out. Well, it’s good to know that we are the ones to determine that.
If trying to make sense of any of it, would it help to know that Sandusky has a grand trine between his Sun, Neptune and his Uranus-Mars conjunction? Yeah, it was way too easy for this guy to lie to himself and his community, but transiting Pluto has seen fit to bring it all to light as he squares Sandusky’s Neptune in Libra. Also, this guy’s Sun (conjunct his south node) is squared by his own Nessus in Taurus, where transiting Jupiter is now, ready to talk justice. All just part of the waking up of our fellow citizens.
It’s too much to take in from ground zero. . what’s happening around the world and here at home. . in real time. Much better I would think, in hind sight. The history books but even more so, the movies will sum it all up with their ability to see from a distance where this chaos is leading us. In the meantime have a blessed Thanksgiving.
be
Many of my thanks this season go to you, Judith, and the rest of the staff & community of PWaves!
I believe you’re right on the money (heheh) here, as usual.
As for the Supreme court & the dubious ethics exhibited by some of the justices, I heartily recommend a brief documentary: A Question of Integrity: Politics, Ethics, and the Supreme Court (by Alliance for Justice). I saw it this past Monday, along with a panel discussion. The panel was composed of an investigative reporter/blogger, a law professor/lawyer, a District Court judge, and a moderator from Common Cause.
I was dumbfounded to learn that there is NO code of ethics the Justices must follow, that the code that applies to EVERY OTHER U.S. JUDGE does not apply to the Supreme Court. Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn this, given some of the antics of Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Alito and the fact that there has been no punitive response to any of them.
For anyone interested in this issue: you can go to afj.org to sign their petition to Chief Justice Roberts asking the Court to adopt the same Code of Conduct that applies to all other federal judges. And attend a screening of the documentary if there’s one near you. It just might get you motivated to do something. 🙂
The other thing this presentation did was to reconnect me with the social justice energy that is so strong at my alma mater (from which 2 of the panelists graduated as well).