I need to post thoughts on:

• Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Antonio Gramsci's Political Writings v.1 and v.2
• Pier Paolo Pasolini's In Danger (collection of poetry, cultural criticism, and political agitation). Pasolini detests the style of the hippies, who wore the rags of revolution rather than fight its battles. Long hair does nothing for him, an openly gay communist.
• How to Survive a Plague, documentary depicting AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) and their direct action to demand AIDS treatment from the FDA, NIH, etc.
• the Allied Media Conference, in which media activists from across the country met to "decolonize minds."
• personal, internal transformation vs. collective, political action (have I, at the age of 23, already soured on organizing vs. personal liberation? Life is short -- a quote from Detroit: "No matter how many maps or studies we [i.e. 'the people'] bring, we will never have as many nor will we be as articulate as those in power." In other words, as long as we speak the oppressor's language, we are compromised, and they will always win when they set the rules of the game. The alternative, stagnation or perpetual disaffection from day to day clockwork on-the-ground work, is what disgusts me. Freire himself made the transformation from organized agitation and political engagement to personal, almost spiritual liberation.

These notes are from March 2011.

Political pranksterism has seen a rise in the past three weeks. On February 22nd, a call between the editor of the Buffalo Beast, purporting to be David Koch, and Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker, surfaced on the internet.

On March 8th, James O'Keefe's "Project Veritas" released a sting video of NPR VP of Giving Ron Schiller and

"I'll talk personally instead of wearing my NPR hat," Schiller says, before describing the "anti-intellectual" turn in Republican fearmongering and Fox News backlash. In how many campaigns in 2010 and in 2008 did we hear Republican nominees decry "liberal elitism"? This is what Schiller gets at when he discusses how universities are now considered liberal just by virtue of serving the intellect. In O'Keefe's video, the accompanying text highlights "liberal because it's intellectual," as if Schiller is saying that all support for critical thinking is inherently liberal. If one watches the tape, you can see Schiller make air-quotes, and he is clearly disagreeing with this 1:1 association of academics with liberalism. This is the state of affairs as rendered by Fox News' supposedly populist rhetoric for the "everyday" person, against education but not against the money that the "conservative elite" has earned through capitalist development, union busting, and free market exploitation.

The undercover video that depicts Ron Schiller calling the Tea Party "xenophobic" and "seriously racist people" does not give us any new information. James O'Keefe's goal is to shut down public funding for supposedly liberal causes.

Conservative activism through video. Recording the biases of corporate executives within a government-funded, supposedly objective journalism organ. But NPR is not the liberal organ of news the way that Fox News vociferously champions a right-wing agenda.

O'Keefe is trying to make change, even if we don't find ourselves on his side, through the dissemination of damning and irrefutable video evidence. Yet it can be refuted because of its presentation: through editing. Words taken out of context? Hardly. But words re-presented as insider chatting.

When Juan Williams was removed from NPR, he also said some hateful things about Muslims.


O'Keefe's expose of ACORN led Congress to defund the community organizing group. Will this clip have the same effect?

Activism in Egypt?

The news is not what's breaking, it's the damning evidence. He could say whatever he'd like in his personal life. He could not say such things on stage or publicly as a representative of NPR. I suppose this is a work-related conversation and thus he would represent the organization.

This event says much more about the echo of media than it does regarding news or analysis.

Yes Men

Prank call to Scott Walker!

It's impressive that within 24 hours of video footage of a VP of corporate giving -- in no way a journalist who is supposed to remain objective -- NPR fires its chief executive. In the wake of the prank call to Scott Walker, in which a fake David Koch asks him if he thought of planting violent protesters in the crowd. "Yeah, we thought of that," Walker said. A man whose job is to funnel money to NPR but who plays no role in content creation. A Governor of a state who considered hiring Mubarak-like thugs to assault his citizens.

These notes are from March 2011.

Things I learned today/arguments I encountered:

-The creation of modern Lebanon as a Maronite Christian nation was initiated by the Zionist movement in order to strengthen the argument that the Middle East was a religious mosaic (David Hirst, "Beware of Small States").

-Lebanon is approximately the size of Connecticut and has 15 religious denominations represented. I would bet that Connecticut has also.

-The pan-Arabist movement was intended to be a secular movement.

-Syria used to be the name for Syria-Lebanon-Jordan.

-Twitter and Flickr posts from smart phones include GPS information that can be decoded by anyone to get your specific coordinates (On the Media, 3/11/11).

-Jerusalem may represent the fundamental human condition: as animals, we are compelled to war, but as conscious beings, we are laden with compassion and grief (On Point, "James Carrol's Jersualem," 3/8/11).

-All of life is a flow. Capitalism and industrial production are no exception (D&G, "Anti-Oedipus)

Madness and Civilization: Asylum on the National Mall

This piece was written during the summer of 2011.

 In the 11th hour of the so-called "debt ceiling crisis," I settled onto the lawn of the National Mall for a screening of Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), a film which I've seen many times but never in such a thought-provoking setting.

Every summer in D.C. an enormous screen is erected on the Mall, and crowds gather with picnic baskets and blankets on the west side to take in old classics. The architecture of the screening provides the spectator with an imposing image behind the screen -- the Capitol building looms in the background -- lest we forget who's running the show.

The film itself and the conditions of my viewing it mirror one another in their display of how power shapes its subjects through consent, and buy-in, rather than coercion.

Forman's film, based on the novel by Ken Kesey, stars Jack Nicholson as the charismatic rogue whom we meet upon his arrival to an insane asylum. We learn that he had been in prison but that he convinced the prison warden to transfer him to a mental institution, perhaps to get out of his work detail. He passes an entrance interview and is admitted to the asylum, where he meets the residents of the ward, half of whom are vegetative and the other half more-or-less functional.

The inmates of the asylum hearken back to Michel Foucault's observations in Madness and Civilization (1964), in which the author traces a history of how civilizations have isolated their undesirables. Madness, Foucault would say, became codified only in the 18th century, when formal institutions were established to control those deemed mad by society. Here they are subjected to a hierarchy of power, between the warden, nurses, and security, who restrain the inmates and reinforce their otherness.

As the film develops we learn that all of the non-comatose inmates of the asylum are self-committed. These men exhibit the self-repression common in modern societies, which use a combination of coercion and consent to wield power over their populace. Drawing on Foucault again, it is knowledge that exercises power over the inmates. They have incarcerated themselves, voluntarily. Society has ostracized these men and their behavior, causing them to self-imprison, self-diagnose, and inculcate their inferiority. In Antonio Gramsci's world, these men would experience the soft power of education, culture, and civil society by indoctrinating the ideals and keeping themselves in check, although within society. Forman's inmates, however, have so consumed the messages of power in their society that they have decided they cannot follow such rules, they cannot be trusted to obey Order, or Law. Thus, they take it into their own hands and have themselves put away.

Discipline functions through coercion and consent. Formal and legal frameworks prevent many of us from shooting one another, because we fear the consequences of our actions (some would argue morality prevents us as well, but I won't get into that). However education, religion, and the media exercise power over us differently, sowing seemingly innocuous seeds that take root as thoughts and one day sprout into beliefs and actions. These cultural and discursive expressions of power, I would argue, are preventive and placatory. They are the types of power that seek to keep our desires in check, that induce us to support the status quo, that prevent us from imbibing in the Weird.

The asylum is such an interesting place because it reenacts political society on a microcosmic scale. There is the despot, Nurse Ratched; her henchmen, the other nurses and security; and the subjects, the inmates of the ward. Within the asylum the inmates attempt to establish their own rudimentary democracy when Nicholson tries to get the World Series on the ward's television. Nurse Ratched, who initially approves of the democratic polling of the other inmates, breaks the social compact by disrespecting the late vote of Chief. She administers Law here, and no matter how arbitrary, her rule is absolute.

The under-educated lack self-policing skills, lack the opportunity to buy in through consent, and end up facing the consequences of coercion in prison and execution.

In many ways, then, we can view Cuckoo as an allegory. Many of the men are self-educated to the point of regulating their own actions. Thus they confine themselves in the film to the asylum. Foucault would also say that the asylum-industrial complex now holds sway.

The other men of the ward -- the 8 "crazies" who stare ou the window, glide around the ward dancing, or mutter to themselves the day long. These inmates are those stashed away for public good, not personal desire. The line between the will to incarcerate oneself, to limit the varieties of experience in submission to Order, to the mechanisms of Power, that is the dilemma of live, at least so far as I have lived it. That is why I am sitting here, in the corridor of might, taking in an old movie in the summer night.

Pedro Noguera, Paolo Friere, A.G., M.F. - education, il popolo, incarceration, consent, POWER.

"Kicking the can down the road," "cooptation," and other considerations: Reconciling international socialism and community organizing

This piece was written in late 2011.

In the current Occupy Moment, I have asked myself this questions repeatedly:

How to reconcile the revolutionary with the practical? The systemic with the experiential? The ideological with the tangible?

Now first I must state that, for the purposes of this musing, I am in some ways conflating Occupy's outburst of 99% anger-about-everything with socialism's goal of a complete overthrow of capitalism. I realize, of course, that there are myriad problems in doing so. For one, we know that not all Occupiers are socialists. And furthermore there are some socialists who believe that Occupiers are disaffected middle-class kids. Nevertheless, the two share such an indignation with business as usual that both are cautious to support reformism, concrete and limited demands, and extensive dialogue or interaction with establishment candidates and electoral politics. That is what I want to talk about here.

Community organizing has a different focus. Rather than beginning from the premise that the revolution must be total, Saul Alinsky and those who have come after him operate under the assumption that power is wielded by people and money working consistently and persistently to achieve a shared goal. Community organizers seek to agitate and develop leaders who realize -- read, actualize -- their own liberation through incremental, measurable change. By building power among people acting on their own interests, community organizers allow the people to lead the process. Rather than deductively working toward an articulated endpoint -- rather than organizing teleologically, as socialists do -- community organizers listen to people and offer frameworks for addressing issues of all shapes and sizes.

Where I imagine tension arises between these opposing viewpoints:

The orthodox socialist would argue that community organizers' reformist agendas and issue-based campaigns do not address the root of the problem called capitalism.By calling for X new jobs, Y corporate taxes, and Z community benefits -- so the argument goes -- Alinsky-style organizing allows the ruling elite to remain in power. It focuses on incremental changes that do not fundamentally remake our society. It kicks the can down the road, cleaning up after the systematic inequalities that persist under capitalism.

The community organizer would contend that socialists speak about the World-as-it-Should-Be while organizers live in the World-as-it-Is.

Community organizers spend their waking hours talking with working people, perfecting the truly radical face-to-face relational meeting, and facilitating a process of liberation led by those most deeply affected. Rather than import an ideological project, they respond to the needs around them and achieve measurable "wins." Furthermore, their work is not issues. Their work is power. Members and constituent institutions select issues, but the goal -- always -- is building the power to act again and again.

In my personal experience agitating youth to act upon injustice in their communities, the language of Marx has not been effective. Speaking about jobs, homes, and educational opportunities has.

The project then for the truly radical organizer -- and by radical I mean, literally, getting to the roots -- is to bridge the practical with the ideological. To take lessons from history and the systemic analyses of socialists throughout the world, and to speak with people and value above all their perspectives and experiences. I believe that community organizing plays a vital role in the quest for socialism, if by that condition we mean a world in which all people are truly, systemically, fundamentally afforded equal opportunities and freedoms. People will only realize their capacity to change the world around them and to upset the dominant order through lived experiences, through a taste of change. We can't hold out on building power because a methodology is not doctrinally pure.

And those experiences must involve processes of organization, consciousness-building, and achievement. Otherwise we're battling against an ingraspable foe for a pie in the sky.

From Rome with Love

From Rome with Love, Woody Allen's latest foray into European adoration after last year's Midnight in Paris, channels the Spanish juggernaut of surrealist cinema, Luis Bunuel. In his Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, three middle-class French couples try to meet for dinner but are perpetually and absurdly interrupted each time – by a monsignor, by an army. In The Exterminating Angel, guests at a dinner party are unable to leave after finishing their last course. They are not held by bars or guards but by an invisible force. In Bunuel's films, we read in the cultural significance where the director has repeatedly claimed there is none. The figures in Bourgeoisie may kindle thoughts in the viewer about the diddling around of the self-fulfilling (and selfish) lifestyles of the well-cultured. Angel's characters may be bound not by physical constraints but by ideology or cultural forces which we do not see.

In Allen's film, Roberto Benigni plays a middle-class Roman who wakes up one day to find throngs of reporters outside his door. They ask him what he had for breakfast and his thoughts about the weather while young women clamor for his signature. He is the mediocre man suddenly made significant. In one particularly memorable scene he is brought onto a news program to share his thoughts on the most mundane of life's activities. He is scrutinized from every angle until, suddenly, one day, the press's attention shifts to another man walking down the street who “looks much more interesting.” Benigni is saddened and shares a pathetic scene with his wife when he hounds passersby to recognize him and ask for his daily forecast.

In another Bunuelian moment, a middle-aged mortician is thrust into the classical singing world by a retired director, played by Allen himself. The mortician's gift, however, is confined to the shower, and during an audition he fails to impress. Allen decides that in subsequent performances, the singer will be allowed his natural habitat. A mobile shower is constructed, and the mortician performs magnificently on stage in front of hundreds, all the while scrubbing his back and lathering his beard.

Another thread of the film follow Jesse Eisenberg, a young architecture student, as he slowly falls in love with his girlfriend's visiting friend. Alec Baldwin is the flourish – a semi-omniscient devil-on-the-shoulder to Eisenberg – who is recognized by all characters but somehow external to the world of the characters in the love triangle. The final stream involves a newly married couple from the Italian countryside who come to Rome to make their fortune. They get separated, the husband becomes involved with a voluptuous prostitute (Penelope Cruz), and the wife sleeps with a burglar after nearly bedding a movie star. Neither of these pieces are as compellingly surreal as the former. Baldwin's character and his presence is half-baked, and the couples comedy lacks the absurd magic of the other segments.

I am struggling with a summation of what I saw, but I enjoyed it. The film was cheerfully absurd and, in the Bunuel tradition, I must deny my impulse to interpret it.