I'm not sure where the fear came from, but almost without noticing it, this fear almost caused me to bypass the magazine all together and in fact, I looked at another magazine first, reading a short mundane article in Time about the private relationships of presidents. I learned nothing. As I put it back I looked down at Adbusters again and from the corner of the cover saw "May 18, Global #laughriot". I picked it up and gave it a quick flip and this was one of the first things I saw:
It spoke to me and jumped out because it didn't really seem to fit in with the rest of the magazine. To be clear, it's a picture of Rob Corddry as the clown on the show Children's Hospital. A few of my friends work on the show and I haven't seen too much of it, but I'm familiar enough with it. Right across the front of his face it says, "Postmodern Shit!" on his forehead, "How utterly cynical can we get" and at the top, "Trix".
Now this shocked me because it echoed a similar sentiment I've felt before and tried to forget, the fact that I am distracting myself from seeing something greater by constantly consuming and creating mindless entertainment. Postmodern entertainment, that may be "smarter" or "denser" than a primetime network sitcom like "Two and A Half Men" is still just as mindless, because at it's core, it is empty, it doesn't speak to anything, there is no point to it's existence beyond entertainment. That you feel smarter or fulfilled from having watched it is the trick it's played on you.
We live in a country with vast "wealth" and yet we aren't rich. We sit in front of screens almost all day, mostly to distract ourselves in an attempt to forget that we are powerless over our lives. We live in a country that values freedom over everything, yet increasingly we get the sense that we are not free or not as free as we thought.
Bradley Manning, the Army soldier that leaked classified government documents to Wikileaks has been in prison, without trial since July 2010, Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks has been on house arrest in England, detained without trial since December 2010.
Now maybe you say, "That's just two people, it's not that big of a deal," but I think it is the detention of these people, as well as the "terrorists" at Guantanamo Bay and the arrest of the people at Occupy encampments that led me to be afraid of picking up this magazine and even considering to explore the idea that something is wrong with this country.
And something is wrong. America is a country without an identity and most of us seem perfectly content to stop searching for it, to keep smiles on our faces and hope and pray that the stock market keeps going up and that tomorrow we have food, water, and shelter. But there is something more to be gleaned from real freedom than just having our most basic needs satisfied. They have us right where they want us, in a place where we are placated just enough to keep quiet, where we keep playing their game and sending most of what is deservedly ours, up to the top.
In a few months, the Supreme Court is going to rule on The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and it sounds like because Congress is forcing you to buy a product, that falls outside of what the federal government is legally aloud to do. But honestly, if you are sensible, you know the existence of our government and society forces you to buy products all the time. Many of us live in cities where we have to have cars in order to go to work or school or get basic necessities. If you have a car, you also have to have insurance. If you are born to a family that doesn't own land, you have no ability to make your own food, so you have to buy that. You have to pay for a place to live. You have to pay for energy. Soon you will have to pay for water and you already do in a lot of cases. So is it really so awful to have a law where you have to buy insurance? Isn't it more abhorrent to create a situation where a large number of people have no access to decent health care? Isn't it more abhorrent to create a system where everyone is forced to buy things all the time in a round about way that isn't written into the law?
I didn't have time to buy the magazine before my lunch, but afterward I was drawn back in to Barnes and Noble. I brought it home like a concealed weapon. One more conversation I don't want to have with my Aunt and Uncle, who work for corporate law firms and investment banks, respectively.
I've been trying to find the thing that incites me, that inspires me, the story that I want to be a part of and help tell. In 2008 we were all filled with hope at the prospect of President Barack Obama. I remember being in Silverlake the night he beat McCain and it feeling like New Years and the Forth of July, only better. Huge murals were all over town, people were joyous in celebration that eight years of what felt like a dictatorship was over. I have no doubt that if John McCain was president, things would be worse. It is important to remember in retrospect, we traded in a President who incited terrorists and started wars and financial crisis for one that is prudent in his language and actions and ends wars, or at least decreases there severity.
But Obama is not the story of 2012. Though he is marginally superior to a Republican candidate and I will be voting for him, he does not inspire the same feelings we had that night in 2008. Part of it is his fault. No doubt, there are positions he could take, that we all know he secretly espouses, concerning gay rights, or immigration that would fire up his base and get people inspired again, but it is likely he wont do this, because sadly, but honestly, he has turned out to be a politician. Most of the blame however lies with Congress, who's inaction has made the most powerful man in the world a prisoner in The White House. Congress is such a joke that the most important thing they've done in the last two years is pass bills to keep the government running. That's not an accomplishment.
The story of 2012 is the second chapter of the Occupy movement, a movement that was in its infancy in 2011 and then forgotten. It is here and it is a sleeper, though not to those in power. Adbusters has called on all Occupiers to descend on Chicago starting May 1st and culminating on May 18th for a day that was originally intend to disrupt the G8 and Nato summits that were to be happening simultaneously in Chicago.
When the G8 summit was moved to Camp David, the concept of the day was changed, though still to be based in Chicago to "Global Laugh Riot" a day of laughing and pranking to clarify what a joke the whole spectacle of the summits are. The Nato summit will still be happening in Chicago and it will be the first major showdown with protesters since the authoritarian law, HR 347. Here is what Adbusters had to say about HR 437:
"A week before the G8 Backdown, the US House of Representatives voted in near unanimous consensus in favor of an authoritarian law, HR 437, that makes it a federal crime to disrupt "Government business or official functions" or to enter any building where a 'person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting.' In other words, to mic check Obama is now a federal crime punishable by a year in prison. And so too is a banner drop if it takes place in any building that a 'protected' person might be visiting in the future, even if the jammers don't know it. And so is the anti-globalization tactic of blocking road access to a meeting of world elites, there is a special clause about that too. Obama signed the bill to law on March 9th."
Here are the demands of the Occupiers for the G8 summit:
1. Bring the financial fraudsters who triggered the meltdown of 2008 to justice
2. Implement a 1% Robin Hood Tax on all financial transactions and currency trades
3. Come up with a binding agreement on climate change with the utmost of urgency
Here are the demands of the Occupiers for the Nato summit:
1. Come out with a clear and unambiguous statement renouncing torture and extrajudicial assassinations
2. Start slowing the $1-trillion a year arms race by all means possible
3. Begin a passionate push for a nuclear-free world beginning with a nuclear-free Middle East
Those demands are simple things that people can get behind and coalesce the movement in a way that wasn't possible nine months ago.
But there is more to it than just simple demands. The very second page of the magazine states it clearly, "We are living through a centralized crisis of meaning." Explain to me the difference between a capitalist and a communist and a terrorist. Our society has taken these words and rendered them meaningless just the way the word "awesome" has become meaningless, by attaching them places where they do not belong. "Truthiness" as Colbert would say, has become the norm, and when everyone is spinning the facts, there is no longer an objective reality, rather a subjective reality formed by the collectives individual perceptions.
It reads, "The first step toward reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination - an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment."
Finding a place for these people wouldn't be difficult in a society that truly valued imagination and creativity. Often it is claimed that America has those values, but the truth is many of our greatest minds, aside from a few strays are given an education in finance and payed by Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan.
Occupy can often sound like the work of liberal idealists, but there is something much more libertarian about the movement that often isn't recognized. Pundits sum it up like this: Tea Party is anti-government Occupy is anti-big business. But the truth is, Occupy is at once anti-government and anti-big business, it is anti those in control and they recognize that big business and big government are entity. Here's how they spell out the corruption when related to Mongolia and it works for the US as well, "Their society is now being set up on the model of a small elite group growing rich from selling resources while the masses live off handouts."
This is why the rich are so afraid of renewable energy sources. Without a resource to buy and sell, you lose the majority of your profit. Hydroelectric power has been readily available in the United States since 1882 and at the turn of 20th century provided us with 40% of our nations electricity. We continued down a different path not out of lack of ability, but out of lack of will from the powers that be.
In every facet of our society the powerful have reaped profits while destroying our community. From Adbusters:
"Housing has become a means not for building a community, but for extracting wealth from it. Thus, the financial resources that used to go toward making our buildings beautiful, now go to paying the interest charges and dividends of a few large corporations."
We are in a country and a people in debt, but in debt to whom? I would say many of us feel indebted to the Chinese laborers who work to make many of the products we so frivolously use, but do we feel indebted to our banks? Hell no. Should our government feel indebted to the banks? Hell no. Why are we in so much debt, when it is so detrimental to society and our future? Put succinctly, "Profits come from debt expansion, not debt reduction."
They want us to be in debt. They want us to keep paying that minimum balance and then be too poor to pay that traffic ticket and have to charge our debit card to the max again. They want our credit ratings to be low so we can get high interest car loans that have high monthly payments. They want government debt to balloon to the point where it is paying a dollar to a bank for every dollar it spends. It is a system that is broken and it is a system that is going to go.
The idea of Occupy is to break the system first, then go start rebuilding local communities. It is an interesting prospect, big goals that are hard to achieve, but extremely interesting none the less. I don't think I could find anything more fascinating than following this story and seeing where it takes me. It is so dense, so complicated, so polarizing, so scary, that I'm not sure I'll end up following it, but it is so magnetic that I don't know I'll be able to follow anything else.
I'll leave you what they left me with:
"A few people start breaking their old patterns, embracing what they live (and in the process discovering what they hate), daydreaming, questioning, rebelling. What happens naturally then according to the revolutionary past, is a groundswell of support for this new way of being, with more and more people empowered to perform new gestures 'unecumbered by history.'"
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