Suggestion: while reading this post listen to the above track, “Far More Drums,” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, featuring Joe Morello, who passed away this year, on drums.
I remember standing outside of Henry’s Coffee Shop in Lawrence, KS, late in the evening of January 24th, talking to an old friend. I told him that tomorrow, January 25th, was going to be a big day. He expressed the characteristic American insta-skepticism. I 95% believed myself, 5% hoped I was right. The previous month the government of Tunisia had fallen, the first domino in a chain of events that was to become known as “The Arab Spring” (at least in the West). Also in January the people of Southern Sudan voted for independence. Two Thousand and Eleven was shaping up to be an interesting year, indeed.
By that point I’d already been accepted into a number of graduate study programs across the country, the last part of a plan that I’d been working seriously for four years. I don’t think I can understate the personal significance of this development, both for me and for my family. The prospect, and the eventual actuality, of moving across the country to begin a new life formed a monumental event in my life. I’d been born and raised pretty much where I’d been living for almost ten years. I’d driven transit buses and lumber-trucks, worked in an independent theatre/ video library and built houses, and eventually bet on an academic career, going all in. Still betting. But not married to the bookie. I’m not sure if that metaphor works. What I do know is that I spent more time, that January & February, in the Union at the University of Kansas on Twitter, than on my homework.
Granger, who played Phillip Morgan, the Raskolnikovian "co-murderer" in Hitchcock's 1948 thiller "Rope," based on the play of the same name by Patrick Hamilton
2011 saw, as every year before it, the loss of a substantial amount of human life. And for as long as we’ve had ‘celebrities,’ we’ve had “notable deaths.” As opposed to those, you now, other kinds. Of the former, we waved a fond farewell to Bill Keane, Andy Rooney, Hightower, Amy Winehouse, Columbo, Dr. Death, The Macho Man Randy Savage, George Whitman, Ernesto Sabato, Poly Styrene, Sidney Lumet, Farley Granger, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Gough, Nate Dogg, Joe Morello, and Len Lesser, among a healthy dose of apparently well-known television producers, sports heroes, lesser known bluesmen and an unusually high number of individuals known for having contributed to the covers of Bob Dylan Albums.
Also of note are the untold amount of American soldiers who’ve committed suicide, 15,000+ more from the Japan Tsunami last spring (and how many more due to radiation poisoning), and the untold Israeli and Palestinian lives that have continued to accrue as a part of the “price tag” for the brutal Zionist occupation of Palestine, people like Mustafa Tamimi, who suffered a tear-gas canister to the face at the hands of an IDF soldier.
Mustafa Tamimi, murdered by the IDF
This summer witnessed the extra-judicial assassination of the biggest villain of the 21st century, Osama bin Laden, though to be fair, his popularity had been lagging in the polls. His assassin’s approval ratings, on the other hand, went through the roof. By the end of the summer Libyan rebels had, with the help of good-old fashioned western imperialists, taken Tripoli back from that one-time freedom fighter, Muammar Gaddafi, who was later found wielding a golden gun in a drainage ditch, and killed. Oh hay I forgot to add Osama bin Laden and Gadhafi to the list above. On a related note, news of “Lil” Kim Jong- il’s death managed to pipe its way to me via the facebooks and the twitters just now. He could probably be lumped in with these last three under “bad boyz.”
On September 17th the Occupy Wall Street movement began in earnest, spreading like wild-fire and quickly becoming the story of the year for such esteemed journalistic publications as TIME. By early October Oakland had thrown its two-cents into the %99 hat and by the end of that month began to experience the brutality of police repression that places like Boston and Atlanta had already, to an extent, experienced.
On October 25th I found myself in downtown Oakland with the spontaneous crowd that gathered at the intersection of 14th and Broadway, not fifteen feet from where Scott Olsen was almost killed by a tear-gas canister to the head. Volley after volley of tear-gas, flash-bangs and sound-bombs vaulted into the crowd, in an effort to disperse us. I found myself, either out of madness or some sort of survival instinct, not running, but – directly before the fixed barricades behind which a veritable army of Bay Area police officers had gathered – dropping to my knees as the bombs flew, hands in the air, palms open – the universal sign for non-combatant. I watched as officers nonchalantly lobbed armature at civilians as they tried to crawl away. For my part, I had no idea that Olsen had been taken down. Had I known this, perhaps my instinct to stay during the firefight would’ve been vetoed. Surely, the cops wouldn’t attack me as I just sat here, would they?
The Occupy Cal General Assembly on the afternoon of Nov. 9th, prior to the police violence
Fast forward to November 9th: following a rally, a march, a General Assembly and the decision to set up our own occupation at Cal, I once again found myself face to face with the cops. Surely they’d learned the lesson of Occupy Oakland, and were not willing to commit violence against a nonviolent demonstration? I asked myself. The answer came in the form of quite a large number of baton blows to my person, including my head and resulting in quite a large number of cracked ribs. As I sit and write my ribs still ache – they don’t like me sitting down. And the UCPD apparently don’t like them. Unfortunately it is a part of my job description to sit down at a desk for long hours, reading, writing etc. Ironically it’s also a part of the UCPD’s job description to protect me, as a student, as an asset to the university, right? Days later, at UC Davis, the meme-generating pepper spray cop, would reaffirm an answer in the negative, and to just what extent the answer to the question of police violence is that it is structural, embedded and becoming normalized.
Oakland and Cal also threw each threw a General Strike, each as a successful response to the police brutality that they’d experienced, and each were immensely successful. Oakland further joined a massive coordinated West Coast Port Shutdown that, if anything, besides proving how tactically effective the movement could be, showed how we didn’t need thousands of people angry (for a week or more) that kids had gotten beat up and/or shot, and that we didn’t need to have camp set up to go on the offensive. As Anonymous says: We Are Legion – and the field is as deep as it is wide.
So here we are, at the end of another year and the “end” of another war. The brutal Syrian regime continues its campaign against its own people, killing thousands and wounding and/or imprisoning thousands more. SCAF has apparently not learned the lesson from last January, and continues Mubarak’s work in Egypt. Leaders in the U.S., for their part, send messages of condemnation Egypt’s way, while continuing to sell them the needed ammunition to repress its citizens, and coordinating nation-wide repression against its own citizens. On top of that, we’ve witnessed the 3-punch combo of rhetoric and legislation (NDAA et al.) that is painting a potentially very dark picture for 2012 indeed.
I feel myself moving towards the question of what is in store for 2012. But perhaps there is another question that should at least be asked first: how do I feel here, at the end of such an epic year?
Well for starters I wish I had a beer, but the place downstairs closes early on Sundays, and earlier than it says it will every day, so that’s out of the question. For another thing more than unprecedented changes have taken place in the Middle East, more than the advent of a new Class War in the United States, more than me starting my graduate studies at UC Berkeley: my personal life has changed radically, beside and on top of the 2,149 miles I drove in a big yellow moving van across the country, my wife and two children in the mini-van ahead of me. Currently (long story short), I live alone in a hotel-style residence in downtown Berkeley, holed up in a room just big enough for me to study and sleep in. From this vantage, 2012 looks daunting, overwhelmingly contingent. Down the hall the landlady knocks and yells on the door of the sick man in 16 she helps take care of. Through my tiny window the sound of the power-washer’s generator hums against the beeps and tweets of the streetlights as it performs its weekly bus stop cleaning ritual. It’s almost Christmas. And all of this, I think, is a good point, because it is against the backdrop – no it’s in the very material of our bodies and our lived lives – that the continuing struggle for justice is waged. It is in the joblessness, the uncertainty of ‘normal’ life, the anxiety-ridden reality of scrambling for good grades or to not get fired, of counting out our wages for food and gas money, of getting our hearts broken and of raising families that the struggle is waged, and has always been waged. No, I know how I feel: tired.
A comrade from the UC Berkeley English Department demonstrates the power of language
So what is in store for 2012? More of the same? Yes and no. I know and I don’t know. 2012 is going to be big for the 21st Century the way January 25th was big for 2011. And the amazing thing is: we’re all going to be there for it.
See you on the other side.
Broadcasting live from the CalHotel in bleak downtown Berkeley, this has been the blackrabbit, signing off. Hay everybody: take it easy on each other. And if you’re up and around bring me a beer, wouldya?
Suggestion: once you’re done reading this post, listen to this and do a little jimmy-jam. Rest in peace Nate Dogg, et al.
