Madeline Louise

lisaguido:

His name is Georges. Smart kid. #OWS (+ a guest post from novelist John Weir) 25 Nov 11 PM:

I spent an hour this afternoon reading a paperback novel in Liberty/Zuccotti Park, in solidarity with a bunch of books: the reportedly 5,000 volumes that police dumped in a trash bin during their clearing of the park last week. It’s a public park, albeit privately owned - you can sit there all day if you want, reading stuff, however subversive, however highbrow, however trite. You can drum drums in a drum circle, which is what some guys were doing. Fine with me. I like to be alone in the middle of things, which is why I live in NYC, 3 blocks from Times Square. In the perfect park of my urban imagination, there are always dissidents beating drums - dissidents or citizens, and lately it seems as if the federal, state, and local governments don’t know the difference, can’t distinguish between a terrorist and a constituent.

“What happened this week,” to quote again from Naomi Wolf, in the article I have linked below, what happened this week and last week and the week before that, in NYC, and Berkeley, and UC Davis, and Denver, and Los Angeles, and Houston, and everywhere, in real time and in images all over the internet:

“is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent.”

I read Wolf’s article gratefully, after I left Liberty Park - “gratefully,” because it helped explain what is going on there, helped clarify for me the absurd aspect of maybe fifty folks inside a park at 1 PM on Friday after Thanksgiving, fifty people either quietly reading - one guy with a white beard whose book title I couldn’t see was wearing a sign around his neck that said “100% Peaceful,” and that was the note of the afternoon, downtown lunchtime office workers reading peacefully and some scruffy kids banging drums, I’ve been to yard sales that were more disruptive and unAmerican - ; fifty, maybe sixty people in a park that was ringed by metal barriers, guarded by police, and patrolled by security guards.

The park is currently aggressively under surveillance. It is ringed by interlocking metal gates that are ingeniously linked and impossible to budge or unlock or discreetly displace. I know, I tried. There is one entrance, on the south side of the park, away from major traffic, 200 yards down from Broadway, and that entrance is guarded by security officers in yellow vests. They cluster there, and while they didn’t stop me from heading into the park, they did halt the guy in front of me who had a big flat artist’s portfolio on his back. “That’s too big to take into the park,” they told the guy. Later I saw that he had gotten into the park somehow. He was unpacking his portfolio, which was filled with paperback books.

Inside the park, there’s a length of red barrier rope running down the north side all along the granite retaining wall, which is also a bench; it is no longer possible to sit or stand on or even approach within three feet of that wall, unless you want a gang of security guards and then police coming down on you. The park is barricaded around the outside, and it is partly barricaded inside, and the police surround it. Most absurdly, the big red abstract sculpture that juts up 70 feet over the southwest corner of the park - it’s called *Joie de Vivre*; the guy who made it, Mark di Suvero, was born to Italian expatriates in Shanghai and raised in northern California - is protected by its own mini-ring of linked metal barriers.

Giant sculptures are protected. Benches are protected from people. Tourists are protected from 22-year-old kids and a couple of middle-aged union guys who lean over the metal barrier along Broadway and try to pitch their stories and read their banners and signs to passersby. Sometimes they heckle cops. As I left the park today, one kid was pointing at a male cop and shouting, “Take off your uniform and join us. Be a man.” I can’t say that shouting “Be a man” at anyone strikes me as a fair and effective political intervention, and if I had more guts, I would have lectured the kid on feminism and gender stereotypes and trying to dismantle an oppressive regime in the rhetoric with which the regime is oppressing you.

I hurried away. I had other stuff to do. One kid acting out didn’t seem to me to be enough reason to call out the tactical nukes. In 31 years living in New York City, in Manhattan, I have watched several successive mayors surrender every diverse and complicated corner of urban landscape to real estate developers and rich investors from faraway. We have welcomed countless people to the city who wanted to ruin it with their wealth. The city I moved to in 1980 has been devastated by wealth. And yet when 500 kids show up with drums and sleeping bags and tents, we put them in a pen, and surround them with police. Who is dangerous to whom?

(photo, Lisa Guido. His name is George. Smart kid.)