New York

Knowing Ourselves

With the loss of Senator Olympia Snowe, the United States Congress continues to bleed moderates, even as Republican presidential hopefuls ramp up the language of division, in their attempts to unite the party behind the narrowest message possible. With the passing of time, we’re becoming more polarized, not less. Maybe we should talk about why.

Especially in the culture war era, many of our disagreements stem from a lack of understanding, and preconceptions about what it means to be liberal or conservative, northern or southern. Both sides of the aisle are equally guilty of building up the narrative of “difference”; take Senator Hatch’s recent, senseless dig against (I think) Brooklyn, or Obama’s unequivocally tone-deaf comment about southerners “clinging” to guns and religion. Similarly, I’ve traveled in enough liberal circles to hear honestly-felt redneck and “flyover” jokes, and enough conservative circles to hear honestly-felt suspicion about anyone who lives in New York City. I’ve also seen homophobes from small-towns become passionately pro-gay rights after actually meeting someone who is gay, and northerners give up their suspicion of the South after living there and getting to know the people (I’ve walked the latter path myself).

This is to say, the surest antidote to sociocultural biases is shared experiences. We’re not actually as different as partisan leaders would make us out to be (as the Republican Party’s losing gamble on contraception seems to prove). Bridging the cultural divide may be as easy as building a mechanism that brings us closer together, by confronting us with that central truth. A few novel ideas, then:

• High-speed rail: a population is its transportation network. Rome was its roads, the Hegemony was the farcasters, and the greater New York City area is essentially a creation of the rail companies that serve it. The LIRR and MetroNorth create the suburbs of Westchester and Long Island, enabling New Yorkers to live in one area while working in another, and forging a larger community in the process. The farther out those connections radiate, the stronger they bind the periphery to the center, changing both center and periphery along the way.  Massive infrastructure investment and its attendant benefits are far from foreign concepts to Americans — Eisenhower’s interstate system allowed Americans to explore far-flung parts of the country, and essentially spawned the idea of middle-class tourism.  Similarly, true national high-speed rail would enable us to live in distant parts of the country, and so put an end to a politics where Southerners can rail against Northerners (or vice versa) based on myths, rather than actual experience.
• Internal exchange programs: as countries go, especially compared to Europe, the United States is huge, and remarkably diverse.  The same notion that justifies foreign exchange programs — a single person, with knowledge of far-flung locales, can communicate respect and understanding to his home on return — could animate an American exchange program, where talented high school students receive scholarships to study “abroad” in California from Texas; in Atlanta from New York; in Iowa from Baltimore; etcetera. Such programs would surely draw upon private (rather than public) financing, but ideally, accomplish a real public service.

One side of the aisle disproportionately gets away with setting us against ourselves; they’ve practically built campaigns on it. But both sides are wrong to engage in the politics of social division. If we’re going to raise the level of public discourse in this country, we should start – not end — by appreciating where each of us is coming from, and spreading that message in our communities.

The Public in the Service of the Private

Some months ago, President Obama asserted — somewhat timidly — a proposition that should’ve been self-evident: that public regulation, public expenditure, and “big government” are not always, or even sometimes, the enemies of private enterprise. As in the case of upgrading the nation’s outdated air traffic control systems, a healthy national infrastructure, created by public dollars, enables private profit.

Yesterday’s Times draws an even clearer example — New York City itself — and explains how the heavy-handed government planning that created Manhattan’s iconic grid enabled the city’s rise to preeminence as a global city, the heart of American culture and finance.

In fact, the story runs even deeper: Manhattan’s inexpensive public transit, the subway, is one of the greatest success stories of how eminent domain can be used to take a private creation, turn it back to the public good, and by doing so enable broader private development. The 1940′s squeeze-out by which New York City acquired the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company was justifiably controversial — and the Supreme Court’s eventual resolution of the fare-caps that made the acquisition feasible, tenuous at best — but produced a more affordable, interconnected, and user-friendly system, better capable of enabling urban growth and suburban life. (In fact, if you’ve transferred at Times Square between the 1/2/3 Seventh Avenue Line and the N/Q/R Broadway Line, or used the 7 Flushing Line, you’ve benefited directly from unified city control.) “Big government” creates the conditions for small business to prosper. Per Jed Bartlet (YouTube):

No matter what its failures in the past and in times to come for that matter, government can be a place where people come together and no-one gets left behind. An instrument of good.

This is in fact the foundational theory of government: that we do better together than we would apart. Somehow we’ve forgotten that lesson during our two-year long tea-induced stupor, but it’s time to remember it, and for Obama, to campaign on it. Unity and common purpose have always prevailed in America over selfishness, profit, and oligarchy. And that, fundamentally, is what the 2012 election should be about.

New York Legislators Speak to the Need for Fair Redistricting

Last night, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York held an event to discuss “Reforming Albany: the Road Ahead,” a task that necessarily begins with fair redistricting. Two lines worth remembering, from an excellent all-around event. Mayor Ed Koch: “fair redistricting is an ‘existential threat’ to the Republican [senate] majority.” Senator John Sampson: “voters pick their representatives — not the other way around.”

How Not to Run a Movement

It’s unclear to me how a strategy of harassment wins converts to the cause, but that’s the route Occupy Wall Street chose to take today. Commuters wealthy, middle-class and poor all alike suffered a complete severance of subway service to and from Wall Street in the early morning rush hour; worse-than-normal barricade and police presence; the terrifying sight of helicopters hovering menacingly at strategic points across the island; “papers-please” checkpoints across the Financial District; and, generally, a crush of confrontational protestors, signs in hand, oblivious to the lives of those around them. My close friend and neighbor — an exceptionally talented playwright who also tutors high school students — said it best:

Today a high school student had to cancel his lesson because you were throwing up barricades and he didn’t feel safe. I have put up with 2 months of barricades, mounted police, horse poop, and security check points. Release my neighborhood – the 99% live here too.

Occupy Wall Street’s message, when they can be coerced into stating one, is vitally important to this country’s future, and it’s a cause that deserves better than to be dragged through the mud (and horse poop) by standard-bearers who apparently value inconvenience and disrespect for authority as ends in themselves; not as undesirable side-effects of some forms of nonviolent protest. New York city, and her people, are allies to be lost, not enemies to be fought. I pray OWS remembers that before the end.

After Zuccotti

Although admittedly without cracking my First Amendment book, Judge Stallman’s order upholding the eviction of Zuccotti Park seems as correct as his decision to temporarily enjoin the eviction, pending litigation, was admirable. “Reasonable time/place/manner” restrictions are the critical and necessary “but” to every claim of a First Amendment right to protest, and especially given the reports of drugs, crime, and health hazards we’ve heard from Zuccotti Park, Brookfield seems well within their rights to eject 200 unexpected campers. I rather enjoy these lovable scamps of the left, but if they camped out in my backyard — and if I had a backyard — I’d do exactly the same.

The question now is what Occupy Wall Street does without its symbolic-speech (read: publicity stunt) element. The movement can certainly survive and, truly, its organizers should take this as a chance to shed the occupation’s many downsides. The necessities of “occupation,” for instance, created a veritable breeding ground of bad news stories detailing crime, sanitation issues, etc., all of which fade once Zuccotti Park ceases to be a center of human habitation. Like a ship scrubbed of barnacles, the “occupation” can transition to an effective messaging operation with Zuccotti as a non-permanent base of operations…

…but first the “occupiers” will need to accept a top-down structure. Disorganization served the movement — or didn’t hinder it as much as it could have — so long as the protester’s message was effectively made by their mere presence in the park. But without this gimmick, to attract continued media attention, and to continue influencing the debate, the movement will have to work for it, which will require a solid agenda, and a well-thought-out method of disseminating that message. The next step could be as simple as a continued but not overnight presence in Zuccotti Park, where a rotating staff hands out leaflets, waves signs, makes screen printed tee-shirts (yes, of course I have one), and generally reminds the financial capital of their existence. That level of activity, though, already presupposes the structure the Occupy movement has rejected all along — but it’s time for them to give that up. Call it something like the routinization of charisma: Occupy Wall Street needs to normalize itself, and grow into a real movement, if it’s to survive.

The Winter of their Discontent

If you’re not in New York right now, let me fill you in. It’s basically the end of the world, and Frost was right: ice will suffice. From my vantage point, the drum circles at Zuccotti Park fell silent, and the welcoming line of sign-holders are nowhere in evidence.

But here’s a theory. If the Occupy movement survives this first test, with their proverbial flag “still there” by the end of the night, they’ll earn some sort of legitimacy for the trouble. Maybe they’re hippies, but if we know one thing about hippies, it’s that they avoid discomfort, which I can assure you is all that waits for you if you’re out of doors in Manhattan right now. Easy for me to say from my warm and comfortable apartment, but I hope they stick it out.

Oh, and I wonder which presidential candidate will be the first to make the, “It’s snowing therefore global warming isn’t a thing” argument?

OWS Needs to Ditch its Student Loan Platform

With an early victory under its belt, and while it continues to capture media attention, it’s time for Occupy Wall Street to narrow its demands, and put a plausible face on the enterprise. The first step is to ditch the unrealistic request for student loan forgiveness.

For reasons I can’t fathom, demands for loan forgiveness have always been a staple of youth movements — but it’s never gonna happen. Forgiveness wouldn’t erase debt, it would just shift it, saddling corporations with the more than $1 trillion dollars currently borne by students nationally. Perhaps corporations remain better able to carry that burden than recent graduates on an individual basis, but on a systemic level, the financial sector simply can’t write down another trillion dollars without prompting another industry-wide collapse. Nor can universities simply stop charging for college degrees, without eradicating jobs for academic professionals, and endangering the research universities that make American higher education (and science) so unique. Simply put, there’s really no such thing as a free lunch here.

And, demands for loan forgiveness fairly clearly bump up against the honorable opposition’s favorite mantra: “personal responsibility.” Some issues truly are out of the hands of even responsible citizens: employment (in many cases) is one of them. Loan debt is not. In today’s economy, a college degree is a bare necessity for a successful life — but a degree from the institution of your choice is a luxury. You don’t have to go to Harvard to get a good education. Nor do you have to go to one of the quaint little liberal arts schools that define the college experience in the popular mindset, but stand to set you (or your family) back $50,000 a year, and offer only a mediocre academic pedigree in return. I sympathize with the kid from a poor family who saved day-in-day-out, went to Georgia Tech, did well, and still can’t get a job — or was laid off when his sector of the economy imploded. I don’t sympathize with (say) SMU alums who simply didn’t ever think about how they’d pay back their loans. That’s on you.

Part of building a good movement is crafting an agenda that’s forward-thinking enough to inspire, but realistic enough to potentially see some real-world success. OWS has hit the first mark — wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could go to Harvard, and not pay a dime?? — but needs to dial it back to hit the second. Until that happens, I’ll sympathize generally with the protestors, begrudge them the minor inconvenience they inflict on my Financial District, and thank God for the privilege of living in a country where people like them can sit around in a park just to “make a statement.” I’ll even take seriously their general discontent (ahem, NSFW) with the current state of things.

But I won’t respect them as a movement until the organizers kick this, and the Marxist element, out of their platform.

Apple and the World You Love

When Steve Jobs passed away last week, one commentator stuck us with this summary of the impact of the ubiquitous iPod/iPhone/iPad triumvirate:

He put white earbuds in the ears of everyone on the planet, and shut us all in to our own little pods of experience.

Harsh, but it doesn’t feel entirely wrong. Walking the streets of Manhattan, or below ground, it’s strange not to see a plurality sporting headphones of some kind, likely connected to an Apple device, or at least to one inspired by the same. To a certain extent, the effect is to strand us in our own islands which, though tranquil, isolate us from some part of the day-to-day experience that’s defined Western civilization for a few centuries. For one, the random subway conversation is a stranger thing today than it was pre-iPod. In many cases that’s for the best, but it does contribute to obliterating those random, happy coincidences that can, in a rare moment of fate, come to define a life.

This is what we’ve lost in the iPod age, but set it against what we’ve gained. Portable connectivity is found time; a chance to listen to music from that girl you met (you know, at the thing), write a longer email that you may not otherwise have had time for, or catch up on missed reading. For my part, Jobs’ creations have let me read more, hear more, and communicate more — albeit with people I already know — adding depth that could otherwise have been lost. I learned to love This American Life by podcast, the New Yorker on iPad, and built (or rebuilt) friendships, largely over Gchat and iPhone, based on shared experiences from both. It’s not for nothing that (according to one study) iDevices stimulate the part of the brain normally reserved for relationships: Jobs’ gadgets are, for much of our lives, the effective portal to those relationships. Whose heart hasn’t skipped a beat at the white bubble of a text message from just That Girl (or guy)? In the modern world, we may fall in love over Gchat, text, or FaceTime, thanks to slicker connectivity. It’s not even unusual.

Jobs’ legacy is a way of designing technology that adds charisma to the routine, unlocks new capabilities, and redefines the modern life. As with grander technologies, our challenge is to use it to (on balance) add to the human experience, rather than lose ourselves in it. And to Jobs’ credit, that’s a goal he wholeheartedly endorsed, and ensured was reflected in his work.

(This post written on an iPhone, on the subway, and with a title referencing one such song.)

A Local’s Impression of the Wall Street “Occupation”

One of the better signs; click to enlarge.

As some of you may know, I live on (and so have ostensibly been “occupying”) Wall Street for the past two years or so. Some thoughts, then, from the front lines.

For those who live or work on Wall Street — a group increasingly composed of the former as opposed to the latter — the inconvenience factor remains more bark than bite. To walk anywhere on Wall Street between William and Broadway, locals must suffer through a gauntlet of more-annoying-than-usual tourists, and tolerate the baffling presence of three-officer mounted patrols by the Stock Exchange, but that’s about it. Call it a large-footprint, low-impact police presence.

To the protesters themselves, let’s correct a few misconceptions. First, contra this guy, if the group is “mostly white,” it’s because the occupiers represent a pretty decent cross-section of America. College-age white hipster-types, or what’s become the pejorative media face of the movement, are in the minority next to middle-aged men and women of all races: the tea party age range, in other words, but with the racial and gender diversity of the left. Latinos represent somewhere on the order of 10-12.5% of the group, and come with translators, Spanish-language signs, and a parallel Latino “Assembly” (more on that later). You won’t hear much of religion beyond some signs (“Jesus stood with the 99%!”, etc.), but the movement has appointed, badge-carrying chaplains, and apparently sports its share of observant Jews. On Friday night, across the street from Zuccotti Park, about 200 people gathered for a crowd-chanted Kol Nidre, followed by a full Yom Kippur service. I’ll have pictures later; it was impressive.

Violence and violent rhetoric are nowhere in evidence; for all the media makes out of the Marxist presence (“Down with corporations!”, etc.), they’re a minority clustered at the back of the park, and hearing them speak, they lack the bloodlust of their progenitors. Apparently, violent revolution is  passé; these guys just want a constitutional convention. Similarly, anti-police activity and signs seem blissfully contained, the latter limited to one or two signs on the periphery, and the former to marches, which draw from a broader population base than the “occupiers.” Most of the protesters are affirmatively non-violent, with more than their share of puppies and guitars, and a free massage station that (I was told) was purposefully designed as stress relief for those occupiers who get too angry, at the police, or the city, or whatever. Yeah, it’s kind of funny, but it beats the alternatives.

I can’t disagree with those who say the protesters lack a coherent message; they still do. But the organization of the movement itself is more than a little impressive. Every night at 7, the occupiers hold an Assembly to discuss the day, their philosophy, and issues of camp management; later in the night, the same information is communicated in Spanish at a Spanish-language Assembly. On Friday, we heard a debate about whether to ban smoking in the park. A schedule of events is prominently displayed on the south side, convenient to the sleeping section of the park, and cleaning crews circulate throughout the area to preserve some semblance of sanitation. Labor is cleanly divided, with “stations” to fulfill most of the occupiers’ needs: there’s a Food Station, a “Comfort Station” for distributing toiletries, donated bedding, and hygiene products, and a sign-making station (pictured above). The National Lawyers’ Guild has a small volunteer outpost, and volunteer Legal Observers circulate throughout the park (and on marches) in bright green hats, so you can find them in a pinch. New Latino arrivals are greeted with translators at another station, where legal staff warn how political activity can impact your immigration status. City regulations forbid the use of microphones and amplifying equipment, but the group makes do with the “People’s Mic”: when an announcement has to be made, a leader yells “Mic Check!”, and those just within earshot respond, and repeat the message as needed. “Mic Check” comes in handy for everything from speeches and religious services to mundane camp management announcements. One we heard:

MIC CHECK!

Mic check!

A PUPPY IS MISSING…

A puppy is missing!…

Think of it like the Beacons of Gondor, but for hippies. I hope they found the puppy.

At this level of organization, it might seem baffling that the group still lacks a coherent, unitary political agenda. But focusing on this deficiency might risk misunderstanding the movement. This isn’t a protest for something; instead, it’s a (thus far) remarkably effective way of increasing the visibility of the radical left generally, in all of its iterations. For most movements, that’s the first, not the last step: it took the Continental Congress months, and the monumental efforts of one John Adams, to translate decentralized anger into an independence movement, and it took Fox News, Dick Armey, and Glenn Beck to forge a movement from the angry rabble of the tea parties. Give these guys time, and some support at the top, and something interesting might come of it.

That said, I admit that there’s a lot to dislike about the protesters. According to some, the occupiers have solved the “bathroom situation” by using customer restrooms at local businesses, all without (of course) paying a dime. That’s inappropriate, gross, and provides an unnecessary point of friction between the protesters and the community. Second, there’re far too many Ron Paul supporters. Ugh. And some locals have apparently “joined” the protesters just so they can smoke pot in public (though to their credit, I heard a few organizers getting very angry about the potentially de-legitimizing effect public drug use would have on the movement).

Finally, we can already derive a central theme to the movement: that corporations wield too much influence over the daily lives of Americans. If we woke up tomorrow and Dodd-Frank was fully implemented, Citizens United overruled by constitutional amendment, and investment banks healthily restrained by a resurgent SEC, I think most of their demands would be met, and the country would be better for it. These are people who actually care about their country — one sign, “If corporations are people, how many corporations are buried at Arlington?” really hits home — and want to leave it better than they found it. At least they’re doing something about it, and I for one see no irony in using corporate products to promote an anti-corporate message. Didn’t we use English law to dismantle the English monarchy? As far as causes go, I’d already take this one over the tea party’s cause célèbre of re-establishing child labor.

We Need a New Metonym

Earlier this year, Duane Reade, the New York pharmacy/convenience store chain, opened its “flagship” store at 40 Wall Street, just east of the Stock Exchange, and slightly west of a set of skyscrapers formerly owned by financial giants like J.P. Morgan Chase, now upscale apartments. The banks that used to occupy these buildings long since left the Financial District. Shortly before Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, that institution moved its headquarters far uptown, to 51st and Broadway. Others had their headquarters in or around the World Trade Center, and simply never returned after 9/11. In the picture below, both of the skyscrapers are apartments. The remaining buildings, high end boutiques.

This is all to say, the “Financial District” no longer lies at New York’s economic heart. When we talk about reforming “Wall Street,” we’re recalling a piece of the past, which no longer describes the new neighborhood. And while I’m normally the first to encourage historically-based descriptors, this one isn’t without its drawbacks. The idea that New York, and a particularly small part of New York, controls the nation’s financial destiny is inaccurate, encourages the kind of culture war tropes that “leaders” like Sarah Palin exploit to set us against ourselves, and fosters a misunderstanding of how structured transactions, and the other types of instruments involved in modern finance, actually operate.

To our other problems with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, then, add this: they’re playing off an outdated definition. Though I suppose it does make the NYPD mounted brigades tasked with “holding” the entrance of Wall Street strangely appropriate — an outdated symbol of state power to defend an outdated symbol of the financial sector.