Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for thirty years. Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor, and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died, and I saw people commenting and saying, “May God forgive him. He committed a sin and killed himself for nothing.” People, have some shame.
She described an earlier demonstration at which few had shown up: “I posted that I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone. And I’ll hold up a banner. Perhaps people will show some honor. No one came except three guys—three guys and three armored cars of riot police. And tens of hired thugs and officers came to terrorize us.”
Mahfouz called for the gathering in Tahrir Square on January 25 that became the Egyptian revolution. The second time around she didn’t stand alone. Eighty-five thousand Egyptians pledged to attend, and soon enough, millions stood with her.
The revolution was called by a young woman with nothing more than a Facebook account and passionate conviction. They were enough. Often, revolution has had such modest starts. On October 5, 1789, a girl took a drum to the central markets of Paris. The storming of the Bastille a few months before had started, but hardly completed, a revolution. That drummer girl helped gather a mostly female crowd of thousands who marched to Versailles and seized the royal family. It was the end of the Bourbon monarchy.
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black hijab.
That the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can shape the weather in Texas is a summation of chaos theory that is now an oft-repeated cliché. But there are billions of butterflies on earth, all flapping their wings. Why does one gesture matter more than another? Why this Facebook post, this girl with a drum?
Even to try to answer this you’d have to say that the butterfly is borne aloft by a particular breeze that was shaped by the flap of the wing of, say, a sparrow; and so behind causes are causes, behind small agents are other small agents, inspirations, and role models, as well as outrages to react against. The point is not that causation is unpredictable and erratic. The point is that butterflies and sparrows and young women in veils and an unknown twenty-year-old rapping in Arabic and you yourself, if you wanted it, sometimes have tremendous power, enough to bring down a dictator, enough to change the world.
OTHER SELVES, OTHER LIVES
Early 2011 was a remarkable time in which a particular kind of humanity appeared again and again in very different places, and we saw a great deal more of it in Japan before its triple catastrophe was over. Perhaps its first appearance was at the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson on January 8, where the lone gunman was countered by several citizens who took remarkable action, none more so than Giffords’s new intern, twenty-year-old Daniel Martinez, who later said, “It was probably not the best idea to run toward the gunshots. But people needed help.”
Martinez reached the congresswoman’s side and probably saved her life by administering first aid, while sixty-one-year-old Patricia Maisch grabbed the magazine so the shooter couldn’t reload, and seventy-four-year-old Bill Badger helped wrestle him to the ground, though he’d been grazed by a bullet. One elderly man died because he shielded his wife rather than protect himself.
Everything suddenly changed and those people rose to the occasion heroically not in the hours, days, or weeks a revolution gives, but within seconds. More sustained acts of bravery and solidarity would make the revolutions to come. People would risk their lives and die for their beliefs and for each other. And in killing them, regimes would lose their last shreds of legitimacy.
Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live. The rest of the year was dominated by battles against the tyrannies that sometimes cost lives and sometimes just ground down those lives into poverty and indignity, from Bahrain to Madison, Wisconsin.
I have often wondered if the United States could catch fire the way other countries sometimes do. The public space and spirit of Argentina or Egypt often seem missing here, for what changes in revolution is largely spirit, emotion, belief—intangible things, as delicate as butterfly wings, but our world is made of such things. They matter. The governors govern by the consent of the governed. When they lose that consent, they resort to violence, which can stop some people directly, but aims to stop most of us through the power of fear.
And then sometimes a young man becomes fearless enough to post a song attacking the dictator who has ruled all his young life. Or people sign a declaration like Charter 77, the 1977 Czech document that was a milestone on the way to the revolutions of 1989, as well as a denunciation of the harassment of an underground rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe. Or a group of them found a labor union on the waterfront in Gdansk, Poland, in 1980, and the first cracks appear in the Soviet Empire.
Those who are not afraid are ungovernable, at least by fear, that favorite tool of the bygone era of George W. Bush. Jonathan Schell, with his usual beautiful insight, saw this when he wrote of the uprising in Tahrir Square:
The murder of the 300 people, it may be, was the event that sealed Mubarak’s doom. When people are afraid, murders make them take flight. But when they have thrown off fear, murders have the opposite effect and make them bold. Instead of fear, they feel solidarity. Then they “stay”—and advance. And there is no solidarity like solidarity with the dead. That is the stuff of which revolution is made.
When a revolution is made, people suddenly find themselves in a changed state—of mind and of nation. The ordinary rules are suspended, and people become engaged with each other in new ways and develop a new sense of power and possibility. People behave with generosity and altruism; they find they can govern themselves; and, in many ways, the government simply ceases to exist. A few days into the Egyptian revolution, Ben Wedeman, CNN’s senior correspondent in Cairo, was asked why things had settled down in the Egyptian capital. He responded: “[T]hings have calmed down because there is no government here,” pointing out that security forces had simply disappeared from the streets.
This stateless state often arises in disasters as well, when the government is overwhelmed, shut down, or irrelevant for people intent on survival and then on putting society back together. Even if it rarely lasts, the process does change individuals and societies, leaving a legacy. To my mind, the best regime is one that most resembles this moment when civil society reigns in a spirit of hope, inclusiveness, and improvisational genius.
In Egypt, there were moments of violence when people pushed back against the government’s goons, and for a week it seemed like the news was filled with pictures of bloody heads. Still, no armies marched, no superior weaponry decided the fate of the country, nobody was pushed from power by armed might. People gathered in public and discovered themselves as the public, as civil society. They found that the repression and exploitation they had long tolerated was intolerable and that they could do something about it, even if that something was only gathering, standing together, insisting on their rights as the public, as the true nation that the government can never be.
It is remarkable how, in other countries, people will one day simply stop believing in the regime that had, until then, ruled them, as African Americans did in the South here fifty years ago. To stop believing means no longer regarding those who rule you as legitimate, and so no longer fearing them. Or respecting them. And then, miraculously, the regimes begin to crumble.
In the Philippines in 1986, millions of people gathered in response to a call from Catholic-run Radio Veritas, the only station the dictatorship didn’t control or shut down. Then the army defected, and dictator Fernando Marcos was ousted from power after twenty-one years.
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In Argentina in 2001, in the wake of a brutal economic collapse, such a sudden shift in consciousness toppled the neoliberal regime of Fernando de la Rúa and ushered in a revolutionary era of economic desperation, but also of brilliant, generous innovation. A shift in consciousness brought an outpouring of citizens into the streets of Buenos Aires, suddenly no longer afraid after the long nightmare of a military regime and its aftermath. In Iceland in early 2009, in the wake of a global economic meltdown of special fierceness on that small island nation, a once-docile population almost literally drummed out of power the ruling party that had managed the country into bankruptcy.
CAN’T HAPPEN HERE?
The United States often seems to lack the attunement between governed and governors and the symbolically charged public spaces in which civil society can be born. This is a big country whose national capital is not much of a center and whose majority seems to live in places that are themselves decentered.
At its best, revolution is an urban phenomenon. Suburbia is counterrevolutionary by design. For revolution, you need to converge, to live in public, to become the public, and that’s a geographical as well as a political phenomenon. The history of revolution is the history of great public spaces: La Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution; La Rambla in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War; Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 (a splendid rebellion that was crushed); the great surge that turned the divide of the Berlin Wall into a gathering place in that same year; the insurrectionary occupation of the Zócalo of Mexico City after corrupt presidential elections; and the space in Buenos Aires that gave the Dirty War’s most open opposition its name: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (the Mothers of the Plaza of May).
It’s all very well to organize on Facebook and update on Twitter, but these are only preludes. You also need to rise up, to pour out into the streets. You need to be together in body, for only then are you truly the public with the full power that a public can possess. And then it needs to matter. The United States is good at trivializing and ignoring insurrections at home.
The authorities were shaken by the uprising in Seattle that shut down the World Trade Organization meeting on November 30, 1999, but the actual nonviolent resistance there was quickly fictionalized into a tale of a violent rabble. Novelist and then–New Yorker correspondent Mavis Gallant wrote in 1968:
The difference between rebellion at Columbia [University] and rebellion at the Sorbonne is that life in Manhattan went on as before, while in Paris every section of society was set on fire, in the space of a few days. The collective hallucination was that life can change, quite suddenly and for the better. It still strikes me as a noble desire.
Revolution is also the action of people pushed to the brink. Rather than fall over, they push back. When he decided to push public employees hard and strip them of their collective bargaining rights, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker took a gamble. In response, union members, public employees, and then the public of Wisconsin began to gather on February 11. By February 15, they had taken over the state’s capitol building as the revolution in Egypt was still at full boil. In February 2011, the biggest demonstration in Madison’s history was held, led by a “tractorcade” of farmers. The Wisconsin firefighters revolted too. And the librarians.
Oppression often works—for a while. And then it backfires. Sometimes immediately, sometimes after several decades. Walker has been nicknamed the Mubarak of the Midwest. Much of the insurrection and the rage in the Middle East isn’t just about tyranny; it’s about economic injustice, about young people who can’t find work, can’t afford to get married or leave their parents’ homes, can’t start their lives. This is increasingly the story for young Americans as well, and here it’s clearly a response to the misallocation of resources, not absolute scarcity. It could just be tragic, or it could get interesting when the young realize they are being shafted, and that life could be different. Even that it could change, quite suddenly, and for the better.
There was a splendid surliness in the wake of the economic collapse of 2008: rage at the executives who had managed the economy into the ground and gone home with outsized bonuses, rage at the system, rage at the sheer gratuitousness of the suffering of those who were being foreclosed upon and laid off. In this country, economic inequality has reached a level not seen since before the stock market crash of 1929.
Hard times are in store for most people on earth, and those may be times of boldness. Or not. The butterflies are out there, but when their flight stirs the winds of insurrection, no one knows beforehand.
So remember to expect the unexpected, but not just to wait for it. Sometimes you have to become the unexpected, as the young heroes and heroines of 2011 have. I am sure they themselves are as surprised as anyone. Since she very nearly had the first word, let Asmaa Mahfouz have the last word: “As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope.”
March 2011
RATTLESNAKE IN MAILBOX
Cults, Creeps, California in the 1970s
It’s true what you heard about macramé. Partly some mutant version of a craft tradition and partly something for the fidgety hands and wandering minds of the drugged, macramé was also the means to create harnesses from which a million planters were hung from a million ceilings to create gratuitous clutter. You can think of macramé as some vernacular extension of 1960s soft sculptures by Bruce Conner, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, and Claes Oldenburg, but its aesthetics had grown monstrously. There was something quintessentially 1970s about these pendulous burdens—obscuring views and dripping foliage—something that tied them to the fern bars of the era and to the overall aesthetics of horror vacui. This era of shag rugs and feather-bedecked roach-clip hair ties rivaled the Victorians when it came to clutter, ornament, jewelry, print, pattern, texture, flourish, tassels, fringes, tendrils, frizz, dangly bits, lace, laces, buttons, and other distractions for the eye.
Dangling, creeping plants were at the heart of 1978’s definitive film, Phil Kaufman’s horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, filmed in San Francisco. Donald Sutherland as the restaurant-inspector-turned-alien-detective walks into Brooke Adams’s house and finds a clone of her growing in a lush, damp sort of greenhouse alcove full of plants; later Jeff Goldblum is cloned in a bathhouse, also full of houseplants. San Francisco’s hills, trees, fog, and intricate Victorian gingerbread houses suit the film’s sensibility. In one scene, a teacher out with some small children in a park near the Haight-Ashbury ominously encourages them to pick the pretty flowers and take them home. Eleven years earlier Los Angeles’s Mamas and the Papas had sung “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair),” promising the city would be full of gentle people, a “love-in.” Now the flowers were monstrous and the emotions were null. Technically the threat in Invasion of the Body Snatchers is colonizing plants from a destroyed planet, but the film makes an allegory of the fuzzy thinking, fuzzy surfaces, spreading tendrils, and labyrinthine passages that were both the culture and the landscape of San Francisco during the late 1970s. In other words, the city—and by extension, the world—is being eaten by the counterculture; and being taken over by the pods turns people into affectless ambulatory vegetables.
Blank is the word that comes to mind for this condition, though blank also sounds like a refreshingly uncluttered surface in that context. Blankness calls up Richard Hell and the Voidoids’s anti-anthem of the year before, “Blank Generation.” Punk rock arrived like a machete in the jungle, hacking at all that stadium rock, chopping the tendrils, paring away everything unnecessary and slicing down to the rage, the indignation, the energy, and the essence. The jungle was the meandering, woolly, over-decorated excesses rock-and-roll had sunk into during the 1970s—the fourteen-minute tracks, the long instrumental solos, the excess of studio polish, the pointlessness of songs about bored decadence and sybaritic luxury, the stale formulas. The Eagles’s 1977 hit “Hotel California” was a flawl
ess piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As Don Henley sang, “They stab it with their steely knives, / But they just can’t kill the beast.”
Punk rock could, and the beast was rock-and-roll itself. I was fifteen in 1977, the year punk hit California. When it arrived, most rock-and-roll sounded as though it was made to be listened to in a hot tub; the music had slowed down and sprawled out. The operative word was mellow. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the aliens clone you when you’re sleeping and then turn you into ashes; relaxation is perilous. Punk came along as a fierce corrective to the excesses and errors of the 1960s, at least in the United States. British punks were perhaps more farseeing; their protest was against a mainstream that would grow more grotesque in the Thatcherist 1980s, while songs like the Dead Kennedys’s “California Über Alles” (1979/80) seemed to imagine progressive and occasionally loopy Governor Jerry Brown as an enduring oppression—insidious, like those tendrils and pods. By the time that song was released in June of 1979, former California governor Ronald Reagan was on his way to the presidency, and decades of Republican governors were on their way to Sacramento. (California wouldn’t have a strong Democratic governor again until 2011, when a seventy-something Brown was reelected.)
“California Über Alles” seems to imagine that the counterculture won. Few foresaw that the right—which seemed in abeyance since Nixon had slithered back to San Clemente—was on the brink of resurgence. Nevertheless, punk rock would have plenty to say about Reagan and the right when the time came: San Francisco’s MDC (Millions of Dead Cops, an important, less-remembered political punk band that eventually changed its name to Multi-Death Corporations) would release “John Wayne Was a Nazi” in 1981, and a host of hardcore bands like L.A.’s Wasted Youth would launch more vitriolic attacks. Even the generally apolitical Ramones would record “Bonzo Goes to Bitberg” in 1985, about Reagan’s infamous laying of a wreath in a cemetery full of Nazi graves. It was possible to hate both possibilities—and dystopic punk was never very good at envisioning solutions and alternatives. It arose from an adolescent’s sensibility of outrage and dissent—the antithesis of visionary—hostile to the Emperor and his embroidered new clothes.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Page 4