Occupy Omnibus: 10 Essential Cross-Disciplinary Books about Protest. By Maria Popova What Billie Holiday has to do with Burma, growing your own marijuana, and the American Revolution. 2011 has been the year of protest.
From the Arab Spring to the London Riots to the global Occupy Wall Street movement, civic unrest and sociopolitical dissent have reached a tipping point of formidable scale. This omnibus of ten nonfiction books that illuminate protest through the customary Brain Pickings lens of cross-disciplinary curiosity, spanning everything from psychology and philosophy to politics and government to art and music, extends an invitation to better understand the art, science, and psychology of protest, both in our present reality and in the broader context of our civilization. The best protest songs are not dead artifacts, pinned to a particular place and time, but living conundrums. And, lest we forget, music is particularly engrained in America’s present political reality.
Obama is, in a sense, the first protest song president. Originally reviewed here. Occupy Journal Square. Occupy Museums to Occupy Sotheby’s in Support of Embattled Art Handlers Union. After an initial protest action that struck a controversial chord, Occupy Museums is barreling ahead with another occupation of MoMA and then a trip to Sotheby’s, where the group will support the picket line of Teamsters Local 814, the Sotheby’s art handler union who have been locked out of their jobs for the past three months after protests over planned cuts.
At 4 p.m., Occupy Museums will meet at MoMA along with members of Teamsters Local 814, then march (or take the bus) to Sotheby’s at 1334 York Avenue just in time for the house’s evening auction at 6 p.m., which the art handlers union will be picketing. On the group’s Facebook page, they write that Occupy Museums is meant to “claim space for dialog and transparency through the physical presence of our bodies. It is to hold space that was previously inaccessible.” As occupiers, the group will “bring the General Assembly to the doors of the museum, to engage in a dialog about the relationships between the arts and capitalism.” Occupy Antarctica. #Occupy Climate Change. In the grand scheme of things, capitalism is a blip.
A flicker on the historical radar and a rather dangerous planetary-scale experiment whose results are easy to guess and hard to ignore. When you have a giant machine pushing for infinite and perpetual growth in a world with finite resources, you know it's not going to end well. Yet right now, for the average citizen of the West, a world without the hallmarks of capitalism – without Wall Street, the rat race, shopping malls, economic growth, debt and competitive consumerism – is almost impossible to imagine.
The very thought of a consumer-free world opens up such a void, such a unknowingness that it scares the bejesus out of us. Throughout history, however, there have been people willing to place themselves in that white void and be petrified, even liberated by change. Some say that capitalism is too big to fail, that there are too many people invested in its survival. #OCCUPYHOMES. Last week, tens of thousands of protesters at #OCCUPYOAKLAND shut down the nation's fifth largest port in a tremendous show of strength for the movement.
It was a rare victory. Less well known is that a few hours later, a bit after midnight, a small number of occupiers may have stumbled across the movement's next great tactical breakthrough. Walking amongst the crowd on its way to the port, a certain strident militancy was obvious in the way that people, some carrying shields, marched proudly forward. The tense mood quickly turned to joyousness once it became clear that the Oakland Police were not going to stand in the way. Multiple layers of human barricades were spontaneously formed within the port by roving musicians, some amplified by bike-powered speakers, whose indie music magically congregated people at tactically key intersections. Throughout the day, there had been talk of escalating #OCCUPY from being a movement to take the squares into a movement to reclaim foreclosed space. Occupy Yourself. Occupy Reality. Occupy Imagination by.