Occupy The Occupiers

Who would have thought that the one thing the American left needed to reinvigorate itself was a blast of pepper spray aimed straight at the eyes of a few defenseless women? It took these women, as well as the two following men, to topple the world as we know it—one police officer with the unlikely name of Tony Bologna, as well as the Tunisian man, Mohamed Bouzizi, who set himself on fire almost a year ago and began the Arab Spring, although I suspect he might have thought twice about self-immolation if he had known how many people across the planet sympathized with his plight.

Watching all of this from the distance and relative safety of Korea, I’ve wondered why the police and the mayors across America who are fighting their own citizens have not drawn the one obvious conclusion that anyone could hope to make about this movement: if you ignore it, it will go away. If you stop breaking up their camps, stop beating them up and tear gassing them and preventing the media from having any access, really, eventually, after a few weeks or months, everything will peter out. From its inception the OWS movement has gained the lion’s share of its strength not from the protestors themselves, or even their supporters, but from the outrage caused by unnecessary police brutality, as embodied by the unfortunate Tony Bologna, who lost ten vacation days for the crime of empowering a movement that, until then, was ridiculed by almost everyone. It’s been going on like this since Quit India, but the people in power just don’t ever get it. This is a monster that draws its strength from attention and institutionalized violence. Without that, as the link above says, OWS is just a bunch of crack addicts mixed in with people trying to sell puppies.

And I’m afraid of where the movement will go, because although it represents my beliefs, and I would totally be out there right now with those guys if I were living in America, and I have thought several times about organizing some sort of solidarity march here in South Korea, despite the prospect of losing my job as a result of doing so—still, cynically, inevitably, I have to say that popular movements are often co-opted and turned against themselves. The energy that causes people to take to the streets and overthrow entire governments is often so fierce it becomes its opposite. Look at what one of the inspirations for Occupy Wall Street, the pseudo-fascist, astroturfed, Koch-financed Tea Party, has now become. Karl Marx became Joseph Stalin. Mohandas Gandhi became Indira Gandhi. The party of Abraham Lincoln gave us George W. Bush; the American revolutionaries fought for the freedom to enslave blacks. As a result of this pattern or rhythm or rhyme I can guess that the Occupiers may find themselves ringing the opening bell of Wall Street itself, sooner or later occupying themselves, dressed in the same suits they despise.

But really, all of us can agree that we have no idea where Occupy Wall Street is going. If it results in handcuffs clapped around the wrists of the guys who wrecked the world economy, that would be nice. If it destroys the two-party system, that would be even nicer. In an interview with Rachel Maddow, I believe, Michael Moore (also known as He Who Must Not Be Named) spoke of creating a democratic economy, wherein workers would presumably be able to hire and fire their bosses, turning our current autocratic economy entirely on its head. That is perhaps the ultimate aim of the movement which the talking heads on TV have been searching for, as I think the motivation of the Occupiers stems not just from police brutality but also from several years of unmitigated disasters by extraordinarily smug, rich men in business suits, all of whom should probably be cooling their heels alongside the millions of very angry inmates whom they have opted to imprison for possessing near-insignificant amounts of marijuana.

They—and I will name names: George W. Bush, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, the reptoid Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, the now-forgotten Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh (bloated with poison, spewing bile every time he opens his mouth), John Boehner, Fucking Eric Cantor, the inevitable Koch Brothers, and even Barack Obama, for disappointing everyone and for doing nothing to correct the wealth imbalance in America—took one step too far with the debt crisis that plunged the American government into chaos over the summer, and all of them had a hand in it, one way or another. They thought they could get away with stealing just a few more dimes out of the pockets of the working class, and now that class is, perhaps, standing outside of their towering skyscrapers and neoclassical capital buildings, waiting, just waiting, for the police to give way, so they can run inside and really start to fuck shit up.

Second Return To America

After I fought through the gauntlet at the airport’s immigration control and indeed miraculously snuck my $30 bag of kimchi and fermented soybeans in right under their noses (despite my wife warning that the half-scorpion guardians at airports always inexplicably find and confiscate Korean food) I found myself unexpectedly giddy with excitement at the prospect of re-entering the United States.

The terminal and the concourse at Thrilling Detroit International Airport awaited me through a wide enormous opening several stories in height, and then beyond, in the heavenly beyond, giant canyons of windows, and gray metal walls, and Jetsons-style moving walkways with a few but certainly not too many white people and black people and Asians and Middle Easterners and Indians and Europeans and every sort of politically correct or incorrect racial appellation you could possibly desire, just riding along as calm as could be, without staring at each other, judging each other, or really giving a shit about the intense multiculturality of it all.

None of them noticed me in the slightest, and I’m sure that by now any trace of my existence there has faded completely from every last person who might have accidentally glanced in my direction. Perfect. So perfect. Like taking a hot bath. The tension of the desperate rat race that is totally inescapable in Korea relaxed its death grip on my sore, bruised, and aching heart; people were not terrified of starving to death if they failed to sprint through an elevator’s sliding doors in time; they weren’t staring at me anymore (or even pretending not to); the calmness and relaxation everywhere was so overwhelming I almost threw myself on the cheap carpeting in a paroxysm of writhing, groaning bliss.

There was small talk. People spoke to me, made random observations to each other about odd doors or the baggage claim, and politely laughed at one another’s banal commentaries. Surely this is the most absurd level of informality. These Americans, these incredible Americans, could actually talk to total strangers without awkwardly bowing and scraping and acting like complete slaves. Koreans (in Korea at least) are incapable of such colossal feats of social interaction.

At one point I said excuse me to a woman who was standing in the way of some bananas, she said she was sorry and stepped to the side, I said that was alright, and then retrieved the banana I desired—all without the usual shoving and grunting and scowling and swearing and tackling that would normally characterize an identical interaction in Korea. My god. How spectacular. And none of them know how good they have it; none of them know how remarkable and amazing even the most mundane stir of a coffee cup is to a goggle-eyed gawker like me. The extravagances of extraterrestrials. There were commercials on television that had nothing to do with cellphones. Mustaches. Cleavage. Jabbas-les-Huttes. Carpets, and people walking on them with their shoes on as if that is not the most horrifying and disgusting feat of which humanity is capable.

And at last, while soaring over the presumed outskirts of Detroit, and while driving along the highways of Maine later on, confronted with trees everywhere I looked, all of them in bloom, like fuzzy balls of cotton from a distance as I gazed out over impossibly deep blue waters at a red-brick New England river town perched like a castle over a “gently sloping” peninsula of green grass perfect for grazing none other than the baaing lamb of god—a line from Blake came to me about England’s “green and pleasant land”, one which just as easily applies to America through the eyes of someone coming back after a long sojourn away.

(actually I didn’t sneak the kimchi in, I told the nice smiling immigration guy (who was not a scorpion guardian out of Gilgamesh) about it straight to his face, and with his triton he let me pass)

A Few Days In America

A spiral galaxy in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

My god, what is this nation! Who could ever hope to put his finger on it?

My Korean girlfriend remarked to me that nothing had prepared her for America. She had been to the Philippines and Australia, had seen pictures of 미국, read books and news articles, talked over the subject with her friends since childhood, and watched movies of the place on any number of screens—still, to stand there, and take it all in! To let the whirlwind wash over you! Nothing prepares you for it!

The first impression was not a good one for her—a cold cement bust of an immigration official tried to send her back to Korea from behind his desk because she didn’t have a return ticket, but after a talk with me we sorted things out and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in airports, making smalltalk with nicer guards and watching the vast, hulking, colorful populace pass us by in a great parade of culture and beauty. A race of giants populates this giant country. And the ideas in this country are equal to the size of the ideas in their minds—to walk any street in New York is to soak up and sponge numerous different ideas, good and bad, all put into practice for better or for worse. This embrace of new approaches and new notions from all over the planet (and the reflection of this embrace wherever you look) is an amazing contrast to the unparalleled conformity, conservatism, and staleness of design you find everywhere in Korea, so my girlfriend was so culture-shocked the first day in the city she could barely eat the amazing pizza we had thrown down before ourselves in a little shop next to some cute children whose words I could actually understand for a change. The second day, after a good sleep, she was already making plans to live there.

The thrill of exploring new places is the best part of travel—and my own (repeated) opinion is that, while the whole world is mapped down to the centimeter in books and on the internet, the only map that counts is the one you carry in your own memory, and if you have never seen a place with your own eyes, it is still a great blank in your mind, it does not yet exist, and, in a solipsistic way, no outsider has ever really explored it. The ideas inherent to each place, the infinite richness of actually standing in a truly new location, make any map, film, or photograph, so weak in comparison as to render each of these representations—including this one—totally useless and instantly obsolete.