On this Occupy Quinquennial …
Excerpts from the 2016 reissue of ‘99 Nights with the 99 Percent: Dispatches from the First Three Months of the Occupy Revolution’
BY CHRIS FARAONE
Happy five-year anniversary to everyone who occupied their public squares in business and financial districts all across the country back in 2011. Time flies especially fast when the mainstream media ignores the legacy and impact of a popular uprising.
For this quinquennial (it’s a real word, I looked it up) occasion I re-released my 2012 book , 99 Nights with the 99 Percent, which I wrote in the heat of the movement starting in 2011. Some called it the best read of the published chronicles of Occupy, but whether it is my account or someone else’s it’s important to remember these events.
The new edition of 99 Nights (pictured above) features a new 3,000-word forward by me (excerpts below), plus three bonus chapters that pick up where the first 99 nights leave off, and new pics and illustrations by Alfredo Rico-Dimas. You can get it on Amazon and at most big online outlets, but I’d really love it if you asked your local bookstores and libraries to order copies. It’s available through most distribution channels. Here’s a press release for any media or book buyers who need it, and here‘s a sneak peek. -CF
On the Media
Some people perusing this reissue of 99 Nights with the 99 Percent: Dispatches from the First Three Months of the Occupy Revolution may have only vague ideas that people slept outside and in the public parks of cities coast-to-coast-to-coast-and-overseas because, as the popular meme went five years ago, shit is fucked up and bullshit. But beyond that most basic of truths, few if any of the most important lessons or inconvenient stories to emerge from OWS survived in the popular narrative — not that of the brutality that rained on many protesters, nor of opportunities discovered and ideas that flourished. There’s been no major motion picture made about the movement, nor have any cable stations or production houses for popular streaming services found room for the topic among no fewer than half a dozen shows about roughing it in Alaska.
There are several solid books and academic papers about Occupy Wall Street (hell, I like to think you’re reading one of them right now), which had its heyday in the fall of 2011. But considering the whitewashing of popular movements throughout history, including OWS despite the stampede of journalists who kept meticulous tabs on developing stories, it would be absurd of me to figure that your average person picking up this paperback knows the first thing about Occupy, let alone lived in a camp or felt the crack of a SWAT bat during the dog days.
On Quarreling with Breitbart
I might as well start with how I killed the conservative pundit Andrew Breitbart. Not with my tattooed meat hooks, or a hunting knife, or a bat, or a gun. Nor did I flatten the sonofabitch with my car, which is how I’d always dreamed of ending Breitbart. Instead, I like to think I nudged him closer to the grave by merely being on the losing end of one of his typical maulings. It was the week that 99 Nights came out, and Breitbart and I had just clashed on a conservative talk radio station. Though wrong on every point as usual, Breitbart got the best of me. Nevertheless, I held my own enough for the host to schedule a rematch one week later — which I would win by default since the showman died the night after our joust.
On Police Brutality and Suing the NYPD
I don’t regret a bit of it. As someone with the privilege of having a friend who would take on my case, it was my responsibility to the public to stand up to the bullies (and to myself to recoup my damages). I also extracted some valuable lessons. While the ancient saying that you can’t fight city hall is incomplete — in reality, you can fight whomever right up to the Pope if you have money to pay lawyers — there is some truth in the wisdom, particularly as it pertains to New York (let the record show that I was assaulted by the police force of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also happens to be the same Bloomberg who made billions serving products, news, and advertising to the businesses that occupiers were protesting). It’s a subject worthy of a separate essay altogether, but the police whom I sued did me dirtier in our deliberations than they did on the curb, from the department neglecting to speak with its own city attorneys for two years after I filed suit, to cops saying in depositions that they didn’t recall the incident at all, but also claiming to have not used excessive force — this despite their being forced to watch two seperate videos of my arrest, including one from the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit.
More than anything else, the experience revealed to me the truly staggering breadth of the department’s depravity — if it fought my clamorous ass (I wrote several articles about the blitz, including one for Esquire.com) for four years over a case with multiple videos of the contested assault and that would have under the least favorable circumstances for it cost no more than a hundred grand, then the fact the department pays out roughly $50 million a year on cop-related claims is far more frightening than even the debt clock above Union Square, since the figure neither includes those who chose not to sue nor mentions those who initiated proceedings but ran out of money or patience …
On Popular Narratives
It is important that the movement is remembered as the kaleidoscopic assembly it was, and not a monolithic horde of quirky bottom-feeders, as was suggested by so many mainstream outlets in their coverage of OWS. From as early as the beginning of 2012, in the immediate wake of raids on the last camps, the Occupy brand was deeply damaged (one major but largely forgotten exception being the near-universally lauded efforts of Occupy Sandy volunteers, who dispatched by the thousands to help put Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens back together after a hurricane wrecked New York in October 2012). That perception, however, is a mere manifestation of the commercial press, and to accept it is to validate the voices that deemed Occupy a failure from the start and to approve the chronicles of publications that linked to and were compromised by the same corporate monsters whom heads in Zuccotti were blasting.
With the fifth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and its franchises all across the country upon us, it’s interesting to consider that both widespread agitation and mass grassroots momentum come in waves — from the anti-nuclear proliferation front in the 1980s to the emerging post-Bernie for President movement today. These magic moments are all worth extensive study, because while the faux-populists who cheered on the extinction of Occupy like to pitch some version or another of the same question — What ever happened to those losers? — but aren’t interested in waiting for responses, the actual answer is omnipresent. At least from where I’m standing.
On the Legacy of Occupy
As a journalist who covers social justice and communities of color — not exclusively, but more than almost any other reporter in Boston, as that is where the most critical but ignored stories fester — I see Dewey Square expats often. As could have been predicted by any participant or close movement observer, person after person who spent time at Dewey in Boston, Zuccotti in New York, or any other public square to shame our nation’s banking class emerged to teach in schools and community programs, staff public and private welfare agencies, and continue sacrificing their livelihoods in more direct ways to advance civil and human rights. I wouldn’t say that they’re a dormant legion, ready to swarm at the sight of an Occupy bat signal, but thanks to social media and smartphones they are more connected than generations of gadflys before them, who also remain in the mix and who increasingly have more time to raise hell in retirement.
