Ferguson and Bullshit Careerism
On Saturday night, I went to see a movie with my girlfriend in Washington, DC. It’s not an uncommon thing in our lives, we like movies, and we live in DC. In this case we went to watch “A Most Wanted Man”, a thriller about the German and U.S. intelligence establishments based on John le Carre’s 2008 novel. It was also Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last movie. You should see it. It speaks to both careerism and malevolence, and the state.
On the way to the movie, we kept passing a growing throng of young-ish protesters, mostly young black men and women, but also hippie-ish white stoner looking types and an iconoclastic middle ager here or there. We didn’t think much of it at first, because DC has a thriving bullshit careerist protest scene. But then, something about it started to seem different. This protest was alive in a way I had never seen in DC.
DC has a certain style of protest, which represents the careerism, bureaucracy, and faux theatricality that makes the city what it is. It contains a certain form of approved gilded dissent, and it has become a culture. How Occupy Wall Street manifested itself the capital in particular is a good way to understand how protest in DC is uniquely organized into a normalized category of bureaucratic behavior .
The Occupy Wall Street setups all over the country were authentic spaces representing a genuine slice of their cities. In New York, for example, it was diverse, with drum circles, anti-police radicals, but mostly well-meaning League of Women’s Voter style goo goo liberals who wanted to stop cuts to education, generally liked police, and wanted publicly financed campaigns. In LA, Occupy campsites were full of homeless people and radicals who hated the LAPD.
In DC, there were two Occupy Wall Street camps, with professional careerist liberals at one and a more authentic and ragged crew at the other. Charles Davis wrote about it at the time, noting that “people paid to elect Democrats are some of the most active participants at the McPherson Square camp.” The action committee of that camp included “employees of the SEIU’s Washington lobbying office,” and used their platform to sign up Occupy Wall Street DC for an “upcoming “national day of action” sponsored by none other than the SEIU, MoveOn.org and Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream. The last such “day of action” resulted in the SEIU/Occupy DC rally at the KeyBridge calling on “obstructionists in Congress” to boost infrastructure spending — by passing Obama’s jobs bill, of course.” Jones is a former White House staffer and current CNN entertainer pundit
That’s what protests in DC often are, a nod to the monuments of authority and the kabuki that protesters offer to that authority. Occupy Wall Street DC was just keeping within this tradition. There are other parts of the tradition, such as members of Congress or high profile American intellectuals or ‘activists’ engaging in the rhythms of nominal law-breaking. Chaining oneself to the White House fence, for example, is an act of public relations as much as it is civil disobedience, and there are well-understood mechanisms for the Park Service police to negotiate protesters before the action occurs. Members of Congress sometimes get arrested in an act of PR most recently for immigration reform, similar to how they’ll try food stamps for a week. It’s not that these kinds of gimmicky theatrical tricks are wrong, or ineffective, since theatricality is one of the essential cornerstones of politics. It’s that they are professionalized. Yes, these people get loaded into cop cars with handcuffs, or yes they have signs, but it’s not an authentic expression of anything except one faction of elites trying to embarrass another faction of elites. The cost of the action is low — no one really thinks those members would end up in jail for any length of time. Often these tactics are used for a good cause, but this cause is a usually specific policy ask that only a group of professionals could actually formulate. The March on Washington during the civil rights era was different, but that was decades ago. Now there’s a “March on Washington” industry.
Anyway, these were good reasons for us to ignore what we saw. Before dinner we saw a small group gathering, and as I wrote before, we didn’t think much of it. After dinner, we began walking to the movie theater, and we kept hitting this same group. Only it had grown dramatically. It was now a raucous protest of roughly a thousand young people shouting “No Justice No Peace”, “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” and “Racist Cops”. It looked like it had been organized, such as it was, by a fringe group, the ANSWER Coalition, whose members like to march, and tend to hold protests all the time. But ANSWER is not taken seriously by elites because they are not understood as representing any real constituency group. It’s a weird inverse careerism of DC, they exist and their role in the ecosystem is to not be taken seriously. “Oh that’s just ANSWER” is useful in and of itself as a guidepost for DC denizens of what to think about and what to ignore.
But this was different, even though there were a few ANSWER people. The protesters clearly didn’t have permits, and they were marching, shouting and screaming. There was no media angle, and no clear ask. It was done on a Saturday night, when no one’s going to report on it. Still, protesters were blocking traffic in a heavily trafficked part of town, Chinatown near the Verizon center, lots of restaurants, and one of two major movie theaters in DC (the other being in the far glitzier Georgetown area). Cops were driving behind and ahead of them, clearly allowing them space to march. Young kids out to club and party nearby were getting into it, since the protesters looked like them and it was about Ferguson, which they had heard about and could relate to.
We followed along for a bit. The protest was more than a thousand people, and they were young and black and white and full of iphones and Androids and video cameras. Perhaps ANSWER had called for the rally, but this was not 20 people holding neatly printed signs. It was a party and a protest. It was joyful. Authentic. I had never seen anything like this in DC. The kids who were marching had time to march on Saturday night, not because that was the best time their PR agency had recommended, but because they are young and Saturday night is when you are free to be who you are, you are free to party and dance and shout. I don’t know if the press was there. None of my friends or colleagues had heard of the march, before or after it happened. But the people driving by, who were stopped in an unexpected traffic jam but still were honking their horns in support, they saw it. Thousands of people, not necessarily politicians or media people, but working class black and white young people out to have a good time on their day off saw it.
The bullshit careerism of DC, wherein civil rights groups from the 1960s sign on to corporate campaigns to protect funding sources from oil or telecom interests, was nowhere to be found. This was different. This was out of the spotlight of the elites, or so they thought. But in reality, it wasn’t, any more than church services are out of the spotlight. Because real protest is about community, about collective belief. It lets people know they are not alone, that their beliefs are real, valid, and that they can express themselves in solidarity with others. It’s raw, real, and beautiful.
And as we were about to turn to catch our movie, I saw an old fat white couple on the side of the road, as the protest went by. The 60 something year old man was wearing a salmon-colored collared shirt and light blue shorts, with his socks pulled up to his knees. His wife was matronly, the perfect Republican partner. He had a belly, indicating he was getting up there in years, but also that he had some discipline throughout his life. He could have been a former General, a former politician, or executive. This man turned to a camera held by one of the protesters, and said “I’ve been Republican all my life, and I worked in the White House for Reagan in the 1980s. And we think you are absolutely right.” Then he and his wife put their hands in the air and said “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” The crowd cheered.
