Starting Anew.

Shiva vs. the self.

It has recently occurred to me that I have been grievously mistaken about the proper way to conduct a human life.

I owe an apology to many people I have injured in my foolishness. I have been blind.

I am going to fix this.

Happy New Year everyone.

Giant Corporations Threaten Political Speech Online

On Friday, the Media and Democracy Coalition stood with SEIU, the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, Healthcare for America Now, small business owners, Greenpeace, PennEnvironment, AFSCME, MoveOn, Change to Win, the Sierra Club, and many other groups in denouncing the regressive policies of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at its meeting in Philadelphia.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been fighting healthcare reform, climate change legislation, and President Obama's attempt to guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of expression online. I spoke to warn my fellow organizers - and all those concerned about freedom of speech - about the growing threat from the giant corporations that control the Internet, and the need to make net neutrality the law. My remarks are below; please go to SavetheInternet.com for more information.

Will the Birthplace of American Democracy Kill Freedom on the Internet?

Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, of Erie.

This is almost impossible to believe - but it's actually true.

About a month ago, the Obama administration announced its intent to write policy that would protect, by law, the freedom that has allowed the Internet to grow and flourish.

It's no joke that such protection is needed. Repression of the Internet by the corporations that control it has already started.

Last month, Apple told a healthcare reform group that they wouldn't carry a healthcare reform app on their AT&T network for 30 million iPhones because it was "politically charged"...

...two years ago, it was Verizon refusing to transmit text messages from NARAL Pro-choice America.

...and in 2007, in the most famous case of all, the Comcast Corporation blocked Internet users from sending the Bible.

As with most other good things that the Obama administration is trying to do, this has been lost in a flood of lobbyists, all arguing that having unchecked corporate power over the most vital part of our economy, political life, social networks, communication tools, reference libraries, and grassroots organizing would be really great for America. (I have cross posted a great piece by Jason Rosenbaum below explaining this in more detail).

Last Friday, 72 Democratic house members signed on to a letter agreeing with the lobbyists.

Among them were members from the great state of Pennsylvania, where American democracy was invented and the Bill of Rights was written - ensuring freedom of speech, freedom to assemble - all of the democratic powers that the Internet magnifies for millions more.

Here's who came out against the future of the Internet last week:

Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper
Rep. Chris Carney
Rep. Allyson Schwartz
Rep. Chaka Fattah
Rep. Tim Holden
....AND Representative Bob Brady - in whose district sits the National Constitution Center, the Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin's first printing press, and pretty much all of the intellectual and moral heritage we are so very quickly as a nation flushing down the toilet.

The rules being written now will shape the future direction of the Internet over the next 20 years. It either can remain a village: fun, chaotic, free, humble, an experimental and educational space ... or turn into something that looks much more like a suburban strip mall: soulless, commercial, and cold.

I believe that Congress wants to protect the Internet. But they have a lot of pressure on them right now.

And they need to hear from you.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Crossposted at Fire Dog Lake:

A Very Odd Letter from Democrats and Telecom Lobbyists on Net Neutrality


A very odd letter from Democrats and telecom lobbyists on net neutrality
By: Jason Rosenbaum Saturday October 17, 2009 1:00 pm
On Thursday, 72 Democrats sent a letter to the Chairman of the FCC, Julius Genachowski. The letter concerns net neutrality, which, according to the Chairman, is set to be enshrined as the FCC’s official policy.

The letter is very odd, especially if you’re not well versed in telecom lobbyist lingo. It lays out “concerns” relating to net neutrality that really don’t make much sense.

The heart of the letter reads:

As the FCC embarks on its much anticipated rulemaking addressing the subject of “net neutrality,” we therefore urge the Commissioner to carefully consider the full range of potential consequences that government action may have on network investment. We are confident that an objective review of the facts will reveal the critical role that competition and private investment have played — and of necessity will continue to play — in building robust broadband networks that are safe, secure and open. In light of the growth and innovation in new applications that the current regime has enabled, as compared to the limited evidence demonstrating any tangible harm, we would urge you to avoid tentative conclusions which favor government regulation.

Clearly, these Members of Congress are urging the Commissioner not to adopt net neutrality standards. But the argument they’re making is very curious. They point to the innovation that drove the creation and adoption of the Internet and broadband technologies as a reason to keep government regulation out of the picture.

On the surface, this might be convincing. After all, the Internet has grown up just fine without these regulations, why would we need them now. That is, until you realize that net neutrality is already the de-facto law of the land.

Right now, we have net neutrality in deed if not word. The FCC has enforced the provision, too, as Chairman Genachowski explained:

We’ve already seen some clear examples of deviations from the Internet’s historic openness. We have witnessed certain broadband providers unilaterally block access to VoIP applications and implement technical measures that degrade the performance of peer-to-peer software distributing lawful content. We have even seen one service provider deny users access to political content.

And as many members of the Internet community and key Congressional leaders have noted, there are compelling reasons for concern about even greater challenges to openness in the future, including reduced choice in the Internet service provider marketplace and an increase in the amount of Internet traffic, which has fueled a corresponding need to manage networks sensibly.

The rise of serious challenges to the traditional operation of the Internet puts us at a crossroads. We could see technology used to shut doors to entrepreneurs instead of opening them. The spirit of innovation stifled. A full and free flow of information compromised.

Or we could take steps to preserve a free and open Internet, helping to ensure a future of opportunity, prosperity, and the vibrant flow of information and ideas.

I believe we must choose to safeguard the openness that has made the Internet a stunning success. That is why today, I delivered a speech announcing that the FCC will be the smart cop on the beat when it comes to preserving a free and open Internet.

In other words, the Internet grew up to be the amazing tool it is today precisely because net neutrality reigned. Recently, telecom companies have started to change that.

In this light, the 72 Democrats who signed this letter don’t have much of an argument. They correctly note that the Internet has grown up well in the open platform it was given, a platform that includes net neutrality. And then they proceed to argue against making these rules formal. It makes no sense…

…until you consider the lobbyists.


As Free Press notes:

The big phone and cable companies have launched an all-out assault on Capitol Hill to try to stop Net Neutrality. They’ve hired hundreds of lobbyists, spent tens of millions of dollars, and unleashed sleazy Astroturf groups to mislead politicians, distort the facts, and resurrect long-debunked myths.

The bad news is that these dirty and deceitful tactics appear to be working on a few people who should know better.

This afternoon, several dozen Democrats sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission asking them to walk away from their plans to protect Net Neutrality.

Their letter parrots telco talking points — which had to come from somewhere, and it certainly wasn’t from the more than 1.6 million people who have signed a petition in support of Net Neutrality.

This is a campaign by telecom lobbyists to block net neutrality from being preserved, using a false talking point about increased regulation. And yes, these Democrats really should know better, especially people like Jared Polis, who’s trying to have it both ways by defending this letter and saying he supports net neutrality.

It is because of net neutrality that we have blogs like this one. It’s because of net neutrality that we have Google, YouTube, Facebook, and all the other sites we take for granted every day. And there’s nothing wrong with the FCC making net neutrality a formal rule so this innovation can continue into the future.

Sign the petition supporting net neutrality and watch out for that telecom spin.

This Week in WTF is this?!?

You know, I love it here. You know, I hate it here. You know, I am really lucky to be here and be doing this. You know, why the hell did I decide to get into politics. You know, I am lucky just to have a job. You know, I am cursed, I am cursed cursed cursed. You know, I have never been happier in my life. You know, I was so much happier when I was 22 and waiting tables. You know, it’s just going to get worse, all of it. You know, my life is going to get better and better every year until I die. You know you know you know you know no no no you don’t know. You don’t know anything at all. Anything. At. All.

1. Hospice. The word ‘hospice.’ WTF is this??!? Is this a made-up word? Is this another motherfucking made-up word? Is this a word that was made up to sound just a little bit like ‘hospital’ to avoid talking about the end of life? What kind of person would make up a new word like that? A lying word like that? What kind of person would make up a word to cover the truth? What kind of person would sin so fundamentally against the nature of language – that being, communication – that they would make up a word to avoid communicating?

2. Lyrics. Lyrics being a lot harder than music. WTF is this?!?!? Why are lyrics so much harder than music? So our little cadre – the Impromptu Task Force to Inject Hilarity into Technology Policy – we have been writing some songs about broadband. So inspired by Mary Alice's AMC-side stylings, I get into my head the word ‘BROADband’ to the refrain of ‘Roxanne’ by the Police.

“Hey guys!” I say. “We should write lyrics to the Sting song…broad-band/You don’t have to turn on the red light/turn on the red light…walk the pipes for money...something like that!”

But what I discovered is, the lyrics don’t just follow. Writing lyrics is really really hard, especially if you already think of an overlay to a tune. We sat at Busboys and Poets on the last night of Knowledge Exchange and tried, and it was very difficult to do, regardless of the amount of red wine consumed.

“Broadband… you want to watch YouTube all night…”

“Broadband…it’s not a privilege it’s a right…ever since I knew ya, I want to download to ya…”

“I think upload sounds better than download.”

“Yeah, it’s dirtier. You know: I wanna UP load to ya (Marvin Gaye vocal thrust)”

“We can’t think about broadband as a prostitute. We should think about her as a prude, and she should spread her love with everyone?"

At this point, Dan opens a GoogleDoc of lyrics… but lyrics are still hard, WTF.

3. The incredible police repression at the G-20. WTF is this!?!

4. Elliot Smith, currently playing in the Big Bear café as I write this. Still, Elliot Smith. Still. WTF is this?!?!?

5. “Death!” said Lauren Townsend. “What is that? What is that?!”

6. The trailer for 2012. WTF is this?!? Another movie about the end of the world, with a black President. In the last shot of the trailer, the giant destroyer U.S.S. John F. Kennedy falls on top of the White House. WTF is this?!?

7. According to the Washington Post, the Democratic Party is having a hell of a time raising money from rich people because of the ‘extreme anti-business tone of the current administration and Congress.’ WTF is this?!?

8. Amalia Deloney’s passionate speech about communications rights and oppression of poor people under that bigass American flag in a hearing room in the Rayburn building. I think this is an anti-WTF is this!??!

9. Everyone in this coffeeshop has a computer on their table. Everyone. WTF is this?!?

10. Ship-to-shore radio. My grandfather - he was a Communications officer in the Navy for 8 years – he took my hand, and he put it over the two metal nails under his skin above his chestplate. “Feel that,” he said. “That’s the heart transplant.

“I’ve been through hell,” he said, and he stared at me, and I had never seen so far into his eyes. “Two wars. My friends, shot. I’ve been through hell.”

WTF is this?!?

Hannah

Gotta get back to writing!

see more Lol Celebs


I gotta start writing more again! Too much stress, unfocused, too much to do, etc. I haven't even started guitar lessons yet.

Lest Ye Forget the Tale of the Zombie Budget

A couple of weeks ago I got an impassioned email plea from a group called Save Our Safety Net. “The Washington city budget faces massive cuts that would do the worst damage to the poorest members of our community!” it said. “Call council and say that the city needs to raise taxes!”

The email had a laundry list of, indeed, last-ditch social service organizations that keep people from literally dying on the streets. It was horrible. So I, barely in the city a couple of months, did what I was supposed to do: went to the rally, lobbied city council. I signed the petition.

“You know, I just moved here from Philly,” I told one of the organizers. “We just went through this. Same horror movie: lost revenue, no political will to raise taxes, and so on.”

“How did it turn out?”

“Well, actually, it has been rather a miraculous thing so far. The community really came together, even altered the budget process itself. We ended up forcing the city to raise taxes with an administration that was never going to do it, through the most democratic process I’ve ever seen in a city government.”

“Wow.”

“Except that, despite the fact it started in 2008, it’s not actually done…”

The Philly budget saga has been going on three seasons now. Winter, spring, summer…and now, it threatens to stretch into the fall. There is a Republican state Senator in Pennsylvania named Dominic Pileggi whose greatest legislative achievement last year was blocking health care reform that would have insured 42,000 impoverished Pennsylvanians, and this year, starving the Philadelphia government by blocking approval of the sales tax increase that would keep the city operating. He should not be in public office at all.

I get very defensive of projects I have worked on. I am mad about this. Amnesia sets in really fast – and it’s been a busy year – but all you have to do it rewind to the chill dark of last December to remember the civic mood in Philadelphia when Mayor Nutter came out with the first pools-and-libraries cuts. I have never seen so many depressed progressives in my life. Really bad bar graphs in winter. That Obama/Phillies high wearing off reaaal fast, and those thirty seconds that Nutter had to prove to the grandmothers of West Philadelphia that he was going to be different from all the other mayors falling off the shot clock.

Remember that?

I was talking to a libraryista this week, and he was going on about Nutter pro-business grumble grumble nothing ever changes…and I realized that people are already forgetting everything that happened after that.

So I am going to sketch out a brief chronology to remind you:

- Mayor Nutter announces budget cuts
- Friends of the Free Library begin campaign
- Firefighters begin campaign
- Lawsuit filed to keep libraries open
- Mayor holds disastrous town halls where people show up, and scream at him
- Mayor holds PhillyStat, round two of town halls, where people show up again, I think these were a little more sedate.
- Coalition to Save Libraries formed, bringing together library advocates, community groups, and other endangered city services
- Bowing to pressure from Philadelphians, Mayor designs and then holds round three of town halls with facilitated process designed by the Penn civic-engagement DJs to take public input to design the city budget.
- Despite deeply ingrained and not unwarranted distrust of their elected officials, hundreds of people show up AGAIN to design the city budget in these fora
- Coalition to Save Essential Services formed, which was a different yet overlapping Venn diagram from the Coalition to Save the Libraries
- Library lawsuit successful, happy New Year!
- New branch of FFL forms in West Philly as a result of the organizing - I think there might be others. At any rate, many branches of this organization were strengthened by the fight.
- Mayor redesigns budget, including tax increases initially including sales and property tax increase.
- (here’s when I skipped town, so my knowledge of the remainder of the story is a little thin, and needs to be augmented)
- Philadelphians find out that property taxes = bad. Again, they take the time and make the effort to organize, go to city council, lobby, go to the umpteenth rally.
- City council hearings result in more participation
- City council cancels the property tax increase
- Mayor rewrites budget
- Mayor sends budget to Harrisburg. Dom Pileggi sits on it.
- Mayor calls for rallies to put pressure on Harrisburg and YET AGAIN AMAZING PEOPLE SHOW UP AND USE THEIR VOICES, including a bazillion social service organizations, taking day trips out to Media.
- …and this is the quick version.

This has all been amazing. This actually all happened. Hundreds and even thousands of people worked very hard to make all this happen. The amount of learning that has gone on by so many people who had no idea what a real estate transfer tax was has been pretty incredible. It’s the kind of thing that changes a city forever. I tell people in D.C. how proud I am of Philly, that we decided as a city what the budget should look like, that we chose to come together and make sacrifices in order to keep homeless shelters and HIV treatment clinics open.

Just the effort required to make this happen is beyond belief, sometimes. Civic engagement is really hard and really time-consuming. People who aren’t political weirdos actually would rather be doing anything other than showing up to a town hall and talking about L&I; this shit has been going on so long, organizers have had to tear people away from Eagles, Sixers, and Phillies games consecutively. And they did it.

Comparatively speaking, our nation’s capital is completely disempowered. Its the capital of the richest country on the planet, and here we were in the DC office building at 13th and Pennsylvania, begging them to not cut the Grandparents Caregivers program! Apparently DC has, for the last 20 years, allowed national and multinational corporations doing business in the District to get out of paying a portion of their taxes. It was like Philly for many years.

“That’s ridiculous,” I told the chief of staff to my city councilman, Councilman Graham, Ward 1. “This is D.C. It would take the Apocalypse for Starbucks to close its stores in Adams Morgan.”

“For years, we couldn’t get anyone to build anything here,” he said. “Getting a Starbucks in your neighborhood – well, that’s when you know you’ve made it.” He smiled.

I was shocked at his assessment of his own district, and its potential power. Ward 1 includes Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights, and most of the other really expensive real estate in the district. If there had been a bad financial history for the city in the past, there had been no recalculation since. The city government of Washington, D.C. is afraid. It doesn’t even get self-determination – they face a possible APileggaclypse every year with the federal government! Cities have been beat down for a long time, and even with Mr. Urban President, there are still gonna be a lot more bad bar graphs ahead until things change.

It’s time cities stopped being afraid. Cities just need to figure out a way to own it again. And soon.

----

The DC budget fight, which really just begun as a public campaign a month ago, is so differently aligned that the comparisons almost can’t be made. I will write them down eventually though, because there is something to learn. One thing that they do have that Philly lacks is a really smart policy thinktank – the DC Fiscal Policy Institute– that is an appendage of the federal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, whence came Peter Orzag. It’s one benefit of having the federal policy class here. There’s also a much more well developed local blogosphere here than in Philly - but with an equally bad digital divide, which still hampers organizing in both cities.

Mais…. ou sont les operatifs?

I’m going to get involved because I miss city politics. It’s the antidote to cynicism, the political space where one can best see the effects of good work – even if cities are the least financially capable, often, to accomplish their own goals. I feel terrible for all these kids on the Hill, little mites in a gigantic federal power structure that they can barely understand, let alone affect. A lot of the people who come here have no experience with local politics – they are often suburbanites, or come straight out of grad school.

There is no reason, really, that they couldn’t learn. And take it back when they go home later. That would really change things, long term.

The Future of America, and How to Stop It

So I was on the Chinatown bus from DC to Philly last Monday, and I was reading a book called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, by a guy named Jonathan Zittrain. It is one of those required reading tomes for most people who work in my field, and Zittrain is one of those required panelists that cycle around in what you could almost call a karmic wheel from one conference to the next – that is, could almost call a karmic wheel, were anyone ever to actually break the cycle of panelist death and rebirth, achieve nirvana, and be freed, in a blinding flash of light from behind a cloth-covered table at some convention center, the lav mic left behind dropping gamely into the empty seat.

Apparently, that has yet to happen.

The book is a great explanation of how the Internet works and what flavors it comes in; I suspect that there is going to be a really scary part about information control, commercialization, etc. later on in the book, that will spur me on to further action. But so far, I have only gotten to the fun parts, like the case of Captain Crunch. Before there were computer hackers, there were ‘phone phreakers’ – people who hacked the phone system.

This guy Captain Crunch was a man who spent years jerking at the skirts of Ma Bell, and whose greatest phreak was accomplished with a whistle found in a box of said cereal. The AT&T phone system was not digital, but analog, which means that you hacked something not with 100110010, but with actual sound. Captain Crunch discovered that these cereal-box whistles, when blown into the phone at the end of a call, signaled to the AT&T system that the line had been reset, and then was free to call anywhere in the world for free and talk as long as he wanted to.

So I was reading this book, and getting a little sleepy, and thinking about what I was going to do the next day at the Media Mobilizing Project, and maybe feeling a little bit of a smarty pants for being able to toss around this new term ‘generative network’ in some work context down the road – maybe even Tweet it in some adorable little bon mot – when I look up and see the enormous sign that says “HARLEM TURN RIGHT”. Then there’s one for BROOKLYN. Then if there’s any doubt that I am not actually in Philadelphia, there’s TRI-BOROUGH BRIDGE… and so on. And so on. It’s about 10 pm. Shit.

“Yeah uh Lauren, I don’t really think I need that place to stay tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks though. I just…overshot my destination a bit,” I say, blushing and sweating into my smartphone. “Yeah. I got on the wrong bus and I’m in New York. Yeah, I’m such a winner.” Pakistani and Chinese families exit the bus en masse, secure in their own sanity and their survival instincts, warm, pudgy, holding white plastic bags of ingredients. “Yeah. I know. Well actually you are right. It is kind of a cool thing. Yeah. Hell yeah. I’d been wanting to come up here. I don’t have to be back until the morning anyway. I’ll just wander around!”

At this point the night turned into an all-night kaleidoscope, which runs through the wasabi peas I ate in the terminal, through a bar called the Redhead which served me the oldest cocktail in America, through the Bowery Poetry Club (I had no idea they still did that in New York), through a congee restaurant (congee is like Chinese grits), then the last few hours, where, as I end up doing over and over again between the hours of 4 and 7 in the morning whenever I am in NYC, I sit on the street with homeless guys, smoke cigarettes, talk, and watch the sun come up over the city.

There are more people living on the streets of New York now than I have seen in 15 years. They are almost all black men. They are lined up on the sidewalk in the Bowery in row after row of crumpled cardboard boxes like an IKEA warehouse of human beings. (Model # ANTHRO). “It’s just the recession,” one guy said to me. Fair enough. But New York is where all our sins come out in the wash, I think. It is the Empire State, after all.

For all of the ‘social conditions’ that lead to ‘homelessness’, these mass encampments are very much a form of protest, perhaps not as political as Tent Cities, but defiant in their own way. If the city of New York – and our culture in general - is going to treat poor black men like trash, then these guys are out there on the street to confront it, parked underneath the pale hipsters laughing and scurrying by, their very presence saying yeah, if we are trash, then we are going to be here, we’re not going to let you forget it, we are going to be the wave of human trash that engulfs this city, engulfs the tourists, engulfs the financial sector until the entire island is buried under a tidal wave of human throwaways. Their very actions are a form of witness. All I can do is treat people with respect, and hear what truth they have to offer, since between 4 and 7 in New York, I am homeless too. I consider this a particularly important stop on my listening tour of the universe. No better place to really discuss healthcare reform - or the fate of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

At any rate, the guys I hung out with were way more worried about me (especially once they’d heard the story), and called me on my cell several times to make sure I got back to Pennsylvania. Survival instincts are hard to define.

The two days before, I had been in Detroit. I didn’t get to see much of it when I was there. However, I was fortunate enough to land in the tangle of leftie community organizers who are trying to cope with the massive shocks that the entire city is going through (and who had the political dirt).

I had no idea how bad it was. Detroit high schools have a 75 percent dropout rate. But from some of the problems and solutions I heard being discussed, it became clear to me that Detroit is very much a preview, a dress rehearsal of sorts, for the coming long-arc collapse of the American economy over the next 50 years. My lifetime. I don’t think I am over-exaggerating in any way to say that it will be the unique challenge of my generation to determine the nature with which we confront this coming storm – whether we remember and uphold values of community, sharing, love, and enlightenment, or if we descend into, even more than we already have, into selfishness, individuality, violence, and brutality. The immensity of this task is almost too much for me to think about, sometimes. I cannot say that I am not scared for us. But we have no choice. This is our home.

As pessimistic as this all sounds, I want to write this so I can hold up Detroit like a candle. I think there is a lot of darkness there, but I think what people are doing is kind. The spirit with which they are confronting their region’s economic cratering is to move towards their neighbors, not away from them, and it is centered on what is good in life.

If that is the epicenter, then I have hope.

Who knew? The Motor City!

NASA Releases First Images of Noctilucent Clouds

Story here.

Allied Media Conference

This weekend I was fortunate enough to go to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit.

There are a lot of conferences in this world, but I think this one is a bit different. It is probably best described as a spiritual experience packaged and arriving in the form of a conference. It is a conference where all the attendants feel - and verbalize - that their art is a form of responsibility towards one's community... folks who exhibit in their art love for the human race, via an unshakable commitment to truth. Everyone there was a teacher of some kind or another, and I was very fortunate to have learned from them. It was true generosity of spirit.

It has taken me a long time to understand that telling the truth is an act of love. For a long time, I thought that NOT telling the truth was an act of love; such are the conditions of so many families, and I think that silence is seen as something that makes the daily small brutalities of our lives supposedly easier.

I am beginning to realize that there should be no line between personal truth standards and popular media truth standards.
The media as it exists now can only be counteracted by an astonishingly brave and powerful and simply unending onslaught of truth - for every violent story they want to tell, we must tell 10 more that are human, and warm, and real. (E.g. the TV show "Nip/Tuck." - how many other stories are going to have to be told to counteract that show? "Transformers 2"? It's all massive cultural damage.)

Thankfully, it's happening. I want to talk about all of it, but right now I am tired and should sleep, and will just post something charming and funny and smart, made by a group of hypercool kids in New York City called Global Action Project.

It's the season finale of "America's Next Top Immigrant."

How to Document your Life, Part I.

“I don’t understand the impulse other people have to document their own lives so much,” I said to a friend. “It’s ridiculous. These online photo sites and all this incessant scrap-booking. Why take all that time out of actually living?”

“When you’re older, it matters,” he said. “I don’t know, but... it just becomes more important.”

Hm. Yeah. It seemed too broad of a generalization. But I’ve been thinking about it since.
Documenting one's life. How does one document one’s own life? Does one, and how, and why?

How can one have the clarity, will, and insight to curate the permanent exhibit of one’s own story? And who are the museum goers?

How much is picture … how much is sound … how much is written?

When do you let others speak about you – and is the act of choosing your character witnesses dishonest?

And isn’t it what I am doing right now?

As I write this, I am sitting outside on a deck overlooking the inlet between peninsular Florida and Clearwater Island. It is night, 78 degrees, my feet are bare, and behind me is a string of lights in the shape of multicolored beach balls. If I wanted to document this particular night, it would be difficult. It sounds simple: I went to dinner with my extended family at a seafood restaurant in St. Pete’s two days before my cousin Jennifer (a wedding planner running her own wedding) is to marry the man to whom she is already married.

There is a large underwater iceberg of passive aggression and cultural conflict going on but those are not the things to document, for me. Such things make an ugly haiku. The things I would like to take down are: Lindsay ordering coconut shrimp, Mark telling me about the healing side of the financial services industry, Josh suggesting we go to Crabby Bill’s seafood restaurant on the night when Uncle Bill was, indeed, a little crabby, and no one making a crack about it at dinner; and the crickets, now, at night.

Most of all, I think I would want to tape the sound of the crickets.

My life is so salty and Ferris wheel and grainy and it speeds back into the past so quickly, like the wake from a ship. I am actually beginning to argue with the entire idea that one should document.




There is this polished stone fossil on my desk called an ammonite, an ancient cephalopod that swam around in the ocean that covered the Sahara Desert 350 million years ago. Now its remains sit on a desk in the office of the Media and Democracy Coalition on 19th Street NW. Whenever I get too worried about some burning question such as “Is the IPhone ‘Wanker’ app going to replace the old print business model for pornography?” all I have to do is look at that little curly petrified bastard sitting on my desk. And I breathe in, and breathe out, because sharing office space with something 350 million years old has a way of putting one's woes in perspective.

In Basin and Range, John McPhee writes about the behavior and psychology of geologists. One of the most amazing things in the book is this: most of what we know about the geological history of the planet comes from the corpses of the plants and animals that died and were preserved in the various layers of the earth. Their remains have allowed us, as humans, shuffling around with our little brushes and magnifying glasses, to discover which layer of sandstone is as old as the other - they move around too much to easily count. It takes the shape of a creature to match it in time.

The other completely amazing things McPhee writes about is the attitude that geologists develop toward time. Geologists, as an effect of their profession, become almost shamanic in their attitude towards time: they transcend it, in fact. Having to think, day in and day out, week after week, in scales of hundreds of millions of years completely alters their attitude towards the importance of their own lives...towards human civilization itself, he writes.

“In some ways, talking about (deep time) makes you know that your life is a blip, nothing,” one of the geologists says.

“But in another way... it's like you live forever.”

All Philadelphians Should Have the Internet. Period.

Thank you Smithsonian, I got to see these guys

The Lesson of the Wave

I have a new place and I don’t live here yet. It has golden walls and I don’t even own a couch yet. There is too much running around and too much fighting all the time. The books are stacked up to the roof and there is not even a bookcase. I left my car in South Philly somewhere and I watch Parking Wars and pray it’s not been towed or stolen. It is not, as they say, “street legal” here, and I don’t think I consider myself that either. I am definitely not “street legal,” although I want to be, and I bought my first go-go CD yesterday.

I spent most of the Fourth of July weekend sitting on plastic chairs listening to storytellers older than myself. I am in research mode. I am reading John McPhee books so I can learn how to write about the Internet because he rocked the abstract.

I have never had to spend so much time absorbing and translating information. My friend who is one of the best writers in the movement told me it took a YEAR for him to even learn to speak coherently about the communications industry; I am at month seven, and growing mighty impatient.

I thought going to the Folklife festival would be a tonic of sorts, because I am in need of guidance right now, and it was. One thing I am learning is that your requests are answered in the most unexpected ways, and I had the most terrifying and touching moment at one of the performance spaces called ‘The Stoop’, where the great Sonia Sanchez from her perch onstage turned and looked right at me in front of 60 people and started talking to me in front of the crowd, telling me that “you have to find time to write, dear sister, you have to carry a notebook around with you, I hated that I had to work and write in my spare time but that’s how it is, I loved my work too and it was hard, and you will find your process, dear sister, on the plane or in the airport, when you go to Peru and South Africa, you will find it, and if you don’t, please come and find me.”

And it blew me away, to be so recognized, and I was speechless, because I walk around all the time with my head in a cloud of imaginary beings, places, loves, wars, characters, drained lakes, animals, newly invented games involving rubber bands, the flotsam of words from billboards, etc etc, all of the story I tell myself in order to make my day to day non-existence a trifle more exciting. This cloud is so thick that I am in constant danger of stepping off the bridge into the river and drowning one day. (Knowing too, that, if that happened, I sure would be telling myself one hell of a story.)

Plus I thought: do I really get to go to Peru and South Africa someday?

I was in Seattle for ten days and just got back Sunday. It was such an astounding adventure I am trying to keep it with me. It was a city that lay completely under the spell of the sky and the weight of the water around it and the trees (even as far as they were in the distance – great Ent trees, some of the tallest trees on the planet).

Ferries poke back and forth across the Sound, and on one of the piers there’s a tiny hut made of bark and twigs with a sign that says “Wild Woman Coffee” where womaned by a tanned blissful being with a miniature espresso machine. There is something that all that water does to you, even in June when I went – it’s sunny then. The fish might as well be swimming down the sidewalk; I think the drunks are part fish. There are certainly a lot of watering holes.

If you are sensitive enough, you can feel the layers of a city’s history emerge in its present, and in Seattle, the wild, brutal frontier town layer – the boom town layer – is still there under the software. It might well be another country entirely – a self-sustaining economy that relies in no way on the federal government but yet creates more value for the country than any other industry.

Everybody looked so outdoorsy and they offered to take me kayaking and about half the men were licensed massage therapists and the city had a pagan parade with large floats of sea animals or comical tributes to the Seattle rain, all headed up by about two hundred naked people riding bicycles in body paint.

I went to a Mariners game with friend Steve, an expatriate New Yorker and Mets fan, and he had to explain at the beginning that it was a “family-friendly” ballpark. “You notice, something’s missing here,” he said.

I looked around. I listened.

“There are no obnoxious drunk guys!” I said. “Where are they?”

I tuned my ears for the sound of insults, grunts, boos, etc., but all that was around me was a small sea of beautiful multiethnic middle school children fiddling with their IPhones, bounded by a phalanx of men in yellow ALCOHOL ENFORCEMENT t-shirts.

“This is weird,” I said. He nodded. The middle-schoolers did a giggly wave.
Ichiro did that cool Japanese-archery flourish he puts on every swing. And the Mariners won, of course.

---

I want to say something important. I have realized something about myself and my endless love-hate relationship with my own career, and I need to write it down. All the advocating I am going to do from here on out is going to be done in the spirit of enlightenment, possibility, education, freedom, hope, and love. When fighting for something, it is easy to motivate oneself by darker emotions – anger, ego, a desire to kick (fill in the blank)’s ass. But all of that is corrosive. It is not that anger cannot be a legitimate force, but it is heavy, and it weighs you down.

There was not a hint of payback in the Obama campaign – although that campaign could have been filled with it - and that is why it was so aerodynamic. It flew. It was weightless.

When one is attempting to organize a miracle – which is really what public-interest people in my field do, and I have a couple on my plate right now – the only forces that have the power to accomplish such a thing are hope and love: love for those on behalf of whom you fight, love for the future… and boundless hope, I mean boundless unfathomable hope that humanity can turn back from the cliff on which we stand teetering and find our way back to civilization and a humane world. This kind of optimism comes close to insanity, but such are the confines of our world, and such is the need to break them.

There is no room for destruction.

These are the only transformational forces on earth. It took me so long to learn this, but it’s true, especially in a job where my primary objective is to hold up the voices of silenced multitudes so that they may sing.

The world that I am helping to create is so beautiful that I simply will not get to it if there is so much as a shred of the fog of anger drifting about me. I do not know if I am going to be successful at this, but it is important that I draw this line now. I have had it with thunderstorms and destruction. From here on out it’s waves only.

The earth turns on its axis and the moon pulls and the wind shears and you get: big beautiful blue waves. Wave… wave…wave… wave. Like the sky over DC this spring – it was like the ocean itself raining down on us. People complained, and the Washington Post ran an article on Mami Wata, but nothing truly spooky happened.

And … maybe once in a while a mild tidal wave… but no one drowns. And the boats get moved a little bit up the shore, but they are fine, and maybe some friendships are formed amongst the comically and mildly angry fishermen who must of course complain but, in the end, simply cannot curse the ocean.

And the sand on the beach is purer, and the land is quenched, and there is an abundance of seafood for all.

This... now I think that this might be a way to live.

Confirmation Hearing

I was standing in the basement of the Senate Russell building with fellow communications advocates yesterday, waiting for the Commerce Committee to bring the pain to Julius Genachowski (of which they brought very little), and my friends were complaining about how everything in our whole field is plugged up and not happening since the administration is dragging its feet about the nomination process.

And I pointed up the marble spiral staircase with a three-story queue of line-sitters paid by lobbyists to hold their spot extending to Room 253 and I said, “Well, this is it, you know. This is like pushing a stalled car and getting it going.” And thought but didn’t say, that I think a lot of really extraordinary things are going to happen soon in very rapid succession. Like a dam breaking.

Intuition is a bizarre thing, it’s so vague that I don’t even know if it’s about work, or my actual life. But I want to write it down so I can go back so I can see if I’m right. Even intuition needs verification sometimes.

I think I’m going to actually like it here. DC is just a bunch of silly rituals and everyone looks so comical and kind of touching going through them, even though they often aren’t aware of it, their little bellies hanging out over their belts, the young women in the flip flops with the many-times-reused crumply Ann Taylor bag containing their heels, the Red Line in the morning full of cut-rate Masters-of-the-Universe-in-training. All there, all waiting for one future or another to start. In just two years, you could be just as lame as Timothy Geithner is today!

I think I was wrong. We are not really running the planet – we are simply showing up for work in the most elaborately over-constructed edifice of language and money that has ever existed on Earth, and it actually prevents us from hearing the saxophonists and keyboardists and mandolin players who stand outside the Farragut North exit and play beautiful rush-hour morning music for the thousands of commuters who flow out silently to their jobs, their eyes averted, pretending to not hear so there will be no obligation to tip - a sea of cheap handbags, idealism, credit card debt, professional jealousy, anti-depressants, sunglasses, diet tips, Netflix to return, thoughts of home, and whatever solitary music they prefer to listen to on their IPods. Usually not involving saxophones.

They say, those ships, they sail into the Golden Triangle and just … vanish. They’re never heard from again. They lose all radio contact with shore.

I guess its time to reestablish.

The Flowers in the Square

Sometimes you have something that follows you around for a while, waiting for you to take notice or pay attention to it. Sometimes it’s a word, sometimes it’s an idea, sometimes it’s just a picture. For me, lately, I have been followed around by rivers. Pictures of rivers, maps of rivers, watershed maps on my wall at work. There’s a picture of the Delaware on my desktop now, but this Friday, I dreamed about the Mississippi, that of it I know.

It was a beautiful dream, like a prism made of water. It was light, light on water, during the day, summer, the part of the river with the three steel bridges up by the border with Arkansas. The riverboat casinos even, down on the Mississippi side, in the north Delta. The green. Too powerful to get in the water, always, a mighty, a massive, like a city itself in motion but instead all water. All water. More water. Move down. Move down, water. Move down, city. Move down.

Move down,
Miss
I
Sip
I.

After that dream, I figured that the River that is all rivers was trying to tell me something, and has been for a while, and it was about time I listened. On Saturday I put on cutoffs and flipflops and got on the Orange line and went straight into to the marshes around the Anacostia River here in D.C., a small patch, 77 acres of what used to be 2,000, which they had to reconstruct from the ravages of progress.

There was a grating of cheap apartment buildings all around the park, and I wandered for a good long time, but eventually I got in. I managed to stay a long time there, walking around, looking at turtles and herons, mostly left to myself; I fell asleep on the banks and was awakened by some teenage boys in canoes who I think were slightly disappointed that they hadn’t found a dead body. “Sorry to wake you up,” they said, and paddled away. I yawned and brushed off a bunch of ants, and immediately went back to sleep.

The Anacostia is a brown river swollen with all sorts of nameless sludge, but there are fish in it, some of them quite large. It’s too bad its so polluted, because it has a beautiful name, but it is not powerful enough to be feared, and it’s obvious that people regard it as a dump. Apparently it’s against the law to swim in the river in the District of Columbia! I was very troubled by this but now I have seen the water I understand. At least there is still a forest there. Best of all, I got to ride home on the Metro promiscuously covered in mud.


This year, the two floats that I saw at the Cherry Blossom Festival were the Anacostia Roller Stars, a roller skating troupe that I think survives off of childrens’ birthday parties, and a flotilla of young Maryland women in Scarlett O’Hara dresses, parasols, and bonnets.

The Anacostia Roller Stars were dressed in superhero costumes, including “ObamaMan”, an African American superhero dressed in blazing white and sporting an “O” on his chest. He was a hit. Little kids wanted to be him. Women wanted to photograph him. After ObamaMan left, the Belles of the South were the next in line, and quite the letdown.

The South is on my mind because my grandmother Angelina Josephina Cuicchi Miller is sick now, in Leland, MS, and her spirit is still very strong, more so that her body. Some people are too strong even for their own bodies to hold, and that is a hard thing. She is 78, and my dad bought her an IPod for Christmas this year on which she still listens to the Three Tenors. When I was born, in 1976, she made me a Bicentennial quilt with emblems of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall on it, and I didn’t even know what they were until I moved to Philly in 1999, and then walked by them every day.

Angie Miller ran the Leland Flower Shop for 20 years, and running a flower shop means caring in a small and beautiful way for everyone in town at the most crucial moments of their lives: births, weddings, illness, funerals. There are always divorce flowers too, of course. And Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the year, which in my family meant the day that everyone had to help Mama at the shop, and work all day, driving all over town and delivering hundreds and hundreds of roses.

It is the place where I learned that some flowers come in humidors flown overnight from Venezuela, and how to strip a rose of its thorns in 2-4 seconds, and other things, as countless as the stars in the Milky Way, the great river of light in the sky.

I still don’t know all that I have been given by this astonishing woman. I am a conduit for it but I don’t even know what it is – I don’t even understand it. It is mostly wordless, and comes and goes without name.

I would be an alchemist with it, all that I have been given; but I hardly know how. All I can do is listen, just listen to the water move.

On Unmanufacturing Consent

So my old friend from Philly Adam Fieled has asked me to "come out of literary retirement" and read at a poetry reading he is organizing of DC poets on August 8. Despite the fact that this would require me to write poetry again, which I haven't for years, I said yes, and now I have to think about what to write.

There is something a bit angelic about Adam himself - his Facebook picture has been the same for years: pallid and underfed, wearing too many layers of sweaters, as if he found the world to be something one had to bundle up against at all times.

In general, I’ve been thinking for a while that I have to find my language again. That campaign business just strangles it out of you. Control and endless testoterone and wretched egomania and bad food and a masochistic learned fear of creativity and the weird ‘fucking up your neighbors’ primary game in Philly – it’s like being a rock doomed to a life of endlessly banging into other rocks.

I think sometimes I should sit down and write down what I learned from it all, except then the thought of reliving it is distasteful. (Anne Dicker is somewhere barbequing right now, doubtlessly thinking the same thing). Sometimes in DC I talk to people who have also just arrived here, and they say things like, “oh, yeah, I got the campaign bug too!” and give me a grin, and I kind of grimace and make them go away.

I know we are all organizers, but there is a big difference between asking a Democrat to vote for Barack Obama, and asking a worker to stand for unionization when it might cost them their job. If just a few of these little puddings could get sidetracked by OFA into something else memorable (like the Dean campaign did quite admirably), then I would feel better about the future of the American left.

But then again, I’m in Washington, so I have absolutely no connection to the American left other than my brother’s feel-good earthy Palo Alto employer restarting Republic Doors and Windows, the factory where the workers had taken over after a shut down– a weird blend of 1930s communism and 2000s California ethical-business principles-cum-marketing-ploy. (For their trouble, they were mentioned in a speech by the president.) I suppose ethical business is the natural response to the historical singularity of consumer capitalism, and so it’s just another iteration.

There was hail in June today, coming down on 18th and L streets; I worried. I had had this terrible dream the night that Air France plane went down, that I was standing on the middle row of a plane in a horrible electric storm, full of terrified passengers, with lighting all around, and telling everyone to be calm, that it was going to be alright. At the time it was so real, so I feared it was foreboding of something, but then I came into work and heard on WAMU about the crash.

Resulting thoughts included a) Is it possible to hear echoes from others, in your dreams? and b) if I am clairvoyant then what the fuck am I doing in political advocacy?

Answers:
a) Yes, with the right drugs, and
b) Since I am doing communications work, it’s probably appropriate. Someday we will be able to get information directly through our skin by touching a metal pad or something. It’s gonna happen. Might as well get spooky and get ready for the future.

“Breakfast of Champions”, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about a science fiction writer, has 50 (at least) topics for science fiction books that Vonnegut himself thinks of but doesn’t bother to write.

THINKTANK RANT #1 (of many to come): One of the most amazing things I’ve seen since coming to Washington is the existence of an entire “future-projection industry”, which runs endless numbers and makes endless prognostications in order to determine what is going to happen over the next 100 years so those in power can make “informed decisions.” Water. Climate change. Oil. Agriculture. The military strength of Mongolia.

The trend became apparent to me precisely because it is in the filed of technology alone that chaos is assumed, and valued. The hilarity really ensues when you get to things like foreign policy, which covers the ‘behavior’ of ‘nation-states,’ which if I remember correctly are large clumps of really chaotic people mostly completely uncontrolled. The journals go on and on: which nation-state is eating too much or too little? Which nation-state is sick, or too religious? Which nation-state is in trouble and needs an ‘intervention’?

As a former sociology student, I don’t dispute the innate demographic needs of human beings to count and tabulate, but what’s so weird watching this vast machinery of think tanks and publications and press conferences, is that it seems so bizarrely solipsistic – so, we have written a paper on how you are running the world, and this is what’s going to happen later on after you continue to run the world a little more, and here how you can continue to get your grubby little hands on the resources you need, because if you have this projection you can point to it in a hearing and then be absolved of responsibility for your decisions. As bizarre as it is, I suppose it is an improvement on a court priesthood or consigliere.

And then again sometimes it’s worse when people ignore it.











I started reading Leaves of Grass this weekend. I decided that if I were going to write and read a poem in DC I was going to do a little riff off Whitman, since he wrote the great song of democracy, and that’s my bag.

I started reading it and I realized how much love he had for America, for every scrap of it. The whole book is just an unbelievable work of love. Our country has changed so much since then, just the fiber of it, and I don’t know what song we would sing now – or if we even have a song in us. We play video games, everything is mushy, we have soft butts in soft car seats, we don’t look out for our neighbors. Sometimes I love everybody on the whole damn miserable train platform so much I can barely look at them, which is the essential starting point of Leaves of Grass, except that how do you start writing about all of that at once?

Do you just start writing about your friends?

Maybe your friends.

Fuck.

That's Spoon River Anthology.

I hate Spoon River Anthology!

My Article on Racialicious on Hate Speech

On Media Reform and Hate Speech
June 2, 309
Racialicious.com

by Guest Contributor Hannah Miller

The media reform movement is an offshoot and part of the civil rights movement. It was born in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ initiated a lawsuit against white-owned TV stations in the South for consistently portraying African Americans in a racist manner, while refusing to show any coverage of the civil rights movement.

Because of their pressure, the FCC shut down a Mississippi TV station, stating that the power and influence that media companies have gives them the responsibility to operate with the broader public interest at heart – with special consideration given to oppressed minorities.

Since then, political pressure has been brought to bear against the FCC and Congress on a wide variety of issues: female and minority ownership of stations and publications, the dangers of consolidation of the media, the need to build public communications infrastructure like cable access stations or city-owned Internet networks, and the need for everyone to have broadband access.

The percentage of our time that the American public spends with media has been steadily climbing for 40 years, and with that, its influence over our lives. The media is our environment, and the battle I am engaged in is over the nature of this environment: whether it is an environment in which ordinary people have a voice – or whether we are to passively absorb content controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Whether the media is democratic, and reflects a variety of voices.

Why is this important? I will take an extreme example of the media’s power, when it is used by one group over another. In 1994, radio stations played a significant role in the Rwandan genocide, broadcasting hate-filled rants and giving directions to how to kill Tutsis, resulting in a genocide that killed approximately 500,000 Tutsis in 100 days.

Continued here.

When the Devil Shows Up on Your Doorstep...

Two weeks ago, on a Saturday night at 1 a.m., my entire neighborhood was torn from sleep by the sound of a massive explosion, followed by the deafening sound of grinding metal. Hearing this, I jumped out of bed, fumbled for the light, slammed a door open, and with most of the inhabitants of my house and the rest of the neighborhood, ran downstairs.

It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life – being jerked out of from exhausted sleep by what sounded like a bomb going off, then the sounds of an entire neighborhood flipping on light switches, opening windows and doors, afraid of what they would see, while all the while, the huge grinding sound continues, as if huge robots are waging war above the nighttime rowhomes of Petworth.

A 17-year-old boy had stolen a car from Kennedy and raced it south down 7th Street NW, losing control about half a block above Farragut and then careening into a parked Acura, a parked Jaguar, a parked Toyota and two other parked cars, before flipping over and exploding in a fireball about 30 feet from the home of Peggy Watson’s house, where I have been living.

The 17-year-old boy had been thrown from the car and was smeared across the road; his 15-year-old friend who had been in the car with him but who had gotten out alive sat on the curb and watched his friend dying. The flames of the still-burning car flickered in the eyes of the neighbors, some of whom held each other, some of whom cried, waiting for the police and firetrucks to arrive. At the end of the street, three men watched the car burn from the wheelchairs to which gunfights had consigned them from the rest of their lives. The guys in the wheelchairs were all under 30. “It’s like Vietnam,” Peggy said.

“This is the summer, here,” Peggy said. “This is just the beginning.”

Peggy Watson’s house is a little like a stone fortress on the corner of 7th and Farragut NW. She is a little bit of the block captain and unofficial mom of the neighborhood. She has two cats, one of which is named Hannah. I don’t know how she holds it together. This horrible scene is only the most spectacular of the things I witnessed there.

I have lived in a lot of places, and not all of them have been what is called ‘nice’, but I was completely unprepared for the stewpot of dehumanization, racial animosity, sexual harassment, mental illness, and just sheer hopelessness in the part of DC that I happened to wash up on. I was consumed by it, because I am always attuned to my environment, and I soak it up.

One of the survival instincts I lack is the ability to disregard other people’s pain; the 70/71 bus (which runs down Georgia Avenue, which I would take to work for the first two months of my existence here) is a moving holding tank of pathos and despair. My second week in town, while waiting for the bus in the morning, I started talking to a man who was waiting at my stop, at Farragut and Georgia. He was about 45, and had been waiting there all night looking for his teenage daughter, who had gotten into drugs and run away from home. He showed me a picture of her and asked if I’d seen her, and I said no, and he said, “Of course, she probably looks different now, she’s probably lost weight.” He had moved to DC with his family from Detroit for a job, and he regretted ever coming here, because the toxins had gotten to his daughter, and he was powerless to do anything about it. The bus pulled up and I had to get on, so I cried a little bit and gave him a hug and wished him good luck and watched him alone on the bench, from the window of the bus.

I have to write this down because I don’t know what else to do. The things I have seen are so awful: the girl’s wrist, for example. There was a tiny, 13-year-old pregnant girl in my neighborhood, and her wrist was as thin as a pencil, she was so underfed. Or - one time going at home at night on the bus, we had to pull over, and everyone had to get off and walk because someone on the back of the bus had literally shit on the floor of the bus.

A community service for the boy who’d died in the car wreck was held a week after the accident, right in front of my house. There were people who walked away from the service and made drug deals two blocks down the street in the early evening sunset. Peggy Watson got up in front of the crowd – she’s lived there for 20 years - and gave a speech that was an act of love. I was very proud of her. “Don’t let anyone tell you aren’t beautiful because you are black,” she said. “We are all beautiful. Don’t let anyone put you down.”

Five days after the accident, I went with Lynda to a happy hour and panel about the DC local blogger community put on by the Next American City magazine. I had never seen this magazine before, even though it is published out of Philadelphia; it was a gorgeously designed urban planning mag about sustainability and carbon footprints and phrases like ‘the built environment’, funded by some foundations, with no ads at all.

The cover of the magazine said “Cities in Crisis,” with a picture of a little old African American lady walking past a crumbling building (assumably Detroit, since they are now the poster child for romanticized urban ‘decay’.) Despite this being a 65 percent African American city, not only were none of the DC bloggers black – there wasn’t a single black person in the whole room! I was astounded. If I needed more of a reminder for why solving the digital divide is important, I don’t think I could have gotten one.

The event mystified me – the reality mystified me. I do not say this to cast aspersions on DC local bloggers, who are a group of extremely idealistic people that are probably the first generation of the DC transient class to ever care about the health of the city. This is a huge and important development.

The thing that is really and truly disturbing about the social breakdown and sorrow of DC is that is happens right under the nose of the most powerful people on the planet. People who could solve these problems with the stroke of a pen. The political class here has completely abdicated its responsibility to its neighbors, and that says everything you need to know about the way they go about running the rest of the country. One cannot govern humanely if you are choosing to ignore the real people around you who need help. That is a strange way to live, and that is why Washington is so dehumanizing. It has echoes of the slave city it once was. Not too long ago, this was not free land. And the two-class city that has replaced it doesn’t really look much different.

The only sure-fire way I know of breaking apathy and hopelessness is by teaching people that they have power over their own lives. That is the only thing that works. Having something to build towards brings out the best in people. The Obama campaign energy is still there, but it has to be channeled in DC, or else it will turn into more cynicism.

Right before I left Philly, I met this magical woman who had lived in DC in the 70s, and she told me about her life here then. It was a different world entirely. It was so much happier of a place, she told me, before crack was invented and all the guns came. She told me about a strip of discos – I don’t know where - where they would literally close down the street so people could rollerskate between clubs. And it would be a Saturday night and all these folks would be out rollerskating. In mean old DC.

Democracy does not cure all problems, and it does not turn thugs into rollerskaters. But what it does do is give people the opportunity to address the problems they see in their own community. What I don’t quite understand yet here is how the disenfranchisement of DC residents exactly works – but I have a feeling that this is connected somehow to all these other problems. Peggy tried to teach me this, but I am still confused, especially since we apparently have a functioning city government.

At the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights dinner, I met the outreach coordinator of DC Vote, and the poor woman got treated to a 30-minute harangue about what field consultant they should hire and how they should go after the unions and all that. “Oh yeah, there's about a six month window with political professionals after they get to town,” Nathan says, watching my enthusiasm. “After that people get resigned to not voting.”

I suspect I will probably be an exception to this, but I don’t have the foggiest idea how I will have time to work on this. However, it’s definitely the next thing that needs to happen in the democracy movement. Suffrage. Suffrage is … come on, it’s Democracy 101. And how beautiful a thing it would be to have an actual democracy movement right in the face of the American federal government.

P.S. I want to give a promo to the blog Lynda writes for (this is Lynda Laughlin, formerly of Temple, for those of you who know her): www.greatergreaterwashington.org. It is very good and smart and community minded and they are on a crusade to clean up the Anacostia River. It also has a blogroll of other local DC blogs. Someday I will write about the DC bloggers. They all know each other and complain about each other, it’s a community. I suppose I am one of them now since I am a blogger and live here. Hooray that I found the other writers!

The Last Island in the Ocean

When I lived overseas, it was commonplace, during American elections, for expats to say: everyone in the world should get to vote in American elections, because American government runs the world. American government should have a global vote.

It seems a bit much, when you live here. But when you leave you realize how true this really is. American monetary policy, military policy, environmental regulations, banking policy… trade, taxation of the international corporations that are based here… technology policy, intellectual property, on and on the list goes… these all effect not just what happens within our borders, but the daily life of millions and millions of people flung all over the globe.

We don’t govern that way – openly anyway. Our political discourse takes as its presumption that we are an innocent little nation state amongst many others, that our behavior is normal, as if there were Tunisian military bases in 130 countries around the world, or if Malaysia regularly sent robot warplanes to bomb villages in Iceland.

I wrote a long time ago in a post about then freshman Congressman Patrick Murphy (D-PA) that one cannot understand the implications our foreign policy unless one witnesses it. And we are so geographically isolated that we cannot really see those things - nor the fact that we are most often the nation that others look to for help and succor, in the most desperate of circumstances. There are entire islands in Indonesia with cultures that have existed for thousands of years, now in danger of going permanently underwater because of the impacts of the 1950s suburbanization of America … whose only hope is that we start biking (and fast) or give them enough money to relocate.

When we do things right, we do things globally right… but more often than not, we do things wrong, and globally so. And this is not being talked about. This is all being swept under the rug. Our world is literally being burnt up, and the human race being overwhelmed in a plague of violence, dislocation, and greed, while our massive communications system and our media hides it, and prevents us from taking action to solve our problems.

I am an optimist. I believe in the intelligence and bravery and kindness and resourcefulness of human beings. Not because such traits automatically flourish – but rather because I have seen them flourish even under the most difficult and brutal of circumstances. Love and hope just never run out, and sometimes all that is needed is to be reminded of them.

No matter how grave and massive our global problems are, I believe that in the deep wisdom of all of our combined cultures we have the ability to address them, and stop them. No – I don’t just believe this. I know this. Ordinary human beings like me and you know what’s best for the world. We know better than anyone else what kind of world we would like to live in.

Right now, though, we are prevented from talking about this world. We are prevented from having the public deliberations that would allow us to come to conclusions and take action. We are prevented from doing so by democratic failures in many countries, and most of all, a global communications infrastructure that is not built for democracy.

And most of all, the most failed system of communications is that which we have in America. Where it is needed the most. Although e get to vote on what happens to the rest of the world, we have a communications system that almost completely fails to tell the truth and give us power over our own political conditions – despite it enveloping and overwhelming us. Our communications system is now actually standing in the way of the human race solving its own problems. It simply must be circumvented or reconfigured, if we are ever to survive at all.

Arundahti Roy wrote in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire that “the only thing stronger than the United States government is American civil society.”

I say this to myself a lot, especially since I live in Washington now and have to see just what it is we are up against. Some of the media corporations we are up against have one lobbyist for every member of Congress.

I have to believe it is true. In fact, I know it is. It’s just a shock to realize that what we are doing is not just organizing for America – we are organizing for the world. And that if the world is to change, it will require nothing less than a sea change in the hearts of the American people.

The Philly Casino Fight, and the World

(Crossposted at Young Philly Politics.)

I work on a lot of things now, and they are all interconnected in many ways, although it’s not always obvious. What holds all of the things I work on together is the principle that the public should have the power to make decisions for itself, without intermediary, and that structures and places that allow and facilitate the necessary discussion and decisionmaking should be free, and protected by law.

I want to write about the casino fight because, as with so many things, the public conversation has become a little amnesiac about what has really happened here.

The casino fight in Philadelphia, and to some extent Valley Forge, is so much more than a traditional NIMBY fight that the comparison (which I sometimes still hear) is downright laughable. For the people who have been involved in this fight over the last 4 years now, our world has been like descending into the depths of political hell and traveling through a seedy, dark underworld of corruption, arrogance, creepy casino operators who make their living impoverishing seniors and bankrupting families, backroom deals, complete lack of respect on the part of elected officials for their own constituents, disgusting short-sightedness on the part of old people who are willing to flush Philly down the toilet on their way to retirement, Gaming Board officials with ties to the mob, open lies, votes at midnight on a vacation weekend, the failure of our business and political leadership to come up with a sustainable economic vision for the city that doesn’t involve creating a morass of crime and social problems, the silencing of the public voice, casino operators pitting neighborhood against neighborhood to incite class and racial hatred in a city they don’t care about because God knows they don’t live here, a failure to talk about property taxes and what really needs to change in our state tax structure…you name it. It has been awful to watch, even when I wasn’t able to actively participate, because it was so anti-democratic, really.

And that’s not even counting the ballot measure.

Did you forget about this?

In the winter of 2007, a number of grassroots groups with no money came together, gathered something like 13,000 signatures to get a measure on the city primary ballot that said basically, no casinos in neighborhoods. It didn’t say no casinos at all, it just said you could only build them where they were 1500 feet from homes and schools. (Which would mean the casinos would essentially have to move to the Navy Yard or the airport.)

This was a really really big deal. The process to get a measure on the city ballot via signatures is very difficult to do in a grassroots fashion. For one, the period to gather the signatures comes before the period to get signatures for candidates – in other words, it’s even colder, and standing outside of a grocery store is even more excruciating.

Two, it’s really hard to get 13,000 people to do anything unless you have a lot of money. Which they didn’t have. REALLY hard. You have to have a lot of angry people for that to happen. In fact, it’s so hard to do this, and requires so many people to do this, that the only other time this has ever happened in recent Philadelphia history was the petition drive to Recall Rizzo – which garnered a similar number of signatures – more than 20 years ago.

So… they got it on the ballot…. City council, to its credit, gave approval… and then we’re all rolling along nicely in the primary when the PA Supreme Court takes it off the ballot because Foxwoods and Sugarhouse sued, and said our vote was illegal.

No reason given. Nothing else was struck from the ballot.
Just the ruling: Philadelphians do not have the right to vote on whether we have casinos in our neighborhoods.

After that, sheer fury ensued. Casino Free Philadelphia ran their own election day operation at 30-plus polling places on May 15 anyway. It was pretty amazing, especially taking into account that this was over and above a huge number of rebellious/progressive political types who were already running/working on 20-plus other challenger city council campaigns at the same time. Not to mention the mayoral volunteers. Lot of energy, that year.

The Supreme Court decision was awful. It is the real knot in all this, that decision. That decision effectively said to me, and to all of us, that the casino owners were afraid. They were afraid of letting us choose, because they know they would lose. For all their rhetoric about it ‘being just a few neighborhoods that are anti-casino,’ those in power were really just bluffing.

Because this is the deal. Almost half the neighborhoods in the city have been threatened by a casino now, and had to organize against it, and have seen their comments and sentiments and their very self-determination about their homes and businesses mowed over by a cabal of casino operators and the people who work really really hard to see they get what they want, while the desperately needed public policy concerns that would help their neighborhoods – education, gun control, affordable housing - languish and die in Harrisburg. The other half of the city may not have been personally threatened, but they have been waiting for a really long time for someone to help them out, and they know that a casino sure as hell isn’t designed to help them. It kills me to hear the governor and the mayor get up there and say things like, “finally, we can move forward, isn’t it wonderful,” as if casinos were health care reform.

Chinatown, Fishtown, Fairmount, Pennsport, Queen Village, Society Hill, Richmond, Old City, Tioga, Center City, Wash West, Nicetown, Germantown, 9th Street, Bella Vista…and now CFP is organizing in West Philly.

Why am I writing about this? I am writing about this because I am beginning to realize that this battle is as important as I thought. I’ve moved to DC for a while to work on democracy (through opening up the media), and one of the things that I have quickly learned in DC is that the United States still sets the standards for democracy globally. I had no idea about this, but this is what people in the State department say – that when we craft any policy that is about democracy, it gets copied in other countries. I was really surprised when I heard this.

But then I realized what a huge responsibility we have. If we are the gold standard, we really have to be the gold standard. That is tremendous power to change the lives and fortunes of people around the globe – based on what goes down in a little casino battle in Fishtown. I think Bill Clinton is even coming to the National Constitution Center next week to talk about this – I don’t think it’s open to the public – but I do wish they would invite the PA Supreme Court.

There is a lot more to say about this – for example, the counterargument that cities and states are really at the mercy of global capitalism and we shouldn’t get mad at them etc etc. There is so much to the picture that I can’t cover it all, and I haven’t gotten to half the stuff I intended to.

But in the end – I just feel like - enough talk, it's time we really got to vote.

Philadelphia should have the right to vote on whether we should have casinos in our neighborhoods.

That's a campaign I would very much be down for.

Hannah

On Magic vs. Power, Continued.

There was another reason that I started using the word magic in place of the word power: sheer self-preservation.

Many times when I met powerful people, or were exposed to their organizations, I was always shocked and disturbed at how power had deformed them over the years – personally, spiritually, socially, and often even physically.

The behavior, paranoia, secrecy, and control mechanisms required to maintain their own personal power seemed to remove so many of them from the basic realities and joys of being a human being - appreciating mystery, enjoying spontaneity and humor, or being able to have a conversation free of any underlying transactional subtext.

It was deeply disturbing, and very sad, because so many of the people I met in Philadelphia had had ideals: justice, peace, freedom, equality. Generally the system that they had become a part of had done them such violence, and so they replicated it with their own subordinates. Not everyone was like this, but I saw a lot of confusion out there.

Paolo Coelho in 'Brida' wrote that there are two types of creators: those who build, and those who plant. And that those who build become trapped by the structure they have built - while those who plant are continually amazed by the new stages and shapes that appear.

I have thought about running for office in the past, because I would be very smart about it, probably win, and then would have power to accomplish progressive goals. I have struggled with this a lot, but in the end I know I cannot do this. I do not want to end up like those folks. It seems like the worst and the loneliest way to live. My job is to carry the ring of power without putting it on. To fragment and destroy all centralization of power, and return the magic (which I guess is just power broken into atomized golden dust) to those who should have it.

I consider myself exceptionally lucky to be able to do this. I have been let into the group of people who truly change the world. It is a heavy thing, but quite amazing, and quite a heavy burden. I have to really earn my stripes, if they are going to let me stay in.

I do not know precisely how power is broken into magic. Sometimes it is force, and sometimes it is music, and sometimes it is just knowing where the cracks are. It is still very mysterious to me. It is sometimes hard, to be that which grounds power – I transfer power through me to others without keeping it for myself - a conductor. But I wouldn't wish for anything else.

On Magic vs. Power.

One of the odd things about my political writing and commentary in Philly over the last few years (mostly on Young Philly Politics) is the fact that I used the term magic. I used it over and over again in place of the word power, eschewing the word power itself almost completely and creating, over two years of writing, an alternate universe in which I recast everything around me in a fantastical light. Candidates or campaigns or political acts either had magic or did not - political actors were pirates or wizards – my political intuition and professional assessment of a campaign’s chances were couched in terms of whether they had good voodoo or bad voodoo.

I did this over and over again, on a public blog, and in conversation as well, without ever really thinking about what I was doing, or why I preferred to talk about politics in terms of spell casting (which is, really, all a campaign is – the concentrated repetition of powerful words.)

I’ve asked myself lately why I did this. And I found that the answer was actually incredibly important and complicated – that I did this because it was my negotiation with the political world I was entering, the action I took to set the terms. When you first get into politics there is a reeducation-camp thing where you learn where the power centers are and where they are on the scale. And ‘power’ in those terms, I found, meant really only one thing: having access to a lot of money. That was it. At first I just hated this, and I didn’t understand it. I was very mad, and it seemed unfair, and I was just full of disgust.

The most amazing and powerful political feats are accomplished not by those with access to money, but those who have very little, and still make things happen. They have to be smarter than anyone else, and they have to work harder, but in the end they are the only people who really change the world. And that is power. This I knew in my heart, but I did not see it reflected in the way that journalists would write about politics. So what I did was come up with my own way to talk about it. They had cleaned out all the meaning of the word ‘power’ – which is, in reality, a very complicated algorhythm. So I had to use another word. The word I chose was magic.

I liked it for a number of reasons. One – magic is entirely too complicated and mysterious for people to fully understand, which is in keeping with reality. If I had to sit down and make a list of the most powerful people in Philadelphia, I don’t know if I could do it, because there are simply too many factors for which to control – is someone born into money, do they have a familiar last name, etc. Even then, I would miss people like Amy Dougherty, the Executive Director of the Friends of the Free Library, who runs a grassroots organization that operates in every neighborhood in the city, and just ran one of the most amazing campaigns I’ve ever seen with a staff of three. Power is much more fluid that people think. I used the word magic originally as a naming device, but I was right in more ways than even I knew. Power behaves, really, more like magic. It is odd, and very fleeting, and sometimes the window opens and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes you can push and it won’t work anyway. Sometimes you are ten years ahead of your time. The word just means “to be able to do something.” That doesn’t reside permanently in any organization or operation or person.

The word itself also causes harm when it comes to organizing. Within the ‘power vs. powerless’ matrix, you have to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy convincing the ‘powerless’ that they do, in fact, have power. It would simply take too much time, it seems, to break apart the whole falsity of this silly word and the brainwashing that goes with it. Maybe that is what I will do down the road, I don’t know. So you have to go out there and say over and over again, you do have power, you do, even though you don’t have any money and very little time and the game is set up so that you can’t participate or are scared or intimidated. It takes so much work, it really does, and I am always so moved by the incredible bravery that people find within themselves. But power is such a foreign word. It has become a word that prevents us from making progress.

I am learning what I refer to as ‘Chinese magic’ now, which is basically the principles as laid out in the Tao Te Ching. This really proves my point about timing – knowledge is very much a form of power, and sometimes it comes to you and sometimes it doesn’t. Books find me when I am ready for them. I tried to read it fifteen years ago and gave up, I even lived in China, and I never got any of this. But it’s a way of talking about power that I love and that speaks to my heart. I am very lucky, at age 33, that I am at a place where I can understand this.

from Chapter Eight of the Tao Te Ching:

The sage’s way,
Tao,
Is the way of water.
There must be water for life to be,
And it can flow wherever.

And water, being true to being water,
Is true
To Tao.

. . .

The sage rules with compassion ,
And his word needs to be trusted.

The sage needs to know like water
How to flow around the blocks
And how to find the way through without violence.

Like water, the sage should wait
For the moment to ripen and be right:

Water, you know, never fights

It flows around
Without harm.

The Media Bill of RIghts

This is the foundational document of the Media and Democracy Coalition, the organization for which I work. Current signatories here.

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The Media Bill of Rights

Preamble

A free and vibrant media, full of diverse and competing voices, is the lifeblood of America’s democracy and culture, as well as an engine of growth for its economy.

Yet, in recent years, massive and unprecedented corporate consolidation has dangerously contracted the number of voices in our nation’s media. While some argue we live in an age of unprecedented diversity in media, the reality is that the vast majority of America’s news and entertainment is now commercially-produced, delivered, and controlled by a handful of giant media conglomerates seeking to minimize competition and maximize corporate profits rather than maximize competition and promote the public interest.

According to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment protects the American public’s right to “an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will prevail” and “suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral and other ideas and experiences.” Moreover, it is “the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”

But too often, our nation’s policymakers favor media conglomerates’ commercial interests over the public’s Constitutional rights, placing America’s democracy, culture, and economy at risk. Instead, guided by the principles that follow, policymakers must ensure that the Constitutional rights of present and future generations to freely express themselves in the media, and to access the free expression of others, using the technologies of today and tomorrow, are always “paramount.”

We ask you to join the broad coalition of consumer, public interest, media reform, organized labor and other groups representing millions of Americans in proposing the following Bill of Media Rights.

Media That Provide “An Uninhibited Marketplace of Ideas”

The American public has a right to:

Journalism that fully informs the public, is independent of the government and acts as its watchdog, and protects journalists who dissent from their employers.

Newspapers, television and radio stations, cable and satellite systems, and broadcast and cable networks operated by multiple, diverse, and independent owners that compete vigorously and employ a diverse workforce.

Radio and television programming produced by independent creators that is original, challenging, controversial, and diverse.
Programming, stories, and speech produced by communities.

Internet service provided by multiple, independent providers who compete vigorously and offer access to the entire Internet over a broadband connection, with freedom to attach within the home any legal device to the net connection and run any legal application.

Public broadcasting insulated from political and commercial interests that is well-funded and especially serves communities underserved by privately-owned broadcasters.

Regulatory policies emphasizing media education and public empowerment, not government censorship, as the best ways to avoid unwanted content.

Media That Use The Public’s Airwaves To Serve The Public Interest

The American public has a right to:

Electoral and civic, children’s, educational, independently produced, local and community programming, as well as programming that serves Americans with disabilities and underserved communities.

Media that reflect the presence and voices of people of color, women, labor, immigrants, Americans with disabilities, and other communities often underrepresented.

Maximum access and opportunity to use the public airwaves and spectrum.

Meaningful participation in government media policy, including disclosure of the ways broadcasters comply with their public interest obligations, ascertain their community’s needs, and create programming to serve those needs.

Media That Reflect And Respond To Their Local Communities

The American public has a right to:

Television and radio stations that are locally owned and operated, reflective of and responsible to the diverse communities they serve, and able to respond quickly to local emergencies.

Well-funded local public access channels and community radio, including low-power FM radio stations.

Universal, affordable Internet access for news, education, and government information, so that the public can better participate in our democracy and culture.

Frequent, rigorous license and franchise renewal processes for local broadcasters and cable operators that meaningfully include the public.

Conclusion

These principles are not meant to be all-inclusive. Rather, they illustrate an American media structure that is the American public’s present and future right under the Constitution of the United States.