Occupy Portland, part 4 - You Know . . . Maybe They Really ARE Fighting Dirty

Take a look at the photographs in this column. Doesn’t it look like something significant happened here in Portland yesterday (Friday, October 28)?

A huge sound stage was set up in Pioneer Square, often referred to as “Portland’s Living Room.” A band made up of the youthful classical/jazz/Latin/swing band Pink Martini (they make their homes in Portland and they’re big in Europe), guest vocalist Storm Large, and some musicians from the Oregon Symphony formed the core of the event.

They performed three of their songs and led the crowd in singing almost a dozen classic pop, musical, and folk songs. Twelve different speakers, including two rabbis, three Protestant ministers, an Imam, two U.S. Congressmen, the state AFL-CIO president, and several activists and organizers addressed the crowd, to much cheering and applause. Starbucks handed out free coffee and chocolate at three different stands around the square.

Occupy Portland, part 3 - Democracy is Messy

[Events are taking place faster than I can keep up with them on my blog, so I’ve decided to provide links at the end of each commentary, where you can find information on news about Occupy Portland and upcoming events. Page down for those….]

I don’t want to leave the impression here that I think everything happening at the Occupy Portland camp is sweetness and light, or that I'm trying to sell that notion to anyone else.

There are many other topics I’d like to address about the protest, eventually -- such as the camp’s relations with the city government and Portland Police; the misleading spin (unintended or otherwise) contained in local TV news reports I have seen; the bigger mission and potential outcomes of the protest -- but at this point I felt I should talk about some of the problems I’ve witnessed or heard about.

As they say, democracy is messy.

Every night at 7 p.m., a General Assembly (GA) meeting takes places at Terry Schrunk Plaza, a small brick arena across Madison Street to the south of the encampment, which is federal land. My schedule hasn’t allowed me to make it to a GA meeting, but OP volunteers try to take notes and post them as soon as possible on the Occupy Portland website.

I understand that much of the discussion at General Assembly meetings has revolved around the same safety and security concerns that the greater public outside the camp has expressed: that Occupy Portland seems to include homeless persons, mentally ill folks, recreational drug consuming and dealing individuals, and possibly criminals. (The couple show here are NOT examples of these subgroups, but more typical citizens chatting on a bench in Chapman Square.)

Occupy Portland, part 2 - This Is Bigger Than You Think

On my first day volunteering for Occupy Portland, I verified a suspicion -- or maybe in the beginning it was just a hope -- that what we see in the camps, especially if we only watch the television news, is the tip of a possibly massive iceberg.

There are indeed a lot of regular folks who support this motley crowd, both in spirit and in deed.

And unlike an iceberg, the substance you see above the waterline is not the same as the material below. Although I saw plenty of middle-class visitors and suit-coated businesspeople who just strolled through the camp -- looking around or heading to and from work -- not a few of them meant business. I know, because they stopped to talk to me and hand me things while I was at the information desk (that's me on duty, at right).

A large middle-aged man in outdoor clothing advised me: “Yesterday the city of Portland got their property tax bills; you’ll get a lot of support from the middle if you go after the right targets.” A more sharply dressed man said he had done very well in real estate, appreciation, etc., and “I don’t pay very much taxes -- that’s why I donate so much. We’re fighting evil here.”

Carl Anderson, a military serviceman 30 years ago who since has worked “half my life” in the Wells Fargo Building, a white tower that overlooks the occupation site from the southwest, said his coffee breaks in the Occupy Portland site have gotten longer and longer. “You guys gotta stay here until the next presidential election, at least,” he remarked. He also mentioned that he has only 12 years left before he retires, and I thought to myself: I could never work at any job for that long.

Occupy Portland, part 1 - First Impressions

I knew that if I volunteered at the Information desk I’d be learning a lot more than I’d be helping anyone. But that was part of the point: I figured this would be the fastest way to get a handle on what’s been happening on Chapman and Lownsdale Squares, downtown Portland, over the past two weeks.

You probably won't be able to read it in the above photo, but posted at the entrance to Lownsdale Square, and elsewhere around the parks, are the camp's extensive "Collective Agreement on Guidelines for Community Safety and Well-Being." They dub the Occupy site weapon-free and nonviolent; prohibit any recreational alcohol or drug use; sequester cigarette smoking to the corner of SW 4th and Main; and call for respectful treatment among everyone, among other things. The panel on the right lists the steps to take in response to any threats to safety and well-being on the site. 

I had participated in the initial protest march on Oct. 6 that involved at least 4,000 people and might have drawn in as much as 6,000 or 10,000 -- various numbers have gotten batted around in the media -- but I hadn’t had a chance to get a good look at the site where the long-haul protesters had chosen to camp ever since.

Yossarian Lives! in a tent with Occupy Wall Street

By now I had planned to have an update on Occupy Portland for this blog, but my schedule has kept me from making a full on-site inspection.

Occupy Portland has settled into a pair of city parks about seven blocks from my apartment -- as the crow flies; eight if you have to keep to the streets -- and I’ve strolled by a couple of times as well as monitored developments on the local news. But I haven't yet taken the time to wander through and talk to the protesters.

Occupy Portland is well into its second week. Occupy Wall Street has completed its fourth week. Worldwide “Occupy” protests have spread to 951 cities in 82 countries, according to Wikipedia …

… and this week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

So many commentators have been writing about Occupy Wall Street that I probably won’t be the first to note the wonderful coincidence between Yossarian’s 50th birthday and the Occupy movement’s message of anti corporate greed, anti endless, meaningless wars, and against the government’s abiding bias toward the rich.

But over the past year I’ve been working on a close study of Catch-22 for Book Drum, a British Web site for which I’ve previously profiled Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

So Yossarian, the hapless 28-year-old anti-hero of Heller’s 1961 classic, ostensibly about World War II but actually about so much more -- from McCarthyism and war profiteering in every armed conflict to the arbitrariness of power, government bureaucracy, and, yes, corporate greed -- has been much on my mind.

Occupy Wall Street comes to Portland, Oregon

On Day 19 of Occupy Wall Street, a crazy idea first proposed in July by the activist magazine AdBusters, the odd little protest that started in New York City’s financial district on Sept 17 (see the CNN Money overview of the phenomenon) went national.

Yesterday -- Thursday, Oct. 6 -- after little coverage in the national broadcast media but plenty of buzz on social media networks, Occupy Wall Street spread to Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities.

That especially included Portland, Oregon, where someone’s always protesting something, often within ten blocks of my downtown apartment. I hadn’t heard or read much about Occupy Wall Street, but I did find it curious that what seemed to be an ongoing populist event in Lower Manhattan, resulting in arrests and some violence by police against protestors, had not made much of a splash in the news on my local TV stations.

When Facebook friends passed along word of a march in Portland on Oct. 6, I decided to check it out. Here's the initial gathering with the Burnside Bridge across the Willamette River in the background. My wife Carole took this and the next photo.

Shortly after noon I got to Waterfront Park, listened to some of the speeches and comments as the crowd grew, and decided to volunteer as a “police liaison,” knowing that I was older than the average protestor and less likely either to get hassled by the police or to lose my cool.

The Flickering Light of a Book

The recent news that Kindle owners will now be able to download library books into their electronic reader seemed like a positive blow for booklovers and readers everywhere.

It might be. But it makes me nervous.

Brier Dudley, business commentator for the Seattle Times, sounded a cautionary note in his column this week. The deal between Amazon and public libraries may be the turning point at which the latter make a massive shift away from the print to digital media, he wrote. The historically egalitarian nature of libraries may erode as larger portions of public library collections become accessible only to patrons who can afford to own e-books and computers.

He adds that Amazon gets another opportunity to advertise every time someone downloads a book. Most ominous, Amazon still isn’t paying taxes to local governments for sales it closes with residents of a given locale. The company has been fighting California’s efforts to collect such revenues, with some success.

I don’t own a Kindle. I don’t expect ever to own one . . . but there is one in my home.

If anything qualified as the must-have holiday gift for grownups in 2010, it probably was the Kindle. In 2009, 2.9 million Amazon Kindle e-readers were sold, and Bloomberg analysts projected sales of 5 million the following year. By December 31, however, sales of Amazon’s e-book had beaten that figure handily: the company sold 6 million in 2010.

Apple iPads outsold Kindles in less time—an estimated 7.46 million flew out of stores between their April debut and September—but something tells me there were a lot more teenagers in that group, whether they spent their own money or their folks’, than there were among Kindle purchasers. I have to wonder how many of those teen iPad users are reading books on their screens.

Because she had requested it, I ordered my wife Carole a Kindle in late November for one of her holiday gifts. Since the beginning of December (Chanukah was early this year), I’ve been hearing about its manifold delights. I can make notes she tells me, and download them into our home iMac later; I can look up the dictionary definition of any word on the spot. I can carry multiple books in my purse, and when I finish one -- or even in the middle of one -- I can switch to another.

That’s nice, I think to myself, but you’ll never get me to want one of those. I love the heft of books, the smell of them, the physical reality of each one. I grew up carrying a stack of books to and from school (I was infamous for this among my classmates), and I expect to carry pleasure reading in printed form -- nearly always a clothbound copy, as well, not a paperback -- until the day I die.

The cover art and the weight are integral parts of a book’s character: I just finished a 1300-page translation of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, and the 4.3 pounds it weighed will always be part of my memory of the experience of reading it. That wouldn’t have been the case if I had read it on the same electronic device I could read any cheap paperback thriller.

Part of the achievement of having finished Proust or Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow is finally putting that sucker down. How does Joyce or Pynchon feel any different from Agatha Christie, Danielle Steel or Stephen King when they’ve all weighed and even looked the same in your hand?

If you drop a printed book in the tub, or in a puddle, you’ve damaged one book. If you drop a Kindle, you’ve lost several, maybe even hundreds, of books. Amazon will let you download the ones you’ve already paid for again, on another machine, but you do have to buy another machine. You can even still read a wet and muddy book, but I imagine a dead electronic reader won’t give you a single digital word.

My fear is that the more public libraries are drawn into Amazon’s commercial agenda, the fewer choices we’ll end up enjoying. I’ve seen this pattern with almost every technological “advance” that’s come down the pike over the course of my life. Some of the 33-1/3 vinyl LPs I owned as a kid never became available on cassette. Something similar happened with the switch from VHS tapes to DVDs: obscure favorites of mine like Kobayashi’s “Harakiri,” which took forever to find on tape, took even longer to find on disk.

CDs have stayed around long enough and are sufficiently inexpensive to manufacture that most of the obscure albums and even vinyl bootlegs by Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and even the Banana Splits that I owned as a teen eventually got reissued. (No sign of Catfish Hodge’s solo “Boogeyman Gonna Get You,” however.) Even my friends, personal and Internet based, have turned out their solo and band recordings on CD. The faster technology moves forward, though, the fewer choices we tend to have, because manufacturers can only afford to turn out product that has mass appeal: lowest-common-denominator entertainment, from Stephen King and Britney Spears to the “Transformers” series and degraded remakes of finer original flicks.

It was a disappointment in college when I discovered some of work of writers I wanted to read had not been translated into English and might never be (e.g., the Danish journalist and feminist Suzanne Broegger, and the Polish existential novelist Witold Gombrowicz). Now I have to worry that the library may only order some books in electronic form, or not at all, because only a handful of readers -- including me -- might care to read them.

This is how corporate-driven consumerism actually gives us less choice, makes us less free, in a supposedly democratic society.

P.S. I am currently rereading Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities for one of my three book discussion groups, about to open Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America for another one, am reading Henning Mankell's final Kurt Wallander thriller The Troubled Man for my own pleasure, and am making copious notes about Joseph Heller's Catch-22 for the extensive profile I'm writing for the Book Drum website, where I have already profiled Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. So you'll see me carrying one or more of the first four books on the streets of Portland over the coming week . . . .