With those specific things in mind, here is a cluster of material related to the underlying theory and evolving practice of the Occupy movement, highlighting adaptive and prefigurative organizing successes and casting an eye towards 2012.

read more at SELECTIONS FROM THE COALMINE >>

He’s the only truly anti-war, anti-imperialist candidate in the 2012 Presidential race, but Ron Paul’s ideas about getting rid of all environmental regulation, returning to the gold standard, rolling back civil rights, and further restricting women’s access to abortion, are all extremist.

Paul, like Rick “Oops” Perry, is another right-wing free-market zealot from Texas not worthy of holding higher public office. So what is it about Paul–his brand or his substance–that pulls support from so many parts of the political continuum?

read more at SELECTIONS FROM THE COALMINE >>

“It’s not just false hope that’s the problem, it’s hope itself…’Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.’”

A free-ranging interview with the author of A Language Older Than Words, Welcome to the Machine, and The Culture of Make Believe about civilization, violence, activism, pacifism, reasons for optimism, and why hope is a bad thing.

A counterpoint interview about Malthusian economics and cults of catastrophism is also offered, with social historian Iain Boal, “We’re Not Doomed; That’s the Problem.”:

Many people believe, at least a little, that the end of human beings–whether by ecological disaster, the collapse of the oil economy, or nuclear extinction–is inevitable. For some, this projected collapse represents a just termination for a species they consider parasitic and pathologically unable to establish an equilibrium with the natural world and the creatures who  depend upon it. Others laments the tragedy of our fate.

But what role do faith and belief play in all of this? What if the capitalist realities of scarcity and collapse have been mistakenly interpreted as natural inevitabilities?  

>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 8 pages)

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.] 

People suck, and that’s my contention.
We’re a virus with shoes.
—Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there’s much to recommend Hicks’ notion that people are viruses with shoes. It’s a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, “Darwin’s Surprise”:

Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone…

Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

One scientist interviewed for the New Yorker article, Thierry Hiedmann, contends that the mapping of the human genome project and recent findings about “endogenous retroviruses” show that genes and viruses are not, in fact, distinct entities, and that the concept of virus and humanity as enemies or combatants, rather than as co-evolutionary forces, is in error. Heidmann and others have even suggested that without viral influence, mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature and led to live birth. “These viruses made those changes possible, [and] It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”

So the stuff of us, the meat of our matter, is partially viral in origin. What of our language, and our culture?

Well. That partially depends on whether or not you believe language shapes thought or vice-versa. Lots of smart people disagree on this particular point. On one side are those like, oh, Noam Chomsky, who say cognition and certain brain structures give rise to infinitely varying, yet universal, linguistic impulses.

On the other side there are linguistic relativists, like the curious Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur linguist (Darwin was an amateur biologist) and evolutionary biologist, botanist, theologian, and physicist, who in addition to linguistics, wrote about gravitation, “being,” trees, color theory, evolution, large stemmed plants, electromagnetism, dreams, and even wrote a Hopi-English dictionary.

Whorf grew to prominence and influence through his work, exploring how languages shape the habit and thought of their users.

Presume, as many linguists do, that there’s a middle ground between these two positions, and admit the possibility that language acts on people much as people act on or through language.

“A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts. The notion of the meme—coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the field of memetics—crystallizes this view of the communication process.

Georges Bataille similarly argued that communication was best understood from the perspective of contagion.

In Bataille any human being is no more than a conduit for communicative process, a channel for ideas which pass through him/her.”If, as it appears to me, a book is communication, then the author is only a link among many readings.” The author is simply a node on a network, through which ideas pass…

Subjectivity is an illusion, one that allows us to operate comfortably in this plane of existence, but which nonetheless masks true reality, in which there is no division between subject and object: “There is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence”

—Bernardo Attias, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University

The complicated relationship between language and its host was a major theme in the work of William S. Burroughs. When pondering the all-encompassing constancy of flux, and the role of human beings and viruses as co-evolutionary partners, and when wondering at the viral properties of language and culture, it’s worth considering the thoughts of a visionary like Burroughs, who identified as a Manichean, and who believed he was writing mythology for the space age:

“I am advancing the theory that we were not designed to remain in our present state, any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole forever,” wrote Burroughs, suggesting that what human evolution requires is actually a biological mutation away from that which one knows as human.

Burroughs always did have a way of making profane things like “Get over yourself, changeling,” and “extinction is inevitable” sound somehow like an already familiar pulp novel.

by Brian Awehali

by Stephen Bender and Brian Awehali
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Edward L. Bernays birthed the public relations industry in the United States. His clients included General Motors, United Fruit, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the U.S. Department of State, Health, and Commerce, Samuel Goldwyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Tobacco Company, and Proctor & Gamble. He directed public relations campaigns for every president from Calvin Coolidge in 1925, to Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He was, in the estimation of cultural historian Ann Douglas, the man “who orchestrated the commercialization of a culture.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 6 pages)

Music can do a lot of different things. There’s music to comfort you, music to make you dance, music to make the time pass easier.

And then there’s music that whacks you upside the head, assaults you, is radically unconcerned with your comfort, and comes to get inside and change you, forever.

Such was the music of Captain Beefheart, AKA Don Van Vliet (1941 – 2010), which was a heavy influence on everyone from PJ Harvey and Tom Waits to Radiohead and Merrill Garbus of Tune-yards. Beefheart’s name, he claimed, was a pun on him having “a beef in my heart with the world.” (He made other claims as to its other meanings, too, and always enjoyed toying with his interviewers.) He once told an interviewer that rock and roll was obsessed with this “4/4 momma heartbeat,” and that he was more interested in “anti-hypnotics.” During the same interview, he also said that he was interested in “breaking up the catatonic state…. and I think there is one…” Van Vliet was a trickster in the true sense; alternately and sometimes simultaneously profound and nonsensical, as deadly serious as a fart in the wind.

The music he made with others was unique: he himself knew almost no music theory, yet he consistently attracted world-class musicians (like Ry Cooder) who were willing to put up with his almost cult-like creative process. For a year prior to recording the landmark 1969 Trout Mask Replica, which consistently makes critics’ “top 100 of all-time” lists on the basis of its wide cultural influence, Van Vliet locked his fellow musicians up in a house and demanded they be in performance mode 24 hours a day. Only one person was allowed to leave the “studio,” once a week, to buy meager supplies. Pictures of the musicians at this time show gaunt, hollowed-out cheeks and a feral lysergic electricity behind the eyes.

Then they walked into a studio that was reserved for three weeks’ time, and, in about three hours’ time, recorded the avant garde “rock” album to end all such albums: a sprawling surrealist prose poem trundling along on ether and the primordial grunts of ur-bluesmen, an ecstatic and complex ode to nature and the Marvelous, all chaos and wonder. Utterly unique. [Here are three of the more accessible tracks from the album: "Moonlight On Vermont," "Veteran's Day Poppy," "Pachuco Cadaver"]

One long-time music reviewer described “Trout Mask Replica” as

about to break apart at the seams, bursting with seemingly diametric differences. The music is utterly new, yet steeped in tradition. The lyrics are non-sensical yet intellectual. The musicianship sounds spasmodic, yet is precisely disciplined. The emotions are playful yet also have a gentle sadness. Everything seems to be directed towards disorientation. The beautiful alliteration and repetition is hallucinatory. The odd time signatures and frenzied changes lend a feeling of vertigo. The tracks do not flow. The entire sound is lopsided ­with much more happening in one channel than the other if you played with the balance…While to some [Beefheart] doesn’t even seem human, he has a remarkably compassionate feeling for humanity. And his empathy for the mother earth and its critters continued through the rest of his recording career, and on to his painting career…

Here’s the Captain and his Magic Band in 1968, playing “Electricity” and “Sure ‘Nuff ‘n Yes I Do” on Cannes Beach. [Full lyrics to "Electricity" at the end of this post.]

Van Vliet turned his back on music suddenly, many years ago, after releasing one of his stronger albums, Ice Cream for Crow. He had always sculpted and painted, but he decided to devote himself fully to his painting and made an unlikely crossover and won a significant level of critical recognition for his painting.

Don Van Vliet in front of one of his paintings, 1980.

Just last week I was talking to my friend Eric about Captain Beefheart and his music. We were in a studio filled with a banjo, a drum, painted studies of the human form, some trapeze rings dangled from the ceiling, and a big theme unifying much of the art on the walls was Third Nature — nature taking back over what industry and civilization had commandeered. We’d been talking about eros, about The World, and about staying fascinated with our various pursuits when Beefheart came up. It all seemed somehow perfect. How to stay fully awake and fully alive in a sleepwalking world was the feel of it.

I was moved and affected by Don Van Vliet’s art and play, and his light in the world. His lyrics were deep and weird and full of many layers of meaning. If you don’t really know his work, I think you might be moved well by him, too. It’s not easy listening, and it does not generally comfort, but you will be rewarded if you persevere. In some cases, you’ll hear things that sound familiar because of how widely studied and copied he’s been, but keep in mind that he was making most of this music 30-40 years ago.

For those who are curious, John Peel and the BBC also did a great short documentary titled “The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart” that is available in segments on You Tube. (Part 1 of 6.)

“Electricity”

Singin through you to me; thunderbolts caught easily
Shouts the truth peacefully Eeeeeee-lec-tri-ci-teeeeeeee

High voltage man kisses night to bring the light to those who need to hide their shadow deed
Go into bright find the light and know that friends don`t mind just how you grow

midnight cowboy stains in black read all roads without a map
To free-seeking electricity (repeat) (Repeat both lines)

BONUS LINK: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band Performing “Click Clack” and “Grow Fins,” from the 1972 album, Spotlight Kid.

The L.A. Weekly did a great post, “Top 14 Reasons Why Captain Beefheart Was a True American Genius” that’s worth checking out in its entirety, but which features this gem as Reason #10:

“in the late 60s fused delta blues, beat poetics, Dada/Surrealist techniques, avant jazz, R&B & the kitchen sink into a metaphysics of the imagination that tore a giant hole in the ozone of pop-artistic possibility. Like an American Van Gogh he seemed to open up new landscapes of consciousness as much as of music.”

 

by Brian Awehali

by Winona LaDuke
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Rethink your geography a little bit, set aside your thinking, and try to think about North America from an indigenous perspective. In doing so, what I’d like to ask is that you think about it in terms of islands in a continent.

I live on one island, White Earth reservation. It’s thirty-six miles by thirty six miles. It’s a rather medium-sized reservation, as they go in North America. That’s one island. A little bit west of me is Pine Ridge, a slightly larger reservation. Rosebud. Blackfeet. Crow. Cheyenne. Navaho. Hopi. Some of the larger islands are further north. When you go north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada, which is somewhere a little north of Edmonton, you’ll find that the majority of the population is native. 85% of the people who live north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada are native people.

How that is perhaps best reflected is in a place called Nunavut. Northwest Territories, a couple of years ago, was split into two territories. One of those territories is now called Nunavut because the people who live there are Inuit. They are the people who are the political representatives. They are the administrators of the school boards. They are the firemen. They are the doctors, the physicians. They have a form of self-governance in Nunavut where the majority of decisions are made by Inuit people. That area, Nunavut, is, including land and water, five times the size of Texas. It is a large area of land. It is the size of the Indian sub-continent.

So perhaps for that reason alone, it is important to know something more about indigenous people…

Let me talk a little bit about indigenous thinking, because I believe that is fundamental for understanding the conflicts that exist in the world today. In the world today it is not a conflict so much between the left and right, or the communists and the capitalists, so much as it is the conflict between the indigenous and the industrial.

(This far-reaching, increasingly relevant speech Winona LaDuke gave to students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh appeared in LiP: Informed Revolt and was also included in the magazine’s anthology, Tipping the Sacred Cow, now available online in PDF form.)

Read the rest [PDF; 10 pages]

 “The biggest difference I see between China and the US is that in China, our government owns the corporations and in the US, the corporations own your government.”

–Chinese people’s historian Liao Yiwu (廖亦武), July, 2010

On September 27th, the Occupy Wall Street rebellion was clearly gathering momentum. The NYPD’s macing of several peaceful protesters the previous weekend, and their arrest of roughly 80 demonstrators in the following days served primarily to spark more coverage, outrage and broad-based support for the movement. Donations were pouring in, a group of hundreds was turning into thousands in lower Manhattan, and similar occupations were blooming in dozens of other U.S. cities.

In the first days of the occupation, most corporate media reporters approached the protesters as would any good B-movie alien delegation: “Take us to your leader,” they demanded. Confronted with a decentralized organizing culture, they furrowed their brows, demanded demands, preferably in sound bite form, and generally derided protesters for being young, unrealistic, weird-looking, and/or unhygienic.

As I made my way to Zuccotti Park from the Wall St. subway stop, portable metal fencing divided crowded sidewalks from empty streets in all directions. People shuffled shoulder-to-shoulder down the sidewalks past policemen stationed every 50 feet. After walking several blocks I saw a straight line of men in dark blue uniforms marching up the street, and thought it was a lockstep show of police force. But these were in fact commercial pilots protesting in advance of next year’s scheduled merger of United and Continental airlines.

Immediately after I passed the pilot’s strike, and opposite the New York Stock Exchange, my progress was blocked by a throng of people gathered to watch a thin blonde model in abbreviated white clothing being photographed against an imposing concrete wall. High above her, a gold flag that said “Hermes” fluttered in the wind, advertising the name of a high-end clothing, jewelry and handbag company that appears to utterly miss the folkloric gravity and meaning of their namesake. Hermes, the Greek incarnation of the Trickster, the Coyote, the Crow, the Raven, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, is the change agent who facilitates intercourse between gods and mortals, captain of the threshold, lord of the in-between.

What any of that has to do in spirit or substance with $4,000 weekend bags or $500 pairs of shiny silver cufflinks for the dapper man is unclear, but I took even this “misnomeric” presence of Hermes as a great symbol for the day, and for the occupation in general. The Trickster, after all, is the attacker of connecting joints in armor, ever poised to tip established orders into flux. And as Lewis Hyde, in his landmark book, Trickster Makes This World notes:

If Hermes is involved, after a touch of chaos comes another cosmos. Hermes is a god of luck, but more than that, he stands for what might be called ‘smart luck’ rather than ‘dumb luck.’

I turned the corner on Cedar to Zuccotti Park and there was the encampment, a small but bustling improvised agglomeration of people at various workstations, surrounded by pink, red and yellow marigolds, sleepers, bedding, blue tarps, umbrellas, food, first aid, and, of course, hundreds of hand-painted cardboard signs, most likely made from pizza boxes:

“Critique us for our ideas, not our hygiene!”

“One Planet, One People”

“Greed is Not Good”

“Abolish Corporate Personhood”

“Bring Back Glass-Steagall”

“In this country, the Richest 400 have more $ than the Poorest 50%.”

On one side of the park was an elevated NYPD surveillance station with coal-black windows, a panopticon on an articulating  hydraulic arm and mobile base, covered in cameras and antennae. It’s official name is “Sky Watch,” and it’s a machine used by the military and various U.S. police departments, but was apparently first used as a tower for hunting quarry from overhead. [Nick Turse has a good piece about Sky Watch and what happened when he asked about it, on Alternet]

"Sky Watch," the NYPD's constant surveillance tower at Zuccotti Park.

The scene brings to mind the 1999 Battle of Seattle, the last time, to quote Naomi Klein’s address to the OWS General Assembly on Oct. 6, “a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power.” It also brings to mind the much maligned 1996 and 2000 Nader/LaDuke Green Party campaigns, which militated against many of the same corporate interests, and had tens of thousands of mostly young people lustily protesting economic polarization and the subordination of people to money. (Indefatigable,Ralph Nader addressed the Freedom Plaza crowd in Washington, DC, on October 8th, saying it was good to keep the ruling classes guessing, and noting that “a leaderless movement can’t be decapitated, can it?”)

The grievances are deep and longstanding; the movement is many movements. Protest tactics and strategy have evolved, but what’s changed most between 1999 and today, and one big reason why the Occupy Wall Street surge for economic justice might develop some teeth is that since the late ’90s, capitalism’s global bubble has been thoroughly burst. [Check out the shockingly honest interview with a trader on the BBC, below]:

The foreclosures, scandals, oil spills, nuclear meltdowns, bailouts, shutdowns and other costly adventures in global mismanagement of the past decade have made it clear to an increasingly broad number of people that there is a real and urgent need for fundamental change. Already this year a swift succession of governments fell in the Middle East, while many others around the world plunged into popular revolt. The joints connecting the armor are weak.

While surveying the hundreds of signs spread across the periphery of the plaza, I asked one volunteer, Will Duffield, 19, what he thought united the messages on the signs.

“I think it’s opposition to collusion between government and big business,” he said.

“Does that seem particularly radical to you?” I asked.

Will made a sad little smile. “No, that doesn’t seem radical to me at all.”

Most of the volunteers and organizers I interviewed in Liberty Square, all of whom indicated they were not spokespeople for Occupy Wall Street, expressed that “messaging” was of secondary importance to actual organizing. Many emphasized that while some protesters were here for jobs or wages, some for environmental issues, for peace and demilitarization, racial equity, or fair military veteran’s benefits, the main point was to gather, to amass, and to build solutions together.

The encampment holds twice daily assemblies, and a growing number of working groups for media, new arrivals, sanitation, legal issues, facilitation, finance, public relations, education and other needs meet throughout the day. Careful attention is paid to procedural matters: facilitators rotate, a “stack” is kept to determine speaking order, and hand cues are used as stand-ins for many verbal expressions: fingers up for agreement, level for uncertainty and down for disagreement. Making a triangle symbol means “point of process,” indicating that an agreed upon protocol is not being followed. Other different procedural mechanisms can be agreed upon on by different working groups. (Nine days later, on October 6, I saw these same procedures explained, practiced and implemented with impressive speed and clarity at a planning meeting prior to Occupy Austin’s first General Assembly. The video below, by Meerkat Media, is a superb and fun look at this process):

Demonstrators in New York are forbidden to use electrified amplification, so the occupation has implemented a “human microphone” system, where a speaker talks in short bursts and is then echoed by a handful to several dozen designated people located strategically throughout the crowd. This requires speaking simply, and makes humorous expression a challenge, but seems also to rein in potentially disruptive speakers, who can’t broadcast their message without the participation of the group. The use of hand signals instead of clapping or yelling also serves to keep potentially confusing crowd noise to a minimum.

Matt, a 28-year-old from the Washington Heights neighborhood in Manhattan, who’d come to the occupation the previous Friday, explained his involvement: “I liked the vibe, and the unity. Everybody came out and we’re figuring out ways to talk peacefully with each other and to find ways to agree on things we might otherwise disagree about. I think the outcome of this whole thing, nobody knows what’s going to happen at this point, but I believe that as long as we all continue to stand in solidarity that something’s going to shake here. This is a hub, we’re at the very center of it, and we have spokes coming off in Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Philadelphia, LA, San Francisco, Sacramento. We have all these major cities where people are waking up and doing the exact same thing. This is…we’re forming our own democratic society, one we want to live in.”

There’s a complicated and somewhat porous line between being the change you want to see in the world and actually changing the world. As one online commenter noted in an activist forum on consensus and activism, “the way we conduct our meeting ain’t a revolutionary act no matter how we do it. The revolution comes from changing and challenging institutions and power structures.”

Thus far, Occupy Wall Street has proven in the short term that it can mobilize thousands of people, adapt to communication and shelter restrictions, weather the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators, hold public space, and organize itself in alignment with radically non-hierarchical values. It’s proven it can wage a media war effectively,disseminating its own message, on its own timeframe, through a variety of live streams, well-moderated forums and social media, and has won increasing respect from corporate media, without a shred of pandering. And the growing support and participation of unions, faith-based organizations and military service people suggests that this movement for economic justice can win still broader, perhaps even revolutionary levels of support.

No matter how non-violent and peaceful demonstrators are, a growing threat to elite power can expect to face ever greater resistance and violence.

In the wake of the 1999 WTO protests and the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, many urban police forces in the U.S. essentially paramilitarized themselves. This may have been marketed in the name of combating terrorism, but it functions far more as a means to control and manage the domestic population.

I asked another organizer how she regarded the prospects for mass mobilization in the US today. As eternal as my hope is, I pointed out the failure of massive mobilizations to stop the US invasion of Iraq, or to tangibly affect the 2004 Republican National Convention. I gestured toward the NYPD police panopticon about twenty yards from us, and mentioned the growing reach of surveillance and the police state.

“Well,” she said brightly, “It definitely requires greater mass now than in, say, the ‘60s, because back then, there wasn’t so much a business hand within the hand of politics. But now that government and business are in bed with each other, depending on which politicians you’re looking at, there’s a hell of a lot more pressure to apply. But it’s like Newton’s Third Law goes, ‘For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.’ That opposite reaction has yet to become equal,” she said, before hurrying off to a working group. “But it’s building.”

The Nassim Nicholas Taleb quote in the photograph to the left, from a sign in Liberty Square, is from a book advancing the theory that most large, redefining events are “black swans”– actually unpredictable events only rendered predictable by conceits of hindsight. Neither the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, nor the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia were forecast, yet all seem now to have had their causal antecedents. They weren’t predicted, but they weren’t random matters of luck either.

The global “mistakeholder” economy is presently teetering under the weight of its own dysfunctional management and hubris, and there’s little doubt that the revolutionary tide kicked off in Tunisia and Egypt will claim more governments and economies before it’s crested. There will be more market panics, more defaults and more rioting over housing, food and fuel prices as the plump chickens of oligarchy come home to roost, and no one can predict the moment of revolution.

Organized and committed masses of people willing and able to adapt on the fly have a way of making their own luck in such times of great flux.

POSTSCRIPT:

On September 28th, the New York City General Assembly Demands Working Group agreed (not without controversy; these demands did not originate from the General Assembly), eight demands for Congress. However revolutionary the heart of the movement may be, the demands were concrete, pragmatic, and relevant now to the 99%:

— Reinstatement of much of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (repealed in 1999), which existed to regulate investment and commercial banks and police conflicts of interest.

— Establish independent oversight of business and prosecute white collar criminals, especially those who clearly broke the law and contributed to the 2008 financial crisis

— Pass the Buffett Rule requiring higher minimum tax rates on millionaires and billionaires;

— Revamp and adequately fund the Securities and Exchange Commission;

— Pass legislation to prevent former government regulators from going to work for the corporations they once regulated;

— Reverse the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that gave corporations free rein to pour money into elections;

— Reduce or eliminate lobbyists; and

— Abolish corporate “personhood” and the legal and economic benefits that accrue from it.

This piece originally appeared on Earth Island Journal’s EnvironmentaList on October 14, as “Occupy Everywhere: Notes from Wall Street”

Scott’s book is essentially about  a  very large number of intentional Southeast Asian maroons or refugees–Zomians–and the book is making me re-think a lot of things, about the normal “advance of civilization” narrative and all that it assumes, presupposes, and omits. It’s also made me to recontextualize my understanding of nation-states to include the surprising importance of elevation.

Tibetans are Zomians. They are are, as I think almost everybody knows, long-term resisters against the Han Chinese empire. The Tibetans are fierce and lovely people who wish not to be told where or how to live. Their monks are known for many things, including sparking militant protest, as they did in March 2008 in Lhasa (elevation: 11,450ft) :

The book is about the estimated 80-100 million peoples of Zomia, a region the size of Europe spanning seven Asian countries, who’ve escaped the realities of organized state societies: slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. It’s a critique of state-making and those who intentionally avoid being subject to it. It posits that state-making is a form of internal colonialism.

Zomia does not appear on any official map, for it is merely metaphorical. Scott identifies it as “the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states.” Though the scholars who have imagined Zomia differ over its precise boundaries, Scott includes all the lands at altitudes above 300 meters stretching from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India. That encompasses parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma, as well as four provinces of China. Zomia’s 100 million residents are minority peoples “of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety,” he writes. Among them are the Akha, Hmong, Karen, Lahu, Mien, and Wa.

The Boston Globe Ideas section recently published a great piece called “The Mystery of Zomia” about the book. A short excerpt and link to the full piece, below:

Empire Electric saw its load drop by over a third in seconds as transmission lines and substations vanished from the grid… Veterans said it really looked like a bomb went off; it was like a mower went through it, chewing everything up. This is a close-knit town… It’s very wholesome, you know, it’s part of the Bible Belt…

 —From June 2011 Joplin-area news accounts, one month after the most destructive tornado in U.S. history

The Brooklyn Rail has published my first person account of visiting the ruins of Joplin, where I was born, one month after a tornado erased just over a third of the town.