Occupy Wall Street One Year Later

-- by Tom Phillips

The anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement has come and gone, and I didn’t take part in any of the commemorative protests.  Why not? 

 

That was last year, and this is this.  The middle-class moderates who were mad enough to take to the streets in 2011, made our points and moved on.   The broad participation in last year’s protests made for a new political dialogue.  No longer is it dangerous for candidates to talk about raising taxes on the rich, or to campaign against the abuses of the financial industry.   

Today’s middle-class protesters are where they ought to be in a democracy:  interested and involved in an election year.  Thanks to Mitt Romney’s “inelegant” remarks and his choice of an Ayn Rand acolyte as a running mate, the campaign has driven home the main point of OWS.   It has exposed the present-day conservative movement for what it’s been from the start – an attempt to roll back 100 years of reform and turn this country into an “ownership society,” where power is equated with wealth.   

We have a long way to go, to claim back the wealth, power and privilege that the "owners" have seized for themselves in the last 30 years.  But I believe the worm has turned.   And it started a year ago with Occupy Wall Street. 

 

Maybe he saw my sign

 

                                          Rev. Debra Given at Zuccotti Park, October 2011

 

Copyright 2012 by Tom Phillips

 

 

 

The Road to Dotage 2: or What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Down the Shore

By Tom Phillips

The road to dotage turns out to be strewn with rocks and boulders.  Why should it be different from any other phase of life?   In June, I was in a “continuum of wonder, free from anxiety or regret” to quote my last blog.  But after a month of summer vacation, I returned to find my house infested with a widely dreaded type of bug, and my mind infected with anxiety, regret, anger, bitterness and despair.  After weeks of nearly constant interaction with children, grandchildren, friends and strangers, almost all of them younger, I perceived myself as decrepit, discounted, rejected, ignored, used, used up, useless.   Don’t get me wrong.  I had fun, I relaxed (see photo) it was good to see everyone.  Still, I couldn’t help but feel the erosion of my place in the world. 

The Road to Dotage

-- By Tom Phillips

What a pleasure it is to run into one’s self in an unlikely place.  A few days ago I was browsing in the Northshire bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, filling time while my wife looked for a gift. In the psychology section of the second-hand book nook, a title jumped out at me: “The Delights of Growing Old,”[1] with a cover drawing of a rakish, unmistakably Parisian gentleman, nattily attired and puffing a cigarette. His name was Maurice Goudeket;  I’d never heard of him, but within a day he became something like an alter ego.    

Like Goudeket, I am in my early 70s, a writer and journalist, finally released from the need to seek gainful employment; comfortably retired, healthy, and happily married. He was a Parisian and I’m a New Yorker, but we live the same way:      

The Protest Gene

-- by Tom Phillips

"Occupy Wall Street" signs 

Readers may have noticed that this blog has no fixed subject.  Its theme is not a particular issue, but rather an attitude of protest against the abuse of power. It has railed against greedy bankers and their conservative cronies, the Israel lobby, Iranian censors, American patrons of the arts, establishments of religion, etc. 

Protesting is nothing new for me. It’s a family tradition, which I learned at my mother’s knee.

Five Broken Cameras

a film by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi
at Film Forum, New York

"Five Broken Cameras," a new documentary film from the occupied west bank, is less about the Arab-Israeli conflict than the Heisenberg effect.  That's a concept from physics, that the very act of observing alters the thing being observed.  Film-makers know the effect increases dramatically when the subject is human and the observing is done with a camera.  And when the film is  intended as advocacy or propaganda, the effect goes off the charts. 

Don’t get me wrong:  the Israeli-Arab conflict on the west bank is real, and bloody, and tragic.  And I agree with the film-makers’ protest against Israel’s settlement policy.  But much of what happens in the film is generated not by the conflict itself but the presence of the cameras, including the five of the title.  These are supplied by Israeli peace activists to a Palestinian west bank resident, each camera subsequently shot up or smashed by the Israeli Defense Forces.  The cameraman, Emad Burnat, serves as the narrator of the film, directed by Israeli Guy Davidi. 

Jewish Gospels: More Confessions of a Philo-Semite

-- by Tom Phillips


The Jewish Gospels:  The Story of the Jewish Christ
by Daniel Boyarin
The New Press, 2012

As a Presbyterian and a philo-Semite, I have long found myself pained by two common attitudes:  that of Christians who “don’t like” the Old Testament, and Jews who refuse even to look at the New Testament.  The first I can deal with.  It’s not hard to show people that the qualities they suppose to be lacking in the Hebrew scriptures, e.g. mercy and forgiveness, are in fact ubiquitous, all the way back to the Garden of Eden, while conversely, judgment and retribution are not at all absent from the New Testament.   

To the second attitude, I don’t know what to say.  I have sat in silence through so-called Interfaith services where the New Testament was unmentioned and apparently unmentionable.  I have composed replies, but never sent any, to the professor of creative writing who opined in a Jewish publication that the New Testament was “a barnacle on the ark of the Bible.”  But now, mercifully, comes a book by a renowned Jewish scholar, who reads the NT as a profound collection of mostly Jewish writings, written for an audience of Jews and Gentiles at a time when Jewish thought was hugely influential in the ancient world.   For +Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic Culture at the U. of California, Berkeley, today’s Jews ignore the NT only at the cost of cutting themselves off from a vital portion of their own history.  

Conventional wisdom today sees Judaism and Christianity as “two different religions,” which split nearly 2000 years ago over the radical teachings and claims of Jesus, who broke the mold of traditional Judaism and laid the groundwork of a new, universal faith.   In “The Jewish Gospels,” Boyarin tells a very different story – of a Judaism which at least half-expected this very Son of Man, even his death and resurrection, and wrestled with the meaning of his story for more than three centuries.   During that time, he writes, the religious community of Jews was much wider and looser than it is today, including proselytes and philo-Semites, known as “God-fearers.”  And “believers in Jesus of Nazareth were mixed up in various ways with those who didn’t follow him, rather than separated into two well-defined entities that we know today as Judaism and Christianity.”  

As for Jesus himself, Boyarin presents him as a credible candidate for Messiah, in an age full of messianic expectation.   He answered to a complex job description that was widely though not universally accepted among Jews – a divine “Son of Man” who was created in Heaven and sent to earth, as well as an exalted human being who would suffer on earth but then ascend on high.   Christian theology, he argues, is not some heady combination of Greek and Hebrew thought, but completely rooted in Jewish prophecies.   

This is Not a Masterpiece

-- By Tom Phillips

A video smuggled out of Tehran has reached our shores, the work of Jafar Panahi, a director under a 20-year ban on making movies, who is also facing a 6-year prison term imposed by the Iranian authorities.  His crimes were supporting the “green” movement that protested the Islamic government’s refusal to accept the results of elections in 2009, and something translated as “gloomism” in his earlier films – showing Iranian life in a dark light.  

The video -- titled “This is Not a Film” -- shows a day in the life of a film-maker trying to find a way out of his personal and artistic prison without violating the terms of his sentence. It shows Panahi in his Tehran apartment, eating breakfast, doing household chores, conferring with lawyers and colleagues, and trying to create art by reading a screenplay aloud amidst an imaginary set laid out on the Persian rug in his living room.  The New York Times immediately hailed the video as a “masterpiece,” in a review that called it a “subtle, strange and haunting work of art.”  I didn’t see it that way at all.   To me, it was a documentary of the ultimate punishment power can inflict on art –  snuffing out its life before it ever sees the light.