fragile freedom

Contrary to the mythology, the Supreme Court's record of protecting the press is very weak when it comes to reporting military secrets.

1. Wikileaks, The Guardian and Glenn Greenwald could potentially be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. Here’s the relevant text of 18 USC § 798 - Disclosure of classified information -- Whoever … publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or … to the detriment of the United States any classified information … concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government … Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both....The term "communication intelligence" means all procedures and methods used in the interception of communications and the obtaining of information from such communications by other than the intended recipients.
2. The Pentagon Papers case, while a victory against prior restraint of publication, was not a sweeping endorsement of a free press. Indeed, five of the nine justices (Chief Justice Burger and Justices Harlan and Blackmun, who all sided with the government and wanted to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, plus Justices Stewart and White, who voted against prior restraint) mentioned explicitly that the government could prosecute the newspapers under the Espionage Act after publication. Justice Brennan—normally a friend of a fully free press—was also shaky, writing that our judgments in the present cases may not be taken to indicate the propriety, in the future, of issuing temporary stays and restraining orders to block the publication of material sought to be suppressed by the Government. Similarly, Justice Marshall, another generally progressive force on the court, concurred on very narrow grounds, and seemed to suggest that the government had a strong argument that newspapers could be prosecuted for publishing certain secrets. Only Justices Black and Douglas stood firm against any attempt to muzzle the press. (full text of concurrences and dissents here)
3. Daniel Ellsberg and fellow defendant Anthony Russo were not acquitted of the Espionage Act charges against them. Rather, the government’s case collapsed into a mistrial after it was revealed that the Watergate plumbers E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had broken into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office seeking salacious stuff to embarrass the leakers.

Our freedom to know what our government is doing in the name of safety and security is, it seems, quite limited. And the ability of whistleblowers to reveal it is incredibly fragile. I am a patriotic American, but all this stuff makes me feel like burning the flag.

inspiration for the fight against stop & frisk

Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope.

-- Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

translated by Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith

the shits are killing us...

... even as they kill themselves--each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Little lies, but they pipe us toward insanity, as they starve our sense of the real. We have grown up in a world more in decay than the worst of the Roman Empire, a cowardly world chasing after a good time (of which last one can approve) but chasing it without the courage to pay the hard price of full consciousness.

Norman Mailer, 1959

this pusillanimous business

When I was about to graduate journalism school, I gave my professor a giant button that I picked up in Times Square. It said: I smell shit. Is there a journalist in the room? (He was ready for my snottiness and, in return, handed me a framed photo of a patient in a mental institution with a blanket over his head, and said, This is you.)

So can't say I'm surprised to see all the hand-wringing by my colleagues in this pusillanimous business about who or whom is or isn't a journalist.

I guess it has to be said:

Yes, Glenn Greenwald is a journalist. He's a columnist who reports. So was the late Mike McAlary, who broke the story of the police abuse and torture of Abner Louima with a toilet plunger in his Daily News column (“Be afraid, be very afraid if this story is true, and I am afraid it is,” McAlary, normally a staunch supporter of the cops, wrote in the first of his columns on the case. Would that he were around now to blast the NYPD for the insane criminality of doing 600,000 stop-and-frisks a year.)

And, yes, Alexa O'Brien is a journalist. The government may not like her blog posts and may question her methods, but she is reporting, trying to get the word out about a case that the government doesn’t want people to hear about—the court martial of Bradley Manning. Her work may be positional--but that is no different from how the late William Safire operated when he was writing for the Times Op-Ed page. Americans, he wrote in a 2001 blast against the Bush Administration for denying foreign fighters and terrorists the right to a fair trial, "have no need of kangaroo courts to betray our principles of justice."

And wikileaks is a journalistic organization. Whether you like or dislike Julian Assange is not the issue. Rather, ask yourself: in reproducing actual documents, in getting them published by newspapers around the world, how is wikileaks any different from The New York Times when it printed the Pentagon Papers?

Speaking of which, here’s a relevant portion of the eloquent concurrence penned by Justice Hugo Black (and joined by Justice William O. Douglas) in the Pentagon Papers case: “The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

royal road test repair

On Tuesday. June 25, starting at 6 pm, I will be participating in a typewriter event called Royal Road Test Repair, which is part of a series of field tests taking place at 1067 Pacific Street in Brooklyn, NY.

The event takes its name from a book artist Ed Ruscha, musician Mason Williams and photographer Patrick Blackwell published in 1967. They threw a Royal 10 out the side window of a Buick Le Sabre at 90 mph in the middle of the California desert and documented the resulting wreckage as if it were a crime scene. They called the book Royal Road Test.

The contours of this event are still in formation. I know this: I'll be repairing my Royal Model 10. Then I hope to do something extravagant with it. If you're in NYC, perhaps you care to share your ideas.

field tests at the test field

              1067Pacific Test-Site


                                        Lets talk about social feasts
                                   June 17th-June 25th

1067 PacificPeople are performing Field Tests at the Test-Site each day from June 17th through June 25th.
Join us at the Pacific Test-Site (1067 Pacific Street, Brooklyn, bet. Classon & Franklin, http://goo.gl/ugOcy.)
We are exploring different types of social gatherings to look into the economy of the ephemeral.
The interventions at 1067 Pacific Test-Site are occurring in parallel with SHUTTLE, a mobile desert performance project ranging from California to Arizona.
Andrea will depart from the Pacific Test-Site on June 26th to join SHUTTLE and will travel and perform with them in the desert ecology  (http://performingmobilities.net/).

Onward.  We hope to be with you one of the social feasts. Upward.:) 1067 PacificPeople

JUNE:

17 MON Hoist the Flag. Burn The Flag.
Landing at the Test-Site
7:00PM-8:00PM

18 TUES Urban Desert Anarchist Prom
7:00PM-8:00PM

19 WED Traveling Citizen Tent Torture
7:00PM-8:00PM

20 THU Death in the Sky
DeLesslin George-Warren and his voice – As Day turns Dark
8:30PM

21 FRI Car Washing Crew
8:30PM-10PM

22 SAT Trench Field Potlock – please bring a food dish and, if you have one, a shovel
6:00PM-10PM

23 SUN  Desert Sanatorium
1:00PM-4:00PM

24 MON Car Mechanic Walking-Tour
3:00PM-4:00PM

25 TUES Royal Road Test Repair
6:00PM-8:00PM

Ed Koch, 1924-2013

Ed Koch, after his primary election victory in 1985

I disliked most of his policies as Mayor, but I have to thank Ed Koch, who died early yesterday at the age of 88. He taught me a crucial early lesson about being a reporter.

In 1985, in my first full-time newspaper job, I was covering several neighborhoods for a weekly Brooklyn tabloid called The Phoenix. Since no one else on the staff had an interest, my beat also included the massive subsidized real estate deals that were being planned for the borough. So, when the Mayor announced the first new office project in downtown Brooklyn in decades, I left the tilted second floor room above Atlantic Avenue that served as our newsroom to attend my first City Hall press event.

I sat on the side and out popped Hizzonor. As Koch spoke, I flipped through the press release his staff had handed out. I made some quick calculations in the margin and discovered that the value of the government subsidies allocated to the building amounted to more than the cost of building it. So I tentatively stuck up my hand.

He called on everyone in the room before he deigned to recognize me. "Mr Mayor," I said when he finally nodded my way, "I've added up the numbers in your press release and from what I can tell, this building is 110 percent financed by the state and the city. So my question to you, Your Honor, is this: how much money is the developer putting into the building?"

Koch peered at me as if from a great distance. Then he spoke in three choppy bursts: "Where? Are You? From?"

All these years later, I still recall the cold sweat I felt as I gave my name and affiliation. It was a humbling yet valuable experience. Ed Koch taught me to ask my questions despite my fears.

Thanks, Mr. Mayor.

a snapshot of my desktop

A partial view of my desk and some of my trusted companions.

RAW campfire get-together

Come on over!
We hope you can visit us next Saturday, Jan. 12 between 2 pm and 6 pm at 1067 Pacific Street in Brooklyn.

Come join the fireside chat and check out the new RAW space we’ve taken on since January 1, 2013.  Say “hello” to the new challenge. For the next five years, we’ve taken on an extremely RAW space: a 600 square foot garage with a lot of 1900 square feet. We’d love to have you with your own creative visionary being together with us as we take the first baby steps in the RAW space...

Dress warm. Bring your warm or cold thoughts. Sustain yourself in the RAW situation. Bring your children and, as well, be open to invite others you think would love to participate in this beginning as we search for ecstasy in impediments with embracement. You fill in the blank: Transient designed shelters for _____? Temporary innovative ______ point for _____? Permanent floating movable _______ platform for _____? Provisional sky  ______? Part-time archaeological garden of somatic _______ for _____?   _____ Guernica outdoors in Bed-Stuy -- but, at 75 feet, three times the size of Picasso's famous anti-war painting? You name it!

RAW Campfire Get Together Chat---SATURDAY, Jan. 12, 2 pm - 6 pm
1067 Pacific St. in Brooklyn, (it's the blue corrugated metal gate between Franklin & Classon) Map: http://goo.gl/maps/1WUZr
Subway: Franklin Avenue (A/C/Shuttle) is just three blocks away, or bike -> plenty of parking space in the lot

Come and Check It Out! Dress Warm. Bring What You Want. Toast Marshmallows. Share Tea (or Whisky.)  Let us know if you will join us. Andrea + Rob

Jonah Lehrer in the Whale

The most dangerous sentence ever written: I think, therefore I am.

The Cartesian cogito (in Latin, the sentence reads Cogito ergo sum) is a fundament of the modern era. But it is also an expression of radical subjectivity. It’s not we think, therefore we are. Or you think, therefore you are. Or even, I think, therefore you are and you think, therefore I am—which, though wacky, would at least indicate the improbable, oddball and interdependent nature of life.

Instead, existence is all about the self. As Popeye had it, I yam what I yam, and that's all what I yam. Honest, maybe, but where does that leave Olive Oyl and Wimpy and Swee’Pea? Talk about egocentric.

I started thinking about the ‘cult of the self’ implicit in the cogito when I read that science writer Jonah Lehrer had been caught fudging and fabricating a bunch of Bob Dylan quotes—and, just maybe, a bunch of other stuff.

I don’t presume to be able to psychoanalyze Lehrer, and I don’t want to universalize his predicament. But it does seem that some authors care more about themselves and the fact they’ve got something to say than about the things they are saying and the people they are saying them about. They’ve got way too much me tied up in their memes. I mean, if Lehrer cared about Dylan and wasn’t just using him to make his own mark on the creative process, would he want to mash-up the Master’s words?

Of course, we all have conflicted and ego-driven roots for our desire to say stuff in print. So here's a kind-of anti-cogito--five principles, all based on humbling experience, that help rip apart any ridiculous desire I may have to make myself the hero of my work:

1. I am no better than the people I interview and write about and come in contact with as I’m reporting. Indeed, I am frequently worse than them—not as honorable or hard working or consistent or hospitable or open-minded or intelligent.
2. I learn more from the people I interview and write about and come in contact with than they will ever learn from me.
3. When I am the story, I have failed. This doesn’t mean no first person reporting. It means that any tales that are primarily designed to call attention to me -- Jonah tweets a jpeg of himself from inside the whale: ‘here I am in the belly of the beast!’ -- are suspect.
4. Write what you know is self-involved and, far too often, self-congratulatory. Rather, write what you don’t know about what you know. Or, what you know about what you don’t know. Or, perhaps even better, what you know you don’t want to know.
5. I will never have the answers—but I may have bumbled onto some relevant and potentially meaningful questions.

For more on these points, here, so simple and sensible it makes me want to cry, is The Envoy of Mr. Cogito, by Zbigniew Herbert. And here is another touchstone—Roque Dalton’s Tense Conversation:

What would you do if your worst enemies
were infinitely better
than you?

That wouldn't be anything. The problem comes
when your best friends
are worse than you.

The worst thing is to have only enemies.

No. The worst thing is to have only friends.

But who is the enemy?
You or your enemies?

See you later, friend.

the capital of urban unrest

South Africa is leading the world in urban protest. According to police statistics, there were 27 protests in cities across the country every day, and 3 protests every day involved what the cops euphemistically call "unrest incidents." Arrests, thankfully, have gone down this year. But over the past 3 years more than 12,500 people have been arrested at these demos. It is, as the Mail & Guardian details, a "rebellion of the poor."

good governance quote of the day, 12 April

Silvio Berlusconi's lawyer, Niccolò Ghedini, admitting that the former Italian PM paid 127,000 euros to the families of three women who are scheduled to be witnesses at his upcoming trial:

"The linking of the payments with the fact they are witnesses in the so-called Ruby trial is absolutely spurious and without foundation," Ghedini said. "With his usual generosity, Berlusconi has sought to help, in a totally transparent fashion through bank transfers, those people who have been caught up in the media storm built around inexistent claims and who are living through an extremely difficult period economically, professionally and on the home front."