Hello, World!

Just a notification to all our authors to cover their hair and eyes: Betting on the Universe has officially gone public.

update

Greetings Class,

Mom is doing great. She is mostly back to her normal sarcastic self. her articulation is back to mostly normal, though she is a bit fuzzy still from all the medications. She has gotten up and walked today, and is eating, rather than being IV fed (though the food is somewhere between liquid and solid still: soups, jello, pudding, etc.)

My write-up is turning out very good so far, and I think this will make an excellent project for the course. I am hoping to be in class next week, but I will keep you all informed.

Thank you for those who have kept us in your thoughts.

--Richard

“This is a Love Movement” Dr. Cornel West on Occupy Wall Street Movement

A status update and comments made by a friend and colleague of mine:

You know things are bad when a young person from a middle class and privileged family is as uncertain of their economic future as a young person from a poor family.

When a black kid from the Bronx doesn’t live the American dream something is wrong with that kid. He must be lazy or dysfunctional. When a privileged non-minority doesn’t live the American dream, something must be wrong with America. I don’t think so.

When you turn a blind eye to the suffering of your neighbor don’t be surprised when the suffering creeps across the yard. The social and political system in this country that contributed to the suffering of the underclass for decades was allowed by the privileged who wanted to maintain the status quo. Now that same greedy machine is biting the middle class in the ass. I think it is too late for the blame game. The damage is done. I only hope we can all learn an important lesson: The social woes of the underprivileged are the social woes of EVERYBODY. We are all connected.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. ~John F. Kennedy

Richard’s status update after attending a General Assembly in Albuquerque:

Irony in action: At the Occupy Albuquerque movement this evening, after getting kicked off of Yale Park and discussing steps to take, an individual walked by and called the protesters "Idiots". The word "idiot" is descended from the Greek word, Idios, which means private person, or individual. This specifically relates to anyone who was not part of the Polis, or the political workings of Athens. The protesters were in a group, in the midst of a highly democratic decision-making process (voting on proposals) actively using their First Amendment Rights to freedom of assembly. So who's the Idiot? I love irony. :)

I think I might have been waiting for this movement for my whole life. From the outset, the occupy movement reminded me of King’s movement for the poor that never really happened. I’ve also thought often of Langston Hughes’ A Dream Deferred. Actually tons of stuff has gone through my head since I first heard about the Occupy Movement, so I am going to throw some of that together.

Two quotes of Martin Luther King Jr. that I love and have used as a signature line on emails:

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

And

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

I reposted this picture on facebook. I feel it’s pretty clear who is actually protesting the power and who is not.

Ani Difranco’s song Fuel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMX8QPP9t-U

Who are the police supposed to serve and protect?

Paraphrasing Brian:The homeless have been “occupying” Albuquerque for quite awhile. If you put signs in their hands, then it’s a problem.

And here are a couple of videos:College humor: We Are the 1%

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrQiGBpHVCc

Video made in support of OWS by moveon.org http://front.moveon.org/this-powerful-clip-is-exactly-why-we-support-occupywallstreet/#.TqcG2DpGEGQ.facebook

Dr. Cornel West participating in a people’s trial of Goldman Sachs. I really like this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgvgHQMV6Mc

We made the front page of the Valencia County News Bulletin.

In this picture are my sons Jason and Jarryn and my husband Jim.

Rough Weekend

Greetings Class,

I had informed Dr. Kells about this weekend, but I wanted to post a brief summary of events.

My mom had open-heart surgery on Friday. Everything seemed to have gone well, but about an hour after I left for the evening, I got a call that she had gone into cardiac arrest. Panic ensued. They were able to stabilize her, but they had to go in a second time to do so and repair the damage. The graft on her heart tore slightly where it connected. Luckily a nurse was in the room when she went into arrest, so there was no delay in response time.

She is doing well now. She is off the breathing tube, responsive, and even smiling a little. She still is not talking, but she had a tube down her throat for 48 hours.

I will most likely not be in class Wednesday, and I plan on, once I am a little more removed, doing a brief write-up on the whole experience in the vein of our class.

I hope everyone's weekend has been much much more boring than mine has.

--Richard

Insider/Outsider Practices: Denise Chavez is a real Chola

So I lost all of my documents a few days ago when my computer crashed and I’ve had to re-write all of these blogs. In a way I’m glad that happened. After last night’s class and Deb’s presentation on Bennet I am seeing Denise Chavez’s work through a different lens. Denise Chavez is from Las Cruces, NM. She is a Nueva Mexicana in the truest sense. Espírtu of the Southwest and a good La Llorona fearing mujer. A product of her landscape, Chavez takes the stage and commands the audience’s attention with the forceful presence of the Organ Mountains. During her performance at the Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture Series, Chavez stressed the importance of belonging to the land from which we came. She told stories about growing up in New Mexico and she read a piece reminiscent of Jimmy Santiago-Baca. It’s hard to write about Denise Chavez’s because it is so embedded and situated in being a Chicana from New Mexico. Every aspect of her screams New Mexican but that quality is indefinable. I remember last semester in ENG 540 I was tasked with presenting Martín and Meditations. Since we had been talking about insider/outsider practices I thought it would be an opportune moment to deconstruct and imagine how an insider might read that text as opposed to an outsider. This presentation failed tremendously because it was nearly impossible for an outsider to ‘imagine’ being an ‘insider.’ The experience, socialization, historical/political context, linguistic knowledge, code-switching strategies, and everything else involved in being an insider is so vastly complex that an outsider cannot access or acquire the persona of an insider by merely trying to ‘imagine’ what it may be like and if they did try to artificially enact insider practices the exercise becomes reductive. To complicate this even further, if knowledge is always contingent and rhetoric is always situated in some knowledge framework then the linguistic and social practices of an insider discourse community, like that of the South Valley or Southern New Mexico, rely on the a shifting knowledge. What I mean is if we shape knowledge and knowledge shapes us (a dialectical process) and we communicate based on this shifting structure then even insider discourse communities are not static but always changing. How is it ever possible for an outsider to acquire insider practices if those practices are ever-changing? This is what I see in Denise Chavez’s work. It would be easy to say that she uses New Mexican insider cliché’s like references to green chile, mariachi music, baptisms, el chupacabra (or el chups as his friends like to call him), and low-riders but Chavez is referring to these uniquely New Mexican traditions in ways that only insiders can appreciate. However, this quality, this insider use of traditional aspects of being New Mexican, is hard to define. I think perhaps a good way to illustrate this is Deb’s explanation of Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter.’ Our traditions, our unique New Mexican-ness, the artifacts that make the people from here New Mexican are our vibrant matter. Chavez knows this and uses these artifacts to generate meaning and connections to our land. We New Mexicans are part of an ecology, we thrive on ritual, and the non-human aspects of our culture (our environment, our traditions, our chola y cholo –ness, our “mira you know what I mean, or no, vato-hombre y que?) are just as important as the human ones. The vibrant matter is generative and foundational to who we are.

Democracy and Pragmatism in Occupy Albuquerque

General Assembly Meeting

OWS-Albuquerque

Wednesday, October 26^th 2011

At the last minute, I decided to attend the Occupy Albuquerque general assembly meeting for my third observation. I was joining Amiee, and her son Jason, for this observation. As I arrived near Yale Park, the majority of people were moving away from the spot. Amiee grabbed me as I was crossing the street, and we went back the way I had just come from. The police had just informed everyone associated with OWS that they had been ordered off the park. Coincidentally, this occurred just at 6:00, when the meeting was slated to start.

The people moved to stand in front of the nearby Satellite Coffee and Schlotszky’s with the permission of the owners. As this was privately owned, the police could not pursue. What followed was incredibly interesting from an analytical point of view. This group, following the lead of other groups across the country, has developed incredibly pragmatic ways of dealing with interesting challenges. Their whole process is incredibly democratic, and the rhetoric is fascinating as well.

The People’s Microphone

In some areas, laws have been instituted to remove megaphones and microphones from protesting groups, under the guise of noise ordinance laws. In response, the People’s Microphone was developed. Anyone who wishes to speak simply speaks up fiorst with “mic check” and everyone around them who hears them repeats (the goal being to repeat in unison) “mic check” and then the speaker talks in short phrases, and everyone repeats, amplifying the words so that the whole group can hear, and without using any electronic support.

Straw Poll

Propositions were made freely, from anyone in the group, and then each one was written down, read (using the people’s microphone) and then reworded as people suggested. Once the verbiage was to the majority’s liking, each one was voted on using a “straw poll” which was simply done. If one agreed with the proposition, they held their hands, fingers up, and if they disagreed, they held their hands up fingers down. Each and every one was voted on, with comments and stand-asides, and sub propositions that wound up combining several into one. The entire process was highly democratic and well organized for the chaos that preceded it.

The focus of the meeting was first focused on what the immediate reaction to the eviction by the police should be, and then down to other points on the agenda. Once decisions were made, the group broke into working groups for ideas on how to accomplish the larger goals of the group and keep the movement progressing forward. The whole process was pragmatic in the approach, dealing with immediate problems in the clearest and fairest way possible, while still generating new ideas that work toward the ultimate goals of the group.

Irony (I posted something very similar to this on my Facebook page)

After getting kicked off of Yale Park and discussing steps to take, an individual walked by and called the protesters "Idiots". The word "idiot" is descended from the Greek word, Idios, which means private person, or individual. This specifically relates to anyone who was not part of the Polis, or the political workings of Athens. The protesters were in a group, in the midst of a highly democratic decision-making process (voting on proposals) actively using their First Amendment Rights to freedom of assembly. So who's the Idiot? I love irony.

Wanderlust: Trials and Tribulations in Occupying the World

Three weeks ago Brian, Deb and I visited the Occupy Burque protest on UNM campus. This protest is an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, which began on September 17^th . I have two major concerns with the Occupy ABQ branch but before I address those concerns I think it may be best to place the Occupy movement in a broader social and historical context.

Below is the mission statement of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. This was taken from their website: www.occupywallst.org.

Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

This #ows movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society.

In this mission statement the Wall Street protesters are identifying three main components of their protest:

· Who has a right to protest: everyone

· Who are they protesting against: Wall Street and politicians

· How are they protesting: By creating general assemblies

Here’s the problem though, every US citizen is implicated as an “enemy.” Unfortunately, Wall Street is the backbone of our capitalist economy. Every product we consume is produced based on the foundationalist belief that someone will buy it. What I mean is capitalism is controlled by the consumer. As long as we consume products that we have bought from a store and that have been manufactured by a company we are supporting “Wall Street.” Wall Street in this sense then is capitalism and a consumerist society. I agree that there needs to be a shift in the American mentality of over consumption and greed. What I find difficult and problematic about the Occupy Wall Street protest is that they are not outlining clear tactics and strategies to create this shift and they are not clearly defining specific persons or entities as the focus of the protest. The Occupy movement has traveled across the world. Protests are sprouting up everywhere but little change has been made.

The Occupy Wall Street mission claims to be leaderless, however, there must be people organizing the occupation. The mere logistics of physically sustaining a massive crowd of people takes man power. If this power was harnessed in creating a rhetorical infrastructure the protest would be much more effective. I fundamentally agree with the ideology of the protesters but a pragmatic approach with clear tactics and strategies must be implemented in order to create change. This was most evident at the Occupy Burque camp on UNM campus which was greatly unorganized and quickly dismantled by APD. Granted there is power in occupying a space but rhetorical and political power comes from constructing a clear and precise agenda and then executing it effectively.