Observations from the Boston rally

29 January, 6 p.m.

• I took an Uber to the revolution hahahahah (sorry, 15min instead of 45!! …hmm…), or close anyway, then walked, and it’s an interesting vibe of rally-inflows, people carrying their signs but not yet in rally mode.
• Saw someone I met once in high school at my former english teacher’s new classroom and he recognized me and I asked “How are you?” like an idiot, like when the gate agent wishes you a safe flight and you’re like “You too!”, because it’s a rote friendly question but everyone is amped and yet in their heart of hearts not necessarily fine, and they don’t know how to answer.
• Don’t call it an #Occupy comeback, they’ve been here for years. Um but it does seem to help that there’s some latent framework, like as a warm-up.
• Boy the homemade signs sure beat the mass-printed political convention signs!
• It’s quite a moment for mayors. Urbanizing cosmopolitan population etc, like that beautiful NYT map of the disjoint blue archipelago and red ocean, the Big Sort. Weirdly this is doing more to devolve federal power (or just engagement?) to state and city levels than years of small-gov conservative federalism (which maybe hasn’t actually been seriously pursued by federal GOP in my lifetime).
• People are here amped about Sen. Warren. I can’t see her but I can hear her, more or less…
• There’s a “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here” chant rolling in from the back, from people who can’t hear Warren, and I’m right at the sort of transition point where people don’t really want to join in the rear chant because they’re trying to listen.
• I know a lot of people are not super thrilled at the general national level of political awareness right now (like tweets like “Keep in mind that a lot of e.g. rural America is shockingly oblivious to many of the scandals and outrages to which you are here daily exposed”), but even controlling for the selection bias of I’m-standing-in-the-middle-of-a-major-pro-immigrant-liberal-political-rally,-in-Boston-no-less, it sure seems that the general national level of political awareness is just worlds away from what it was in the precedent environments cited on a lot of these signs, notably circa early Nazi Germany. Like it seems in retrospect that it took a long time for it to dawn on the world what was going on. Like today I feel like we would know very fast where any given train was going. But, ok, is that awareness… potent? Surely there was a ton of distraught awareness and rallies and things and… it just wasn’t enough. Idk. Dangerous comparisons. I’m pretty ignorant.
• Lol there’s a Cambridge city councilor running the call-and-response and he’s like “I’m a city councilor…” and everyone’s like “I’m a city councilor…” and scattered people are like, I am?, and then “When I ran…” / [all] “When I ran…” // “I won by six votes…” / [all] “I won by six votes” and we’re crackin up over here by the tree by the steps as we all repeat his résumé. But I guess the call-and-response isn’t just affirming or agreeing, it’s also just acoustically amplifying, even when you’re echoing non-generalizable first-person narrative. Sorry I’m new here.
• Theologically, chanting “Today we are all Muslim” is, um, a little fraught, and maybe not actually respectful of the power of the word in Islam…? Christianity and Islam have different relationships with signs and symbols!
• “Can’t build a wall / Hands too small” is getting laughs. Some verbose attempted chant about Gov. Charlie Baker being a Trump shill has a wicked clumsy meter and does not take off at all (and also I forget it!).
• “Nap”/”woke” pun signs on babies are maybe beginning to jump the shark.
• Shocking diversity and lack of sports references for a Boston crowd. All super polite and warm and friendly!
• The Banksy Muslim woman is probably the most popular (maybe only?) recurring reproduced image.
• Signage fabrication notes: Sharpie on scraps of cardboard probably most popular. Bright marker on white or fluorescent card stock. Some inkjet cut and pasted onto posters. Some just 8"x11". (Where’s the craft-supplies long-volatility ETF? Sorry sorry sorry.) Almost all are handheld; very few on good wooden sticks; that’s something to watch for as people accrue practice and matériel. Languages: almost all English, a few Arabic, a couple Spanish, some scattered Chinese. A fair amount of red/white/blue flag imagery, but almost as much roygbiv. A lot of Statue of Liberty; I guess that’s the dominant image, if we’re talkin images. Today the language is far more pro-immigrant, Muslim, refugee than it is anti-Trump, actually. A lot of “This land…” and “Love > Hate” and “Give us your tired” and “No ban, no wall”. Bannon getting maybe half as many mentions as Trump, including a couple like “Impeach Bannon”, puppetmaster angle; Pence a distant third. Nobody I’ve seen exploited the “No ban” / “Bannon” syllabic chiamus near-anagram. “One minute closer to DOOMSDAY.” Some scripture. Also “White people are fucking immigrants.”
• Most common slogan might be “We are all immigrants.” Interesting. So like… insofar as the U.S. is exceptional, it seems to be largely because two sides of the world collided and one totally wiped the other out through a mix of intentional and unintentional disease and a lot of warfare and probably subtler policy and general disruption. A sort of slow genocide that evacuated a continent. So people from (kinda) all over come in to fill the void, so you get a pretty young & diverse new nation that has a concept of its foreign origin more recent than “time immemorial”. So you get monuments to that and stuff. Um. Exceptional horror in origin and exceptional makeup thereafter. (Are our demographics actually more diverse or am I making that up?) And one can imagine an irredeemable original sin like that being useful to liberal tolerant pluralist virtues thereafter. A monstrous original debt which forms a sort of moral currency for posterity. Not currency, that’s crass. Idk, what’s the logic of “original sin”? Something about a lamb. But then slavery and institutional racism are, like… um… well: Saying “We are all immigrants” plays into this nice exceptionalist narrative I just kinda sketched — we really all* (*not quite!!) are and it is our greatest sin and greatest virtue, so that’s poetic or whatever. But “We are all immigrants” kinda skips over the part where, uh, very many people were ripped and stolen from their homes and communities and shipped here against their will and subjected to terrible terrible terrible things, and continue to suffer from the legacy of that, it wasn’t a Statue-of-Liberty kind of arrival.

29 January, 11 p.m.

This is all written in my politics voice btw, which (aside from sheer laziness/roughness) is meant to connote (like, idk, um) non-closure, hypotheticalism (hypothesy?), divergence, ergodic hypocrisy, like I’d take back and disagree with every point, given enough time to write. Kind of like: “the specifically novelistic essay (in other words, instead of claiming to convey some apodictic message, remaining hypothetical, playful, or ironic).” Except not very novelistic. But “apodictic” is a great word for something I’m not.

One really big serious factor in all this is that rallies are so fun.

Here let me blockquote Kundera here in my ciswhitemale millennial Medium blog post:

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Part Three: The Angels

5

A magazine photograph: a row of men in uniform, bearing rifles and in helmets with protective plastic visors, watch a group of young people in jeans and T-shirts, hand in hand in a ring, dance in front of them.

It is clearly an interlude before a clash with police guarding a nuclear power plant, a military training camp, the offices of a political party, or the windows of an embassy. The young people have taken advantage of a lull to form a circle and, to a simple, well-known tune, take two steps in place, one step forward, raise first the left leg and then the right.

I think I understand them: they have the impression that the circle they are describing on the ground is a magical circle uniting them like a ring. And their chests swell with an intense feeling of innocence: they are united not by marching, like soldiers or fascist formations, but by dancing, like children. What they are trying to spit in the cops’ faces is their innocence.

That is how the photographer saw them, and he brought out an eloquent contrast: on one side, the police in the false unity (imposed, commanded) of the row, on the other, the young people in the true unity (sincere and natural) of the circle; on this side, the police in the sullen posture of lying in wait, and on that one, those who are delighting in play.

Dancing in a ring is magic; a ring dance speaks to us from the ancient depths of our memories. Madame Raphael, the teacher, clipped that photo from the magazine and gazed at it dreamily. She too wished to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a circle of men and women with whom she could hold hands in a ring dance, at first in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then in the Trotskyist Party, then in a Trotskyist splinter party, then in the movement against abortion (a child has a right to life!), then in the movement to legalize abortion (a woman has a right to her body!), then she looked for it in Marxists, in psychoanalysts, in structuralists, looked for it in Lenin, in Zen Buddhism, in Mao Tse-tung, among the followers of yoga, in the school of the nouveau roman, and finally she wishes at least to be in perfect harmony with her students, to be at one with them, meaning that she always compels them to think and say the same things she does, to merge with her into a single body and a single soul in the same circle and the same dance.

Her students Gabrielle and Michelle are now bent over the Ionesco play in their room at the residence hall. Michelle is reading from it aloud:

“ ‘Logician, to the old gentleman: Get a sheet of paper and work it out. If you take two paws from two cast, how many paws does each cat have left?

“ ‘Old gentleman, to the logician: There are several possible solutions. One cat might have four paws, the other one, two. There might be one cat with five paws and the other cat with one paw. By taking two of the eight paws from the two cats we might have one cat with six paws. We might have one cat with no paws at all.’ ”

Michelle interrupts her own reading: “I don’t get how you could take paws from a cat. Could he — would he — cut them off?”

“Michelle!” Gabrielle cries out.

“And I don’t get how a cat can have six paws.”

“Michelle!” Gabrielle again cries out.

“What?” asks Michelle.

“Did you forget? You’re the one who said it!”

“What?” asks Michelle again.

“This dialogue is certainly intended to create a comic effect!”

“You’re right,” says Michelle, looking elatedly at Gabrielle. The two girls look into each other’s eyes, their lips quiver with something like pride, and finally their mouths let out some short, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of their vocal range. Then the same sounds again and again. “A force laugh. A laughable laugh. A laugh so laughable they can do nothing but laugh. Then comes real laughter. Bursts of repeated, rushing, unbridled laughter, explosions of magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad. They laugh their laughter until the infinity of their laughter. . . . O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter . . .”

Meanwhile Madame Raphael was forlornly roaming the streets of that small town on the Mediterranean coast. Suddenly she raised her head as if a fragment of melody carried on the wings of a breeze were reaching her from afar, or as if a distant scent had struck her nostrils. She stopped and heard within her skull the shriek of a rebellious void wanting to be filled. It seemed to her that somewhere nearby a flame of great laughter was blazing, that perhaps somewhere nearby people were holding hands and dancing in a ring . . .

She stood this way for a while, looking around nervously, and then the mysterious music abruptly vanished (Michelle and Gabrielle had stopped laughing; suddenly they looked wearied by the prospect of a night devoid of love), and Madame Raphael, oddly anguished and unsatisfied, made her way home through the warm streets of the small coastal town.

6

I too once danced in a ring. It was in 1948. In my country, the Communists had taken power, the Socialist and democratic Christian ministers had taken refuge abroad, and I took other Communist students by the hands or shoulders and we took two steps in place, one step forward, raised the left leg to one side and then the right to the other, and we did this nearly every month, because we always had something to celebrate, an anniversary or some other event, old injustices were redressed, new injustices were perpetrated, factories were nationalized, thousands of people went to prison, medical care was free, tobacconists saw their shops confiscated, aged workers vacationed for the first time in expropriated villas, and on our faces we had the smile of happiness. Then one day I said something I should not have said, was expelled from the party, and had to leave the ring dance. . . .

30 January 12pm

Something I forgot to mention. There were a few scattered beggars on the street, on the periphery. (Surely there’s a better word than “beggars”?) They did not seem to be getting much attention. Certainly not on a per-capita basis. Certainly not commensurate with the generally abstractly charitable atmosphere. Which is hard, right? If one is to be neighborly one ought to start in one’s own backyard? I mean I didn’t really watch closely; I imagine they saw, in aggregate, considerable kindness. One sign read “It’s my 40th birthday.” That’s a sign I didn’t mention in my exhaustive analysis of signage above. I had zero cash in my wallet. I swear, I did. Didn’t have any cash, that is. I… But I could’ve… hm.