Rural Farmers Feeding The Occupy Movement

Produce from western Massachusetts farms; Actions and Investigations

As a companion piece to today's article considering Crystal Bridges, Alice Walton, and the Occupy Movement, Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster has just sent word of Feed the Movement, a grassroots effort by farmers in the Northeast to help feed the Occupy gathering in New York:

WNYC has also profiled the work of the folks on the ground in city who gladly receive this food and then work to prepare it to be put to use on Wall Street. Jennifer Hsu writes of how one OWS member and an unemployed chef are cooking for thousands of people each afternoon:

Every night at Zuccotti Park, dinner is served around 7 P.M. What protesters may not realize is that their meals are made from fresh, organic produce donated by a dozen or so small farms located throughout the Northeast.

Since the early weeks of the protest, regional farmers have been coming down independently to Occupy Wall Street to donate fruits and vegetables. In those days, meals were prepared in volunteers' homes. Yet, as the protest quickly gained momentum, food preparation needed to get more organized, and Occupy Wall Street set up a daily dinner operation out of a soup kitchen in East New York, Brooklyn.

Crystal Bridges, Alice Walton, and the Occupy Movement

Crystal Bridges; Mike Pirnique, InArkansas.com

As the 11-11-11 opening date for The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art approaches, many high-profile articles on the site and its guiding spirit, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, have begun to appear across the airwaves and the internet. 

Just this morning Elizabeth Blair reported on NPR about the museum and its relationship with its local cultural and natural environment. As has happened across much of the media coverage, Ms. Blair's otherwise excellent overview characterizes the Bentonville area as being small-town, though the region's statistics suggest otherwise; please see Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster's previous piece on "Art & Identity In a Not-So Rural Corner of Arkansas" for a deeper discussion of Bentonville and Walmart's place in this expanding corner of the state. 

Across Ms. Blair's piece, as well as Martha Teichner's feature from CBS Sunday Morning below, Crystal Bridge's rhetoric on the synthesis of art, architecture, and nature is taken at face value - with no consideration of how rural culture (let alone Ozark culture) comes to inform the space. Ms. Teichner's piece is a success in many other ways -- as it humanizes a figure vilified by certain segments of the art world -- even suggesting, if we read between the lines, a kind of rural-urban narrative within the reactions to an Major American Museum built in the Ozarks. However, the emphasis on "nature" over local culture allows for another piece of reporting on Crystal Bridges that offers the Museum as a pastoral retreat. Ultimately, this does a disservice to Ms. Walton's vision, and to the more engaging discussions that could emerge from such journalism. 

[Unfortunately, CBS disables the YouTube embedding for Sunday Morning; please follow this link to view the 9 minute feature.]

Both of these pieces do succeed in suggesting that the story of Crystal Brides is complicated -  and that a knee-jerk reaction against the museum or its founder misses the unmissable fact: that most major art museums, art institutions, and, indeed the art world itself, is motivated in large part by the largesse of such individuals and their corporate partners. While many citizens might criticize Corporate America's business practices, they gladly partake in the latest Impressionism exhibit. 

Such interconnectedness suggests the argument the Occupy movement has not yet made forcefully enough to its followers: that they are implicated in the very structures they critique. (For instance, the We Are the 99 Percent tumblr page displays the extent to which the movement is energized by frustrated arts and humanities graduates.) A self-examination of where the 99% and the 1% might converge, or at least have shared values or interests, could do profound good for the cultural and political atmosphere in this country - much more so than Guy Fawkes masks on one side and the cartoonish reporting of Fox News on the other.

I find it interesting that this weekend the media will provide dispatches both from the opening of Crystal Bridges and from a new weekend of Occupy events across the country. As these demonstrators begin to feel the effects of winter, as their figures march across the screen, we will also be presented with images of the stunning architecture of Crystal Bridges - a museum set in one of the most caricatured and misunderstood regions of America. Both of these stories suggest that our easiest and most impassioned arguments may not, in the end, bring us any closer to understanding what we might learn, and what we might have in common.

Occupy Rural: Will It Play In Peoria?

Gone Viral: Diane McEachern and her dogs in Bethel, Alaska;  Anchorage Daily News

There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.

          - Slavoj Žižek, speaking at Occupy Wall Street on October 8th

I'd like to continue a discussion of the rural dimension of the Occupy movement with these words by internationally-acclaimed literary critic Slavoj Žižek. Folks can read his full remarks in transcript, along with video here; and I'd encourage our readers, regardless of political persuasion, to review Mr. Žižek's comments, as his remarks stand as one of the most lucid articulations of this movement from one of the world's most celebrated thinkers. From what I can tell, much of the mainstream media -- just as Diane Sawyer focuses again on rural destitution for urban consumption -- is more interested in displaying a cartoonish view of the Occupy movement. These words help to expand the dialogue; here's another excerpt:

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the rule is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless, moral protest. A decaffienated process. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes to third world starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after marriage agencies are now outsourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

Žižek gets to the two poles at the center of this debate: on one hand, that this gathering of voices could be minimized to a "harmless, moral protest," something for which a number of folks in rural organizations can no doubt identify. In keeping with that, and considering Occupy Wall Street from a rural perspective, the closely-related possibility is that, for many living outside of the cities and suburbs, these members of this movement will appear, in modifying Žižek's words, only "in love with themselves." 

I include these images not to offer a caricature, or to poke fun, but to suggest that while the Occupy movement should be concerned with projecting a richer narrative of its aims to the American public, they also need to be concerned with the very image- and media-related techniques which they openly critique  Or, to put it another way, they might ask how will it play in Peoria? 

Or, how would it play to Joe Bageant? He would no doubt support their efforts, but the video below adds a class-perspective, and a cautionary one at that,  to the possible perceived "smugness" of the Occupy movement. If folks haven't read it yet this week, please see Lisa Pruitt's stellar consideration of his work in The Daily Yonder.

Beyond this, the movement should ask themselves if the rhetoric of "smashing capitalism" allows for real change, or if it is a self-congratulatory position. Is it perceived, outside of the largely urban sanctuaries of Occupy culture, as a comfortable, elitist slogan? Across most of the countryside we need rural economic development, we need local and sustainable business communities, we need imaginative entrepreneurs. Purely from my own perspective, I would echo what Alec Baldwin says below, that capitalism is worthwhile. I would add to his remarks that we need to think, as the Occupy movement has forced us to, about how we can can adapt these questions on a local level. Consider the words of Wendell Berry in The Citizenship Papers along with Alec Baldwin's remarks amongst Ron Paul "sentimentalists" at Occupy Wall Street:

We live, as we must sooner or later recognize, in an era of sentimental economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of "the many" who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present.

Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the "free market" and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to "the many" - in, of course, the future. 

 

Since our initial piece on the rural dynamic to the Occupy movement, many new outlets have emerged to help tell the broader cultural story; earlier this week we mentioned Occupy Rural, and to this list should be added two Occupy Rural America Facebook groups here and here. 

As I mentioned earlier in the week, the kind of change folks could see in their local, rural communities might be more lasting, more permanent, than what emerges on a broader scale from Zuccotti Park.  I'd refer above to Rachel Reynolds Luster's description of her experiences in southern Missouri, and I'd also suggest that these kinds of social gatherings in a rural America could cut across generational, cultural, and political lines in such a way that these newly formed communities could put their minds towards solving together some of their region's challenges. If the politics of the last decade has fractured our sense of participation and cooperation, then perhaps such collaborations might be the lasting legacy of the Occupy movement.

Occupy Rural: Its Place And Its Possibilities

Occupy gathering in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho; Jessica Robinson, Oregon Public Broadcasting

Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.

- Michael Kimmelman

This last weekend, as I've mentioned previously, I had the honor of presenting The Art of the Rural at the BIG FEED, a "regional social" of art, music, and rural culture organized by the M12 group of artists. Unbeknownst to me, two events happened during this weekend which have led me to consider again the rural element to the Occupy movement -- both its challenges and its extraordinary potential.

I say this first: my opinions on this subject are purely my own and they do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone else associated with AOTR. My editorial logic for covering the Occupy movement, as opposed to the Tea Party, is that -- as responsible journalists are reporting -- this is still an amalgamous, decentralized and non-partisan group of citizens. The minute that this becomes aligned with a traditional political party is most likely the minute that it loses most of its cultural imperative. As it relates to this site, I am more interested in writing about people than political parties; at this point, this is an extraordinary and moving example of people uniting across generational and class lines.

To return, I was interested how, during the BIG FEED, the Occupy movement was referenced alternately with curiosity and passion by both local presenters and folks who have flown from far away to attend the event: rural people, members of the rural diaspora, and even their supporters in urban areas, are all thinking about how this movement might be applied to the countryside. Last week we offered one example from southern Missouri, complete with Rachel Reynolds Luster's take on the events.

Steph Larsen and Brian DePew Occupy The Pasture; photograph Steph Larsen

In a moment of synchronicity, just as such a dialogue was percolating around the edges of the BIG FEED on the Colorado high plains, I received an email from Anna Culver informing me that an Occupy Rural group [Twitter: @occupyrural] was online, collecting "storylines" via toll-free phone that they would present via Soundcloud. Here's the introduction to this storytelling project:

Another Test by occupyrural

Occupy Rural also maintains a Facebook presence, and they ask that readers submit their stories to the ever-expanding tumblr page We Are The 99 Percent. If folks haven't seen this tumblr page yet, I highly recommend a visit; it's the best articulation of what concerns this movement.

At the BIG FEED I had the opportunity to meet Mimi Zeiger, the editor and publisher of loud paper and a leading voice on art, architecture, and urban space, and she offered within her talk some inspiring examples of how artists and citizens are reclaiming public space -- ideas which readers can find in her Interventionist Toolkit series published online at Places. We had a chance afterwards to talk about the connections between interventionist art and the Occupy movement, and Ms. Zeiger later alerted me to a piece by New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman that holds real possibility for folks who want to think through the potential for a rural Occupy movement.

"In Protest, The Power Of Place," will resonate with many of our readers because it's less interested in politics than how place and community serve as a movement's lasting source of power. Instead of the expected myriad of demands at Occupy Wall Street (or beyond), Mr. Kimmelman tells us, "the encampment itself has become the point:"

And it was obvious to me watching the crowd coalesce over several days that consensus emerges urbanistically, meaning that the demonstrators, who have devised their own form of leaderless governance to keep the peace, find unity in community. The governing process they choose is itself a bedrock message of the protest.

It produces the outlines of a city, as I said. The protesters have set up a kitchen, for serving food, a legal desk and a sanitation department, a library of donated books, an area where the general assembly meets, a medical station, a media center where people can recharge their laptops using portable generators, and even a general store, called the comfort center, stocked with donated clothing, bedding, toothpaste and deodorant — like the food, all free for the taking.

To modify Mr. Kimmelman's language, how might "consensus emerge ruralistically?" Herein lies the reason that I feel that the Occupy movement could hold even greater possibility for rural place and rural citizens: we see a drastically different sense of geographic and community scale in rural places, and we may find that -- despite coming from different ideological backgrounds -- the Occupy movement in rural America could allow for folks to not only raise awareness of pressing, unacceptable, national problems but also to work as a community to solve them on a local level. Certainly, this can also happen in a city, though, as I know from a few years in living in Boston, it is too easy to retreat back into our physical and cultural neighborhoods. In rural America, such retreat is impossible. We have to see each other. We have to work together.

This is already evidenced in the diverse group of Occupy rural folks we previously covered; the solutions they proposed were singular, sensible, and non-partisan. Tomorrow I will continue this commentary on the rural Occupy movement with a look at these solutions, and the rhetoric of its urban counterparts.