The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (59 page)

In Tampa, Matt Weidner started blogging about Occupy just a few days after the protesters
took the park, and didn’t let up. He compared it to Shays’ Rebellion just after the
Revolutionary War, called it “the Tea Party with brains,” and in a post titled “Mr.
President—Tear Down This Wall (Street),” he wrote:

The Occupy Wall Street movement is just the beginning. Admittedly small, but powerful
and frankly quite dangerous. Both to the established order and to the way of life
that this country is currently infected by. This current way of life is not sustainable.
This country has become a lie. It has become a lie because our leaders, both elected
and business, have become utterly corrupt. Truth and consequences no longer matter.
Lies and greed drive all. Wall Street and Goldman Sachs have supplanted the ideals
and principles embodied in our former national center, Washington, DC.

Occupy Tampa brought hundreds of marchers to a downtown park. Danny Hartzell wanted
to be there, because he liked the message about corporate greed, but he didn’t have
time between Wal-Mart and the kids, plus there was the price of gas to think about.
Sylvia Landis went down and saw retirees like herself, students carrying debt, families,
unemployed people with underwater houses. Some of the younger protesters seemed aimless,
and their anticapitalist rhetoric worried Sylvia. She didn’t consider herself part
of Occupy, but she brought them leftover mac and cheese that she’d made for a party,
and she drove a group of them to a training session given by foreclosure defense attorneys
in Sarasota. But after a few weeks, a few tropical squalls, and numerous trespassing
arrests, downtown returned to its habitually depopulated character, and Occupy Tampa
dwindled to eight or ten lonely protesters holding signs on the riverfront while an
occasional passing car gave a honk, and eventually they agreed to move to an isolated
park in West Tampa that was owned by the proprietor of a strip club called Mons Venus.

*   *   *

In late October, the rule against tents in Zuccotti Park was relaxed. Ray, who had
inherited a zero-degree sleeping bag and a one-man tent when the substitute teacher
landed a small share in a loft, claimed a patch of ground eighteen inches by six feet
along the south side. Zuccotti quickly filled up with tents, so that it became hard
to walk through, and Ray found that this closed the park off from the public, making
it less lively and more squalid. He rose early every morning and walked a few blocks
to watch the sun come up over the East River, then explored the Lower East Side and
Chinatown before wending his way back to Zuccotti. The fishbowl intensity of the park
was starting to get to him—lyrics from the old XTC song “Senses Working Overtime”
kept running through his head. The drum circle was starting to have the atmosphere
of Fellini’s
Satyricon
. Ray missed having a TV to disappear into—he had left Seattle before the last two
episodes of
Breaking Bad
, the most brilliant show since
The Wire
. His days were spent recharging his phone at Starbucks and taking care of other mundane
business. He used his food stamp card to buy a few pieces of fruit and a bar of unsweetened
80-percent-cocoa chocolate at the Whole Foods north of Ground Zero. He ate so little
that it didn’t matter if he was down to just a few dollars, as long as the park’s
kitchen continued serving food. Around nine at night, Ray zipped himself up in his
one-man tent, watched the Twitter feed for the Rachel Maddow show on his phone, then
went to sleep early in order to get a few hours’ rest before the noise of young people
partying nearby woke him up. He never slept more than four or five hours. One night,
the park filled with a sustained chorus of howling.

Ray found that it wasn’t easy staying active in Occupy Wall Street. He got involved
in an Occupy Central Park group, but it faded when the city refused to issue a permit.
He rarely attended the nightly General Assembly by the red sculpture, where the human
mic carried on for hours and nothing was ever resolved. The movement seemed to be
losing its hold on the ordinary public. The same issue of its newspaper, the
Occupied Wall Street Journal
, was handed out for weeks. A loud lunatic element marred the conversations along
Broadway. There were dozens of “working groups,” and many of them held meetings a
few blocks from the park, in the atrium of the Deutsche Bank building at 60 Wall Street.
But a few activists seemed to dominate these groups, in an insular conversation about
“the process” that kept returning to ideas for restructuring into smaller groups in
order to refine the process and make it “more inclusive.” A division was opening up
between the activists talking in the atrium and the occupiers holding down the park.
At one meeting of the Facilitation Working Group, a man asked Ray—an unfamiliar face—why
he was there.

Ray knew why he was there. “As a symbol, the park needs to stay occupied,” he said.
“If they say, ‘Okay, we’ll listen to what you’re saying—let’s everybody chill out
and go home and we’ll continue the discussion,’ the focus goes away, the TV trucks
go away, and the people become complacent and get into their reality shows, and who
knows what kind of bubbles get burst.”

Around the time that Ray was growing disenchanted, Nelini was getting frustrated,
too. In the euphoria of the early weeks, when seven hundred people attended a General
Assembly, one person couldn’t disrupt it. But as the meetings shrank to thirty or
forty people in the atrium, two or three people from, like, the Direct Democracy Working
Group could start an argument or block consensus and disrupt the whole thing, and
sometimes they’d use race or gender as a pretext, so it was really hard for someone
like Max, a white man, to call them on it. Nelini didn’t know if they were provocateurs,
but she wished someone would step up and tell them, “Actually, what you are saying
has nothing to do with what they were addressing and this needs to be stopped.”

Occupy was dominated by the kind of people who ran the Canadian magazine that had
gotten the whole thing started,
Adbusters
—very educated postmodern anarchists. Nelini was self-conscious about never having
finished high school—they’d read so many books she’d never heard of—and they also
made her feel sometimes that she wasn’t radical enough. She was an organizer, and
she worried that Occupy was becoming too narrow, and she wanted to figure out how
to turn it into a durable movement that could work on achieving practical goals, like
getting people to close their accounts at the big banks and moving the homeless into
foreclosed houses. She thought that at some point Occupy would need to come up with
demands. She was even beginning to think that it might be better to move on from Zuccotti
Park.

In November, as the leaves on the honey locusts turned yellow, the occupation started
to fray. The park acquired a desperate edge—it felt more like a Hooverville than a
sit-in. In Ray’s neighborhood, the appearance of a ratty sofa became a source of considerable
tension. Chris, the drifter from Florida who had been outraged by the video of women
being pepper-sprayed, hauled the sofa off a Manhattan street. But it attracted revelers
who had no interest in the movement, and it took up space that could go to two tents,
and after much discussion the sofa was handed over to the drum circle. Then one night
it was back. While Ray lay zipped up in his tent a few feet away, Chris, who had been
drinking vodka, and another man got into an argument over the sofa that ended in Chris
landing a punch and being led off under arrest. Within a few days, he was back.

Just after midnight on November 15, Nelini was in her room in Bed-Stuy when she got
a call from her Occupy friend Yotam, wishing her a happy birthday—she had just turned
twenty-four. While they were talking, she checked her Twitter feed. Questlove, the
drummer for the Roots, one of her favorite hip-hop groups, had tweeted at 11:38: “Omg,
drivin down south st near #ows. Somethin bout to go down yo, swear I counted 1000
riot gear cops bout to pull sneak attack #carefulyall.”

Nelini told Yotam, “I think they’re raiding the park.”

Ray woke up to a clamor of voices. He soon made sense of what people were saying:
the police were moving in. The park lights were shut off and a bank of klieg lights
from the north end flooded the tents. Ray put his shoes on and stepped outside his
tent to see a cop walking through the park, handing out leaflets that instructed occupiers
to leave or be arrested. Loudspeakers were blaring the same announcement: Zuccotti
Park was being closed because of fire and health concerns. Quickly, Ray broke down
his tent. He packed his belongings into a plastic bin and carried it out of the park,
along with his sleeping bag and pad. He began crossing Broadway as a wave of police
swept into the park and tore down everything in their path.

Nelini’s taxi got her to lower Manhattan around one in the morning. Cops in riot gear
were everywhere and they had Broadway blocked off north of Liberty, police vans lined
the side streets, corrections buses, garbage trucks, flatbeds loaded with metal barricades,
and even a backhoe rumbled down Broadway, and helicopters clattering overhead shone
searchlights into the financial district. A block away the red sculpture was bathed
in floodlights and a loudspeaker was droning incomprehensibly. The streets were full
of people who had heard the news and rushed downtown to rage at the police: “Fuck
you! Get the fuck out of my country!” “Arrest the real criminals!” “You’re making
bin Laden proud, guys! Thanks for serving the Taliban! Make your brothers and sisters
who died in Iraq and Afghanistan proud! Serve and protect the United States—who are
you protecting?” A chant of
“We—are—the ninety-nine percent!”
started, and then
“This is what a police state looks like!”

“I know what a police state looks like,” a black cop said. “This is not it.”

Nelini was close to people in the NYPD—both her aunts and a friend of her mom’s were
in the force. She used to blame the brutality on the administrators at the top, but
after the Union Square arrests she thought, “Okay, all the white shirts are crazy,”
and finally she flipped it around—maybe there were some good individuals scattered
through the lower ranks, but she had absolutely no respect for the institution.

She was in a group that was getting pushed up Broadway near Maiden Lane and she had
her back turned to the cops with her hands up so they wouldn’t have an excuse to grab
her. She was on her phone when she turned around and felt the spray hit her face on
the right side. Her contact lens popped out and her right eye burned as if it had
been squirted with lemon juice. She ran into a store with others who’d been sprayed
and bought milk and water to pour into her eye. A while later, she saw her friend
Jeremy get arrested and she ran over, yelling, and when a cop grabbed her, people
pulled her back and she got away. But at around 3:00 a.m. she was walking with friends
farther up on Broadway when a police car pulled over—“That’s her, that’s her”—and
three cops jumped out and tackled her to the ground as she yelled, “My hat!”

They put her in metal cuffs, drove her back to the park, and transferred her to a
van, where she sat with four cops for what seemed like hours. She told one of the
cops that she was having her period, and he expressed sympathy—he had teenage girls
of his own. Finally they drove her to 1 Police Plaza for booking. On the way in she
passed her friend Yotam, who had just been released. “Happy birthday, darling,” he
said. “See you later.”

Nelini spent the first day and night of her twenty-fourth year in jail, singing songs
of the revolution, thinking about the next stage, and trying to get some sleep.

As the financial district became a militarized zone, Ray’s only thought was of escape.
He decided to make his way along the route of his morning walks, now lugging his worldly
possessions. He went past the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, past Chase Manhattan
Bank (where he still had forty-two cents left in an account that he’d opened with
Washington Mutual before it imploded during the financial crisis and was bought up
by Chase), past the AIG building, then under the FDR Drive to the East River. He wanted
to get away from all the tumult, and he found an isolated spot just south of the Brooklyn
Bridge, where he sat on a bench and tweeted: “earlier than usual i’m at what has become
a favorite morning spot. i fear i be no much of an occupier as i’ve left behind my
comrades.” Every now and then a police helicopter appeared overhead, but he was pretty
well hidden.

Ray kept checking Twitter, but by four in the morning there was still no word about
where the evicted occupiers were going to gather again. His phone battery was dying.
He was alone: a homeless man in New York.

At dawn it began to rain. Zuccotti Park, surrounded by metal barricades, was empty
except for the security guards in lime-green vests—once again a plain granite rectangle
waiting for the first workers to begin their day on Wall Street.

2012

$2 BILLION PRICE TAG FOR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
 …
But on Friday, the cavalry arrived: a $5 million check from Mr. Adelson to Winning
Our Future, a “super PAC” that supports Mr. Gingrich.
…
“You graduated from college two years ago. We’ve been supporting you for two years
and that’s enough.” “Do you know how crazy the economy is right now? I mean, all my
friends get help from their parents.”
 …
With his hood up as the rain came down, Trayvon made his way to one gated community
among many, the Retreat at Twin Lakes. Past a dozen storefronts, four of them vacant.
Past signs and billboards shouting “Now Leasing!” and “Rent Specials!” His was a tour
of a post-bust stretch of Sanford.
…
@BarackObama:
“Same-sex
couples
should
be
able
to
get
married.”—President
Obama
 …
TWO NFL PLAYERS GO HEAD TO HEAD ON GAY MARRIAGE
 … Young people, selected by lottery, slaughter one another with kill-or-be-killed
desperation in “The Hunger Games.” The savagery is a yearly ritual mandated by the
tyrannical regime of Panem, a broken nation built, after a terrible war …
WHY DO BILLIONAIRES FEEL VICTIMIZED BY OBAMA?
…
The Kelleys were known for their lavish parties, with extravagant buffets, flowing
Champagne, valet parking and cigars for guests from nearby MacDill Air Force Base,
including David H. Petraeus and Gen. John R. Allen, who now commands troops
 …
WHAT BOTCHED THE FACEBOOK IPO?
… 47 percent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what. All right,
there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe
that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for
them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to …
On Nov. 5 “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” a series that follows the lives of six entrepreneurs,
premieres on the channel. “We were looking for a place that hadn’t been saturated
with a bunch of reality,” Evan Prager, one of the executive producers, told
 …
We saw the lights of spiritual shining / Getting closer every minute
 …
OBAMA’S NIGHT
 …
“Something better awaits us”
 …
AS ELECTORATE CHANGES, FRESH WORRY FOR G.O.P.
…
Then we skipped the rails, and we started to fail / And we folded up, and it’s not
enough / To think about how close we came / I wanna walk like a giant on the land