The Commons
Our stage is "contested space," a commons that has been privatized. It is a place where the First Amendment's rights of speech and assembly were exercised, but in the era of the transnational corporation are seized by preemptive architecture or by corrupted law enforcement. You made our Main Street into a mall? OK, so we go into your mall shouting.
We come from the traditional performance arts of theater, dance, spoken word. But the stage where things happen that might change our lives is rarely behind the usual footlights. The scripts of the traditional arts are depoliticized by Consumerism. So we go to sidewalks and streets, parks and subways. We counter-invade the endless spatial offensive of the transnational cookie-cutter stores, their cash register altars, their lobbies, and advertising frames. Now that's a charged stage.
The 24/7 activity of American Consumerism is a highly specific set of gestures, phrases, and reward-and-punishment patterns. The consumers proceed through a formal choreography. The much-heralded American prosperity sends most folks from bed to highway to desk to hallway to elevator back to the car to the evening sitcom-sports-reality of TV. The maze of repetitions is re-created from medicated sleep to medicated sleep. Is this hypnosis or happiness? We're too hyped to make the distinction. The charged stage that we seek interrupts all this, in homage to those who came before us, such as Rosa Parks, Abbie Hoffman, or Subcommandante Marcos. What was the stage for these actors? There is Rosa's famous bus; with Abbie, the streets and parks and courts of the sixties; and in the case of the ski-masked and piped Chiapas leader, Time was that there was a field in the center of town where people dismounted and loafed, hitched wagons, fools and musicians yawped, visionless uncles winced, cads seduced, traders saved, and everyone but the tax collector cursed the King. Most importantly, there was a kind of talk and a kind of hearing that took place outside of power. Nowadays, we make our culture on the run, because a hologram of the King sits in the center of the park covered with surveillance cameras. The King can't be alone! He's copped The Commons. But The Commons keeps coming back. We have seen, for example, the community come to life in times of extreme joy or tragedy. Ever meet everyone in your neighborhood at the three-alarm fire? Those of us at 9/11 remember how downtown Manhattan that September was a promenade, no cars. It was breathtakingly radical: neighbors approaching each other, the variety of emotion in the foreground, the weeping and laughing, the ad hoc help that was offered. The Commons can reassert itself very quickly. The air can be cleared of cars, advertising, and other corporate distractions in the exhale of some laughter. It can happen in a moment. Suddenly, right there, in that anything-can-happen moment, we might be able to ask basic questions about our hypnotizers the corporations. And we should be able to do this on purpose. We should be able to create an instant, portable commons. We just have to be crazy enough to ask these questions on our own, and not wait for geniuses or tsunamis or some self-help God.
If the Commons has been tortured into boxes, into pixels, into share-price, if the parks are over-policed, the community gardens bulldozed, and anything not tied down purchased by the transnationals, we are still not commons-less, because we carry The Commons inside us. In the Church of Stop Shopping we sometimes cross into contested space as fierce clowns, singing and waving signs. Often we go into transnational chain stores incognito, disguised as consumers, ready to buy. They want our money. They want us to approach their product. They will survey us as we walk in; they'll limit our gestures and talk; they'll ask us to leave the moment we break out of the Consumer's Choreography—but they will let us in for a moment as they eye our wallets. When they hear our unsupervised conversation (our guerilla commons is showing) they will run toward us with their uniforms, but we will have disappeared, as they say, into the civilian population. The Commons will hang in the air, and witnesses will carry it in their memory. There never was a revolution where those in power didn't squawk "Trespassing!" Real social change was never accomplished without the force of an unexpected performance. Do I have a witness? —Reverend Billy March 14, 2006
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the air force attack on the Mexican government's army with paper airplanes and laughter. The three reentered the grand bluff of entrenched power in public space. The three retook their "Commons."
It was a heady experiment for those of us in the business of neighborhood-defense. Suddenly we were taking care of each other, no money down. It would have made Rosa and Abbie and Marcos smile.
