Occupied Thought - College Edition

Is it me or has the Occupy movement seemed to be going the way of every great concept that's washed up on the shores of this grand nation? (I would have said "crossed the borders into," but that's a different issue.) What started as an attempt to bring attention to corporate greed, government fiscal irresponsibility, and unfair taxation seems to be turning into more of a fashion statement than a political one. The movement is being applied beyond that initial focus of the 99%ers, and now Americans from all walks are creating a convoy of personal bandwagons to occupy everything that's perceived as unfair or inequitable except farm labor jobs. They couldn't be content standing on streets with misspelled signs, now they're turning the movement into the Great American Camp Out. And you know somewhere there's

The pen is mightier than the sord!

an overpaid Coleman or R.E.I. ad exec trying to figure out a way to ride a little mileage down that road to get their stock values up.

Instead of staying the course and keeping their sights on banks and other financial institutions, or maybe showing the capacity to organize a road trip to Washington, D.C., like middle school kids do, protestors have diversified and to no one's surprise are now assembling on college campuses to protest high tuition.

Q & A Time: What's the difference between an activist and a protestor on a college campus?
a) Although neither has graduated, activists have more years of college.
b) Activists write signs, protestors carry them.
c) Activists get hit less with police batons than protestors because all smart leaders
    stand in the rear of the formation.
d) On average, activists spend more time in court and protestors spend more time
    in the emergency room.
e) All of the above.

Would come as a surprise to anyone that a confrontation resulted from a protest at a college campus? While I could use an example from the campus at UC Berkeley, that institution of higher learning has technically been occupied in perpetuity since the 60's - and by some of the same people (See Q&A above, answer "a") - so it's hard to separate the overlap between one protest and the next. Instead, I give you the following incident from the campus of the University of California, Davis.

On November 18th, campus and city police in Davis, California, confronted Occupy protestors at an unauthorized encampment in the UC Davis campus quad. A spokesperson from UC Davis said the campers were given "written warning to remove the tents by 3 p.m., or police would remove them." Guess what happened after 3 p.m.?

Campus police watch as two UC Davis engineering

undergrads struggle in vain to successfully refold a

tent and make it fit inside its storage bag.

Naturally, one side was not very pleased with the result. A graduate student supporting the student activists criticized the UC Davis police for what he characterized as a particularly aggressive stance in dealing with the protesters. The student said the communication between police and their liaison was sparse. "They were not communicating well with student activists. We had no intention to antagonize the police." Okay, how much of that "remove the tents or the police will" communication didn't land between their ears? UC Davis students average a score of 510 to 640 out of a possible 800 on the Critical Reading section of the S.A.T. tests, so I can't imagine they'd need a picture to go with the words in order to comprehend the written warning.

As for having "no intention of antagonizing the police," everyone participating in these Occupy functions should be aware by now that occupying a space without permission - that means setting up a tent camp where there is no KOA sign - will at some point in time result in the police showing up and giving the order to disperse. If you are one of the 99% not packing up your hemp duffel bag and walking away, you're what's commonly referred to as an antagonist. The minute you are instructed to leave and you don't, you have crossed the line separating "non-violent civil disobedience" from having the right to remain silent.

While the Davis campus incident is mild compared to the recent incidents any incident at Berkeley, the potential for escalation cannot be ignored. The job of the police is to enforce. All of you English majors pay attention: the word "force" is in the word "enforce." It's not like it's a Word Jumble puzzle and you have to move the letters around to see it. And force can be as passive as a direction, like a written warning, which when followed avoids the physical use of force. Now for you History majors in the crowd, you know what else is a use of force? An occupation. Just ask anyone from Poland, France, or Czechoslovakia still alive from the 1940's.

I'd like to take a side, but the student body isn't making me feel very sympathetic to their cause. I fully support anyone's right to voice their opinion or decry an injustice. I think the schools have made it very clear that protesting is fine, camping isn't. So if you organize and set up your campsite with the intent of getting arrested, and openly admit to doing so, you should expect to get arrested. The problem manifests itself when the police show up to arrest anyone who won't leave and the ones who were there to get arrested resist getting what they wanted, which is to be arrested. This leads to the cops having to use force. Then the ones who got their wish complain about the use of force by the cops. Sure, there are cops that probably like their jobs waaaay to much, but the beating/subduing can be avoided next time if you just stick to the plan and get fucking arrested. If you turn the around and put your arms behind your back instead of linking them with your neighbor and playing red rover, you're less likely to get a hickory stick Heimlich or a pepper spray facial.

I'm not part of the 1%, but I don't feel like I'm part of the 99%, either. I'm as upset with rising costs and big government debt as much as anyone. What the banks and the government did and continue to do affect me, too. I'd like to protest, but I can't take time off work to sit on the curb and cry foul. I do that and the next thing you know another mortgage isn't being paid and the debt problem grows by one more. What upsets me more is when someone who's borrowing money from a bank to, oh, I don't know, go to a college with a name that doesn't start with "Community," protests about how greedy the banks holding those loans are. Here's my protest about what banks do: they create unsecured debt by lending money to someone who will, for example, spend seven or eight years in college getting their doctorate in rhetoric or some other liberal art degree that has no marketability, then can't get a job to pay their loan back. So who gets stuck with that debt? The bank, a.k.a. me.

If some of those student loans are going to come out of my pocket, I want to see some return on my investment. So I say this to you students: Get out of your tents and back into your classrooms. Hit those books to find a practical solution to the problem. Show me that level of intelligence that qualified you to be an alum of an elite university and not a certified specialist from a Technical Institute (read: trade school). Otherwise, if you want me to pay for you to pitch a tent, join the military.

Devil in the Details

Art restorers working on a fresco in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi found what

they claim is a figure of a devil hidden in the clouds. The news excited art historians, but upset Catholics throughout the world as it distracted them from looking for the image of the Virgin Mary on a cheese melt or Jesus on a dog's butt.

Quick Quiz: The exclamatory term "Jesus Christ on a cracker!" originated:
a) from an actual sighting of the image of Jesus on a saltine.
b) as an inside joke among priests to reference the wafers they served during communion.
c) from a little used Nabisco marketing campaign to support their claim that everything that sits on a Ritz tastes great.

The image in question is described as the profile of a figure hidden among the clouds in a panel of the fresco painted by Giotto di Bondone depicting the death of St. Francis. The profile went unnoticed for over 7 centuries as the image was difficult to see from floor level. Close-up photography made the image somewhat visible. I have provided a detailed close-up on the section of the fresco where the profile was found. While I could not make out what art restorers identified as "the image of the devil," I was able to see what appeared to be the image of Regis Philbin.

This isn't the first time a famous artist had "a bit of fun" hiding images and things in their art work. Vincent Van Gogh was famous for hiding religious imagery in his paintings. Salvador Dali hid the face of Voltaire dead center in his "Slave Market" piece. Even the great Michaelangelo couldn't resist putting his self-portrait onto his masterpiece, "Last Judgment." But the prankish Giotto seemed to enjoy sneaking whimsical little nuggets into his art, and did so with much more frequency than art historians have documented. Here are a few of his lesser known works.

Rising of Lazarus, Arena Chapel, Pauda, in which
the Magdalene sisters give Jesus a hotfoot.

The famous Nativity 1310s, located in the north transept
of the Lower Church, San Francesco, Assisi, where

they discovered a bit of sheepish activity in the nativity.

 Giotto also had a well-known panel, Omaggio di un 
Uomo Semplice, Homage of a Simple Man, in the
Upper Church in Assisi. But what isn't widely known is
that it was a before-and-after, two-panel fresco.
This is the panel most of the world is familiar with...

The second panel was found hidden in an obscure 

recess of the church. It was playfully referred to as
Omaggio di un Burlone Pratico, or Homage of a
Practical Joker.

So I take a moment to celebrate the masters, those talented artists who dedicated their lives to their craft, but weren't so wholly committed that they wouldn't slip into a church in the middle of the night to paint a goatee on an angel...or blend the face of the devil into a cloud. Like the old saying goes, I don't know art, but I know what I like. And what I like is a good bit of irreverent fun to remind me that life ain't all that serious.