Editor’s note: This is the twelfth in a series of excerpts from Jim Gober’s book titled “Deep in the Heart of Occupy Austin.” A new excerpt will be published at OccupiedStories.com every Wednesday, so come back next week to follow Jim though the evolution of Occupy Austin.

AUSTIN,TX - Today, the sun rose on more news that occupy camps around the US are being raided and
harassed and the pace of the fascist assault is quickening. In Denver, the fascists
attacked the camp with a hail of rubber bullets, shooting people out of trees,
tear-gassing them and beating them with clubs. Pictures of hideous wounds from the
actions of the fascists were posted across the internet. In San Francisco, an attack
was called off at the last minute. The fallout from the latest attack on the camp in
Atlanta continues, and across the country occupiers are beginning to dig in for the
winter. With the occupy movement only a few weeks old, and the fascists reacting so
badly, it makes you wonder what the future holds.

In Oakland, the blame for the disastrous attack on the protesters is being shuffled
between the mayor and the chief of police. But isn’t that what the fascists always
do? Keep shuffling the blame until it goes away? I got bad news for them. It’s not
going to work this time. We are not going away until the fascist system that has
created a one-sided casino where a few win while millions starve is destroyed,
demolished and ground into the earth never to return again. There will be no more
lobbying, no more payola to congress and no more fascist control on the local, state
or federal level. There will be no more corporate citizenry that carries no
responsibility to any laws whatsoever. No more commodity indices that drive up the
cost of food. No more unregulated financial instruments, and no more free loans to
investment banks. There will be a fair tax system that stops the vacuuming of money
off the streets so it flows directly to the fascists, who then use the money to
decimate the laws that are supposed to protect us from them. And for God’s sake, we
demand the fascists stop using the police to beat the crap out of us-or kill us. If
anyone dies from the outrageous actions of the police, who are now protecting the
thieves, the streets will run with the blood of more and more victims because the
fight is just beginning. America, which was once a shining beacon on the hill for
the whole world to see, will collapse upon itself. When we rebuild, we will
inoculate every politician that enters the arena against the scourge of fascism, the
horrible crippling malady that spreads by contact with a dollar bill. And we will do
it with the threat of the same punishment the fascists dish out to the innocent.

After writing all morning, I arrived at the plaza on the last warm and balmy
afternoon of the season as October was drawing to a close. The mood at the camp was
subdued, and of course the local press was out hoping the 25 or so occupiers hanging
around in the middle of the day were going to try and burn down a tree or something,
because they were angry at the pig-headed attempts to destroy freedom of speech and
assembly across the country. The news clips of people being brutalized didn’t cause
the press to throw down their cameras and join us, it made them come to the plaza
and hope upon hope they would witness their fellow citizens being brutalized in the
same way. I wandered over to the welcome booth and took a picture of the welcoming
committee, Carey, John and Melanie. I interviewed Carey who’s been with the scene
since the first day. He said he is optimistic because the general assembly is
functioning well, people are working together better and the goals are getting
solidified. His optimism was contagious and it was great to hear some optimism at
this point. But others I talked to were more concerned, and the prognosis from most
of the old-timers was we had about two weeks.

Then, Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo arrived on the scene in a business suit and
made a statement to the press: “Out of all the people out here, most are exercising
their first amendment rights, but then there are the few who step off and do things
inappropriate. Quite frankly, most of the arrests that are made here are made from
those drinking in public and causing fights or what have you.” He did not seem
irritated, but every time he looked up at the mezzanine, which sits above the wide
steps most people use for sleeping, meeting and storing gear, he looked concerned.
The press has reported only one or two arrests, but today, according to the folks I
spoke to, there had already been seven. The police department was obviously lying to the
press about the number of arrests, and the press being the press, were too lazy to
verify the truth. Something was going on that didn’t smell right.

So I had a question for the press. I caught the attention of a news reporter from
KVUE-TV who just finished covering the Police Chief’s statement. It was an old
friend named Shelton, who was wearing the most beautiful burgundy guayabera shirt
you ever saw. I asked him to tell me about the biggest challenge he has covering the
occupation. He expressed frustration on finding someone to talk to who is in charge
of this leaderless movement, so he could sort out the truth, because he hears
something different from each person he interviews. I was pleased to see the
maddening effect we were having on the press, especially when I’ve watched them go
out of their way to interview the most fucked-up person they could find over and
over again. While at first frustrating, the search by the press for the most inept,
had unintentionally become an integral part of the guerrilla war against the media
we are waging in which we use the lack of relevant information and leaders to
confuse, obfuscate and keep them guessing what we are going to do next. We didn’t
even have to work hard at it, because the press, in their race to the bottom, were
driving themselves mad by cherry-picking the least informed and vacuous people they
could find hanging around the plaza. There were plenty of lucid people who knew what
was going on the press could interview, but now our attitude was to go ahead and let
them to interview the slacker. Why should we care anymore? The press isn’t going to
give us a fair shake anyway. But since Shelton was my friend, I suggested to Shelton
that he talk to Sylvia, who is our official media person, and he said he did talk to
her. Sylvia told him the press should only talk to her and that anyone else was an
impostor. Then Shelton pointed at a man in a pink shirt who told him he was the
media contact and Sylvia was an impostor. You could see Shelton’s frustration
manifesting itself in beads of sweat along his brow, but I told him to talk to
Sylvia anyway and he thanked me before I took off. Later in the day, I saw Shelton
interviewing Sylvia and he didn’t look quite as harried or alarmed. The next day, I
learned Sylvia was relieved of her duties and another media specialist named Carl
was chosen. I laughed thinking about poor old Shelton scrambling around looking for
a scoop among the chaos, when all he, and the rest of the press had to do from the
beginning, was treat us with professional respect.

So I went up to the much-maligned mezzanine and talked to Sandra, who was relaxing
on a bedroll. I asked what brings her here and she said, “At first I was with the
occupation, but recently it’s got crazy, so I’m just here to sleep. I enjoyed the
meetings and signs and thought we were for something, then it became a big slumber
party and people came in to destroy the place, fight and do drugs. Everyone is just
kind of here.” I asked her how long she thinks this will continue. She said, “The
security comes out at 7 am yelling at everyone to move their stuff, and looks for
little things to hassle or arrest people. Even if you make a comment or refuse to
get up when they tell you, you will be arrested. One guy, who was sleeping on the
mezzanine every night, was arrested yesterday.” Sandra went on, “The city officials
are walking around looking disgusted and talking to the cops and are just trying to
run people like us off. We work with carnivals and our daughter needed money so we
couldn’t save enough this year, and here we are on the street, and I know cold
weather is coming. My husband is out right now looking for a job, but good luck with
that, you know?” There are so many people like Sandra, who’ve been hurt by the
system, and really want to work and contribute to society, but society has no place
for them. She was right about the suits walking around looking disgusted. You
couldn’t look across the plaza today without seeing at least one suit with a glum
face looking down its nose at us.

About that time, the plaza was flooded with a group of people protesting the body
scanners recently put in place at the Austin airport. There was a series of fiery
speeches by both men and women alike, and they brought along their own PA system.
They questioned why we can’t use some other less invasive means of checking for
bombs such as bomb-sniffing dogs rather than a photo of your naked body. This went
on until dusk, when I began to chat with a man in the crowd, about 55 years old,
named Dan. He was a right-wing talk-show fanatic who insisted “the Greeks, Jews,
Europeans and Americans all learned to write in the same year 6,000 years ago.” He
also claimed that we should put all Muslims in concentration camps like we did with the
“Japs” in WWII and that the Koran was the devil. He claimed that never in history
were people tortured or killed to force them into Christianity like in Islam, and
the bible is not a collection of stories passed down by word of mouth before people
knew how to read or write, it was written by God and it just appeared out of thin
air. I thought about how this man, who ordinarily would be a kind gentle soul, had
become a card-carrying member of the fascist propaganda machine because he, like us,
was afraid of his future and was looking for answers. But instead of finding the
truth, he had become a Frankenstein’s monster of the information age who espoused
every stillborn idea ever perpetuated by talk radio and Fox News. He had become a
fascist extraordinaire who would sit by and let an innocent man be strung from a
tree because Rush Limbaugh said it should be so.

Thankfully, the general assembly started and today was the first day I noticed a
sign language interpreter. The discussion was generally about how to get control of
the mezzanine from the undesirables. I thought about Sandra up there listening to
the young people, who all had homes to go to, discussing one more way to make her
life inconvenient or evict her from her spot in the universe. But we all know it’s
not Sandra we wanted out of there, it is the people who insist on disrupting
everything, like the no-talent asshole named Jackal who followed me around the
entire day banging on a drum every time he saw me trying to record an interview. I
have never heard such a bad drum player-even three year old kids have better rhythm
than that guy. And what was the point except to disrupt and be a jerk?

But that is what all the occupiers, with all their good intentions, are learning in
every camp across the country: Some people hanging around the Occupy movement just
need to clear out and find another place to go if they want to help the
movement. What some of us also didn’t know, and are now unfortunately finding out,
is how many people in our society are completely sane, but are incurably lazy
spoiled bullies that take up space someone more productive could easily fill. This
awakening is going on throughout the occupy movement. And it is causing us to fall
back on either time-tested means of control, like asking the police patrols we hate
so much for help, or doing what the fascists want to do to us, which is beat the
crap out of the ones taking up space and hope they go away. It is at this point
where Occupy is in danger of becoming a farce. That is because we are fighting
against a system of government we despise, but need its structure and protection to
survive. Then, throughout the movement, and especially in Austin, there is the same
political infighting and me-me-me crap that goes on in every organization. I see
people trying to gain power, be it from who is on top of the mezzanine to who is in
charge of the donation coffee can or the PA system.

A new and disruptive development is an influx of feminists exerting their muscle by
playing the victim at every turn to gain power. For example, one enormous and
spiritually malformed trouble-making feminist, who was new on the scene, was loudly
complaining that a gay man with a southern accent had called her “Sweetie” when he
asked if he could help her move a pile of wet brochures and newspapers. She was
proud that she and a couple of other women had now formed a women’s group and were
making YouTube videos not trashing our fascist enemy, but the men of occupy who they
felt were somehow a threat to every woman that ever lived. Their stated mission was
to, “loudly confront every nuance of sexism either in public or online.” And part of
their regular meetings were to be held in secret. So you can imagine the endless
possibilities to wreak havoc. All the men of Austin Occupy were so liberal, this was
a disturbing development. I never heard one misogynist statement the entire six
weeks the movement was in existence. I couldn’t in all reality figure out the reason
for the feminists’ hatred and intense desire to create havoc and split everyone
apart. They wanted the men on this side and the women on this side, then the women
and men they approved of on this side, and the men they didn’t like on that side.
Then, they began to spread rumors and innuendo to pit one group against the other.
And no one had done anything wrong. When I see new people like this come in and try
to kick Occupy Austin to pieces, I get discouraged. I thought about the words of the
famous Texan Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good
carpenter to build one.” What we lacked was a few good carpenters, because it was
becoming apparent we had an entire corral of jackasses.

The day ended with a march to the capitol followed by a candlelight vigil in support
of the Oakland protesters who were injured a few days before. And true to form,
there were provocateurs in the crowd, but it was a candlelight vigil and they
sounded stupid when they started to act out. Whoever had the idea for the
candlelight vigil was a genius. It was a beautiful and poignant moment and brought
us together one more time to fight one more day. And the real fight was on its way.

-Jim Gober-