Architect of Putin’s System of Politics Is Reassigned

By ELLEN BARRY NY Times

MOSCOW — The Kremlin on Tuesday announced the reassignment of Vladislav Y. Surkov, the “gray cardinal” who has overseen Russia’s domestic political scene for more than a decade. The reassignment, made in the midst of a new protest movement against Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s paramount leader, suggested that Mr. Putin is prepared to make changes in the tightly controlled system that emerged during his first and second presidential terms. Mr. Surkov, the deputy head of the president’s administration, is considered the architect of the system under Mr. Putin and his protégé and successor as president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, which Mr. Surkov christened “sovereign democracy.” He will now oversee modernization and innovation as a deputy prime minister, but will take no role in domestic politics. Russia’s political system has come under unprecedented pressure this month from protesters who complain that elections offer them no alternative to Mr. Putin’s rigid model. Former finance minister Aleksei L. Kudrin, who this month presented himself as a potential leader for disgruntled liberals, said the move affecting Mr. Surkov suggests “political reforms are going to continue.”

“I consider him one of the designers of the system,” Mr. Kudrin said in an interview with Kommersant-FM. “Now, the system is being reconsidered. Other organizers are needed, with other views on the political system.”

Mr. Surkov, an advertising prodigy who was brought into government toward the end of the Yeltsin era, has argued for years that centralizing power in the Kremlin was a matter of survival after the 1990’s. He acknowledged last year that “centralization has reached the limits of its capacity,” but attempts to cultivate new parties were often discontinued if they showed signs of slipping out of Kremlin control. Asked by a journalist on Tuesday why he was leaving, Mr. Surkov responded: “Stabilization devours its young.” He went on to say that he had requested a reassignment. Asked whether he would take a role in settling down the protests, Mr. Surkov said no. “I am too odious for this brave new world,” he said, in a short interview with the Interfax news service. He then summed up his achievements at the reporter’s request. “I was among the people who helped President Yeltsin realize a peaceful transfer of power,” he said. “I was among those who helped President Putin stabilize the political system. I was among those who helped President Medvedev liberalize it.”

“I hope I did not undermine my employers and my colleagues,” he said. “Democracy was preserved, renovated and by the acts of Dec. 22,” when Mr. Medvedev proposed a swathe of substantive political changes, “ it was translated to a working state. I hope it will successfully make it through the trials ahead. It was good work. There were, of course, enough mistakes, but let’s talk about that another time.” In September, the billionaire Mikhail D. Prokhorov called a press conference where he called for Mr. Surkov’s ouster and described him as “a puppet master who long ago privatized the political system, who has long misinformed the Russian leadership about what is going on in the political system, puts pressure on the media, and tries to manipulate citizens’ opinions.” Mr. Putin on Tuesday offered a softer assessment of the protest movement which began after Dec. 4 parliamentary elections tainted by ballot-stuffing and other violations. He seemed to have thought better of belittling the demonstrators, as he did earlier when he said their white ribbons resembled limp condoms, though he said they lacked leaders, organization or a clear agenda. “There always are, always were and always will be forces which are not geared toward development, but instead Brownian motion,” he said, using a term from physics that describes the random movement of microscopic particles. “Such people exist, and they always will exist. Let them fly their flag, they have the right to exist, and in fact I consider that we should treat them with respect.” He also suggested initiating a dialogue with dissatisfied voters on the Internet — an unusual step coming from Mr. Putin, who last year described the Internet as 50 percent “pornographic material.” Earlier this month, Mr. Putin said he does not use the Internet because he is too busy.

latimes.com

Christopher Hitchens dies at 62; engaging, enraging author and essayist

The British-American's polemical writings on religion, politics, war and other hot-button topics established him as a leading public intellectual. His openness about having cancer elicited thousands of letters and emails to Vanity Fair, where he was a longtime contributor.

By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times

Christopher Hitchens, the engaging and enraging British-American author and essayist whose polemical writings on religion, politics, war and other provocations established him as one of his generation's most robust public intellectuals, has died. He was 62.

Hitchens died Thursday night at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said his literary agent, Steve Wasserman.

Hitchens was diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer in June 2010, when his memoir, "Hitch-22," hit the bestseller lists. He wrote and spoke unflinchingly of his grim prognosis and acknowledged that years of heavy smoking and drinking had placed him at high risk for the aggressive disease.

His openness about having cancer elicited thousands of letters and e-mails to Vanity Fair, where he was a longtime contributor. Many of the well-wishers offered prayers for the famously atheistic author, who had made his case against religion in the 2007 book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." He maintained that his illness had not changed his mind about religion and, borrowing from Shakespeare, asked believers not to bother "deaf heaven" with their "bootless cries."

Erudition, a roguish sense of humor and passion for intellectual combat were hallmarks of his writing, which was prolific. In addition to Vanity Fair, he was a columnist for the online magazine Slate and contributor to Harper's, the Atlantic and a number of British publications. He wrote two dozen books, including highly regarded biographies of George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, and co-wrote or edited at least eight others.

A swashbuckling opinionator, he loved few things better than a good argument — and he knew how to pick one. Once described by the New Yorker as "looking like someone who, with as much dignity as possible, has smoothed his hair and straightened his collar after knocking the helmet off a policeman," he tarred Bill Clinton as a rapist, Mother Teresa as a fraud and Henry Kissinger as a war criminal. He argued in Vanity Fair that women were less funny than men, which stoked the wrath of female comics. "I am programmed by the practice of a lifetime to take," he wrote, "a contrary position."

In his personal life he was no less the "rapscallion iconoclast," as historian Douglas Brinkley once described him. He left his pregnant first wife for another woman. He swore an affidavit during the Monica Lewinsky scandal that put his friend, Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, at risk of a perjury charge. Over the years he fell out of friendship with a long list of notables, including novelists Gore Vidal and Saul Bellow, who dismissed Hitchens as a "Fourth Estate playboy thriving on agitation."

After the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001, he truly became the scourge of the left. Repulsed by what he saw as the left's desire to blame American foreign policy for the attacks, he championed the Bush administration's war on terrorism and resigned his longtime post as Washington columnist for the liberal Nation magazine. His polarizing views brought sarcasm from former allies, one of whom described Hitchens' shift as "the first-ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug."

"During all this I never quite lost the surreal sense that I had become in some way a pro-government dissident," Hitchens wrote, "and that of all the paradoxes of my little life this might have to register as the most acute one."

Writer Martin Amis said the controversy merely illuminated his friend's "autocontrarian" nature. Hitchens "sees, not only the most difficult position, but the most difficult position for Christopher Hitchens," Amis wrote in the London Guardian in 2011. "Christopher is one of nature's rebels. By which I mean that he has no automatic respect for anybody or anything."

He was born Christopher Eric Hitchens in Portsmouth, England, on April 13, 1949. The elder of two sons, he had a cool relationship with his father, Ernest, a commander in the British Royal Navy, but a warmer one with his mother, Yvonne. She taught him to love books and was determined that he would be the first Hitchens to attend college. "If there is going to be an upper class in this country," Hitchens overheard her telling his father, "then Christopher is going to be in it."

His parents saved enough money to send him to Leys, a boarding school in Cambridge, and then to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics and bloomed as a political campaigner. He joined the International Socialists, a faction of the anti-Stalinist left, and charged into the anti-Vietnam War movement. A skillful debater, he discovered that "if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone." British literary critic Terry Eagleton, who had been a socialist comrade at Oxford, said Hitchens was so nakedly ambitious that he "made Uriah Heep look like Little Nell."

In 1969, Hitchens began writing book reviews for the left-leaning London weekly New Statesman, where he forged important friendships with writers Martin Amis, James Fenton and Ian McEwan. In 1970 he graduated with honors from Balliol and won a grant to travel across the U.S., which left him smitten by his "New World." He returned to England, where he burnished his journalism credentials writing for mainstream and leftist publications. One of his assignments was a New Statesman profile of Margaret Thatcher in which he riled the future prime minister's Conservative Party supporters by calling her sexy. In a subsequent encounter at a party, Thatcher called him a "naughty boy" and swatted his behind.

In 1973, when he was 24 and living in London, his mother committed suicide with her lover, a defrocked vicar, during a trip to Greece.

Years later, he discovered one of her secrets: She was Jewish, which made him Jewish. "My initial reaction, apart from pleasure and interest, was the faint but definite feeling that I had somehow known all along," he wrote in a 1988 essay, "On Not Knowing the Half of It." But he remained anti-religion and anti-Zionist.

With London as his base, Hitchens spent the 1970s covering revolutions and human rights: nail bombers in Belfast, anti-fascists in Portugal, persecuted leftist journalist Jacobo Timerman in Argentina.

While on assignment in Cyprus in 1977, he met Eleni Meleagrou and married her in 1981. He left her when she was expecting their second child and in 1991 married Carol Blue, a freelance journalist.

In addition to Blue, he is survived by their daughter, Antonia; two children from his first marriage, Alexander and Sophia; and a brother, Peter, a conservative columnist for the British paper Daily Mail.

Some Hitchens watchers trace his disillusionment with the left to 1992, when he called for military intervention in Bosnia, but Hitchens said it began later, during the Clinton era. The rupture was complete after the 9/11 strikes in New York and Washington, when Hitchens drew a line between himself and other leading liberals, such as Noam Chomsky.

He was contemptuous of Chomsky and others who argued that American imperialism, by turning much of the world against the U.S., had drawn the terrorists here.

"I can only hint at how much I despise a left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist," Hitchens wrote later. "Instead of internationalism, we find among the left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism" and "a masochistic refusal to admit that our own civil society has any merit."

In September 2002 Hitchens wrote his last column for the Nation, which he said had become "the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace" than bin Laden, and organized intellectuals and activists to campaign against Saddam Hussein's rule. He was criticized just as harshly by his former allies, such as New Left Review editor Tariq Ali, who wrote that the Hitchens he knew disappeared in the 9/11 inferno, leaving a "vile replica" in his place.

In 2007, on his 58th birthday, Hitchens enjoyed a moment of high patriotism and irony: The onetime Trotskyite took the oath of U.S. citizenship in a private ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial, conducted by George W. Bush's homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff.

What Hitchens once said of Vidal was also abundantly true of himself: He possessed "the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones." In Vanity Fair, which he joined in 1992, he wrote of his personal encounters with waterboarding and Brazilian bikini waxes with self-deprecating humor and cerebral detachment.

Both qualities informed his writing on his bleakest subject: his cancer.

"I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death," he wrote in Vanity Fair last September, shortly after learning he had esophageal cancer that had spread to his lungs and lymph nodes. "But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse." Noting that his father had died of the same type of cancer, he added, "In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist." His cancer was classified Stage 4 and he readily conceded that "there is no Stage 5."

His illness caused him to cancel the publicity tour for "Hitch-22," which opens, eerily, with a rumination on death prompted by his recollection of an incident years ago when he was referred to as "the late Christopher Hitchens." In this prologue, he rejects fatalism and declares "I personally want to 'do' death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me."

He aggressively sought treatment, which included genetic testing to determine which chemotherapy drug might be most effective on his cancer. He was encouraged to try the experimental approach by his friend, Dr. Francis Collins, the eminent geneticist and born-again Christian with whom he had debated the existence of God.

He also kept up a frenetic pace of writing and, until recently, public speaking. In one of his most publicized appearances after being diagnosed with cancer, he faced Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and recent convert to Catholicism, in a sold-out Toronto debate on whether religion was a force for good in the world.

Despite his obvious frailty, Hitchens was in top form, provoking wide laughter when he compared God to "a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea."

At the debate's end, the audience of 2,700 voted him the winner.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Our Local Correspondents

All the Angry People A man out of work finds community at Occupy Wall Street.

by George Packer    The New Yorker                                                                                

 

Until this fall, Ray Kachel had lived virtually all of his fifty-three years within a few miles of his birthplace, in Seattle. He was a self-taught Jack-of-all-trades in the computer industry, who bought his first Mac in 1984. He attended Seattle Central Community College but dropped out; not long afterward, he was hired by a company that specialized in optical character recognition, transferring printed material into digital records for storage. Eventually, Kachel was laid off, but for a long time he continued to make a decent living; keeping up with advances in audio and video production, he picked up freelance work editing online content. He also programmed and played keyboards in a band, and had a gig as a night-club d.j.; sometimes, between technology jobs, he worked in his adoptive parents’ janitorial business. He spent his money on a few pleasures, like microbrewery beer and DVDs. His favorite movie was “Stalker,” the 1979 sci-fi film by Andrei Tarkovsky. “Three guys traipsing through the woods—it’s visually and aurally very, very strange,” Kachel said. “Tarkovsky is famous for painfully long takes, creating an environment that’s uncomfortable without it being clear why.”

Kachel lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment. In the nineties, after his parents died, he became something of a hermit, with just a few friends. Small of stature, with short-cropped hair, drab clothes, and a mild manner, he was the sort of person no one noticed. Then again, a lot of tech workers were antisocial, and the information economy embraced millions of skilled, culturally literate, freelance oddballs. As long as the new economy made room for him, Kachel lived the life he wanted.

When the recession hit, tech jobs in Seattle started drying up. After the death of the owner of his main client—a company for which he did DVD customization—Kachel found that he no longer had contacts for other sources of work. He cut back on expenses and quit drinking beer. Last December, he ordered from Amazon a green, apple-shaped USB stick containing the entire Beatles collection; just before it was scheduled to ship, he cancelled the order. “Around that time, I started realizing spending two hundred fifty dollars on something wasn’t such a good idea,” he said. “I’m glad I made that decision, because I wouldn’t have enjoyed the stereo mix anyway.”

In March, Kachel’s mouth went dry; he felt sick with anxiety and could barely eat. He realized that he was coming to the end of his savings. He could survive as a barista or a delivery driver, but he didn’t think he was capable of chatting with customers all day, and he had stopped driving years earlier. He applied for every tech opening that he could find, but only one offer came, from Leapforce, a company that evaluates Web search results. Kachel signed on as an “At Home independent agent,” doing work on his iMac for thirteen dollars an hour, but the hours soon dwindled to twenty or thirty minutes a day. That was his last job.

Over the summer, Kachel went on eBay to sell off his computer equipment, like a drought-stricken farmer eating his seed corn: first his MacBook Air, then his iPad, then his iMac. He found buyers for his DVD collection, which had a thousand titles, after first storing digital copies of them on a hard drive. The last thing that Kachel sold was his copy of Final Cut Pro, Apple’s state-of-the-art video-editing suite. “I was hoping, by holding on to that, if I found another project I could work on somebody else’s machine,” he said. “But it just wasn’t happening.” The sales yielded about twenty-five hundred dollars in all. In September, he fell behind on his rent. The only thing worse than being homeless, he thought, was being homeless in his home town.

Kachel had started tweeting in 2009, and it helped him get to know many people who were in similarly desperate circumstances. This fall, as he was preparing to vacate his apartment, he learned on Twitter that several hundred demonstrators had taken over a park in lower Manhattan.

None of Kachel’s online acquaintances could say what, precisely, had sparked the protest, which began on September 17th. But Occupy Wall Street, as it was called, emerged so spontaneously that it quickly absorbed the pent-up energies of a wide array of people in every corner of the country. Because it was formless and leaderless, the movement passed the test of authenticity—the first requirement for a citizenry that no longer had faith in institutions and élites. Its brilliant slogan, “We Are the Ninety-nine Per Cent,” was simple and capacious enough to cover a multitude of stories, including Kachel’s.

The protesters in Zuccotti Park were angry about things that Kachel recognized from his own life: the injustice of an economic system in which the rich and the powerful sucked the life out of the middle class. He had long felt critical of the big banks, the oil companies, the huge corporations that didn’t pay taxes. Fracking, the hydraulic extraction of natural gas, was a particular concern of Kachel’s. He was also an obsessive follower of Rachel Maddow—he loved her wit, her agreeableness—and Occupy Wall Street was starting to come up on her cable news program.

Kachel had four hundred and fifty dollars from the sale of his copy of Final Cut Pro. For two hundred and fifty, you could travel to New York City on a Greyhound bus. He had never been farther east than Dallas, but New York City was so dense and diverse, and so full of ideas and ways to make money, that if he could learn to exist there he could surely find a place to exist. On the last night of September, he went to bed telling himself, “Oh, this is just absolutely nuts, you can’t do that.” He woke up in the morning with a clear thought: This is exactly what I’m going to do.

Kachel didn’t tell his few friends about his plan. But on the night of October 3rd, on a Wordpress blog that he had set up, he wrote, “About to board a bus to NYC. Not sure if I’ll ever come back to Seattle. . . . I have had some moments of panic, asking myself if I’ve completely lost my mind. That’s entirely possible. But those moments pass quickly and my sense of adventure takes over and I’m ready to hit the road all the more.” He had abandoned most of his remaining possessions; he was travelling with only a small duffel and a daypack, and they contained not much more than a few changes of clothes, a portable hard drive with some of his movies, and a “relatively stupid” cell phone with enough memory to send and download tweets. The bus left at midnight. At five in the morning on October 6th, Kachel arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal, in Manhattan. By 10 A.M., he had made his way downtown to the occupation.

Zuccotti Park—or Liberty Square, as its occupiers called it—takes up a small rectangular block in the financial district, shadowed by skyscrapers, just east of the World Trade Center site. When Kachel arrived, the leaves on the park’s fifty-five honey-locust trees were still green. Tents were forbidden by the city, and the overnight occupiers had to lay blue tarps on unforgiving granite.

At the west end of the park, a drum circle rolled out a wild, interminable beat, adrenaline for the occupiers and annoyance for the neighbors. The drummers’ area, called “the ghetto,” was made up of hard-core anarchists and long-term homeless people, a world unto itself, where interlopers were made to feel unwelcome. The center of the park was crowded with various hubs dedicated to the occupation’s self-organization: the kitchen tarp, where food prepared on the outside and delivered was served to anyone who lined up; the comfort station, where occupiers could obtain donated wet wipes, toiletries, and articles of clothing; the recycling site, where protesters composted food waste and took turns pedalling a stationary bike to generate battery power; the library, with several thousand volumes stacked high on tables; the open-air studio, where computers and cameras streamed live footage of the occupation twenty-four hours a day.

At the east end of the park, along the wide sidewalk next to Broadway, beneath a sculpture of soaring red steel beams called “Joie de Vivre,” the occupation and the public merged. Demonstrators stood in a row, displaying signs as if hawking wares, while workers on their lunch hour and tourists and passersby stopped to look, take pictures, talk, argue. An elderly woman sat in a chair and read aloud from Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.” Another woman stood silently while holding up a copy of Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men”—day after day. An old man in a sports coat and golf cap: “For: Regulated Capitalism. Against: Obscene Inequality. Needed: Massive Jobs Program.” A union electrician in a hard hat: “Occupy Wall Street. Do It for Your Kids.” A woman in a blue nurse’s smock: “This R.N. Is Sickened by Wall Street Greed. Trust Has Been Broken.” A young woman in jeans: “Where Did My Future Go? Greed Took It.” The crowd was dense, the talk overlapping.

Kachel, exhausted from his cross-country trip, was overwhelmed by the pandemonium. He could barely sleep, as the only bedding he had was a thermal wrap made of Mylar. At one point, someone told him that a shower could be arranged at the comfort station. When he arrived, there was no shower to be had, and suddenly he was confronted with the fact of being broke and homeless in a strange city. He withdrew into himself, curling up to sleep in his fleece and waterproof shell on the steps near the east side of the park.

One day, Kachel overheard a group of young occupiers, who were sitting on the steps just a few feet away, talking about him as if he weren’t there. “He’s not going to make it here doing that,” one of them said. “He isn’t taking care of himself.” They were right—his socks and shoes, drenched in a rainstorm, had been wet for several days. Kachel saw that he couldn’t survive in the park alone. He had to become part of the collective in an unreserved way—something that he’d never done.

He volunteered for the newly formed Sanitation Working Group. To keep warm after dark, he spent part of each night scrubbing the paths and the sidewalks. Another occupier, seeing Kachel working, gave him a sleeping bag and a tarp. Kachel began making friends: Sean, an Irish immigrant from the Bronx who worked the graveyard shift spraying fire retardant on steel, then came downtown to spend his days at Zuccotti; a homeless substitute teacher with a degree in physics; Chris, a drifter from Tarpon Springs, Florida, who had been so outraged by a YouTube video of a New York City police officer squirting women protesters in the face with pepper spray that he had ridden the rails to Manhattan in order to defend female honor.

Kachel found a sign that said “Ban Fracking Now” and, after working on his delivery, spent a few days talking to strangers on the sidewalk along the south side of the park. It was a little like acting, and he discovered that he was willing to speak out. He tweeted regularly, and soon had more than thirteen hundred followers. Perhaps readers were drawn to the modesty and the objectivity of Kachel’s notes on the occupation. October 8th: “There are elements of communal living. it’s a really amazing experience tho totally out of my comfort level.” October 22nd: “It surprises me i have a guardian angel. it doesn’t surprise me he’s a soft-spoken, hard working Irish guy from the bronx.” October 23rd: “Dear mr. ferguson. i have lived in new york for over two weeks now. it does not smell of wee.” October 27th: “Keep seeing reference to ‘horrendous police abuse’ re: ows. I’ve been here 2+ weeks and have seen none and heard of little.” November 13th: “I lived in my old apartment in Seattle for nearly a decade and barely knew 2 other tenants. . . . i’ve lived in liberty square for just over a month and regularly talk with many of my neighbors and have made many new friends.”

So he didn’t panic when, one rain-swept night, his duffel was stolen as he slept, and water entered the tarp in which he was rolled up, soaking his sleeping bag, and he stayed calm when his daypack—including the portable hard drive—was taken away the next morning by zealous members of the Sanitation Working Group who were clearing out waterlogged objects, leaving Kachel with nothing but the clothes he had on. He simply turned to his new friends for help, and was given a dry sleeping bag. By then, he belonged to the occupation. Liberty Square was his home.

On the evening of Wednesday, October 12th, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Zuccotti Park would be cleared for cleaning on Friday morning. On Thursday night, a thousand demonstrators went to the park to protest the Mayor’s order. At around six the next morning, Bloomberg reversed himself, and when the news was shared in the park the response was euphoric—the high point of the occupation. That morning, a woman named Michelle Brotherton was standing in the crowd on the Broadway sidewalk. She came down to the park for an hour at a time, between shifts as a bartender at a West Village pub and sessions writing a novel. Because she was very tall, in an elegant trenchcoat, with vivid red lipstick and chic glasses and a prominent chin, everyone stopped to read her sign: “I am a working New Yorker with a full-time job. I pay federal, state & city taxes. I choose to occupy Wall St. and this park.” It was written on a piece of cardboard from the envelope containing her master’s degree—a major source of her hundred thousand dollars in student-loan debt.

“We’re in a dire situation in this country,” Brotherton said, quietly. She came from a small town in Illinois, and was the daughter of a single mother who worked in a factory. “If I have an enormous pain in my chest, I go to my doctor,” she said. “We shouldn’t wait—the country has an enormous pain in its chest. We have this citizenship in this country that is capable of so much. This is an opportunity to protest what we complain about in our homes all the time.” She wondered how C.E.O.s could live with their vast wealth after being bailed out by ordinary people who were now suffering: “I can’t imagine, as a human being, being comfortable with that money, and walking down a street in any town and seeing people, who gave that money, being in need.” She had no idea where the movement would go. “This is in its embryonic stages. The important thing is dialogue, discussion. Talking.”

Farther down the row were two friends: Shira Moss, thirty, and Mazal Ben-Moshe, twenty-seven. Moss had a degree in midwifery but no job; Ben-Moshe was studying social work. Ben-Moshe volunteered for Barack Obama in 2008, and both were thrilled when he became President.

“As soon as he was elected, we disappeared,” Ben-Moshe said. “I didn’t vote last year. It was inexcusable.”

Moss, who had arrived at the park at 5:30 A.M., was impressed by the size of the crowd. “There’s never been anything like this in my lifetime,” she said. “I wanted this all my life.”

A few guys in hard hats, on their lunch break from construction work on 4 World Trade Center, walked by and checked out the signs. One of them, Mike, saluted the protesters. “There’s no work for us anymore—we’re out of work a year at a time,” he said. “It’s because of them”—he waved toward the financial district. “The people who are holding us back. The banks, the government, anyone who controls the money.”

Two middle-aged men had stopped in front of Moss and begun to argue with her in heavy Russian accents. “Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela is ultimate destination of what you’re doing,” the first Russian said.

“My wife is midwife—she has job,” the second man said.

“Congratulations, that’s great,” Moss said.

“You can get job, too.”

“I’d love one. Can’t find one.”

“This is waste of your time. Go look for job—put your time into that.”

“Bottom line: go to North Korea,” the first Russian said. “This is your final destination.”

Among the onlookers was a fortyish man in a baseball cap who worked in financial services—he was an analyst for one of the ratings agencies. He had a sneaking sympathy with the cause. Some of his colleagues found the protest movement funny, but others felt as he did—that inequities and corruption in the banking system harmed them as well. He listened to the Russians argue with Moss, then told the first one, “There are oligarchs in Russia. Do you see any connection between that and what she’s saying?”

The first Russian said, “This is government problem, this is not banks’ problem.”

The second Russian complained about the people in Zuccotti. “They smoke in park! This is illegal. They think they are superior.”

“True or false,” Moss said. “Things are absolutely fair for everyone in this country.”

“True,” the second Russian said.

A chorus of voices: “False!”

Russell Garofalo, a thirty-two-year-old accountant from Brooklyn, was also on the sidewalk. This area of the park was kind of Socratic, he thought. “You can feel the tension of improvised reality,” he said. Stiff-backed and round-faced, with curly dark hair and skinny pants, Garofalo was neither a sign-holder nor an onlooker. He came to express support by his presence. His job was to be a body—that was as far as he could go, for now.

When he was in his early twenties, Garofalo had watched his mother and stepfather, who lived in Arizona, fall out of the middle class. First, his stepfather was laid off from his job as a managing systems engineer at a computer company that was failing—escorted out of the building after eleven years of employment. His parents started a small import business that failed. To keep their house, they had to commute an hour to jobs that paid less than what Garofalo was making, waiting on tables in Scottsdale. “My stepfather is one of the most principled people I know,” he said. “It was such a clear death of the American Dream—there’s no safety net. You worked all your life and are a good person and it doesn’t matter. You’re really prone to getting fucked. These aren’t people on the fringe. We’re not even near the bottom.”

Garofalo moved to New York in 2005, to try his luck at standup comedy and improv. After taking an accounting course, he started doing the taxes of friends who were also freelancers. The work introduced him to the details of income inequality. “I see the distress people go through, and I can put a number to it,” he said. “It’s not just ‘I’m unhappy.’ It’s ‘I have ten thousand dollars’ debt.’ My clients are pretty close to doing what they want to do, but they’re not there yet and they’re asking themselves if it’s going to work. There’s this glimmer of optimism and hope, and it wears out over an artistic life. It hasn’t worn out yet, but they don’t know if they’re going to make it, and I tell them they owe four hundred dollars and it’s a ton of bricks. They’re not going to cry, but their voices change and their faces go blank.”

This year, Garofalo earned thirty thousand dollars doing taxes—the first time he had what he called “lower-class fuck-you money.” Still, he couldn’t afford health insurance—Obama’s health-care-reform law had so far done nothing to change this—and the thought that an illness could destroy his family angered him. The more he learned about money and politics, the more he was beset by a persistent sense that he didn’t matter. You were a dupe if you believed that any established institution was on the level. But there was no way to express it.

Garofalo first stopped by Zuccotti Park on October 5th—the day of a big march to Foley Square. The rebellion attracted him, but there were elements that he disliked: the hippie clichés, the whining, and the endless meetings, which reminded him why he worked alone. He was also wary of feeling like a fool for caring about something—he wasn’t one to spend his life trying to save the wolves. But, when Bloomberg announced that the park would be cleared, Garofalo felt galvanized: he wanted to defend the occupation. As the afternoon of October 13th went on and he discussed the impending closing of the park with friends online, Garofalo got madder. He began calling local officials and the property company that owned Zuccotti, telling them to keep the park open. He posted on his Facebook page the text of an e-mail he’d sent to the Mayor’s office: “I’m very angry about your sham cleaning and rule changing to end Occupy Wall Street. You’re taking the heart of this movement and shutting it down. A few days ago you said they could stay but apparently it’s only on your terms. You’re fucking up.”

That evening, Garofalo’s girlfriend asked him if he was going to the park. He hadn’t planned to do so, but he asked himself what kind of life he wanted to look back on, and he knew that he’d be ashamed not to have been there.

The sense of togetherness in the park that night was like nothing he’d ever felt. Garofalo still found the drummers annoying, and the activists who dreamed of an alternate world of pure democracy, without rules, were not for him. Still, he now felt responsible for keeping Occupy Wall Street going. He wanted others to make the pilgrimage: “If you bring someone down here for a day, they’ll attach so much emotion to being here that it will have an effect next year, even if this isn’t here the day before the election.”

A period in Garofalo’s life had ended—the period when being amusing was the highest goal because being serious felt futile. He was now ready to carry a sign on the sidewalk along Broadway. He stayed up nights trying to think of the right one: “I have a job, but I think being here is important”; “You’re cynical, lazy, and would be ashamed to tell your kids you did nothing.” Finally, one morning, he went down to Zuccotti Park with a signboard that said, in red block letters, “I Don’t Have a Lobbyist, Can I Still Have 3/5 of a Vote?” Garofalo was split, seventy-thirty, on his own sign: he thought that it was witty, but the reference to slavery was only a few steps away from invoking the Nazis. Yet he stood on the sidewalk for more than an hour and held the sign aloft while people paused to read it.

Why is the protest happening now? Why not in 2008, when Wall Street nearly collapsed, or 2009, when unemployment and foreclosures soared? For Ben-Moshe, Obama’s election seemed like the end of the battle, not the beginning, and it took her three years to return to the field. Garofalo thought that his generation needed to be inspired and then let down by Obama in order to realize that they had always expected someone else to do the heavy lifting. Michelle Brotherton didn’t understand the precise reasons for the financial crisis in 2008, but in the following years she saw two concrete results: ongoing distress for the majority of Americans, a quick rebound for the rich. In living rooms and in bars, she and her friends grumbled about the injustice of it all, until their cynicism made the topic moot.

Before Occupy Wall Street, the economic upheavals of the past few years produced no organized movement of the have-nots. For some Americans, Obama’s legislative initiatives—the stimulus, health-care reform, financial regulation, credit-card reform—offered the best hope for easing the country’s hardship. The Tea Party, a populist movement of the right with heavy support from wealthy individuals and corporations, captured the media’s interest, dominated the political discourse, and explained the country’s woes in terms that ignored the role of the one per cent. But the Obama Administration failed to harness public anger or turn the economy around, and the Tea Party wore out its welcome after the 2010 elections. When Occupy Wall Street lit a match, the wood was bone-dry. Suddenly, there was a dramatic, public way to talk about problems—money in politics, income inequality, corporate greed—that frustrated Americans but seemed intractable.

“We are the ninety-nine per cent” has become a clarifying slogan for the public’s inchoate discontent. A Tumblr blog that takes the phrase as its name has assembled a gallery of hundreds of anonymous people holding up personal statements written on pieces of paper. From November 17th (the face is obscured by the sign):

I did everything they told me to, in order to be successful. I got straight A’s and a scholarship. I went to University and got a degree. Now I’m sinking in student debt, unable to get a job. I have an eviction notice on my door, and nowhere to go. I have only $42 in the bank. I AM THE 99%!

From November 15th (a woman’s blurry features peer out from behind her sign):

I am a 37 year old who makes $8.00 an hour. . . . Our assistant and general managers make a decent 5 figures to do nothing but talk about employees/customers. I don’t get 10 minute breaks, nor 30 minute meal periods. After paying Insurance, Federal & State taxes, Social Security, Medicare, I am left working for the gas money to get to work. I AM PISSED!

When dozens of these compressed life stories are read in a row, they amass the moral force of a Steinbeck novel. They explain why Occupy Wall Street became an instant brand across the country. In mid-October, in Greensboro, North Carolina, a march of seven hundred people was organized with little advance notice, largely through social media. As long as Occupy Wall Street speaks the language of inequality and powerlessness as simply and directly as the self-portraits on Tumblr, it will resonate with millions of Americans. The most important facts about our society, widely known but seldom mentioned, are now the first order of conversation. Dylan Byers, of Politico, recently reported that the use of the phrase “income inequality” in the media has more than quintupled since the beginning of the occupation. In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has already done its work. The point is what was happening on the Broadway sidewalk. No one should expect this protean flame to transform itself into a formal political organization with a savvy strategy for enacting reforms and winning elections. That’s someone else’s job.

In late October, the city stopped enforcing the rule against tents. Kachel, who had inherited a zero-degree sleeping bag and a one-man tent when the substitute teacher landed a share in a loft, claimed a patch of ground eighteen inches by six feet along the south side. Zuccotti Park quickly filled up with tents, so that it became hard to walk through, and Kachel found that this closed off the park 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 Park. 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. He spent his days charging his phone at a Starbucks in the United States Realty Building, around the corner from the park, and taking care of other mundane business. 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 9 P.M., Kachel slipped into his 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 was filled with a sustained chorus of howling.

Kachel 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 assemblies by the red sculpture, where a system of call-and-repeat, known as “the human microphone,” 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, on Wall Street. But a few activists dominated 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 in the atrium and the occupiers in the park. At one meeting of the Facilitation Working Group, a man asked Kachel—an unfamiliar face—why he was there.

Kachel knew why he was there. “As a symbol, the park needs to stay occupied,” he said. “If they say, ‘O.K., 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 people become complacent and get into their reality shows, and who knows what kind of bubbles get burst.”

In November, as the leaves on the honey locusts turned yellow, the occupation started to fray. Zuccotti Park acquired a desperate edge; it felt more like a Hooverville than like a sit-in. In what Kachel called his “neighborhood,” the appearance of a ratty sofa aroused considerable tension. Chris, the drifter from Florida, had hauled the sofa off a city street. But it attracted revellers who had no interest in the movement, and it took up space that could go to two tents, so after much discussion the sofa was handed over to the drum circle. Then, one night, it was back. While Kachel 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 by the police. Within a few days, he was back.

Shortly after midnight on November 15th, a week after the sofa incident, Kachel 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. Kachel 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 blared the same announcement: Zuccotti Park was being closed, because of fire and health concerns. Quickly, Kachel took 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.

The streets of lower Manhattan filled with people who had heard the news. They hurled rage and contempt at the cops, who were in riot gear, and who forcibly kept them away from the park. Meanwhile, police vans, corrections buses, and even a backhoe rumbled down Broadway, and helicopters hovering overhead pointed searchlights down on the streets. The financial district had become a militarized zone, and Kachel’s only thought was of escape.

He followed the route of his morning walks, now lugging his worldly possessions. He went past the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, past the headquarters of 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 acquired by Chase), past the A.I.G. Building, then under the F.D.R. 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.

Kachel kept checking Twitter, but by four in the morning there was still no word about where the evicted occupiers were going to gather again, and his phone battery was dying. He was determined to find his comrades and help rekindle the movement that had so strongly connected him to other people. For the moment, though, he was alone: a homeless man in New York. ♦

PHOTOGRAPH: Institute

 

Evangelical Leader Rises in Brazil’s Culture Wars

By SIMON ROMERO NY TIMES

FORTALEZA, Brazil

SILAS MALAFAIA’s books, which sell in the millions in Brazil, have titles like “How to Defeat Satan’s Strategies” and “Lessons of a Winner.” The Gulfstream private jet in which he flies has “Favor of God,” in English, inscribed on its body.

As a television evangelist, Mr. Malafaia reaches viewers in dozens of countries, including the United States, where Daystar and Trinity Broadcasting Network broadcast his overdubbed sermons. Over 30 years, Mr. Malafaia, 53, has assembled thriving churches and enterprises around his Pentecostal preaching.

Still, he might have garnered little attention beyond his own followers had he not waded into Brazil’s version of the culture wars. After all, Brazil has evangelical leaders who command larger empires, like Edir Macedo, whose Universal Church of the Kingdom of God controls Rede Record, one of Brazil’s biggest television networks. Others, like Romildo Ribeiro Soares, of the International Church of God’s Grace, are known for greater missionary zeal.

But it is Mr. Malafaia who has recently attracted the most attention, with his pointed verbal attacks on a broad array of foes, including the leaders of Brazil’s movement for gay rights, proponents of abortion rights and supporters of marijuana decriminalization.

“I’m the public enemy No. 1 of the gay movement in Brazil,” Mr. Malafaia said in an interview this month here in Fortaleza, a city in Brazil’s northeast where he came to lead one of his self-described “crusades,” an event mixing scripture and song in front of about 200,000 people. Tears flowed down the faces of some of the impassioned attendees, while others danced to the performances that served as his opening act.

Before ascending to the pulpit, he described how coveted he had become on television talk shows as a sparring partner with gay leaders. But that is only a small part of his repertoire, and television is just one of many media at Mr. Malafaia’s disposal. On Twitter, he has nearly a quarter of a million followers, and in videos distributed on YouTube, he lambastes not only liberal foes but also journalists and rival evangelical leaders.

Not surprisingly, his rising prominence has made him the source of both admiration and unease. He mobilized thousands to march in the capital, Brasília, this year against a bill aimed at expanding anti-discrimination legislation to include sexual orientation.

“He’s like Pat Robertson in the sense of being a pioneer in moving Brazil’s evangelical right into the national political realm,” said Andrew Chesnut, an expert on Latin American religions at Virginia Commonwealth University, comparing Mr. Malafaia to the conservative American television evangelist.

Brazil’s elite is seeking to understand the rise of such a polarizing figure, and how it might influence the nation’s politics. Piauí, a magazine that is the rough equivalent of The New Yorker in the United States, ran a lengthy article this year on Mr. Malafaia’s rise from obscurity in Rio de Janeiro, where he grew up in a military family, to the power he now wields.

BEYOND Mr. Malafaia, the broad expansion of evangelical faiths, particularly Pentecostalism, in recent decades is altering Brazil’s politics. (While Pentecostalism varies widely, its tenets in Brazil include faith healing, prophecy and exorcism.) Leaders in Brasília must now consult on a range of matters with an evangelical caucus of legislators with resilient clout.

About one in four Brazilians are now thought to belong to evangelical Protestant congregations, and Pentecostals like Mr. Malafaia are at the forefront of this growth. In a remarkable religious transformation, scholars say that while Brazil still has the largest number of Roman Catholics in the world, it now also rivals the United States in having one of the largest Pentecostal populations.

Not everyone in Brazil is enthusiastic about this shift.

In a November essay, the journalist Eliane Brum wrote of the intolerance shown toward atheists in Brazil by some adherents of born-again faiths, describing what she called the “ever more aggressive dispute for market share” among big churches.

Ms. Brum’s essay unleashed a wave of reactions from Pentecostals. Mr. Malafaia’s words were among the most caustic.

During the interview here, he called Ms. Brum a “tramp,” and repeated his contention that “communist atheists” in the former Soviet Union, Cambodia and Vietnam were responsible for more killings than “any war produced for religious questions.”

Whether by design or default, his aggressive language has often become a spectacle. In November, Época magazine reported that Mr. Malafaia, during heated comments about taking legal action against Toni Reis, a prominent gay-rights advocate, said he would “fornicate” Mr. Reis.

Mr. Malafaia fired off an explanation that he had actually said he would “funicate” Mr. Reis. While researchers were unable to find Mr. Malafaia’s word in reference dictionaries, he said it was slang that roughly translated as “trounce.”

The visibility Mr. Malafaia achieves from such episodes has fueled questions about his political ambitions. He said he had no desire to run for office because it could make him beholden to a specific political party, thus curbing the broader visibility he now has.

“God called on me to be a pastor,” he said, “and I won’t exchange that for being a politician.”

But political influence is another matter. Mr. Malafaia said he voted twice for Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and for years enjoyed access to Brasília’s corridors of power. But he also related an anecdote about Mr. da Silva’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, that suggests how important evangelical figures are becoming in national elections.

He said she spoke with him by telephone for 15 minutes during last year’s presidential campaign, trying to lure his support. But he said he refused because of ideological differences with parts of the governing Workers Party of Mr. da Silva, a former labor leader, and Ms. Rousseff, a former operative in an urban guerrilla group.

“I told her, ‘I don’t have anything personal against you. I think you’re an intelligent, qualified woman,’ ” he said. “ ‘But how can I vote for you if I spent four years fighting with the group from your party supporting a bill to benefit gays, thus hurting me?’ ”

MR. MALAFAIA, while stabbing the air with fingers adorned with diamond-encrusted gold rings, delivers such tales in booming Portuguese with a thick Rio accent.

His persona has given him almost rock-star status among some supporters.

“I didn’t recognize him without his mustache,” said Erineide Mendonça, 39, an employee at the Fortaleza hotel where Mr. Malafaia was staying, referring to the trademark facial hair that he shaved not long ago. “But I recognized his voice,” she said, asking to be photographed with the evangelist she adores.

Both Mr. Malafaia and his wife, Elizete, were trained as psychologists, and when he rises to the pulpit, his voice echoes in sermons laden with lessons of self-help and perseverance.

A favorite theme involves success and how to attain it. While he contends that he still lives relatively humbly and is not even a millionaire, he makes no apologies for his own material rise. In fact, he celebrates it, touting, for instance, his Mercedes-Benz — a gift, he explains, from a prosperous friend.

Then there is the Gulfstream, acquired secondhand in the United States, he said, not by him but by his nonprofit religious organization at a reasonable price.

“The pope flies in a jumbo jet,” he said, referring to the chartered Alitalia plane that carries the bishop of Rome, and chafing at what he viewed as a double standard with which Brazil’s ascendant evangelical leaders must contend. “But if a pastor travels in any old jet, he’s considered a thief.”

A Throwback Is True to Form, Feisty Right to the End

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY NY TIMES

He is not irreplaceable.

And that’s the sad truth behind all the hosannas and hoopla that surrounded Regis Philbin’s grand send-off on Friday. After so many years — and some 17,000 hours on the air — this 80-year-old entertainer took his final bow on “Live! With Regis and Kelly.” Maybe not on Monday, but someday soon, a new co-host will settle into Mr. Philbin’s chair. If anything, morning television will most likely go on even more smoothly than before.

In a daytime landscape filled with bland, polished hosts and smarmy good cheer, Mr. Philbin was crumpled, nasal and histrionic. He was a snaggletooth amid cosmetic dentistry and porcelain veneers.

It wasn’t his age that set him apart. CBS is preparing to bet big on seniority, recruiting Charlie Rose and Gayle King to overhaul “The Early Show” in January. In a way, that incongruous casting choice may be as much a tribute to Mr. Philbin as it is an effort to mimic the oddball chemistry of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. For all the diversity of race and gender on morning talk shows, there isn’t a wide range of personality or pizazz.

Mr. Philbin was beloved by viewers partly because he didn’t try to be likable. Feisty and always antic, he could be embarrassingly candid, and his humor was often needling. His former longtime co-host Kathie Lee Gifford, who left his show in 2000 and was later hired by NBC as a co-host on “Today” with Hoda Kotb, returned on Thursday to reassure him that he would enjoy retirement.

“Does it nag at you that you are missing something?” Mr. Philbin asked her, then wondered if he would need to return, “like you crawled back to Hoda?”

He promised he wouldn’t cry on Friday, and to his credit, he didn’t. He mostly looked embarrassed and impatient with all the sentiment.

Networks love to milk retirement specials: Oprah Winfrey’s farewell lasted an entire season and was more opulent than a pharaoh’s funeral. The producers poured on the bathos for Mr. Philbin, and even gravitas, filming his final walk from his dressing room to the stage in black and white and putting up a plaque in his honor at the studio. The mayor gave him the key to the city; his wife, children and fans made video tributes. The studio audience was filled with old friends and famous faces. Mr. Philbin made fun of that.

“V.I.P.’s?” he barked. “Where are they? Tony Danza’s the biggest name here.”

He didn’t well up when his co-host, Kelly Ripa, tearfully talked about the joy he brought viewers — and she cited those with cancer, mothers nursing babies and a little boy staying home to avoid a math test. When he finally had the floor to say goodbye, Mr. Philbin spoke briskly and briefly, thanking people with generic terms like “my lovely co-hosts” and the “prop-house guys.”

That was fitting. Even in his younger days there was always a showbizy Damon Runyon element to his on-air persona. He never lost his Bronx accent, and comedians loved to impersonate the way he speaks — like a racetrack announcer with a head cold. He still seemed to live in a world where people send opening-night telegrams, and men call the waitress “doll” and get together to “have some laughs.” Mr. Philbin recently published an autobiography, “How I Got This Way,” and he proudly told viewers earlier this week that he was a guest on NPR. This is how he put it: “I’m there for my book, which is opening today.”

Mr. Philbin made insecurity and professional envy part of his shtick, but he was not always kidding. He told Katie Couric on the ABC show “20/20” that he was leaving partly because he was unhappy with the contract offered him, which he said “wasn’t what I expected or I thought I deserved.”

When Ms. Couric asked him to name his greatest regret, he mentioned the fact that he had spent so many years in relative obscurity on local shows in Los Angeles and New York before going national in 1988.

“I wish I didn’t have to wait till I was in my late 50s before the good part of my life started in this business,” he replied, dead serious. “That’s what I regret, that it was kind of a late start for me.”

Stars and would-be celebrities keep nothing back about their love lives, addictions or personal tragedies on television, but they are rarely candid about their professional disappointments or missed opportunities. Onstage Mr. Philbin told funny, off-the-cuff anecdotes and didn’t bother viewers with sob stories and personal demons. Even after bypass surgery in 2007, he came back to the show determined to play down his brush with mortality.

He did the same on Friday, and it was refreshing. There will be plenty of other popular morning hosts, but that kind of restraint and old-school showmanship actually is irreplaceable.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 18, 2011

An earlier version of this column contained incorrect information about the role of ABC in producing ‘Live! With Regis and Kelly.’” That syndicated show is distributed by Disney ABC Domestic Television.

 

Global protests: is 2011 a year that will change the world?

Will this year go down in history as one of those that redefined global politics? Just what are the parallels – if any – with 1968 and 1989

John Harris Guardian UK

Police clear the Occupy Wall Street protestors in the early hours of Tuesday morning Photograph: Lucas Jackson/REUTERS

Midway through last month, when the Occupy movement was at its peak and the New York police department was keeping its distance from Zuccotti Park, I was in Berkeley, California. Outside a branch of Bank of America, a compact local Occupy camp had sprung up, apparently drawing on a mixture of battle-scarred lefties, students from the University of California, and the sizeable local homeless population. Their line of argument was captured on A4 flyers that were pasted on to every available surface in the surrounding streets, the most direct of which read thus: "Are you pissed [off] yet? You should be! No taxation of the rich. Endless war. Bankers not held responsible. Corrupt politicians. Destruction of the planet due to politicians' and corporations' greed. Can it get any worse than this?"

On a trestle table lay small piles of a leaflet credited to the "Bureau of Public Secrets", which quoted 69-year-old Kalle Lasn, the editor of the Canada-based countercultural magazine Adbusters: "We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab spring recently. We are students of the situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world."

Looking at the shabby camp in front of me, any talk of Paris in 1968 seemed absurd – but then again, subsequent events in nearby Oakland, where thousands of Occupy supporters took to the streets on 3 November maybe suggested that such reference points were not completely misplaced. The 1968 reference also chimed with an article, not from any anarchist leaflet, but from the Financial Times, titled 2011: The Year of Global Indignation, and written by the paper's foreign affairs columnist, Gideon Rachman. "Many of the revolts of 2011 pit an internationally connected elite against ordinary citizens who feel excluded from the benefits of economic growth, and angered by corruption," he wrote. "The creation of a global mood is a mysterious thing. In 1968, before the word 'globalisation' or the internet were even invented, there were student rebellions around the world. The year 1989 saw not just the fall of the Berlin Wall but the Tiananmen Square revolt in China." And then a tentative question: "Perhaps 2011 will come to rank alongside 1968 and 1989 as a year of global revolt?"

This year has so far seen convulsive events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen. Mass protests against economic breakdown and austerity in Greece, Italy and Spain. Marches and protest camps in Chile and Israel. The arrival of Occupy Wall Street – which was cleared by police yesterday, though it will surely return in some form – and a movement-cum-meme which quickly arrived in London and beyond. And all the time, from Arab dictatorships, through to the world's banks and the Murdoch empire and now the vast edifice of the EU, the sense that interests and institutions, that once seemed invincible are either cracking or being questioned as never before, while mainstream politics is left looking bereft not just of answers, but even ideas.

But what connects the crowds who are making all the noise? What could link a student camped outside St Paul's to Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian vegetable seller who, having set himself on fire, died on 4 January, and thereby set in motion the events we now know as the Arab spring? How to draw lines from the Spanish indignados to the student protestors responsible for the so-called Chilean winter?

Sometimes, the answer seems to lie in actual links between the people at the centre of events. On 26 October, for example, Occupy Wall Street was visited by a group of activists drawn together by the Egyptian Facebook-based 6 April movement, who blessed the camp with the spirit of Tahrir Square; a fortnight ago, demonstrators outside St Paul's Cathedral conducted a live video linkup with pro-democracy activists in Syria. Such moments highlight the kind of people who have taken the lead in spreading the message of protest and dissent: a new political breed, unlike their politicised predecessors in some respects; but in others, remarkably similar.

Graduates with no future

"They all looked alike. They would immediately recognise each other. They seemed to possess a silent but absolute knowledge of certain issues, but to be totally ignorant about others. Their hands were unbelievably skilful at pasting up posters, handling paving stones, spraying on walls ... all the while calling for more hands to pass on the message they'd received, but not completely deciphered."

So runs a passage from Chris Marker's documentary A Grin Without a Cat, about the rise and fall of the forces let loose in 1968. It popped into my head back in February, when I was reading a brilliant blog by Newsnight's Paul Mason, titled Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere, which remains among the most incisive analyses of this year's events.

"At the heart of it all are young people, obviously: students; westernised; secularised," he wrote. "... a new sociological type – the graduate with no future ... With access to social media, they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyranny … They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies … They all seem to know each other … I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square … The common theme is the dissolution of centralised power and the demand for 'autonomy' and personal freedom."

Speaking from an international summit in France, Mason expands on that thought, which he has now poured into a book to be published in January. His travels this year, he explains, have hardened his belief that what ties together 2011's tumultuous events is tangled up with new(ish) means of communication, and a new sense of what it is to be politically organised.

Once you're networked via social media, he says, you're open to profound changes in "who you are and what your personal space is". The idea of any seemingly arbitrary authority standing in the way of all that can easily become an affront – and at the same time, your means of communication offers you a method of opposition and resistance: online, in the real world, or both. This is the essential story of, say, the hundreds of thousands of people who responded to the 2010 death of the young Egyptian Khaled Said by joining the massively influential We are all Khaled Said Facebook group, or the summer's Direct Democracy Now! protests in Athens, said to have been organised solely through social media.

For Mason, all this is also pretty clearly manifested in this year's most iconic archetype: the tent community which springs up in the midst of the city, usually home to the flickering blue light of laptops and the incessant hubbub of intense conversation. "One thing that there has been in common between the Arab spring and the European and American events is this drive – which is almost pathological – to secure space, and live in it," he says. "In one sense, it's a meme … and I think it does satisfy a desire. Once you've lived and experienced this sort of spontaneous, communal, utopian sort of existence online, which is what you do if you're a net-savvy young kid … well, put it this way: if you were to ask yourself, what is the real-world equivalent of being in a 200-strong World Of Warcraft horde [gamespeak for an online community playing the hugely popular fantasy game]? It's probably sitting in a square, in a tent."

And what of all those historical comparisons? Might 2011 be another 1968, or 1989? Mason's favoured comparison is a much more distant year, when abortive revolts spread across Europe at speed, and two fired-up German radicals wrote The Communist Manifesto.

"I think it's going to be seen more in terms of 1848," he says. "1968 was a cultural thing: it only came to street-fighting in Czechoslovakia, the black ghettoes of the US and Paris. In 1989, apart from Romania, there was as much coming from above, through diplomacy, as there was from below. Only in 1848 have we had an explosion that goes from one country to another as fast the mode of communication of the time, and then doesn't stop, and feeds off a zeitgeist that is about freedom, which crosses borders, and involves people identifying with each other from very different cultures."

The dangers ahead

Between 1993 and 1997, Robert Reich served as Bill Clinton's labour secretary. Of late, as if to demonstrate that sections of the US Democrats are being energised and excited by Occupy, from his base at Berkeley University he has visited and spoken at Occupy Oakland (cleared for a second time by the city's police on Monday), Occupy San Francisco, and Occupy Los Angeles. Not without reason, he's wary of too many comparisons with what's happening in the industrialised west and the Arab spring, though he readily accepts that in terms of "political ferment", 2011 may well turn out to be a watershed year.

Reich agrees with the importance Mason places on the new stereotype of the graduate with no future – people, he points out, who now have both solid reasons to protest, and, given the shortage of the kind of jobs that used to fund people through university, plenty of time to do so. In the US and beyond, he says, "the assumption of upward mobility has been brought into serious question"; American opinion polls show that "a plurality of people believes that the game is rigged in favour of people with privilege and power".

What, I wonder, might be the concrete result of all the noise?

"It's impossible to know at this stage. Even in 1968, we had no idea until many years later – and even now, revisionists appear every year, re-interpreting what happened. 1989 was much more clear-cut: we know how the world changed. All we can say about 1968 with any certainty is that there were mass protests and uprisings, people felt nations were moving in the wrong direction, and there was a kind of shock of political recognition among elites, that they had to change direction because of these swelling ranks of discontented people. In the US, that ultimately helped end the Vietnam war – but it also, indirectly, ushered in Richard Nixon, and a Republican, regressive agenda."

Here, he says, lies a danger, common to the US and Europe: that if the mainstream left does not convincingly address the tangle of economic issues that underlies this year's great outbreak of protest and unrest, the initiative could easily be seized by the right. In other words, the onus is on Obama and the Democrats to speak to the moment, and there's an increasing sense that if they don't, the American centre-left may splinter along generational lines. On one side will stand the staid party establishment; on the other, the young networked multitudes, many of whom did their bit for Obama in 2008, but are now gripped by disillusionment that could easily get worse.

For Reich, this possibility has clear echoes of 1968 – and that infamous episode when politicised young people descended on the Democratic convention in Chicago and dramatised the party's miserable failure to rise to the moment, while the city's police used what one convention speaker decried as "gestapo tactics".

"You will recall that in 1968, the Democratic party split," he says. "The establishment Democrats went with [Presidential nominee] Hubert Humphrey, and young people deserted the party. Basically, the Democrats lost big because they didn't know how to respond to the wave. And the drama of 2012 will be a drama, I think, of the Democratic party."

Thirty miles away, Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. His 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man encapsulated the giddy, celebratory mood that followed the European events of 1989, when he claimed, "a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy had emerged throughout the world … as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and communism." Comparisons between those times and events in the Arab world now extend into the distance (witness hundreds of online musings about "the Arab 1989"), though when I quiz him about the supposed parallels, he sounds hesitant: Tunisia's young democracy may be hailed as an example of the way ahead, but any such idea founders against the uneasy states of affairs that currently define Egypt and Libya, not to mention the countries where revolts have been met with brutal oppression.

Fukuyama's latest book, The Origins of Political Order, maps the unwieldy period "from prehuman times to the French revolution", and lays out his three prerequisites of stable democratic systems: a functioning state, the rule of law and accountable government – which is a pretty good prism through which to view the Arab spring and its aftermath. "Where the analogy with 1989 breaks down," he says, "is that the historical background in the Arab world is really different from eastern Europe in 1989, and therefore they don't have the same institutional background to make as quick a transition to democracy as Poland and the Czech Republic and Estonia had. The basic impulse is similar, but it's going to take a much longer time for them to get to a real stable set of democratic institutions." In other words, for all the cheering that erupted earlier this year, we could well end up with analogies to, say, Russia and Belarus, rather than Poland and the Czech Republic.

"Yeah … you shouldn't expect miracles. Take a country like Libya: it's not just that they don't have democratic and rule-of-law institutions: they don't even have a state. You've got to construct all these things simultaneously, which is not something Poland had to worry about. So yeah, you may have Islamists in the driving seat, you may have civil war in some cases. It's not going to be an easy task. But you've got to start somewhere."

The west's current big difficulty, he says, is down to "an incipient problem that hasn't really gelled, which is the impact of 30 years of economic growth under a fairly conservative set of economic principles, which in a country like the US has had big distributional impacts – the stagnation of middle class wages and so forth". Even this one-time supporter of Ronald Reagan freely admits that such tensions "will blow up in the system at some point" – but when I mention Occupy and the thousands of networked young politicos who have got involved, he's as sceptical as I expected.

"There's no question that the new social media make it much easier to mobilise people on a short-term basis. But what's missing is a broader set of ideas that govern that mobilisation: that really unite all these people in a sustained and coherent critique of the current system." Fukuyama's style of conversation is too measured to lead him to sneer, but he comes close. "You don't get a broad social movement from a bunch of unhappy kids. You get it from much larger classes of people that have a real social grievance. That class exists, but until they're mobilised in a more effective way, it's not going to have the political impact it ought to."

"You need a coherent leftwing alternative to address a lot of the problems that have accumulated over the last couple of decades," he says. In the absence of anything that meets that description, there will be an opening for what he calls "crazy populism", particularly if "we're headed for a second leg of this recession: continued high unemployment and economic stagnation."

"Just listen to the quality of debate in this country about what the source of the problem is," Fukuyama continues. "It's very dismaying; it just doesn't reflect a real grappling with reality, and the complexity of the issues that face us. And then you've got the right in Europe, which is anti-immigrant, and broadly populist, because they don't like the way elites have governed Europe – and they've got a certain case to be made. That could get a lot stronger in the coming year." As with Reich, his message is: watch out – as any student of history well knows, revolt is often a reliable sign of an imminent backlash from nasty forces of political reaction.

The next 20 years

In 1968, Tariq Ali was a member of the Trotskyist International Marxist Group, up to his neck in protest against the Vietnam War, and in regular contact with the young enragés who were making the political weather in Paris. The week before we speak, he was at Occupy Oakland; he has also visited Occupy London. "Oh, you know … It's very sweet. It's lovely seeing young people being engaged again. I'm not being patronising, I think it's great. But I think you have to recognise it for what it is: essentially, a symbolic protest.

"The most striking feature of these uprisings," he goes on, "is that nobody has yet demanded a totally alternative social and economic programme – apart from Greece, but even they are in a confused state: they say no to austerity, but there isn't even a charter of six or eight demands. And if they carry on thinking like that, they will be defeated. Without any doubt. It's a huge weakness."

What he says points up the clash between what you might think of as the Old New Left, and the generation that has recently taken centre-stage. Others might rhapsodise about autonomous communes and the glories of non-hierarchical organisation: by contrast, though their politics are light years apart, Ali echoes Fukuyama's argument that without a coherent programme and convincing mass support, you're toast. So is there reason for even the most qualified optimism?

"Yes. Because I think these are the first signs – not of a unified movement, but of different movements in different countries that are searching for something. And that process of searching is extremely important. We're in a period of transition."

And when might things start to cohere? "I would have thought it depends a great deal on how the economic system functions over the next 20 years. I think the next two decades will be quite decisive."

His words reflect those of just about everyone I've spoken to over the last six weeks, whether they've been camped in city squares, or cloistered in university rooms. All the historical comparisons go some way to illuminating our own times, but if you get too hooked on 1968 or 1989, you're in danger of underestimating one sobering fact: that we're in the midst not just of an unbelievably volatile and unpredictable year, but a volatile and unpredictable era, in which this year's events are likely to only be the start. Hold on tight.