"Hold the Line, Friend of Mine," Montreal, Night (& Day) 48

(Note: There are photos embedded in the original blog post at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com/)

 

Ryan Harvey, the second half (with me) of my solid affinity group this weekend, says of his raw video footage from June 9: "Watch as Montreal police attempt and fail to control massive crowds on the 47th consecutive night-march emerging from the student strike/anti-austerity movement"--in a weekend of trying (and often succeeding) to disrupt and highlight the show of conspicuous wealth that marks the Grand Prix here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKcZkdHnnNA&feature=youtu.be

Odd that just over 24 hours ago, I was standing next to Ryan while he filmed this demonstration or what might better be called a spontaneous convergence of convergences over many hours, illegal like every other one since emergency law 78 passed. It looks just as surreal in this clip as it did in person. Time and again, the police seemed to have no idea or capacity to gain the upper hand on a populace that seems to have lost its faith in and fear of the police's authority.

Whenever I ask a Canadian about this, they pretty much all say, "If a law like 78 passed in the United States criminalizing dissent, people wouldn't stand for it either." The argument is that we in the United States, too, would be able to make our cities ungovernable and generate a serious political crisis for government. And I keep thinking, "Really?" Here, maple spring seems to have unleashed a profound awakening that Canadians don't want to become like the United States. Whether watching scenes like this in person or experiencing casseroles and massive marches, the depth of belief that a society should obviously offer social goods--a social goodness too--from education to arts and more, seems diametrically opposed to popular views in the United States, where education, food, health care, and the like seem to be perceived as somehow things that will always be in scarce or limited supply, and correspondingly, things that people should individually earn or somehow individually deserve. Yeah, surreal here.

And overwhelming. So on night 48, I sort took the evening off. A new acquaintance who went to tonight's night march said it was "small" (meaning about a thousand), did a lot of snaking through downtown, and met with a ton of police in none-too-good a mood. I instead went to get a glimpse of Occupy Montreal at the end of a day of assembly and workshops--all seemingly small (as in dozens or less), and made to seem far smaller by the fact it was being held in the large Parc LaFontaine. It was hard to find occupy, in fact, amid all the many, many other people in the park in red--not only squares, but shirts, pants, hats, bikes, frisbees, and more.

On Ryan's last night here on this weekend visit, he played to an even smaller occupy crowd in this park as the warm sunshine of today mellowed into the gentle warmth of a summer evening; half his audience was me, three of his friends, and a new friend I've made on the streets of Montreal, plus two stray kids who wandered over and a dog that ran over with a ball in its mouth. But a couple of the folks there, including my new friend, were at that open-to-a-world-of-new-ideas point in their lives, as they were newly working to help make that new world through occupy (here and, for my new friend, in the United States). So Ryan played to them--songs of rebellion, resistance, disobedience, and hope. He also, inadvertently, played to me with his final song--about how the police kept coming at people, time and again, and the people don't back down. Here I was, sitting in a thoroughly lovely park, with charming graffiti on a nearby park cafe proclaiming "La Resistance," and only about 24 hours earlier, he and I had been part of the police coming at people and people not backing down. For really real, in a way that Ryan's video simply can't capture. Yet in a way that the chorus to Ryan's last song this evening eerily grasped for me:

"Hold the line, even if your voice shakes
Friend of mine, even if your voice shakes
Push forward, it's up to you
See it through"

For really real, people did that by the thousands last evening, although with unshakable voices. Surreal indeed.

We left the park as darkness fell, and joined CKUT radio show host and now CUTV crew person too Aaron Maiden to hear Penny Rimbaud (formerly of Crass) perform poetry/words with some Montreal dancers/musicians at La Sala Rossa. Between Ryan's songs in a lush-green park and Penny's spoken word in a bohemian red-and-black performance space; Aaron telling us that La Sala Rossa had long ago been home to Arbeiter Ring (Workers' Circle) and that as part of that, Emma Goldman had spoken in the same room; and knowing that as we watched what felt like something out of early punk days with an edge, people were convening at the usual march spot at Berri-UQAM Metro stop for night 48, I was again overcome by a surreal feeling. This time, it was a feeling of how amazing and almost unbelievable it is to live in this particular time, but a time that is also connected to so many other rupturous moments by threads and discontinuities, mistakes and heartbreaks, and sometimes a gaining of ground, a holding of the line. Sometimes even some wins, and a bit more freedom.

Earlier in the day, on my "day off," I'd rented one of Montreal's Bixi bikes so that I could join the "tour de l'ile en rouge" (tour of the island in red), which began from the same Parc LaFontaine where Occupy Montreal was having its assembly in another corner.

Our critical-red mass was made up of some thousand or more cyclists, most dressed in red, and pretty much everyone sporting the red square on their shirts or hats, or as a cardboard square within their bike wheel or square-red flag attached to their bicycle. Many also brought spoons, so many spoons, and a healthy chunk of pots too, making us more of a red casseroles tour of the island. One of the folks I biked next to the whole time--another new acquaintance, a Concordia student who told me about how hard it had been to try to maintain even a small strike there, especially when they attempted to do a hard picket line against exam day--mentioned how she always now travels with her spoon. You never know when it will come in handy--say, when a bunch of folks were already inside the Grand Prix outdoor party area on/near Crescent Street on Friday night. Spoons have become the new public enemy, along with red squares, red scarves, and black umbrellas, among other subversive objects! Police have been targeting, stopping, hassling, hitting, and/or arresting people for these household and clothing menaces.

Who knows, soon cops may be rounding up the little kids who are joining in too? Like the 8- or 9-year-old girl on this bike ride today who kept starting up chants all by herself, calling out the first part, with all the adults around her then calling out the second part--such as in "Charest" "Whoo-Who!" You have to hear this chant to appreciate it, resonating with what I'm told is a hockey cheer/jeer, and never failing to elicit glee among the participants. The glee on this young cyclist's face, though, put all the others to shame: her little act of self-organization was working! And like kids who've grown up in Zapatista autonomous communities in Chiapas or MST communities in Brazil, to name two, maybe this child--and so many children I've seen on the Montreal spring, outwitting police cars during their neighborhood casseroles in order to take the streets, or already on the streets in situations like last night's eruptive disruption, or organizing walkouts from their high schools, or even meandering into Ryan's music tonight--will grow up in such a radically different society that she'll think self-organization along with practices of mutual aid and dignity, for starters, are the "natural" norms.

I spent the near-three-hours of this gorgeous red bike ride--meant as a counterpoint to the noisy, fuel-unefficient, expensive Grand Prix happening on a nearby island--in friendly political debate with yet another new acquaintance (uprisings are good for the creation of social bonds and communities that usually feel far more genuine and mutualistic than most, and often last far longer too). He and I were basically arguing about political strategy and the related notion of a diversity of tactics--or, in his view, not. And yet here we were, on this stunning red bicycle ride on a stunning maple summer day, winding our way through Montreal neighborhood after Montreal neighborhood, and all around us were people going out of their way to raise their fists or wave hands in solidarity, display their own red flags or squares, bang their own pots, or even grab their bike and join us. While yesterday night, winding our way through the streets of Montreal, all around us were people going out of their way to raise their fists or wave hands in solidarity, display their own red flags or squares, bang their own pots, or simply walk off the sidewalk and join us. One calm leisure, and the other chaotic disruption. Both, though, evidence of the depth of social support for and involvement in this profound moment of people not only holding the line on austerity cuts but opening up space for their own collective empowerment and social solidarity. And both evidencing that there is increasingly, as I've noted before, not an "us" on daytime bike rides or nighttime disobedience with people watching from the sidelines but a growing "we" weaving through the whole fabric of this society in upheaval.

Like occupy in the States, and no doubt Occupy Montreal and other occupy sites across Canada, social and self transformation is a messy business, or rather a beautiful and messy experiment. There will never be a perfect "we," neatly bounded like the perfect little red squares increasingly visible all across the Montreal landscape and Montrealers' bodies. There will be the debates about strategy, tactics, and aspirations, and struggles over how to turn street power into popular, self-governing power. There already are, and many of the conversations with many of the new acquaintainces and friends--and old ones too--that I'm having on the streets involve both the surreal quality of this maple spring (in a breathtakingly dreamy sort of way!) and the constant lived experiences of the dilemmas it raises. Should we ride bikes, bang pots, play music, or riot, among other things, or all of the above? Which brings in more people? Keeps them there? Which scare people off? Or which, as Ryan's video shows, only embolden them further?

Even my rental bike became part of the surreal quality of this historical moment in Montreal, in yet another display of how imagery, symbols, and art are equal yet complementary partners in this uprising. All of the bixi bikes have advertising on them. (At one point a while ago, some anonymous culture-jammers printed up some 11,000 stickers with a few dozen or more different versions of short poems on them, and in a couple hours, covered over all the bixi ads with them (on 5,500 bikes). They then put out a Web site that looked legit, claiming that bixi had decided to abandon the ads for the social good of beautiful words instead. When the prank was discovered, the Montreal bixi bureaucracy decried the vandalism and started ripping off all the poems. There was a near-riot, metaphorically, among the populace, which wanted those poems on those bixis, damn it! But I digress...as usual in this evening's meandering blog.) My random choice of a bixi had this (red!) ad for RioTintoAlcan, which describes as "a world leader in finding, mining, and processing the earth's mineral resources," on its side and front:

And coincidentally, as if harkening to the night before on the Grand Prix party streets of Montreal, as if this bike had maybe even taken itself over there for a peek, this reworked (red!) version on its front:

I'm not sure where this blog post tonight is going, or like my lengthy rebel red bike ride, where it actually went, so I'll end now with big hugs to a dear "friend of mine," Ryan, who has the remarkable ability to be as gregarious as me, get as enthused about and engaged in revolutionary possibility as me, and inspire me, and who was a super companion on the streets and in the parks of Montreal. Plus he aided and abetted my obsession with taking pictures of red squares, including this one on his guitar case today: