Hobbesian logic

Recently watched a  movie about the reclusive Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist, Dear Mr. Watterson.

Now, for contrast here, think about Snoopy. Snoopy was on my first lunchbox in 1971. Snoopy has been here through my parents’ childhood, through my childhood. He’s more commonly found selling life insurance than kid’s toys nowadays, but he’s been celebrating every holiday with his pal Charlie Brown for 50 years.

At my parents and grandparents and almost any house I ever visited, I could read books of Peanuts comic strips. Snoopy was ever present. Similarly, many many kids of today’s generations started to read using Calvin and Hobbes. Imaginative books with the rich ink drawings of today’s large format  books.

Hobbes, in contrast to Snoopy, was never ever licensed. There is no official Hobbes doll. Hobbes doesn’t appear outside his comic strips. The comic strips are the only way to see his real-world facing stuffed toy skin, the only way to see the skin he wears dancing with Calvin and his overactive imagination.  Calvin and Hobbes live only in the collected books of comic strips.

How many millions were left on the table by not licensing a stuffed toy Hobbes? The film seeks to answer – Why?

One of the people arguing for licensing asked the viewers to consider how much comfort a Hobbes doll would bring children.

I argue the opposite. By refusing to license one Hobbes, everyone has Hobbes. Any plush toy at arm’s reach can dance in your imagination. And they all look as different as the people holding them.

 

 

Occupation Blues

The lack of an exit scenario is a real problem for Occupy. Consider any other creative or business endeavour we do. You have an end game, or several, that you’re working towards. Whereas political movements seem to be rather … what does inchoate mean? Maybe full of potential energy, kinetic energy. How is it transformed to energy that can actually power a machine?

Politically, I’m all over the map. Experiential political involvement. My first political march was against the first Gulf War. I marched while we chanted: “Send George Bush! Send Dan Quayle! Send Neil Bush when he gets out of Jail!” George W hadn’t even been invented yet, he was probably off in oil fields or baseball fields of dreams, not yet on the national stage. It was exuberant and tiring and then I woke up the next morning still a bit groggy and gave blood to support our troops. And it started despite our protests and just like that, the war was over. The first Gulf War did not drag on.

20 years later, the Gulf War surged and resurged and refused to end. And I was front and center at the Texas Republican convention, right before the ticket was locked down to McCain and Palin. When Ron Paul was still marginalized.

We’d met up, attended meet-ups, and supported the Ron Paul candidacy believing there had to be a voice for changing course. Opposing endless war in a 1984 style, a war grinding our youth to brain-damaged lads with continuing costly health care bills — and how the bloody hell are we going to pay for THAT? Opposing endless Big Brother tactics, spying on our every move, creating government to report on government to report on people until we’re each neck deep in files about files in some Eastern Bloc nightmare. Which made it particularly odd when mainstream folks screamed the N-word at people trying to avoid repeating Germany’s mistakes.

Precinct convention, state convention, old-school operatives with years upon years of rubber stamping a political process were suddenly revolted by a pissant crowd of unwashed republicans streaming in and voting some things up, other things down. A woman with years of service, a woman so proud to have inserted god language into the Texas pledge of allegiance to the flag, a woman who loved everything Bush with all her heart, the warmongering evangelical side of the Republican party, called us Nazis. Us, a bloc of people not voting her way, not selling our rights and tax dollars the high way.

And out of the ashes of the rEVOLution, we got the Tea Party. The Tea Party born by adopting secular anti-war anti-PATRIOT act outrage and giving it an evangelical spin with incoherent conflicting wants.  Taken together: more oppressive rules, continuing to wage costly war, lower taxes, no education, no food, no health care for the citizenry, we’ll take the cheap route now and pay later, so stock up on guns and beans and pray for relief from the apocalypse of poverty?

All that just to say, I’m watching the Occupy movement. Interested. Not from a stance of looking at what is happening but instead wondering what it will bring about in 3 years.

Occupy Wall Street started with two weeks of no media publicity. First I heard of it, links to a video friends worked on showed up in my facebook news feed.

Occupy Austin started on a Thursday, a work day, I was at the office while my superhero boyfriend’s sign read “Down with Plutocracy! Give us back our Democracy!” He reports the police smiled and nodded, understood and agreed with the sign as they read it, and all was good at City Hall.

Ten days after Occupy Austin started, there was a call to march on a Saturday, and we both went. We walked from City Hall up past Chase bank, up to the Capitol, and back, on a UT game day holding up traffic and banging drums and it was good fun. We marched right past this gorgeous black Lamborghini parked on the street and there wasn’t a fingerprint on it. I was proud to be in Austin, Texas all over again. As a community, we do right more often than wrong.

Most of the audience didn’t care, simply didn’t like the traffic hold up, no one was rude. Some supporters waved back. Enthusiastically. Getting feedback from the crowd made it worthwhile, firing people up, like the cheerleaders at a pep rally, applause for the show. Marches are political theater.

Consider Occupy as a  huge improvisational force. The general assemblies are genius. They have excellent methods of allowing large crowds to talk together, twinkling hands to applaud and show support without making noise, ways to ensure people are on track, ways of voting ideas up and down. It’s great theater, masterful crowd control and consensus building.

A great show with horrible backstage planning. Food. A place to be. A safe place to sleep. If I were still living in the car, I’d be there quite a bit too. Slowly drawing more and more dreadbeats and homeless, and, um, the homeless aren’t easy to get along with, or they’d have a home.

What are the expected outcomes? What is the exit strategy, when they all pick up their sleeping bags and say “My job is done here?” I don’t see it.

Or, maybe I do, and it’s bloody violence and I’ve turned away in disbelief. Anytime you get up on stage, you understand how you’re getting off. Always know what you’re building up to, even if you make it up as you go along. If you start an improvisational skit, you have to not only have the guts to get on stage, shape what happens into a story, and the hardest part? Close and exit.

Since I started writing this, found a cartoon describing the Occupy brand as peppered and sprayed with violence. My prayer: let’s not take a page from the gulf wars and fight without end against an amorphous poorly-defined enemy while we take more and ever deeper damage each week.