Post/riposte

Update to the Great Cougar Saga of Twenty-Ten:

Two days after the incident, I noticed a handmade sign and a small cluster of flowers in jars arranged in a shady bus stop niche. Predictably, the good people of Berkeley were saddened and/or outraged by the killing, and they'd erected a miniature shrine to mark the occasion, complete with an expression of their disappointment with the Berkeley P.D., as well as what looked like a 5th grade homework assignment on cougar facts. Being the perpetual cynical jerk that I am, I chuckled and snapped a photo with my iPhone, to be shown to friends in the crude vein of "LOL, hippies."

But when I passed the shrine the next day, there was a new addition -- a typed letter, presumably from a fellow cynic, lightly chiding people for being so foolish and quick to splash moral outrage over a fairly cut-and-dried situation (cougar in burban neighborhood = dangerous). Every time I passed by the area on subsequent days, there was some new development in the shrine discussion: notes jotted on the typed letter, both approving and disapproving; more facts sheets and print-outs of National Geographic-style cougar photos; a prayer for peace and harmony with the animal kingdom; and even a second typed letter, this one riddled with arrows pointing to facts from the original shrine decor, calling them out as specious and then arguing vehemently for "critical thinking" -- a lost art, according to the anonymous writer.

At first, I was simply amazed by how virtual-looking this discussion was becoming, with its hyperlinks and follow-up threads, and how well-represented every facet of Internet commentator was in the fracas. There was the OP, the snarky respondent, the peacemaker, the fact-finder, the critic of the fact-finder... all that was missing was the obscene troll and the inevitable comparison of the California law enforcement tactics to that of Hitler's Germany.

But then I remembered something I'd read while researching for my undergrad thesis on dissent and revolution in communist and post-communist Eastern Europe. In the 80s, a shrine to John Lennon instantaneously materialized in the middle of Prague right after the announcement of Lennon's tragic death. The communist police were miffed at first and tried getting rid of it, but the plethora of flowers and candles and teary notes reappeared in the morning after each clandestine midnight sweep, like mushrooms after a rainfall. Eventually, the police gave in and, pun intended, let it be. Seizing the opportunity, the dissident community appropriated the shrine as a symbol of their resistance movement, as John Lennon and The Beatles had already been for the disgruntled East European youth for the better part of a decade. To the flowers and candles and teary notes were added more overtly political messages on the subject of Peace and Freedom. Dissidents even began to use the shrine as a bonafide message board, posting locations and times of their next meetings in the middle of the traditional mourning accouterments. Eventually, the police were alerted and became more vigilant about pruning the shrine of political content -- but by then it was already the late 80s, and a real revolution was just around the corner.

Clearly, the people of Communist Czechoslovakia already had some germinal concept of message boards in their heads, and it only took a few more years for technology to catch up to the idea. What really makes me giddy is the continuity not only of the theoretical aspect, but also the concrete implementation, the blow-by-blow of how this public discussion plays out. Whether it happens in the street or in the comments section of the New York Times, it's the same kind of discourse, built on digression and marginality, fixing on some highly public, emotionally resonant event in history, and then pulling together people's preexisting political agendas, performed personas, and various other axes that need grinding. It's at once centripetal and centrifugal, generating the weight that gives importance to the event, while simultaneously threatening to pull the solidity and homogeneity of communal interpretation in a dozen different directions. Both modern and primal, just like a cougar roaming the back-alleys by one of the world's most distinguished restaurants. People: truly the world's most fascinating beasts.