How did the Wisconsin protests happen? Who did what when? How did we get here? A timeline.

"On Feb. 7, with Wisconsin united in the afterglow of a Green Bay Packers victory in the Super Bowl" — so begins the Wisconsin State Journal begins today's article about the protests with a reminder about how great everyone felt in Wisconsin so recently. We were deprived of our enjoyment of the afterglow!

On February 11th, when Gov. Walker "dropped the bomb" — his words — union chiefs and organizers had "a freakout of a long weekend" — as one of them put it.

As unions organized protests to be launched in the coming days - the largest in Wisconsin's capital city since the Vietnam War - about 250 people in two separate groups picketed Sunday at the Capitol and in front of the Maple Bluff mansion Walker now calls home.

Here's my post commenting on the thin, mellow crowd that day:

It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm Sunday, and our new governor has just dropped a shocking union-busting proposal that our newly Republican legislature is likely to step up and pass. This is the push-back from the unions?

Ha ha. And the Isthmus didn't seem at all enthused:

Protests are exactly what Walker wants, because they can only lead to two outcomes: Either they are peaceful and accomplish nothing; or they turn violent and create a massive backlash against the unions and their members. Either way, Walker wins.

Look back over the last 2 weeks. We now know the protests were huge and peaceful, so did they accomplish anything? Did Walker win? He chose not to confront people, and, interestingly enough, the people of Wisconsin who opposed the protests didn't make trouble either. There was one pleasant Tea Party event on the first Saturday, with a good turnout, but everyone was nice. I mean, the anti-Scott Walker folks had their Hitler signs and so forth. But that's all. Over-the-top analogies.

Back to the State Journal:

Before Walker unveiled his budget-repair bill on Feb. 11, the Teaching Assistants' Association at UW-Madison, along with campus student groups Student Labor Action Coalition and Multicultural Student Coalition, had planned a noon march from the Memorial Union to the Capitol to deliver "I Heart UW" valentines to Walker and urge him not to cut education funding....

They delivered the valentines.

That night, TAA leaders went back to campus and sent their 2,800 UW-Madison members an e-mail urging them to return to the Capitol on Tuesday and testify at the Legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee, which had scheduled a hearing on the bill at 10 a.m.

Unions across the state were doing the same, as a dozen leaders convened Monday.

State law prevents Capitol Police from locking the building while there are ongoing hearings. So some TAA members made plans to stay as long as necessary, not realizing they wouldn't sleep at home again for weeks and that their union would set up a nerve center in a Capitol office, with members coordinating volunteers and helping manage what became the Capitol's 24-hour ecosystem.

So the occupation of the Capitol began as a UW TAA operation.

[Tuesday, February 15th], AFSCME, a 68,000-member union that represents state and municipal workers... started running buses from at least seven cities throughout Wisconsin.

About 10,000 people gathered at the Capitol for noon and 5 p.m. rallies, holding protest signs and chanting "Kill the Bill!" and "This is What Democracy Looks Like!"

Inside, 3,000 more turned the ground-floor rotunda into a raucous drum circle and plastered the walls with anti-Walker, pro-union posters. It was the start of a protest village that would occupy the Capitol at least through Sunday, Feb. 27, when Capitol Police say they'll no longer allow protesters to stay overnight.

So the TAs gained the support of AFSCME (and its buses). Why did the Capitol Police let them stay? They're clearing everyone out today, supposedly, but why did they let them stay so long? I talked to the Capitol Police yesterday, and I asked them the questions I raised in this post about free speech and viewpoint discrimination. I got a sense of what the answer is and will write about that later today.

Back to the State Journal. (These are excerpts from the article. For a more complete timeline, go to the link at the beginning of this post.)

At the [Madison Teachers Inc.] meeting, executive director John Matthews  discussed the far-reaching consequences of the bill and the group decided Madison teachers should spend the next three days at the Capitol - and not in the classroom.

"We were in lockstep," said Matthews. "There was no dissention."...

About the same time, finance committee co-chairs Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, directed staff to stop registering people wanting to testify, angering opponents....

The committee adjourned about 3 a.m. Wednesday. At that point, Democrats continued hearing testimony in another room, giving justification to protesters to stay overnight in the Capitol.

So the reason the protesters could stay in the building overnight was that the Democrats kept hearings going, which kept the building open. With the Madison schools closed, the crowd in the Capitol swelled on Wednesday, and many slept in the building overnight.

Thursday morning, the Senate's Democrats absconded, which kept the bill from passing and the protest going. And here's a State Journal scoop: Republican Mike Ellis, the state senate president, helped the last of the 14 Democrats get out of state, at least according to that Democrat, Tim Cullen. Cullen was assisting the family of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Bill Bablitch, who had just died. Cullen says he called Ellis "to ask if he could enter the Capitol without being detained," and Ellis "said fine, come in. There's no problem." Keep in mind that the Republicans only needed one vote to meet their quorum. They had Cullen, and they let him get away! According to Cullen. Ellis even called Cullen as Cullen was driving to Illinois to "double check" if he got out okay. According to Cullen. Doesn't that mean the Republicans accepted or even encouraged the prolongation of the protests?

The flight of the 14 Democrats enthused the protesters, and Madison public schools were closed for a second day and then a third, February 17th and 18th. Saturday, the 19th, was the day the pro-Scott Walker people showed up too. They came, had a rally outside the building, and then left.

That was a week ago. The occupation of the Capitol continued, and you've seen the pictures and descriptions on this blog. Yesterday, we had "about 70,000 people" at the Capitol, but they were mainly outside. I went inside. I walked right up to the nearest door, and a "volunteer" in an orange vest told me to go wait in a line to go in some other door. This door was for... I didn't quite catch who the special people were who got to go right in the door I'd walked up to, but I said, "This is a public building. You're saying there are 2 kinds of people — ones that get right in and ones that go wait in line? Who are you?" He was obviously not a uniformed city official. I was all "Who are you?" and "How dare you!" and, after a few seconds, I (and Meade) got right through that door.

Once in, I said "How dare they!" about 10 times. Sorry, Meade didn't video that. You've never seen video as emotional as I was right then. I got outraged for myself and for all the people that were out there waiting in that line. I was outraged about them for 2 reasons: 1. Because they were treated as second-class citizens who had to enter through the subordinate door, and 2. Because they meekly accepted their subordination.* On the other hand, whether the restricted entry plan came from the Capitol Police or not, it assisted them in what appeared to me to be a well-coordinated procedure of closing down portions of the building and moving a smaller and smaller group into the central area. I assume this slowly tightening cordon will effectively accomplish the end of the occupation at 4 p.m. this afternoon.
_______________________

* My stature as a "line pioneer" was verified by David Foster Wallace. I have that in writing from the now-dead genius writer, who had a problem with lines too.

Are long novels still worth reading?

"The enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held every late July in the state’s midcoast region..."

"The assigned subject of this article is the 56th Annual MLF, July 30 to August 3, 2003, whose official theme was 'Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster'":

2003 Festival highlights: concerts by Lee Ann Womack and Orleans, annual Maine Sea Goddess beauty pageant, Saturday’s big parade, Sunday’s William G. Atwood Memorial Crate Race, annual Amateur Cooking Competition, carnival rides and midway attractions and food booths, and the MLF’s Main Eating Tent, where something over 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught Maine lobster is consumed after preparation in the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker near the grounds’ north entrance. Also available are lobster rolls, lobster turnovers, lobster sauté, Down East lobster salad, lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, and deep-fried lobster dumplings. Lobster Thermidor is obtainable at a sit-down restaurant called The Black Pearl on Harbor Park’s northwest wharf. A large all-pine booth sponsored by the Maine Lobster Promotion Council has free pamphlets with recipes, eating tips, and Lobster Fun Facts. The winner of Friday’s Amateur Cooking Competition prepares Saffron Lobster Ramekins, the recipe for which is available for public downloading at www.mainelobsterfestival.com. There are lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet claws that wobble on springs.

I'm doing a lobster theme today, following the pattern of previous theme days on this blog, which is to work a theme only after I've perceived an accidental theme present in the first 2 or more posts.

Putting "lobster" through a Google news search just now, I see that "Lobster fest starts today in Rockland." An odd coincidence:

Lobster lovers and others come from all over the U.S. and other countries to the volunteer-run festival, which [the prez of the festival] estimated generates as much as $2 million annually for the area economy.

“It’s gained so much national and international recognition,” she said.

She said many of this year’s showcase activities — such as the crowning of the Sea Goddess from a court culled from local girls — are tried-and-true crowd pleasers which have been around for decades. Others, such as Sunday’s “Real Maine Man” pageant, are relatively new.

Last year, organizers had a “Real Maine Man” cooking contest, but they’ve upped the ante this summer. Cash prizes totaling $225 will be awarded to those who can prove their Mainely manliness after competing in categories such as Best Real Maine Man Outfit, Talent, and Feats of Strength and Endurance....

There also will be a parade, an art show, Navy ship tours, and a lobster crate race, among many other activities planned over the five-day festival.

But the star of the show, Kolmosky emphasized, is everyone’s favorite sea creature.

“I think the highlight of the festival is the delectable Maine lobster,” she said.

One must-see is what organizers proudly refer to as the “World’s Greatest Lobster Cooker,” a behemoth that can cook 1,600 pounds of lobsters every 15 minutes at its peak capacity.

“It’s a show in itself,” Kolmosky said.

That's from today's news article. The quote that starts this post is from a much darker account of the festival, David Foster Wallace's 2004 essay "Consider the Lobster." Wallace has a lot to say about the World’s Greatest Lobster Cooker:

So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is it all just a matter of individual choice?...

[T]he whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of [G]ourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.

There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site. As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.

He's just getting rolling at that point... just getting roiling. It's a festival of agonizing over there at the link.

Things found behind the radiator.

I tend to put magazines on the radiator when I'm clearing away the clutter that accumulates on the dining table, so it didn't surprise me that an old magazine had slipped into the rarely inspected space between the radiator and the wall. But if, at the point when the magazine had been spotted, you had asked me what old magazine I'd hoped had hidden out back there and escaped my routine recycling, I'd have said the issue of The Atlantic with the David Foster Wallace essay "Host."

I have the essay in the book "Consider the Lobster," but the book had taken the magazine's big pages that had little colored boxes around text and wide margins with corresponding colored boxes of additional text and reduced it to small black-and-white clutter, and I'd been avoiding reading it for years.

I exult when the magazine is the issue of The Atlantic with "Host." I display the layout, note the colors, and bitch about the book.

Response: "It's like hypertext."

I look on line and immediately find the essay with all the boxes moved out of sight and words and phrases neatly hyperlinked. How deflating! Is the magazine discovery nothing at all — or nothing more than a prompt to Google the old essay, which now all of you have too?

I scan the magazine version. There's something nice about the way they found to graphically depict hyperlinking, I suppose, but more than anything, I think about how much I love reading on line, fully at ease with clicking through things I'm in the middle of and flowing all over everywhere for hours, completely enthralled, perhaps never to return to the place where I started. There's nothing at all like the copy of "Consider the Lobster," sitting on my bedside table for years, reminding me of the unread essay it contains.

"It's just unbelievably fascinating that he could write a novel about the most boring and unpleasant parts of life..."

"... and make it interesting and exciting and worth writing about.... This is the stuff that our life is really made of, and the challenge is to find a way to be happy."

And David Foster Wallace committed suicide in the middle of writing this book, "The Pale King." The "most boring and unpleasant" thing he was writing about was the IRS.

Today, the pages of "The Pale King" sit in bins and boxes around [editor Michael] Pietsch's desk at home, but he bristles at the suggestion that he won't get through them in time to publish the novel, as he has promised -- and as Little, Brown has announced -- in the spring of 2010.

It doesn't seem to faze him that among the various drafts are sometimes "10 different versions of one chapter or one scene."...

"You do not change a word if someone's not there to argue with you or discuss it with you," he says.

What this means is that he has his work cut out for him. "It's not clear what the intended structure was," Pietsch admits, although Wallace left copious outlines and notes about "The Pale King" that he will use as guides. The published book "will just stop where it stops," and may include some of Wallace's notes and journals.

Good God. May I suggest not making a book at all, but a website? Put everything up, connected with links, and just let us try to find our own way through it ... or give up, as Wallace did.