OK, boys and girls, it’s long past time we took up the Occupy movement.
I’m enjoying watching the various occupations coalesce, disperse under pressure and reform, especially as this also involves watching The Man and the media try to figure out just what the hell Occupy is all about.
It seems fairly clear to me: Some folks woke up one morning and realized that the light at the end of the tunnel is the taillight on the gravy train chugging away without them, taking the 1 percent to Fat City and consigning the 99 percent to the hobo jungle.
And it pissed them off. Finally, something pissed them off.
So, as V.I. Lenin famously asked, what is to be done? Voting doesn’t seem to work — I’ve been voting since Nixon-McGovern, never picked a winner until 2008, and if the country is better off today than it was in 1972 the enhancements seem to be eluding me.
And speaking of Lenin, old-school leftist doctrine doesn’t strike a chord with the average American, or even with me — my brief flirtation with communism via the October League and the Communist Party (M-L) taught me that Marxism-Leninism, like representative democracy, looks good on paper but less so in practice.
The whole tea-party tempest was never truly a grass-roots uprising — it was basically an Astroturf op’, financed by the big boys and orchestrated like “Network,” with various mad prophets of the airwaves instructing their audiences to join them in screaming, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
But this Occupy thing kind of takes me back to the Nixon days, when he claimed to speak for a great Silent Majority that wasn’t in the streets agitating against his administration in general and the Vietnam war in particular.
Nixon’s heirs deride Occupy with the usual outdated lingo — get a job, you smelly hippies, dope fiends, and sex-crazed beatnik weirdos — but I’m starting to wonder whether Occupy might be some combination of Marx’s proletariat and Nixon’s Silent Majority, finally clearing its throat and taking to the streets to speak its mind.
Discuss.
Mad Blog Media 
The Occupy folks do seem to be a bona fide grassroots movement. Its a case where if the tea baggers really thought about stuff in any detail, they would be out there too. After all, aside from the men behind the curtain (Rush Windbag, the Koch brothers, etc.), most if not all of the tea party folks are in that 99% watching the train leave the station.
But as Larry’s wife, Dr. Heather, says with those three pithy words…
K, I agree. The big boys have always been good at the divide-and-conquer game, setting the po’ folk against each other to keep them from looking up to see just who’s sitting, Scrooge McDuck-like, on that big pile of gold. Thus we get the Tea Baggers squaring off against Meskins, nigras, welfare babies and socialists, when all five groups are in the same barrel awaiting their shift at the bunghole.
I like the way the Occupy folks have stepped out of the shadows and forced the media and the elites to look at them — putting faces on the 99 percent — but I wonder how long it will be before folks just start averting their eyes, shutting them out, as they do with the for-real homeless.
The easiest thing in the world to get around is a fixed position, as the French learned with the Maginot Line. Maybe this should be a mobile movement, a la the Vietnam-war protests?
I’m hoping that in this age of electronic media, Twitter, etc., that the movement can move, physically and politically, fluidly when the need arises. Its been good that the unions have come out for them.
Maginot Line is an excellent example of the opposite. Those forts were impressive, as were the Froggy tanks. But they just sat there.
Saw the Ides of March this afternoon and thought of how Clooney’s character is running for the White House on many of the same principals as he Occupy movement. Good show for those politically inclined out there. As for me, looks like I’ll be occupying a full time job soon after knocking my interview out of the park earlier today. Nice to feel wanted again! Now, if the ribs I broke last Friday in a MTB crash heal up a little quicker, I’d be ecstatic.
Congrats on the new gig, Boz … and take care of those ribs. That’s one injury I’ve spared myself so far (knock on wood). It sounds like all kinds of no fun at all.
Thanks, I’ve learned not to cough, laugh, or sneeze, the things that happen when I read your blog!
With respect to your OccuPad™, I was reading a couple week old issue of BillBoard at the library coffee shop last Saturday. There was this ad that was trying to sell a couple of songs about OWS. I’m still laughing at the concept of trying to make money off OWS. It says everything about how sleazy the music biz is.
NPR’s Morning Edition had an interesting story about OWS and the political risk of the Democrats adopting a’la the Tea Party and the ReThugs.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/27/141733449/protests-pick-up-steam-will-obama-get-burned
Jeff, I’ve read one story about a yahoo trying to trademark OWS. Didn’t say whether it was Bank of America, Apple or Goldman Sachs.
And there’s more than political risk out there. One service OWS has performed is to remind us that our police forces have become little armies, with heavy weapons, attack vehicles, drones and Darth Vader-like body armor. “To Protect and To Serve?” Protect and serve whom, and from what?
Yeah… The Oakland stuff was way over the top. I’ve always been wondering about the police departments looking like a Special Forces heavy weapons squad.
I can recall, way back in the day (mid/ late 60’s) watching several of the companies (army) that my father commanded doing riot control training. What really stuck with me was how he was worried that one of the faux rioters (members of the HQ Company) might get butt stroked if one of them tried to grab a rifle of the folks that were training. It still frightens me.
Boz-best of luck to you!
I don’t know….and neither do the ‘occupiers.’ Seems silly in this day and age of high unemployment that one who can sit in a park all day and “protest” would risk their next job (or three) with a misdemeanor on their record.
The train HAS left the station and those who are “protesting” missed it. Too bad, so sad.
And Boz – best of luck to you in your new job! It ain’t easy being on the DL (forced or otherwise) but the good ones get picked up. As for the ribs: don’t laugh! Chuckle, but don’t laugh.
I think some of the plutocrats are getting nervous – it seems the folks who’ve been getting screwed are finally a) realizing it b) demonstrating their anger. What happens next? Seems the Repugs are blocking ANY attempts to fix it, they just want more of the same.
Will enough folks get mad enough to toss ’em all out come 2012? Living over here in I’tly is looking better all the time.
Then there is the UWS (UnSuit Wall Street) Movement *lol*
http://www.slowpokecomics.com/strips/unsuitwallstreet.html
Damn… I wounder when they will get their own DeathStar?
http://www.click2houston.com/news/29619788/detail.html
While I don’t pretend to know what the Occupy folks hope to accomplish, Paul Krugman makes a good point about what SHOULD be done to deal with these economic crisis issues
Why isn’t anyone paying attention? It’s not like this guy is some wild-eyed, hippie, anarchist, crackpot.