Tea Party-haters are taking painful pains to elevate #OccupyWallStreet, et al. to more cosmic importance than those populist twits.
My favorite so far is a fellow named Matt Stoller at michaelmoore.com, who writes:
“What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent.”
Wow. Impressive. A church, even.
Me, though, I think of the even more wise Jerry Garcia:
“It’s pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.”
It’s no fun keeping it to yourself–undifferentiated weirdness needs some place to go, some place to be. So if not here, where? If not now, when?
The entire “Occupy” mini-phenomenon [I must consider it “mini” here in Los Angeles until they can outdraw the Clippers] is beatified by Stoller as
“…a group of people, gathered together, to create a public space seeking meaning in their culture. They are asserting, together, to each other and to themselves, ‘we matter'”.
Oh, my. True in its way, because we all matter, in our way. But besides the Leftover Left in all their craggy glory as heroically depicted above, #Occupy is a function of the young, who have been let down by the system.
I feel you, brother. $70,000 in hock to the Educational-Industrial Complex and still no job to pay off your medical bills, the ones you ran up spending your cash on clubs and sushi and gadgets instead of insurance. Now you’re streetcamping, trying to figure out how to make a meal out of Cup O’Noodles and a can of Red Bull.
Stickin’ it to The Man. The Man sucks, whoever He is.
Another quote from the sainted JerryG:
“We’ve been trying to sell out for years–nobody’s buying!”
The rubber just met the road. At least Jerry could play a good guitar. $70K worth of Education later, you don’t even know how to change the oil in a car, for which someone would actually pay you.
See, the #OccupyYoungbloods never got their chance to sell out, to cash in, never got their turn to get good and greedy. No wonder they’re pissed. It’s just not fair.
The worst thing in the world is to try to sell your soul and get no takers.
The worst thing in the world is to try to sell your soul and get no takers
But only slightly behind, messing up your html tags.
Thx for the generous correction, sir, fixed. I don’t think it quite rises to making a point, but I do appreciate the careful proofing. You’re hired.
No, Tom. Chartres, it is not.
Or even better, having O friends on Facebook! I’m trying, but finding it’s much harder than you might think. Damn…won’t give up, though.
I’m one of those folks who see the Tea Parties as, more or less, Republican versions of anti-war protests. Republicans like drum circles too and, hey, that’s perfectly okay.
Now my first inclination was to see Occupy Wall Street as a version of those two kinda protests but I see a major difference between this one and those two.
Anti-War Protest Pick-Up Line: “Hey, baby. I’m totally against the war.”
Tea Party Pick-Up Line: “Hey, baby. I’m totally against government spending.”
Occupy Wall Street Pick-Up Line: “Hey, baby. I’m unemployed.”
Those first two are, potentially, very smooth indeed. The last? I shudder to think.
Sweet, Jaybird. Marxism gets you laid. Having a job gets you married.
[We have to check out the photo evidence of the talent at the various gatherings. ]
[I realized I was getting all male-ist with the above. But I think it holds: where would you go to meet a girl you’d want to bring home to mother?]
[Jimmy Cagney, Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three” [1961]. The hot-to-trot daughter of the Coca-Cola honcho falls for the East German commie True Believer. Cagney transforms him into an acceptably high-bourgeois son-in-law, who ends up getting the job Cagney wanted.]
[Can you hear me on this one, Brother JB? I re-saw it just recently—my jaw dropped and my sides split. Yr comment brings the OP home. We are Horst Buchholz.]
[It’s all there in the classics, everything we blab about here…
the East German secret police, who later force Otto to sign a confession that he’s an American spy (after finally cracking from repeated exposure to the song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” during interrogation).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One,_Two,_Three
[Enhanced interrogation techniques. The bastards.]
Well, that may be a sign that there’s more going on than with the Anti-War protests or the Tea Parties.
Which may, in itself, be reason to think that this protest is different.